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Saturday, November 15, 2008

centerbound

Peter Beinart:

Because Americans are less afraid and because Republicans have abandoned the foreign policy center, Democrats need not worry that Obama will suffer the fate of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale or John Kerry. He won't lose because he looks weak. The greater danger is that he will change positions in a bid to look strong -- as he recently did on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- and come across as inauthentic and insincere. As Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin have noted, the Democrats' biggest political liability is not that Americans believe they are too liberal but rather that they believe that Democrats don't stand for anything at all. On foreign policy, Obama has a chance to change that: to articulate a vision based on the principles of global cooperation and human dignity that animated Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. He shouldn't be deterred by fears of being called soft. Those fears are the echoes of a bygone age.


Repubs to use Obama's audiobook against him:

"Dreams from My Father" has been widely acclaimed as an introspective and insightful read far from the anodyne campaign-oriented books politicians often produce, traits that Obama's critics believe make it ideal for use against the candidate.

In a passage describing his high school experience in Hawaii, for example, Obama explains the allure of drugs: "I kept playing basketball, attended classes sparingly, drank beer heavily, and tried drugs enthusiastically. … If the high didn't solve whatever it was that was getting you down," Obama intones, "it could at least help you laugh at the world's ongoing folly."

While many voters know that Obama used drugs as a young man, they haven't heard the senator describe his drug use in those terms, or in his own voice. Nor have they heard him extensively quoting from the first sermon he heard from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., his longtime clergyman whom he renounced during the primary, saying, "The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago."

In one excerpt from the audio book that Hewitt played on his show in March, Obama alters his voice to mimic Wright's and repeats passages from a sermon decrying a society "where white folks' greed runs a world in need." Later Obama says of Wright's preaching, "I found the tears running down my cheeks."

"My copy of his book is dog-eared and covered with yellow marker," said Floyd Brown, a longtime conservative activist whom Obama recently cited by name as a prototypical political mudslinger. Brown added that the audio should be even more effective in bashing Obama.

"I expect to use his words a lot in the ads that I do," Brown said. "And I would highly encourage other independent efforts — or the [McCain] campaign itself — to do the same thing."

Brown was coy about what specific audio quotes from the book would be used but allowed, "What we're doing now is test-marketing messages."


Nicholas Kristof:

When a distinguished American military commander accuses the United States of committing war crimes in its handling of detainees, you know that we need a new way forward.

"There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated abuses in Iraq, declares in a powerful new report on American torture from Physicians for Human Rights. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

The first step of accountability isn't prosecutions. Rather, we need a national Truth Commission to lead a process of soul searching and national cleansing.

That was what South Africa did after apartheid, with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and it is what the United States did with the Kerner Commission on race and the 1980s commission that examined the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Today, we need a similar Truth Commission, with subpoena power, to investigate the abuses in the aftermath of 9/11.


Hertzberg on Helms:

Far too late for it to do anybody any good, Jesse Helms has died. He has done so on Independence Day, which, since he was born too late to own slaves and in too liberal an age to allow him to outlaw sedition, will forever be his only resemblance to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.


Joe Galloway:

We are living in a time when the right of habeas corpus — which simply put is your right to be brought before a proper court of law where the government is made to prove that there is good and legal reason to detain you — recently survived by a margin of only one vote at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now these bad actors are prepared to set aside your right to privacy — written into the Constitution as a key part of our Bill of Rights — with hardly a nod in the direction of the true patriots who rebelled against an English king and his army to guarantee those rights.

The fact that British troops, operating on flimsy general warrants handed out by local magistrates, were kicking in the doors of ordinary Americans and rifling through their pantries and papers in search of smuggled, untaxed goods was a prime reason why our ancestors rebelled against their king and went to war.

This is WHY we celebrate the Fourth of July. This is why the vote on renewing the expanded version of FISA and whitewashing the egregious violations of the Fourth Amendment for seven long years by our government is important.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

That's it. That's the Fourth Amendment. That is what these folks in Washington, D.C., have violated continuously and in secret for seven long years.

How can even one senator on either side of the aisle in good conscience vote in favor of this law that does nothing to enhance our security and everything to diminish our rights as a free people?


I didn't realize Bob Schieffer was such a wanker:

Bob Schieffer, on Face the Nation, responding to John Kerry stating that McCain has completely changed his position on a large number of issues:

"Are you attacking John McCain's integrity?"

I mean, he's a war hero!


Frank Rich loved Wall-E as much as I did:

Indeed, sitting among rapt children mostly under 12, I felt as if I'd stepped through a looking glass. This movie seemed more realistically in touch with what troubles America this year than either the substance or the players of the political food fight beyond the multiplex's walls.

While the real-life grown-ups on TV were again rebooting Vietnam, the kids at "Wall-E" were in deep contemplation of a world in peril — and of the future that is theirs to make what they will of it. Compare any 10 minutes of the movie with 10 minutes of any cable-news channel, and you'll soon be asking: Exactly who are the adults in our country and who are the cartoon characters?

Almost any description of this beautiful film makes it sound juvenile or didactic, and it is neither. So I'll keep to the minimum. "Wall-E" is a robot-meets-robot love story, as simple (and often as silent) as a Keaton or Chaplin fable, set largely in a smoldering and abandoned Earth, circa 2700, where the only remaining signs of life are a cockroach and a single green sprout.

The robot of the title is a battered mobile trash compactor whose sole knowledge of human civilization and intimacy comes from the avalanche of detritus the former inhabitants left behind — a Rubik's Cube, an engagement ring and, most strangely, a single stuttering VCR tape of "Hello, Dolly!," a candied Hollywood musical from 1969. Wall-E keeps rewinding to the song that finds the young lovers pledging their devotion until "time runs out."

Pixar is not Stanley Kubrick. Though "Wall-E" is laced with visual and musical allusions to "2001: A Space Odyssey," its vision of apocalypse now is not as dark as Kubrick's then. The new film speaks to the anxieties of 2008 as specifically as "2001" did to the more explosive tumult of its (election) year, 1968. That's more than upsetting enough.

One of the great things about art, including popular art, is that it can hit audiences at a profound level beyond words. That includes children. The kids at "Wall-E" were never restless, despite the movie's often melancholy mood and few belly laughs. They seemed to instinctually understand what "Wall-E" was saying; they didn't pepper their chaperones with questions along the way. At the end they clapped their small hands. What they applauded was not some banal cartoonish triumph of good over evil but a gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out.


The NYT profiles the creator of The Wire:

Mr. Burns said he was surprised by all the attention "The Wire" received from policymakers who were piqued by the show's gritty civics lessons — the very sort of people, he said, who more or less ignored him when he worked in the public sector.

"The irony is that you have to be somebody before anybody listens to you," he said. "I wasn't an expert when I was an expert, and now that I'm not an expert, I'm an expert. It's kind of curious."

I already want to see this:

Mr. Burns hopes to make, with Mr. Simon, a period mini-series about the Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886, when the police, trying to break up a labor demonstration, were struck by a bomb that killed seven officers and sent four wrongfully convicted defendants to the gallows. With its troubled police department, corrupt city officials and compromised press, the incident has echoes of "The Wire." But Mr. Burns sees it in broader strokes:

"We've forgotten what it's like to be a working man," he said. "There was a flush of money, and we've forgotten our roots. These stories have a power because it's when men stood up."



Bush Surveys the Damage (vid- funny)


RFK Jr. on how to confront global warming


Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up

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