Quote/Unquote 2006 June

For much of American history, the Supreme Court has refused to resolve the most fundamental conflicts between individual rights and national security. Instead it has required Congress explicitly to authorize any presidential intrusion into the domain of civil liberty--even when national security is threatened. In this way, the Court has enlisted the separation of powers on behalf of individual liberty. The Court's stunning decision in the Hamdan case is a ringing endorsement of this simple practice.

We put it out on the web, I’m gonna say roughly around 9, 9 pm a couple nights ago. The Wall Street Journal matched us at 10, the Los Angeles Times matched us at 11. So, you know, a scoop is a scoop for about a nanosecond now– but it's a scoop.

Now, even George Bush’s speechwriters know that the Hungarians did not actually succeed in 1956, nor did they actually overthrow their own Communist dictatorship nor expel the Soviets. The Soviet Union was the “Evil Empire” that claimed to have liberated Eastern Europe and establish true democracy. Eventually that Evil Empire died of its own excesses, and the Russians had to abandon their subject nations.

What the President is obviously telling the world is that Iraq, too, has been occupied by an empire that promised democracy but delivered only tyranny and violence, and the only hope he holds out for Iraq is the eventual dissolution of the American Empire.

I conclude from this speech that David Frum has been replaced by Stephen Colbert.

Years ago in Albuquerque, at a conference rich in themes of American Indian philosophy and the Southwest's Spanish legacy, a local journalist tossed a thought at me that I found epiphanic in its elegant yet caustic common sense.

"The difference between the Eastern establishment and us is really simple and geographic," he said, more or less."You think American history moves from right to left. We think it moves from left to right, except all those folks on the right started heading in our direction. You read American history like Hebrew. We read it like, if you will, Spanish!"

Having announced last week that the widows of 9/11 actually enjoyed the fallout and celebrity related to their husbands' deaths, right-wing political commentator Ann Coulter has now gone one better, widening her lens to include other areas of American history. Last night, Coulter spoke as part of an Abraham Lincoln symposium held at Ford's Theater in Washington, DC. In the midst of a lengthy presentation, Coulter explained how, after the assasination of the 16th president, Mary Todd Lincoln reveled in her newly minted widowhood while at the same time taking a secret delight in the success of the Confederacy's final blow against the Union."She'd been a southern sympathizer all along," Coulter noted."The seeds of treason were always there in her personality and in her allegiances. Several of her Kentucky Todd relatives had fought for the South." Coulter went on to actually implicate Mary Lincoln in the assasination plot itself, saying that it was she who insisted the president take her to see the play"Our American Cousin" that evening, and that it was she who suggested he not wear a bullet-proof helmet during the performance, as was his normal custom. Coulter presented as further evidence of Mary Lincoln's complicity the long list of"other American traitors" who have, on various occasions, spoken of her with sympathy and"absurd" respect. This list includes Carl Sandburg, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Moyers."What other proof do we need?" Coulter raged at the conclusion of her remarks, pounding her fist down on the podium."The woman was a shrew plain and simple: a Fifth Columnist and a Godless, husband-murdering bitch!" (Satire)

WEEK of June 19, 2006

The first pragmatic reason to be for Gore, then, is that he is electable. He won once. He can win again. This is not simply a slogan; it is a serious thought. I find, moreover, that there is an undercurrent of guilt around the country about the fact that the presidency was taken from him by a vote of 5 to 4, with the 5 votes coming from Supreme Court justices who, on any other matter, would otherwise have reflexively deferred on a matter of Florida votes to the power of the Florida courts whose judgment would have resulted in Al Gore being president and not George Bush. These"strict constructionists" and"originalists" suddenly turned activists. That Bush has been such a clot as a president, such a golem magnifies Gore's stature as a thinking person with beliefs he can defend honestly and persuasively. Imagine what would be the outcome of a rematch. My guess is that if there were a poll asking voters whom they had voted for in 2000, Gore would win by a landslide. I know people who are actually ashamed of having cast their ballots for George Bush. But Gore will not be running against Bush.

The three Guantanamo suicides earlier this month were treated as the much sought-after evidence that will bring about the closure of the camp. Did we have to release Nazi leaders after the suicide of Göring? Did we have to close German prisons after the suicides of Rudolf Hess or the Baader-Meinhof group? Should French prisons be closed because 115 prisoners took their lives in 2004 alone? Well, some of them actually should. Many French prisons and detention centers for asylum seekers are truly horrific. But they are of little concern to the anti-American demagogues.

Of all the famous names associated with CBS News, the biggest and brightest on the marquee are Murrow, Cronkite and Rather.

The military's attempt to turn Pfc. Jessica Lynch into a hero after the invasion of Iraq quickly unraveled when it emerged that she had not emptied her rifle at advancing Iraqi soldiers as first reported. The initial accounts of Cpl. Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan in April 2004 came undone when it was disclosed that the corporal, a former N.F.L. star, had been killed by members of his own unit.

Military abuses now have a longer shelf life than acts of derring-do.

It was easier to create heroic stories in 1918 when the press was more pliable and the public more gullible, and the popular media had a fondness for uplifting tales of uncomplicated bravery. Though newspaper articles at the time refer to members of York's platoon who challenged the accounts of that day, the doubters were given only enough attention to dismiss them. His exploits grew until he had single-handedly silenced 35 German machine gun nests and killed 25 enemy soldiers.

One of the most unfortunate myths pervading American culture, the American psyche, and the whole American weltanschauung -- and it's one for which we might as well go ahead and blame movie director Frank Capra -- is that in most situations the good guys win. Morality triumphs. The greedy and self-interested, the cruel and mean-spirited are defeated. Ultimately, or so the myth goes, the bad guys win some of the battles, but in the end the good guys win the wars.

Sadly, in the real world, good doesn't always win. Sometimes, good isn't even there. When it comes to Iraq, the left, the liberals, the progressives (for the sake of argument, the good guys) sometimes seem to have their heads in the clouds. That's true in regard to the crucial question of whether President Bush's stay-the-course strategy can succeed. The answer, unfortunately, is: Yes, it can.

The Bush administration's strategy in Iraq today, as in the invasion of 2003, is: Use military force to destroy the political infrastructure of the Iraqi state; shatter the old Iraqi armed forces; eliminate Iraq as a determined foe of U.S. hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf; build on the wreckage of the old Iraq a new state beholden to the U.S.; create a new political class willing to be subservient to our interests in the region; and use that new Iraq as a base for further expansion.

WEEK of June 12, 2006

I think there has been a substantial revival of interest in Marx in recent years, and this has been largely because what he said about the volatility and shape of capitalism was correct - even some business people now seem to recognise this. Marx is once again somebody that you can quote, and this in part is due to the end of the Cold War.

In terms of Marx's legacy, as the Chinese are reported to have said following the French Revolution:"It's too early to tell." What we do know, though, is that Marx and his disciples were massively responsible for the shaping of the 20th century, for good or for bad, and Marx was an extraordinarily important thinker.

In this era of neo-liberal globalisation, Marxist thinking is still important in showing that while capitalism is enormously dynamic, that dynamism creates crises. We need to address these crises, not by free markets, but by controlling the system or changing it altogether. Whether or not that is possible in the short term is a different story.

World War I Is Still Ending: Among last week's developments in Iraq, the killing of Zarqawi probably was less important than the naming—a disgraceful six months after the elections, and almost three weeks after the rest of the government was sworn in—of the two most important ministers, those of Defense and Interior. But a development 1,500 miles northwest of Baghdad, one almost lost in the welter of last week's news, deserves contemplation: Montenegro completed its dissolution of the union with Serbia. With that, the last bit of Yugoslavia was gone.

Yugoslavia and Iraq were created at the same time, in the aftermath of World War I, and for the same reason—to cope with that war's destruction of empires. Yugoslavia was assembled from shards of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Iraq was carved from the old Ottoman Empire. Both were artifacts held together always largely, and often only, by force.

As the sad and often bloody story of Yugoslavia comes to a close, the question of whether Iraq has a future as a single entity, let alone as a democratic one, remains open. But last week the chances became a little bit better because a sociopath has died, and other sociopaths have been given reason to wonder whether taking his place would be a prudent career move.

The Democratic Party is that amazing thing, out of power for six years and yet exhausted. They're pale, tired and unready. Too bad, since it's their job to be an alternative, not an embarrassment.

[T]he history of killing terrorist and insurgent leaders suggests that we must be cautious before declaring the death of any leader to be decisive. In 1992, Israel killed Abbas al-Musawi, the secretary-general of the Lebanese Hezbollah, to much self-congratulation. Although Musawi was a determined and capable leader, his successor, Hassan Nasrallah, has proved to be one of the most effective terrorist and guerrilla leaders in history.

As more facts come out about the Duke lacrosse scandal, it should prompt some deep reflection.

No, not just about racism and sexism, but also about the perniciousness of any kind of prejudice that reduces people — yes, even white jocks — to racial caricatures. This has not been the finest hour of either the news media or academia: too many rushed to make the Duke case part of the 300-year-old narrative of white men brutalizing black women. That narrative is real, but any incident needs to be examined on its own merits rather than simply glimpsed through the prisms of race and class.

Racism runs through American history — African-American men still risk arrest for the de facto offense of"being black near a crime scene." But the lesson of that wretched past should be to look beyond race and focus relentlessly on facts.

WEEK of June 5, 2006

I think of war with Iran as the ending of America's present role in the world. Iraq may have been a preview of that, but it's still redeemable if we get out fast. In a war with Iran, we'll get dragged down for 20 or 30 years. The world will condemn us. We will lose our position in the world.

One generation ago the peoples of the world asked themselves: Where were the"good" Germans? Well, there were some good Germans. The Lutheran theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the foremost exemplar of someone who led a life of principled opposition to the Nazi-terror state even unto death.

Today the peoples of the world are likewise asking themselves: Where are the"good" Americans? Well, there are some good Americans. They are getting prosecuted for protesting against illegal U.S. military interventions and war crimes around the world. First Lieutenant Ehren Watada is America's equivalent to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Vaclav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Wei Jingsheng, Aung San Suu Kyi, and others. He is the archetypal American Hero whom we should be bringing into our schools and teaching our children to emulate, not those wholesale purveyors of gratuitous violence and bloodshed adulated by the U.S. government, America's power elite, the mainstream corporate news media, and its interlocked entertainment industry.

BLOCKQUOTE>Bob Schieffer of CBS News made a good point on"The Charlie Rose Show" last week. He said that successful presidents have all skillfully exploited the dominant medium of their times. The Founders were eloquent writers in the age of pamphleteering. Franklin D. Roosevelt restored hope in 1933 by mastering radio. And John F. Kennedy was the first president elected because of his understanding of television. Will 2008 bring the first Internet president? Last time, Howard Dean and later John Kerry showed that the whole idea of"early money" is now obsolete in presidential politics. The Internet lets candidates who catch fire raise millions in small donations practically overnight. That's why all the talk of Hillary Clinton's"war chest" making her the front runner for 2008 is the most hackneyed punditry around.