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Banned
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
I know I'm not the only one who thought "up to their necks in sand" here.
Anyways I'm glad .1% of the estimated lawyers in the US has decided to speak out so forcefully about something they are not sure on.
Fine material for truthout.org again.
I do have to wonder, what do you think congress is afraid of that would make them so reluctant to nail a political opponent? They never had such reservations in the past, look at all the investigations done 'just because' by prior past democratic congresses of republican presidents.
Perhaps, just perhaps, there are real reasons for it of which you know not.
Personally I say go for it, my guess is it can only make democrats look bad for some reason, otherwise they would be all over it.
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Ustwo, I have asked you this question before, I saw no answer to it, and I'm not expecting one, now....
My question, is...what the fuck have you had the correct "take" on, in the three years that we have been posting side by side, on this forum?
Over on this thread, tonight,
"Please take a moment to pause, and think of our Military overseas this Christmas"
You posted:
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
We are fun group here eh?
The politics section is mostly radical left wingers and a few stubborn people on the right who perhaps lack the wisdom to not poke into their cages.
You accidentally poked the cages, I knew it wouldn't end well, but I did have some hope it would just pass.
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In 1916, you would have tarred anyone supporting women's suffrage, racial equality, and the right of workers to organize trade unions with your "radical left winger" insult.
Who has been getting "it" correct since 9/11? Is it Ustwo, or the "centrist liberal", Peter Beinart, described in all of his contorted and revised statements, or has it been the "radical left wingers".
How is it that they are "radical" and "wingers", but have been correct about the wasting of lives, limbs, and huge borrowed treasury dollars, in illegal, counterproductive foreign occupations? While you have argued to "stay the course"?
If those who have gotten it almost entirely correct, are "radical", "wingers", what labels would be appropriate to hang on you?
Quote:
http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/20...-not-bush.html
by Peter Beinart
Had history taken a different course, this new brand of liberalism might have expanded beyond a narrow foreign policy elite. The war in Afghanistan, while unlike Kosovo a war of self-defense, once again brought the Western democracies together against a deeply illiberal foe. Had that war, rather than the war in Iraq, become the defining event of the post-September 11 era, the "re-education" about U.S. power, and about the new totalitarian threat from the Muslim world that had transformed Kerry's advisers, might have trickled down to the party's liberal base, transforming it as well.
Instead, Bush's war on terrorism became a partisan affair--defined in the liberal mind not by images of American soldiers walking Afghan girls to school, but by John Ashcroft's mass detentions and Cheney's false claims about Iraqi WMD. The left's post-September 11 enthusiasm for an aggressive campaign against Al Qaeda--epitomized by students at liberal campuses signing up for jobs with the CIA--was overwhelmed by horror at the bungled Iraq war. So, when the Democratic presidential candidates began courting their party's activists in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2003, they found a liberal grassroots that viewed the war on terrorism in negative terms and judged the candidates less on their enthusiasm for defeating Al Qaeda than on their enthusiasm for defeating Bush.....
.....In 1950, the journal The New Leader divided American liberals into "hards" and "softs." The hards, epitomized by the ADA, believed anti-communism was the fundamental litmus test for a decent left. Non-communism was not enough; opposition to the totalitarian threat was the prerequisite for membership in American liberalism because communism was the defining moral challenge of the age.
The softs, by contrast, were not necessarily communists themselves. But they refused to make anti-communism their guiding principle. For them, the threat to liberal values came entirely from the right--from militarists, from red-baiters, and from the forces of economic reaction. To attack the communists, reliable allies in the fight for civil rights and economic justice, was a distraction from the struggle for progress.
Moore is the most prominent soft in the United States today. Most Democrats agree with him about the Iraq war, about Ashcroft, and about Bush. What they do not recognize, or do not acknowledge, is that Moore does not oppose Bush's policies because he thinks they fail to effectively address the terrorist threat; he does not believe there is a terrorist threat. For Moore, terrorism is an opiate whipped up by corporate bosses. In Dude, Where's My Country?, he says it plainly: "There is no terrorist threat." And he wonders, "Why has our government gone to such absurd lengths to convince us our lives are in danger?"
Moore views totalitarian Islam the way Wallace viewed communism: As a phantom, a ruse employed by the only enemies that matter, those on the right. Saudi extremists may have brought down the Twin Towers, but the real menace is the Carlyle Group. Today, most liberals naïvely consider Moore a useful ally, a bomb-thrower against a right-wing that deserves to be torched. What they do not understand is that his real casualties are on the decent left. When Moore opposes the war against the Taliban, he casts doubt upon the sincerity of liberals who say they opposed the Iraq war because they wanted to win in Afghanistan first. When Moore says terrorism should be no greater a national concern than car accidents or pneumonia, he makes it harder for liberals to claim that their belief in civil liberties does not imply a diminished vigilance against Al Qaeda.
Moore is a non-totalitarian, but, like Wallace, he is not an anti-totalitarian. And, when Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and Tom Daschle flocked to the Washington premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, and when Moore sat in Jimmy Carter's box at the Democratic convention, many Americans wondered whether the Democratic Party was anti-totalitarian either....
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Quote:
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/06/16/beinart/
A kinder, gentler war on terror
New Republic editor Peter Beinart admits he was wrong about Iraq -- but still calls for liberals to fight the "new totalitarianism rising from the Islamic world." Yet many on the left don't believe his bogeyman even exists.
By Andrew O'Hehir
June 16, 2006 | We owe Peter Beinart a debt of thanks for his book "The Good Fight." Not so much for his alleged central argument, which is, as his ungainly subtitle declares, "Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again." There are things worth hearing in that argument, which isn't quite as belligerent and neocon-like as it sounds, but Beinart carves away the ground under his own feet so effectively as he goes along that liberals, leftists or progressives (pick your label) who disagree with him can pretty much close the book with a shrug and go back to their Dick Cheney voodoo dolls.
Beinart's great accomplishment is to return the debate about Iraq, terrorism and the American left to the ground of civility. He lays out, as clearly as he can, his disagreements with the "anti-imperialist left" (his term, but it's probably fair), meaning those who oppose preemptive or preventive warfare by the United States in almost all circumstances. I don't think he always understands this position clearly or characterizes it accurately, but he never red-baits his left-wing opponents, never levels charges of stupidity or cowardice, never accuses them of coddling al-Qaida or hating America. (Ann Coulter's got all that covered.)
Furthermore, Beinart isn't a neocon in Birkenstocks. When he calls himself a liberal, he means it, in much the same way that Democratic Party dinosaurs like Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson would have embraced the term. He argues simultaneously for a hawkish anti-terror policy, broad acceptance of international restrictions on American power and an activist domestic policy aimed at combating poverty and inequality.
Unlike some of his peers among the so-called liberal hawks, Beinart reserves his angriest rhetoric for the current administration. Left-wingers who have long suspected Beinart's publication (he's an editor at large at the New Republic) of tending a not-so-secret flame for the manly men of the Bush-Cheney regime will be heartened by his lusty denunciations of its misdeeds and misguided ideology. In stripping away the restraints on American power, Beinart writes, Bush has made that power illegitimate. In insisting that America is incapable of evil, Bush has created an environment in which Americans kidnap, torture and kill without compunction. Setting himself apart from so many in mainstream politics, Beinart repeatedly uses the word "torture" to describe U.S. treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere.
Beinart is trying to clear some space, it seems, so that those in the center and on the left of American politics can speak frankly about our disagreements, while remaining focused on a broad set of shared priorities (i.e., rewinding and erasing as much of the 21st century as possible, except for the 2004 Red Sox and HBO's prime-time schedule). This is a noble and perhaps doomed endeavor, but after half a decade of enraged gasbag rhetoric from all sides of the political spectrum, it's nice to see someone try it. Undoing the creeping right-wing coup of the last six years will require forging a common front among many different groups and individuals who don't agree about Iraq or Iran or Israel or a lot of other things, and God knows the Democratic Party -- grown putrid in some places and calcified in others, like an abandoned avocado -- doesn't seem capable of it.
Civility, you might say, is the handmaiden of humility, and for better or worse Beinart begins "The Good Fight" from a severely humbled position. In 2003, he was an ardent supporter of the Bush administration's push for war in Iraq. To his credit, he does not flee from this position or flail about seeking to justify it (à la Christopher Hitchens). Instead, he opens the book by serving himself a man-size helping of crow.
Beinart believed that a U.S. invasion was the only way to prevent Saddam Hussein from assembling a nuclear bomb, he explains, and he also believed "it could produce a decent, pluralistic Iraqi regime, which might help open a democratic third way in the Middle East between secular autocrats and their theocratic opponents." His armchair view of these positions is not complicated: <h3>"On both counts, I was wrong."
His errors, Beinart writes, were more than misjudgments of fact (many of us -- more than will ever admit to it -- were misled by the Bush administration's cooked intelligence). "I was wrong on the theory," he says. "I did not grasp the critical link between the invasion's credibility in the world and its credibility in Iraq. I not only overestimated America's capacities, I overestimated America's legitimacy."</h3> As someone who had supported the relatively effective U.S. interventions in Kuwait, the Balkans and Afghanistan, he continues, "I could not see that the morality of American power rests on the limits to American power. It is a grim irony that this book's central argument is one I myself ignored when it was needed most."
Anyone who opposed the war all along is entitled, I suppose, to a flash of bitterness on reading Beinart's mea culpa, which comes after so many thousands of lives lost and so many billions of dollars. But I couldn't sustain that reaction. Beinart and his fellow liberal hawks played no role in the Bush administration's misconceived war plans, beyond providing them some tiny amount of intellectual cover on the left. His candid admission that he failed to live up to his own principles during the rush to war evinces a quality of self-reflection sorely lacking in American public life; one could argue that this lends him more credibility, not less, as a spokesman for the embattled liberal tradition.
Beinart's recantation is far more direct than the murky half-apology offered by George Packer, another leading pro-war liberal, in his book "The Assassins' Gate." That's mostly because "The Good Fight" is an unavoidably personal account of a developing political philosophy, while Packer's book is a magisterial work of reporting, almost certainly the best thing yet published on the prelude, conduct and aftermath of the disastrous war in Iraq. Behind both authors lurks the specter of Paul Berman, along with Hitchens the leading so-called liberal intellectual to support the war. While Beinart seems to have backed away from Berman's analysis a bit more than Packer has, the fact that he calls the Islamic terrorist threat "totalitarianism" suggests he has not cut the cord altogether.
....Still, Beinart's opening confession creates a problem that echoes throughout the length and breadth of "The Good Fight." He is defending a political ideology that, as he admits, led him to support an arrogant and ill-fated military adventure. <h3>The same political ideology, as he also admits, led an earlier generation of liberal hawks into a different arrogant and ill-fated military adventure, in Southeast Asia.</h3> (Earlier still, the same ideology led too many American liberals to equivocate from the sidelines for too long while Joe McCarthy persecuted suspected Communists and their families.) Perhaps only a liberal could find himself so consistently behind the eight ball, admitting his own team's flaws and hypocrisies while still arguing for its moral rightness.
Next Page: <a href="http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/06/16/beinart/index1.html">We're all so shit-scared of being blown up at the mall that we'll sign up for any level of homegrown fascism</a>
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meanwhile,over by the dental floss bush (forgive me,Frank Zappa)it's still 1916
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...121601760.html
washingtonpost.com's Daily Politics Discussion
Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post White House Reporter
Tuesday, December 18, 2007; 11:00 AM
Winnipeg, Canada: Can you explain why the move by three members of the judiciary committee for impeachment hearings against the Vice President has not received much media attention? I didn't see anything in the online Washington Post, for instance. Rep. Wexler apparently has gathered 80,000 signatures supporting his position on his Web site. This appears to be big news to me.
Michael Abramowitz: To be quite honest, I am not aware of whether we have written about this. We have gotten these questions in one form or another for several years: Impeachment is not going to be happening under this Congress, even if there are some law-makers who think it is a good idea. So the media moves on to other things....
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Last edited by host; 12-25-2007 at 12:17 AM..
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12-24-2007, 07:47 PM
