Joseph Lawler at The American Spectator blog responds to my criticism of the magazine for touting a piece on Hitler's banker as "Obama's national socialism." Lawler:
So is Dreher prepared to deride the work of Liaquat Ahamed, Adam Tooze, and The New York Times for looking like "scream-sheets of the loony right"? If not, he should back off his criticism of Srodes's article.
Lawler misses the point of my critical remarks. I wasn't criticizing the article per se, but it's framing, linking the president to the Nazis in that explicit way. I'm pretty sure I know why they did what they did, but I think it cheapens the magazine, which, as I said in my initial post, is a good magazine overall. I hated it when the left called Bush a "fascist," because despite the egregious power grabs the Bush administration engaged in, to resort to that kind of language to describe an American president says more about the unseriousness of the person deploying it than it does about the president.
I would be interested to hear what Lawler thinks of the real substance of that post of mine, which was about the way we talk about the other side in American political discourse, and the temptations it poses.
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
So, we're not allowed to call any American president fascist or Nazi, regardless of how closely their policies resemble fascism or Nazism?
Not at all. But just understand that precisely because "Hitler" and "Nazi" and "fascism" have been so overused and applied to just about any conceivable political opponent, whether justified or not, that such arguments do far more to undermine your position than to validate it.
You might as well go around calling your opponents "The Great Satan".
Let whoever will write the articles, as long as I get to write the headlines.
So true, Marian, so true.
I don't know about fascism, but this country did slip into a police state without anyone noticing. A police state is when the police (or military) create 'the laws', written or otherwise, and there is no recourse to the courts.
No, having 'terrorism' be an actual crime doesn't help if said detained people are not actually charged with it. They're not arrested for the crime of terrorism, they're arrested because the executive branch decided they were something called 'terrorists', which is unrelated to any actual laws about terrorism. (For example, shooting at soldiers of another country isn't terrorism under any law whatsoever, even if you do it outside the bounds of legal wartime behavior. It can be a war crime, or it can just be attempted murder, but it ain't terrorism.)
Law and judgment by the executive branch means 'police state'. That's what 'police state' means. A 'police state' is when a single branch of the government is doing all the functions of it...giving the law, enforcing the law(Which the police are supposed to do), and punishing people for violations. (I had to be redundant to get that across, as people seem to have trouble grasping it.)
As this is usually the executive branch, and usually using the police, it is called a 'police state'. Here, we used the military, but it is functionally the same.
No, calling them 'unlawful combatants' and asserting they're 'detained', not 'arrested', doesn't fix thing.(1) If you cannot leave, you are under arrest, no matter what anyone calls it. Arrest means 'cannot leave'. And the fact that the executive snookered people on how 'POW' law worked is not very important. (POWs are granted a special power to 'plea bargain' their way into POW camps. Neither they, nor any other prisoner captured in battle, have less rights. They can demand jury trials if they so choose.)
They still were arrested for violating imaginary executive branch laws and subject only to executive branch classification.
It just so happened this police state mostly effected people outside the US, so no one noticed. But they asserted the right, and used it a few times, to do this within the US too. So we were, according to the president, functionally a police state, even if he was aware that actually using that power would result in a backlash.
A friend sent me this email below. Any ideas?
"My dad pretends to be an independent, but tends to be more of a liberal with the way he votes. I think one cause of this is the fact that he watches MSNBC and reads Newsweek and the New Yorker. For fathers day I would like to get him a center right focused magazine. NR (national review) is out of the question because he probably wouldn't read it. Any other ideas to balance his source of news?"
What mag does what Rod is talking about? Expounding ideas without turning off skeptics?
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.