a meeting of the minds

On his blog for the Atlantic Online today ("The Daily Dish"), conservative libertarian Andrew Sullivan gives a shout out to Glenn Greenwald's new book, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs Evil Mentality Destroyed the American Presidency. (The book is available here and will be officially released on 26 June.)

Greenwald is certainly a leftist, and Sullivan, though I'm sure neoconservatives have labelled him as a liberal, is a prolific and well-respected conservative writer. And yet, very tellingly, they find common ground on this issue.

Here are some excerpts from Sullivan's post:

And yet this tale of Manicheanism gone awry, of a utopian vision ending in a dystopia, of the terrible dangers of any moral crusade that sanctifies "any method necessary" (in Giuliani's language) in its well-intentioned pursuit of evil is not a new story...

The genius of the American constitution, however, is that it provides the framework for such immoral moralism to be checked and moderated. Alas, we have also seen these past few years how dependent such a system is on the integrity and courage of the people in it.
It depends on an elite willing to stand up against their own power, and it depends on a people alert to the erosion of their freedom. Today, both guardrails against tyranny appear weakened, and the pushback against a radically authoritarian executive has been weak...[W]e have a people seemingly content to watch freedom being stripped from them - because, right now, it's mainly people with brown skin and funny names being railroaded by the executive branch. Al-Marri and Padilla can be distanced...

There is still a chance to repair the damage - but given how much we have lost since 9/11, the constitutional consequences of another major attack are likely to be terminal to the American experiment in liberty. If a Giuliani or a Cheney is in power on such a day, we can kiss goodbye to the constitution. If I sound overly alarmed by what has happened to American liberty, it's because I honestly didn't expect to see habeas corpus, the most basic freedom we have, so casually thrown away and torture so casually enshrined in the American system. I never believed an American president would not only claim but exercise the power to detain any person in America and jail and torture them with impunity - indefinitely. But these are the facts.

(Interesting thing I just learned, too - Andrew Sullivan was born and raised in the UK, and though he has been living in the US since 1984, he is unable to become an American citizen on the grounds that he is HIV positive. Nice policy.)

continental clusterfuck

Europe's Leaders Hold Tense Summit - NYT

Highlights include:

(i.)
The EU is considering a voting system that takes into account each country's population.
But [Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw] Kaczynski has said Poland wants compensation for the deaths it suffered during World War II, when Nazi Germany invaded. He argues that his country would be a much larger country now if not for the war.

Mi scusi? This is absurd, but first and foremost, completely unethical. Point One. Point Two.

(ii.)
Polish media reported Wednesday that Warsaw had renewed its demand that the new treaty include a reference to Europe's Christian heritage -- something [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel is keen not to include.

John Paul II notwithstanding, didn't half a century of Communism accomplish anything on this front?

(iii.)
Britain, meanwhile, opposes greater EU powers over policing and foreign policy and does not support making a new EU human rights charter legally binding, a move that London fears could hurt its control over domestic laws, like labor rights.

Brussels can't take a stand on human rights because someone in Blackpool might go on strike? I guess it would also fly in the face of tag-team Abu Ghraib parties the special Anglo-American relationship.

(iv.)
All 27 nations, however, agree the EU move quickly to adopt a new rulebook to streamline the complex decision-making system crafted years ago when it was a union of 15.

27. The end.

eu + uk ... AAF TLF?

Recently, there has been a spate of articles on BBC News online discussing Gordon Brown’s possible EU referendum, planned for when he takes office in a few months.
Here’s the most recent article.

In other words: Outlook Not Good for Mother Europa.

The rhetoric flying around Downing St and Parliament re: the EU does not bode well for the future (or present) of the Union. On the one hand, it’s calmed down a bit, with Brown no longer mentioning a referendum. On the other hand, Blair and Brown have made a formal statement that the UK refuses to compromise on the Charter of Fundamental Rights (they don’t support it), foreign policy, common law, and tax and benefits – which is tantamount to not supporting any central power in Brussels at all. Where does that leave Europe at the upcoming summit?

The UK is right to suspect the worst from European bureaucrats. It’s just a shame that the response is not to throw their weight around and actually foment change in the constitution creation process, but rather to flail about and decry the loss of national sovereignty and tax dollars. UKIP, the UK Independence Party (read: Tories selling an isolationist populist message) is a good example of the wrong kind of response to the bloated Brussels bureaucracy. Take Lord Pearson’s proposal for the European Union (Implications of Withdrawal) Bill earlier this month. You’ve already signed up for this project – the place for this fight is at the summit, not at home. Take your grievances to the European Parliament and force some reform!

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s imploration to create a “single legal personality” for the EU is a positive and necessary step in the European experiment. Both France and Spain have gotten behind this rhetoric, and the only real opposition is coming from Poland and the UK.

Bottom line: the EU is a mess, operationally. The Constitution failed because it was 200 pages long – a symbol of the excessive and out of touch attitude at Brussels. Jumping from 15 members in April 2004 to 27 members today doesn’t help, either. But the fact of the matter remains: support for the EU is correlated to how realistic Europeans are willing to be. No single European country is powerful enough (politically, economically) to assert itself globally in the way necessary for it to maintain its high opinion of itself, or to assure sufficient future growth. Y’all need each other, so get over what’s been true for the last sixty years and do what you have to do to make it work.

this is not my theme

I don't wish to come across as an entirely political web log, and I certainly don't intend to make the 2008 presidential election, or Hillary Clinton, major fixtures of discussion on here. I guess it's just been coming up a lot lately.

Below is a letter i posted on salon.com in response to Walter Shapiro's latest article, an interview with the Grande Dame of Chappaqua herself.

Here's a link to the interview.

And here's the text of my letter:

As if her first name is the real issue here...
While I am usually very impressed with Walter Shapiro's writing, and with Salon's political coverage in general, this interview really demonstrates what I see as Salon's biggest weakness in 08 coverage so far: reflexive support for Hillary Clinton.
I'm sick of reading about whether or not "Hillary" is dimunitive, about who is out-fundraising who, and similar such trivialities. We're choosing a Democratic presidential candidate to finally lead us into a new century, and these are the issues we see fit to discuss?
If Clinton wants to sell me on her candidacy, there are a lot of questions I want answered. Save the hawkish posturing, the finger in the wind moderate charade, and the bipartisan talking points for the general election. Barack Obama has not budged from my first choice position because he represents a moving-on in Democratic politics - a new generation. I fear the horrors of the last six years have diluted much of the displeasure many Americans felt at the close of the Clinton years (conservative backlashes don't just happen because of 9/11. If everyone loved Clintonian politics then as they seem to now, Gore would have won handily).
It should be the responsibility of openly left-leaning media outlets like Salon to force Hillary Clinton to address this issue. She gets away with not answering anyone's questions and the last thing we need is another president whose arrogance makes her feel that she is not accountable for her positions and her policy decisions.
She's brilliant and competent, it's true. But does the nation's number one permanent law school overachiever really have a vision for us, and will she ever really come clean about what it exactly entails? Next time you interview her, ASK HER!
-- jeffelavar

"let the conversation begin." [hillary!]

Judith Warner's most recent NYT blog post, "Who's for Hillary. And Who Isn't," perfectly illustrates what is already wrong with press coverage of the '08 presidential election (and more specifically of the Democratic primary field, and most specifically of Hillary Clinton's candidacy).

First of all, Judy's ramblings in much of this post are pretty non-sensical. The basic premise with which she opens is that younger, less wealthy women tend to like Hillary more than their older, wealthier, and more highly educated counterparts. OK, simple. It is in her attempts to explain this polling data that she runs into problems:

"But I’ve repeatedly found that better-off women, who have decent health care, child care, education and, to a greater degree, job flexibility, tend to often be hostile to this sort of communitarian notion of shared responsibility ["It takes a village"]. (“Do you want the government raising your children?” is the frequent riposte.) They’re big believers in the American ethos of individual “choice” and “personal responsibility”; after all, being the winners in our society, it has worked out well for them. And they – rightly – perceive that they’re bound to be the losers, tax-wise, if their own gated community of family comfort is opened up to the larger village."

Alright, so none of this is, on its face, ludicrous. Many (if not a majority) of Americans believe in the "American ethos" (duh). But here's the problem: this is not the make-or-break on supporing Hillary - this sounds like a make-or-break on whether or not to support Democrats or progressive domestic policies in general. An affluent woman of a certain age with a master's degree who is very concerned about the growth of the tax burden on her income because of programs like HeadStart is not going to vote for Hillary. Or Obama. Or Edwards, god forbid. The women who are saying they trust Obama more than Hillary - find him more authentic - are probably not the people who find "the communitarian notion of shared responsibility" a turnoff, since Obama, and to a greater degree Edwards, displays stronger progressive rhetoric than Hillary, at least so far in the campaign. In other words, this is lazy reporting. Judy, you're not explaining anything except for why women who are already Republicans are not supporting Hillary. Thanks for the help.

The big problem Warner's post brings up has to do with coverage of the campaign. Her blog post is entirely typical of how things have gone so far - identifying something like a gap in support for Hillary between younger and older women, and then doing absolutely nothing to explain it. In other words, not asking any damn questions. It's not enough to say that people hate or simply don't wish to support Hillary because they are rich and feel alienated by "It Takes a Village." I'm desperately hoping that my fellow Democrats aren't stupid enough to hand her the nomination, and I certainly don't feel victimized by communitarian notions, generally speaking. So memo to Judy, the Washington Press Corps, and the rest of the lazy journalists of the world: stop equating anti-Hillary sentiment with anti-progressive sentiment. I respect her very much, but front-runner or not, that doesn't maker her the voice of the new Democrats, nor does it equate her with progressivism. She's the spokeswoman for ambition.

it starts.

"We live in a growly snarky time, heavy irony clacking everywhere like people walking around in tap shoes..."
[Garrison Keillor]