Also via Andrew, this requiem for the right-wing by Joel Kotkin. Excerpt:
Like the 1944 pop standard says, President George W. Bush has hurt the most all those he professed to love the most -- from the conservative ideologues and born-again Christians to the free-market enthusiasts, energy producers and red state political class. Perhaps no politician in recent memory has done more damage to his political base.The most obvious recent equivalent, Richard Nixon, did cause harm to the conservative cause, but that damage was short-lived. It reflected his deviousness more than his policies. Similarly, Bill Clinton's many personality flaws weakened the Democrats' hold on the White House, but inflicted no permanent harm to liberalism.
In contrast, the Katrina-scale disaster that has been the Bush presidency may leave his ideological backers in the wilderness for years to come. Over the past eight years, Bush has done more to undermine conservatism than all of the country's college faculties, elite media and Hollywood studios put together.
The historical/psychological framework for my politics -- and, I'd wager, for the politics of many of us Gen Xers -- depends on having become politically aware at the end of the Carter presidency, and into Reagan's first term. Considering Carter as inept and ruinous for the country, and in turn Carter as representative of the Democrats, was the emotional touchstone for me. Don't doubt for a minute there aren't millions of American teenagers who are waking up politically at the end of these Bush years and having their political orientation imprinted right now. If Obama has even a halfway successful first term -- if all he can do is stop the bleeding -- the Democrats will own our national politics for a generation.
Hell of a job, Dubya.
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""`If they would rather die,'' said Scrooge, ``they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
Shorter illinidiva.
We have now reached parody, ladies and gentleman. "
Never said I wanted people to starve or die... Just that I think it is a good thing if crappy, low paying jobs go overseas as they will be replaced by good high-paying ones.
""Anyone who links to Juan Cole on their blog is definitely not even a moderate Republican; even moderate Republicans defend Israel and don't support anti-Semitic bloggers."
This isn't conservatism. This is farce."
Yes and I know I must be one of those evil neocon Jews that Cole seems to hate. By all standards, Juan Cole is very anti-Israel and pro-Arab to a point that is verging on anti-Semitism.
"I don't recall ever blogging any specifics about health care, except to note that 47 million Americans without it is far too much. I have no idea what a single payer system even is, but that doesn't stop our friend from his fanciful straw man building. I blog about defense policy and weapons systems, not health care."
Then perhaps don't talk or whine about it... I work in the healthcare industry and know that the only way that you are going to get people insured is to make the gov't in charge (single payer system). So basically that means diminishing the health care that the other $250 million (a good majority of people) receive to help the minority.
Moreover, there are some gaps in health care with pre-existing conditions that need to be addressed, but some of the newer gov't programs encourage freeloading. In some places like NJ, families making $80K are applying for CHIP health care. I understand the COL is high there (but not that much higher than Chicago), but someone making that money can pay for their own healthcare.
Not to pick on Illinidiva, but she(?) made a comment in her first post that sticks out to me and hasn't been discussed yet. That is with regards to the comment that--paraphrasing here--Bush's policies have kept us safe for the past 7 years. I hear this frequently among the Bush-faithful. There's several points I want to make:
1. Its difficult to tell if there's a causal relationship between instituting extraordinary rendition, torture techniques, etc and no attacks on America proper in 7 years. As an aside I assume we have to count only attacks on America proper because obviously there have been numerous terrorist attacks against our citizens and military abroad and against our European allies. Since we are talking, then, only about attacks on the US proper, the question for me becomes "would one have predicted an attack on the US directly" based on probabilities and historical statistics. Attacks on the US mainland are rare. How many have occurred since the rise of modern Islamic radicalism? 1993 (WTC), Oklahoma City (domestic terror), 1998 (US Embassy--I'll count it as US soil for the sake of argument), 2001. How many others in the since around mid 1970's? If we measure from 1980, then that's 4 in about 30 years, or once per 7+ years. You can quibble over the dates and numbers a bit, but the fact remains that attacks on US soil by Islamic radicals is exceedingly rare and was rare before torture and warrantless wiretaps and all of that. So I think its a reasonable point to question whether we would have even expected to be hit again over the past 7 years. I should also mention that your need for tranquilizers for flying (if your sole fear is terrorism) is scientifically irrational when considering probabilities.
2. If we are hit tomorrow, does your defense of Bush's controversial policies change? I mean your argument seems to me to be predicated on the fact that we haven't been hit directly since the policies were enacted. Again, if you measure terrorist attacks world-wide, they are probably gone up (and dramatically so) since in the Iraq war and Bush doctrine and all that. Looking at the Bush legacy we were hit once and it was a big one. Can the blame for 9/11 be laid solely at the feet of GWB? No. In fact, I've heard many conservatives blame Clinton and his policies (argument for another day). I wonder though, if there was an attack in the first 9 months of an Obama presidency, would you blame Obama or would it be evidence of failure of the Bush policies of the preceding 7-ish years.
3. The real Bush legacy with regards to the torture, rendition, wiretapping, etc, really hasn't been written yet. How have these unpopular policies affected terrorist recruitment long-term? Lets say, for argument sake these policies have directly led to us being attack free (US mainland) for 7 years. But what if the cost has been a generation of young Arabs being radicalized? Is the trade worth it? What if its led to the destabilization of allies so that their ability to fight uptick in radicalism has been diminished with consequences that will be felt for the next 20-30 years?
Heck these are questions above my pay grade, but I think "he's kept us safe" is a bit myopic and simplistic. It also--and this will be my last point--relies on a FALSE CHOICE. That is, the choice was between torturing a potential bad guy vs. 1000's of innocent Americans dying. That ignores a bevy of other choices/scenarios that existed. Howabout using tried and true, proven effective means of information extraction--information that can be trusted and used in a tribunal to save those same lives. The pro-torture argument relies on both a false choice and a ticking-time-bomb logical fallacy.
"...a ticking-time-bomb logical fallacy.'
The only historical "ticking time bomb" analog I can find is the sinking of the Austro-Hungarian battleship Viribus Unitis, a Tegetthoff class dreadnought.
(a dreadnought refers to any WW1 era battleship built with all big gun armament ie: the major guns are all 12 or 14 inch rather then mixing 12, 9.2 and 7 inch all on the same ship. Tertiary 5 or 6 inch weapons are not counted for this purpose. HMS Dreadnought, brainchild of Lord Adm. Bobby Fisher, pioneered the concept of all big gun armament when it became obvious that fire controllers could not tell the difference between splashes from a 9.2 inch shell and a twelve inch shell at long range, hence making it impossible to correct gunnery. Also, mixed calibres made for more logistical, stowage and handling problems.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegetthoff_class_battleship
At 5 p.m. on 31 October 1918 the commander of Viribus Unitis, Janko Vukovich de Podkapelski took command of the entire fleet. The National Council of SCS promoted him to rear admiral, and sent diplomatic notes to the governments of France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States of America and Russia, to notify them that the State of SCS was not at war with any of them and that the Council had taken over the entire Austro-Hungarian fleet.
Later that night, while the crews were celebrating on their brightly lit ships, at 10:13 p.m. the Italian torpedo boat MAS-95 a few miles from Pola, sent a tiny vessel towards the harbour. The vessel, called a Mignatta (Leech), carried two divers and two 200 kg (400 lb) mines. With some help from Italian agents in Pola, the vessel passed through all the nets, barrages, and other obstacles placed at the harbour entrance. It entered the anchorage, and just before dawn, amongst the brightly lit ships, the divers Rossetti and Paolucci selected the Viribus Unitis as their target. At about 5 a.m. on 1 November they were spotted, and a boat from Viribus Unitis pulled them out of the water. However the divers had already placed their mines under the flagship. When they were brought aboard, they told everything to the officers and the admiral. The prisoners were transferred to the sister ship, Tegetthoff.
The mines detonated well below the water-line but, as the ship's coal bunkers were empty coal dust instantly ignited and caused a further explosion. The design features intended to minimise the effect of explosions had not worked. The ship rapidly took in water and at 6:10 a.m. 1 November 1918, the flagship Viribus Unitis, with the Croatian flag on her mast, capsized and sank quickly with around 300 members of her crew aboard. Admiral Vukovich, who commanded the Croatian fleet for barely twelve hours was last seen standing peacefully on the stern, waiting for death to come.
Matt, it is important to remember that many of the programs that we use today were first started by Bill Clinton, so I don't think that it is fair to tag Bush with the policies. Frankly, any President up to and including Obama would have done the same things that Bush did to keep us safe. In fact, I remember after 9/11, some Democrats were upset that we didn't move fast enough with the action against Afghanistan and the Democrats actually knew about and approved of Bush's actions. This is because during war the President has extraordinary powers. Bush's use of secret wiretaps or even Gitmo is nothing compared to the actions of FDR and Lincoln. If he didn't use some programs, he'd have likely allowed an attack on the U.S. I think that Bush is a convenient whipping boy because he has done a poor job defending himself and liberals despise him because of the 2000 election.
As for our allies, I think that many of them do not do a good job integrating the Muslim population into their countries. In America, there may be some radicals, but most Muslims are pretty mainstream. There's a mosque right outside the town that I grew up that serves the surrounding county. (It is an actual mosque, not a storefront). An iman came to my Catholic HS to discuss his religion with his wife. Europe does not do as good a job integrating Muslims into their population, and I think that is why Muslims are so radicalized. It is impossible for them to integrate into society and find a good balance between their traditions and our culture.
Illinidiva-
I want to make one point regarding my perspective. I became interested in politics after 9/11 but particularly so during the lead up to the Iraq invasion. I'm a liberal, but I really didn't care too much about the 2000 election thing although i can understand why there were some pretty upset people. As a result, I tend to focus on GWB--its what I know. I had my political awakening during this adminstration.
Regarding the wars: I supported the war in Afghanistan and felt that we went in a bit soft and relied too heavily on the Northern Alliance (I think that's what they called themselves). Iraq though--that was my big problem. I just couldn't connect the dots no matter how hard I tried. I felt it was a moral error and a strategic error and it cost us support in the GWOT, cost us soft-power, drained resources unnecessarily, was ill planned and, thus, lead to dead Americans. Many bipartisan security reports that have come out over the past several years seem to indicate that the Iraq war has made us LESS safe looking long term. Many of the things the left was screaming about in 2003 eventually were proven true. Now maybe its like the old saying, even a broken watch is right twice a day;)
Regarding torture, no matter who started it, who knew about it, what was done in the past, I believe its morally and strategically wrong. In a constitution-based, freedom-cherishing country such as ours there has to be some moral absolutes. I think this is a concept conservatives can get behind. Besides being a tactical error, not working and all of that, these policies are morally wrong. Period. If we lose that sense of the rule of law and fundamentals of right and wrong, then I believe we have lost.
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