Cartoon Karma

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I know some of you won’t be interested in this, but I’m gonna write it anyway …

The Right Blogosphere has become even more unhinged over the Mohammed cartoon riots as they did over the French riots. Just check out the links on Memeorandum.

Apparently the Danish cartoons came about because a Danish author was having trouble finding an illustrator for a book about Islam. Arthur MacMillan wrote for The Scotsman that publication of the cartoons was “intended to generate a debate about freedom of speech.” Well, it’s done that. Andrew Sullivan said that “The cartoons were not designed to ‘incite religious or ethnic hatreds.’ They were designed to protest such incitement – and we have the corpses of Theo van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn as useful proof.”

Whatever the original inspiration, most of the cartoons did not focus on the acts of particular Muslims but instead depicted Mohammed and Muslims in general as homicidal whackjobs. So some bad acts incited more bad acts, which incited violence among Muslims, which incited some Europeans to republish the cartoons to show they weren’t gonna let Muslims tell them what to do, and the violence got worse, and now the nice doggie’s readers are stocking up on ammo. I don’t know if anyone’s been killed yet, but if no one dies before this firestorm dies down it’s going to be a miracle.

It occurred to me that this episode is a textbook example of karma. I was taught by the Zennies that the Sanskrit word karma means action, in particular actions created willfully by both deeds and words. In other words, it’s all about cause and effect. Karma has its own law of physics; once set in motion, it tends to stay in motion. So, for example, Bill may have a hard day at work and come home and yell at Mary, who then loses her temper and takes it out on Junior, who kicks the dog. That bad temper being passed from one person to another is karma.

This cartoon flap is karma writ large.

I am repelled by violence, and I admit I am repelled by Muslims’ violent reaction to the cartoons. But the way to respond is not to work oneself into a self-righteous hateful snit, as our home-grown righties are doing, and use the violence as an excuse to hurl hatespeech back. The way to respond is, first, to refuse to be baited. Refuse to hate back. This is, I believe, what Jesus was reaching to when he said “turn the other cheek.” I’m sure it’s what the Buddha meant when he said,

Occasions of hatred are certainly never settled by hatred. They are settled by freedom from hatred. This is the eternal law.

Others may not understand that we must practice self-control, but quarrelling dies away in those who understand this fact. — The Buddha (the Dhammapada, Pairs 3-6)

The consensus on the Right is that “we’re better because we’re not rioting and burning stuff and issuing death threats. We are verbal haters only.” That won’t win ’em any Buddha points; thoughts and words create evil karma as well as deeds.

I’m not calling for toleration of lawbreaking and violence. As I said, I am repelled by death threats and acts of vandalism. I can’t control what people do in their own countries, but if Muslims in Europe don’t get control of themselves I suspect law enforcement will take control for them. I don’t see any way around that. Most western nations take a dim view of gangs of people using violence and threats to prevent citizens from personal and lawful activities. (The United States may be one of the few exceptions — the anti-abortion rights terrorists are getting away with shutting down abortion clinics all over the country. But that’s another rant.)

But the more I think about it, the clearer it is to me that newspapers that choose not to republish the cartoons are acting correctly. I agree with this Boston Globe editorial —

This was a case of seeking a reason to exercise a freedom that had not been challenged. No government, political party, or corporate interest was trying to deny the paper its right to publish whatever it wanted. The original purpose of printing the cartoons — some of which maliciously and stupidly identified Mohammed with terrorists, who could want nothing better than to be associated with the prophet — was plainly to be provocative. Islam prohibits the depiction of Mohammed in any way, whether the image is benign or not.

Other European papers reprinted the cartoons in a reflex of solidarity. Journalists in free societies have a healthy impulse to assert their hard-won right to insult powerful forces in society. Freedom of the press need not be weakened, however, when it is infused with restraint. This should not be restraint rooted in fear of angering a government, a political movement, or an advertiser. As with the current consensus against publishing racist or violence-inciting material, newspapers ought to refrain from publishing offensive caricatures of Mohammed in the name of the ultimate Enlightenment value: tolerance.

Just as the demand from Muslim countries for European governments to punish papers that printed the cartoons shows a misunderstanding of free societies, publishing the cartoons reflects an obtuse refusal to accept the profound meaning for a billion Muslims of Islam’s prohibition against any pictorial representation of the prophet. Depicting Mohammed wearing a turban in the form of a bomb with a sputtering fuse is no less hurtful to most Muslims than Nazi caricatures of Jews or Ku Klux Klan caricatures of blacks are to those victims of intolerance. That is why the Danish cartoons will not be reproduced on these pages.

I admit my opinion is based more on religious philosophy than political philosophy. Politically, the issue is more dicey.

Eugene Volokh is pissed at the Boston Globe because he couldn’t find condemnation of the famous “Piss Christ” photograph in their archives, possibly because the Jesus-soaked-in-pee photo was in the news in the late 1980s and the Globe online archives don’t seem to go back that far. As for the Brooklyn Museum’s display of “the Virgin Mary covered in feces” — I don’t believe that’s accurate. As I remember, the work in particular did not “cover” the image of the Virgin in feces; rather, the image was rendered in medium made partly of elephant dung. (Whether the art was disrespectful or not depends on the beholder, seems to me. I once saw a Zen student make a Buddha out of dog poop and set fire to it, as a demonstration that all things are buddha and also impermanent. The monks were fine with this.) Anyway, the Globe defended the art, which Volokh found inconsistent.

Maybe. Again I am guided by Buddhism, which teaches that purity of motive is essential to purity of action. From that perspective, if the Globe reprinted the Mohammed cartoons it would be an impure act, because they would be doing it only to “get back” at the rioting Muslims. The cartoons are not up to the Globe’s standards and would not have been published for any other reason. If the cartoons were something the Globe wanted to publish for their own sake, however, that would make publishing them an entirely different act even if the Muslims were rioting about them.

I know this sounds convoluted, but that’s how I see it.

Update: Juan Cole takes a stab at explaining the Muslim perspective.

Update update: See also Joe Gandelman: “…some editors don’t feel they have to publish them to maintain their right to publish them or show that they have this right.”

See also Editor & Publisher.

Update update update: A cartoonist’s perspective.

Preposterous

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It’s as sure as night follows day — whenever some new revelation shows President Bush in a bad light, the Right Blogosphere kicks into overdrive to come up with reasons why the news is fake. Yesterday a “fake” tag for the recently revealed January 2003 memo was attached to the “entrapment” section of the memo (quoting The Guardian, not the memo):

Mr Bush told Mr Blair that the US was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of “flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours”. Mr Bush added: “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]”.

Our good buddy and closet Maha fan The Confederate Yankee writes,

U2 high altitude surveillance aircraft typically operate near their operational ceiling of 70,000 feet, or more than 13 miles in the air. The aircraft simply cannot be seen from the ground, regardless of what paint scheme it manifests, whether it is United Nations blue, or pink with green stripes. The very concept is preposterous.

I’ll assume that’s true, but would Bush have known that?

Tbogg writes,

The fact that that the U2 normally operates at 70,000 feet doesn’t in any way disprove the fact that President George Bush might have a suggested it.

Because, well, he’s an idiot.

And it wasn’t as if the Iraqis hadn’t already shot down a spy plane two months before which may have given him or the neo-con advising him at the moment the idea in an effort to nudge the UN.

It’s a big world of possibilities out there….

Tbogg commenters came up with many of those possibilities, btw. Fun reading.

Juan Cole does the CY one better:

For all the world like a latter day Gen. Jack Ripper as depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Bush was going to fly a US spy plane over Iraq painted in UN colors, in hopes Saddam would have it shot down, so as to provoke a war (and ‘protect our precious bodily fluids?’). This crackpot idea doesn’t make any sense to me, and suggests the truth of the rumors that Bush never really did give up drinking heavily (or maybe it can only be explained by doing lines). The UN doesn’t have spy planes and everyone knows it. And, wouldn’t Secretary General Kofi Annan have pointed this out?

Speaking of preposterous, let’s go back to this part of the Guardian story:

· Mr Bush told the prime minister that he “thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups”

You see the howler, I’m sure — Bush used the word internecine? No way! But maybe Professor Sands (the guy who says he saw what was in the memo) was paraphrasing.

Seriously, there’s always the possibility that Sands is delusional or fabricating. But see David Corn, who says Sands is a friend of his and that he is a “trustworthy fellow.” If the memo does turn out to be bogus we can blame Corn for leading us astray.

A Free Speech Question

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I’m doing some “thinking out loud” today, or more accurately, “thinking on blog.” Forgive me if I wander a bit.

Righties are up in arms about cartoons lately. On the one hand, some righties are angry that the Washington Post published this cartoon by Tom Toles that ridicules Don Rumsfeld. On the other hand, other righties are angry that a major American newspaper won’t publish these cartoons, which ridicule the Prophet Mohammad.

Michelle Malkin argues that righties are not, in fact, being inconsistent. Those opposed to the Tom Toles cartoon (including the Joint Chiefs of Staff) are not issuing death threats or rioting in the streets the way some Muslims are about the Mohammad cartoons. The Toles objectors are just speaking out, writing letters to the editor, and otherwise exercising free speech. John at AMERICAblog reveals that the people objecting to the cartoon aren’t making any sense, but Malkin has a point — so far I haven’t seen any of them threatening violence. Anger at the publication of the Mohammad cartoons, however, has set off violence throughout the Muslim world.

(On the other hand, as a commenter to AMERICAblog points out, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff send a formal objection on official letterhead objecting to the political content of a newspaper, the newspaper editors might feel a bit intimidated. See also comments from Editor & Publisher.)

The Mohammad cartoon crisis began on September 30, when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published the 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. When angered Muslims threatened the newspaper and Denmark with various reprisals, including a boycott of Danish products, several European newspapers reprinted the cartoons as an act of solidarity with the right to free speech. Since then violence has escalated — Palestinian gunmen shut down a European Union office in Gaza City. Protesters besieged the Danish embassy in Indonesia. And so on.

Malkin and others on the Right are unhinged over the fact that American news outlets are refraining from publishing the cartoons, which are all over the web (link above).

I understand the urge to express solidarity for free speech. I remember when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — a really disgusting guy in my book — condemned Salman Rusdie to death after publication of The Satanic Verses. Americans flocked to bookstores to buy the book just to show the Ayatollah he can’t tell us what to read. That was noble. So why aren’t American newspapers showing Muslims they can’t tell us what to publish? Is this not giving in to the terrorists?

I’ll come back to that question in a minute. The other argument righties present for publishing the cartoons is based that old, bedrock conservative moral principle — they do it too. Specifically, other people make fun of Jesus, so why can’t we make fun of Mohammed? Malkin has more “they do it too” examples here.

Seems to me Jesus already explained that the “they do it too” defense doesn’t hold water.

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. … Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

I interpret that to mean “just because somebody does something that pisses you off doesn’t make it OK for you to do the same thing.” I’m dismissing the “they do it too” argument as typical rightie hypocritical whining.

So let’s go back to the “free speech” argument. Are U.S. news outlets refusing to publish the cartoons because they are spineless cowards, or could there be another principle involved?

Earlier today, the U.S. State Department took sides with the Muslims:

While recognizing the importance of freedom of the press and expression, State Department press officer Janelle Hironimus said these rights must be coupled with press responsibility.

“Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable,” Hironimus said. “We call for tolerance and respect for all communities and for their religious beliefs and practices.”

Malkin argues that the State Department is betraying the principle of free speech. On the other hand, as I recall we’ve got this little “ending tyranny in our world” project going on in Iraq, and it seems to me that if we are serious about that program (a debatable point, I know) we need to be careful that our words and actions regarding the Muslim world support the program. Encouraging newspapers to publish the cartoons might feel gratifying, but in the long run it could make anything resembling “success” in Iraq more difficult to achieve. And if we’re trying to persuade Muslims that the western way of doing things is superior, showing them that we are free to ridicule the Prophet may not be the best argument. I’m just sayin’.

I have one other argument against publishing the cartoons — they’re stupid cartoons. They’re crude. You may disagree, but IMO their only point is that Mohammad (and Muslims) are bad. They remind me of old war cartoons depicting “the enemy” in a way that makes us a tad squeamish when we look at them now.

This set me to thinking about what makes a good political cartoon. I’ve heard it said that a good political cartoon exaggerates to reveal an underlying truth. If the “truth” is a common bias or prejudice, where’s the revelation? IMO a good cartoon should have an eye-opening quality, like a mini-kensho; they should make you slap your head and say, wow, that’s right. I see it now. On the other hand, cartoons that serve only to reinforce bigotry are propaganda.

For that reason, I can’t get worked up into a pitch of free-speech righteousness about publishing these cartoons. I can imagine a cartoon I might support — say, something that reveals an ugly truth about bin Laden or Zarqawi, for example. No problem with that. But these particular cartoons are not worth going to the mattresses over, I say.

What do you think?

Update: More about what distinguishes a good political cartoon from the master, Herblock.

Update update: Andrew Sullivan writes, “The cartoons were not designed to “incite religious or ethnic hatreds.” They were designed to protest such incitement – and we have the corpses of Theo van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn as useful proof.” Oh good; protest religious and ethnic hatred with more religious and ethnic hatred. Yes, children, another variation of “they do it too!”

Occasions of hatred are certainly never settled by hatred. They are settled by freedom from hatred. This is the eternal law.

Others may not understand that we must practice self-control, but quarrelling dies away in those who understand this fact. — The Buddha (the Dhammapada, Pairs 3-6)


Update update update: I think this editorial in The Guardian gets it right.

Fools Rush In

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The Brits are mourning the loss of 100 soldiers in Iraq, and this story by Richard Norton-Taylor in today’s Guardian probably isn’t much comfort:

Tony Blair told President George Bush that he was “solidly” behind US plans to invade Iraq before he sought advice about the invasion’s legality and despite the absence of a second UN resolution, according to a new account of the build-up to the war published today.

A memo of a two-hour meeting between the two leaders at the White House on January 31 2003 – nearly two months before the invasion – reveals that Mr Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second UN resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons programme.

This disclosure comes from Phillipe Sands, a QC (Queen’s Counsel; a barrister appointed as counsel to the Queen) and professor of international law at University College, London. Last year Professor Sands exposed doubts of Foreign Office lawyers about the legality of the invasion. These disclosures forced Blair to publish the full legal advice given to him by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith. Norton-Taylor continues,

Downing Street did not deny the existence of the memo last night, but said: “The prime minister only committed UK forces to Iraq after securing the approval of the House of Commons in a vote on March 18, 2003.”

According to Professor Sands, the memo reveals:

· Mr Bush told Mr Blair that the US was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of “flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours”. Mr Bush added: “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]”.

Isn’t that entrapment?

· Mr Bush even expressed the hope that a defector would be extracted from Iraq and give a “public presentation about Saddam’s WMD”. He is also said to have referred Mr Blair to a “small possibility” that Saddam would be “assassinated”.

· Mr Blair told the US president that a second UN resolution would be an “insurance policy”, providing “international cover, including with the Arabs” if anything went wrong with the military campaign, or if Saddam increased the stakes by burning oil wells, killing children, or fomenting internal divisions within Iraq.

You’ll like this part:

· Mr Bush told the prime minister that he “thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups“. Mr Blair did not demur, according to the book.

It’s clear to me that the Bushies came into office with a burning desire to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein. And out of that burning desire came the various and ever-shifting rationales offered by the Bushies about why this was necessary. But these were always the excuses, not the reason. The reason was never eliminating weapons of mass destruction; otherwise, word coming from the weapons inspectors that they weren’t finding any would have at least suggested to the Bushies that perhaps the invasion wasn’t necessary. Instead, Bush was eager to entrap Saddam Hussein so that there was a backup excuse in case the WMD thing didn’t pan out.

And it was never about fighting terrorism, or they wouldn’t have passed on three opportunities to take out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before the invasion. NBC News’s Jim Miklaszewski reported in March 2004:

Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

In other words, the Bushies needed Zarqawi to be in Iraq, even though he was operating in an area not controlled by Saddam Hussein, because they needed reasons to get Saddam Hussein. (See also Daniel Benjamin in Slate.)

And it’s hard to believe Bush ordered the invasion with serious aspirations of nation building when he and his “advisers” prior to the invasion hadn’t bothered to make any plans for nation building. The “ending tyranny in our world” stuff has all the earmarks of a post-hoc excuse. They’re making it up as they go along.

Certainly, the hard core Neocons for years believed in the fairy tale that taking out Saddam Hussein would, by itself, trigger a domino effect that would spread democracy and American hegemony all around the Middle East. I don’t call these people “over-educated twits” for nothing. And a lot of these twits advised Bush to go ahead and invade on any excuse he could patch together, I’m sure.

I don’t think oil was a primary consideration for most of the Neocons, but to many — like Dick the Dick — I’m sure it made the prospect of invasion a lot more interesting. And all those mega-GOP campaign contributors in the defense industry certainly added to the interest. The Bushies may not have made plans for nation building, but they were johnny-on-the-spot about handing out those no-bid contracts.

In 2002, Karl Rove realized that the drumbeat to war could easily drown out the Democratic mid-term campaigns, but I think this reason was a by-product, an added benefit, not the Real Reason. I wrote about other added benefits in March 2003:

The Cakewalk War was supposed to be the magic bullet that would solve all of Shrub’s problems. First, the war would stimulate the economy. Second, all that news coverage of joyous Iraqis dancing in the streets and thanking their American liberators would put Shrub’s approval numbers right up to where they were after September 11! Win-win!

In other words, the Iraq War must have seemed a better and better idea to the Bushies, the more they thought about it. Niggling little details like a lack of WMDs or no solid connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were brushed aside. Oh, and the pain and death of war? What’s that?

But the Real Reason, the ultimate reason, that George W. Bush came into office burning to invade Iraq was, I think, revealed in the hours after the Marines entered Baghdad. What did they do? Did they immediately occupy government buildings known to have contained records about Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs? Of course not. Instead, they were ordered to the Rashid Hotel to tear up the floor mosaic portrait of Poppy, George H.W. Bush, placed there as an insult to the 41st President.

For the Boy King, it was about besting his old man and settling a score. All the other reasons were just props. He may have persuaded himself that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, but without the score to settle Iraq wouldn’t have gotten his attention to begin with.

In other Fools News, Murray Waas writes in National Journal,

Vice President Cheney and his then-Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby were personally informed in June 2003 that the CIA no longer considered credible the allegations that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation of Niger, according to government records and interviews with current and former officials. …

… Despite the CIA’s findings, Libby attempted to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had been sent on a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger the previous year to investigate the claims, which he concluded were baseless.

(Digby: “I guess that blows ole patriotic whistleblower Karl Rove’s excuse out of the water, too. Remember how all the wingnuts said he was just warning the press off a bad story when he spoke to Matt Cooper?”)

Eriposte at The Left Coaster provides detailed background and analysis to the Waas article. The one aspect of this that stands out for me is the extent to which Dick the Dick and Scooter would go to ensure compliance with their beliefs and plans. Whether the uranium story was true or not doesn’t seem to have worried them.

Update: See more links to news stories about the January 2003 memo at After Downing Street.

Darts and Dolts

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I hate to quibble with Anatole Kaletsky, who wrote this in the London Times:

For the past five years, America has been led by a president who is clearly not up to the job — a man who is not just inarticulate, but lacking in judgment, intelligence, integrity, charisma or staying power.

Who (with a brain) could argue with that? But then Kaletsky writes,

While America has been run by one of the most doltishly ineffectual governments in history, it has forged ever further ahead of Europe in terms of wealth, science, technology, artistic creativity and cultural dominance.

Why does America’s prosperity and self-confidence seem to bear so little relationship to the competence of its government? The obvious answer is that America, founded on a libertarian theory of minimal government, has always had low expectations of politicians. In America, it is not just business that thrives independently of government, perhaps even in spite of government. The same is also true of other areas of excellence which in Britain are considered quintessentially in the public domain — higher education, leading-edge science, culture and academic research. Because Americans expect so little of their government, they are rarely disappointed. They do not slump into German-style angst when their governments fail to find solutions to the nation’s problems.

Kaletsky then tosses in some anti-Gubmint proverb from St. Ronald Reagan. But the attitude he describes has not been common throughout American history. Through most of our 225 or so years we have expected the government to work for us. And most of the time, it has. It’s only been in the post-Vietnam era that conventional wisdom said government can’t be expected to walk and chew gum at the same time, so to speak.

When you are dealing with big things, like a huge and prosperous nation, it takes a long time for momentum to stop. If the people of the world are still lining up for American movies and blue jeans, this is the result of many decades of momentum. Since Reagan, the Right has been trying to undo generations of progressive reform, and by now they’ve dismantled quite a bit of it. But a lot of us are still benefiting from The Way America Used to Be Before Reagan. Boomers like me are still benefiting from the fact that our fathers got free educations on the GI Bill and our newlywed parents got cheap housing and cut-rate mortgages from other government programs, for example. Our parents’ prosperity got us off to a good start and put us on the road to security, equity, and stock portfolios. In a very real sense, many of us today are living better lives because government in the 1940s and 1950s effectively responded to the needs of citizens.

Each generation of middle-class, working Americans on the whole has been more educated and more affluent than the generation before. Even though we boomers bellyached a lot that our parents had it better than us, in the end we kept the momentum going. I wonder if the same thing will be true for my kids’ generation, though. The 20-somethings of today really are having it harder, I believe. Jobs are less secure, wages are stagnant, benefits are being cut, pensions are things of the past. Maybe I’m being too pessimistic, but seems to me the momentum may be about to stop.

Put another way, the full effects of having a dolt in the White House now may not be felt for another 20 years. I wonder what commentary the London Times will publish then?

Permanent Bases?

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I just participated in an informative conference call with Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) and former senators Bob Graham and Gary Hart. The congresswoman is organizing SecureUS PAC to help Democrats talk about and actually run on national security issues. In short, Harman, Graham, et al. believe it’s past time for Dems to stop conceding national security as an issue to the GOP and to call Bush to account for the absolute mess he’s made of it.

It’s amazing to me that Dems are still afraid of the national security issue (except for the Lieberman-Clinton axis who show how macho they are by supporting the war). But after seeing parts of Gov. Tim Kaine’s tepid response to the SOTU I’m afraid that’s still the case.

From the SecureUS web site:

• Americans from both political parties and swing voters want leaders who will protect America with strong and sensible national security policies. Democratic candidates must be able to articulate those policies if they are going to win on Election Day.

• The old ways of defending America have not worked against present and future threats. We no longer face armies on the march. Today, we face terrorist networks and outlaw regimes attempting to acquire chemical, biological or nuclear weapons and attack our homeland. We need bold, fresh thinking on how to stop these threats.

SecureUS plans to train Dem candidates to talk about national security issues effectively in the 2006 campaigns. I hope this works.

Gary Hart said something that I know will interest some of you — is the U.S. building permanent bases in Iraq? Hart said he has heard from people in a position to know that the US is “welding steel and pouring concrete” for at least four and perhaps as many as 12 permanent bases. He speculated the government in Iraq will “invite” the U.S. (at our insistence) to keep a permanent force of 50,000 or so troops in Iraq. Sounds plausible.

Wilsonianism

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Following up the last post — at the Los Angeles Times, Andrew J. Bacevich asks “What Isolationism?”

IN HIS STATE of the Union address on Tuesday, President Bush worked himself into a lather about the dangers of “retreating within our borders.” His speech bulged with ominous references to ostensibly resurgent isolationists hankering to “tie our hands” and leave “an assaulted world to fend for itself.” Turning inward, the president cautioned, would provide “false comfort” because isolationism inevitably “ends in danger and decline.”

But who exactly are these isolationists eager to pull up the drawbridges? What party do they control? What influential journals of opinion do they publish? Who are their leaders? Which foundations bankroll this isolationist cause?

The president provided no such details, and for good reason: They do not exist.

Nonexistence is of little consequence to the Right, of course. They do love their boogeymen over there. Witness the mythical “liberal elite” that is the cause of all evil in America. It doesn’t exist, either, yet belief in it fuels much of rightie politics.

Bacevish, a professor of international relations at Boston University, continues with some interesting observation of isolationism in American history and its opposite, the Wilsonian tradition. He concludes,

Can America be America absent Wilsonian ideals? Perhaps not. But an America intoxicated with its self-assigned mission of salvation while disregarding prudential considerations will court exhaustion, both moral and material. Our present circumstances may not dictate a full retreat. But they do require a revived appreciation of what we can and cannot do. Contriving phony charges of isolationism to dodge tough, practical questions is not only dishonest, it is reckless and irresponsible.

Irresponsible! My goodness, can that be? On the Right, the only “responsible” discourse starts with “I love Dear Leader.”

But this reminded me of something Glenn Greenwald said yesterday about the SOTU speech:

The award for most ambitious statement in the speech would have to go to this passage:

    Abroad, our nation is committed to an historic, long-term goal: We seek the end of tyranny in our world.

Is that really our foreign policy goal now – “the end of tyranny in our world”? This sounds a lot like something which third-grade students or beauty pageant contestants say when asked what their greatest hope for the world is. It also sounds like something which justifies and, if followed, guarantees endless wars.

And you know that in earlier times if a Democratic president had said something about “the end of tyranny in our world,” the Right would have been up his ass about it a split second later. Conservatives have been deriding “Wilsonianism” for decades. But now that their boy is more Wilsonian than Wilson, that tune has changed.

Which is why I think Steve Soto is right when he says Democrats can move to Bush’s right on national security. They can do this not by taking the Clinton-Lieberman road and supporting a Wilsonian war, but by getting real.

Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey write in Newsweek (web only),

The president’s strategy of defeating terrorism with democracy faces fundamental challenges in the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Iran. In all three places, terrorists and militants have attracted more popular support, not less, through the ballot box.

Democrats have a rare opening to be more hawkish than Bush on terrorism. They could argue, like Jordan, that the current goal must be to fight militants and terrorists—not to move towards more democracy. They could argue, like Bush himself in 2000, that the job of the U.S. military is to win war, not build nations. …

… five years in office have left the White House straining under the weight of its own contradictions. Iraq was never meant to be a war about terrorists or democracy. It was a war launched to disarm a dictator with weapons of mass destruction. By lumping the two together out of political necessity, the White House seems to have lost focus on the single goal that voters really care about: killing off Al Qaeda.

I’m not sure Bush was ever clear in his own mind what the Iraq War was meant to be, but never mind. This is right; this is exactly what the Dems should be doing.

Update: See also Matt Y.

A Fast One

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Though we may be frustrated by their lame-ass political news coverage, somebody at the New York Times is a great editorialist. Go there now and read “The March of the Straw Men.”

President Bush is not giving up the battle over domestic spying. He’s fighting it with an army of straw men and a fleet of red herrings. …

… Let’s be clear: the president and his team had the ability to monitor calls by Qaeda operatives into and out of the United States before 9/11 and got even more authority to do it after the attacks. They never needed to resort to extralegal and probably unconstitutional methods.

Mr. Bush said the warrantless spying was vetted by lawyers in the Justice Department, which is cold comfort. They also endorsed the abuse of prisoners and the indefinite detention of “unlawful enemy combatants” without charges or trials.

The president also said the spying is reviewed by N.S.A. lawyers. That’s nice, but the law was written specifically to bring that agency, and the president, under control. And there already is a branch of government assigned to decide what’s legal. It’s called the judiciary. The law itself is clear: spying on Americans without a warrant is illegal.

One of the oddest moments in Mr. Bush’s defense of domestic spying came when he told his audience in Nashville, “If I was trying to pull a fast one on the American people, why did I brief Congress?” He did not mention that some lawmakers protested the spying at the briefings, or that they found them inadequate. The audience members who laughed and applauded Mr. Bush’s version of the truth may have forgot that he said he briefed Congress fully on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We know how that turned out.

Yep. We do.

Rightie Hypocrisy Watch

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Tristero at Hullabaloo waxes nostalgic about those dear, long-ago days when the Christian Right was in a frenzy because some art gallery in North Carolina displayed a photograph of a crucifix in a jar of urine. To this day the Right believes this opus was “funded” (how much funding do you need to pee in a jar?) by the National Endowment of the Arts. It wasn’t, but when has the Right let facts get in the way of self-righteousness?

The nostalgia was triggered by this rightie post on Muslims outraged by Danish caricatures of Prophet Mohammed. “You know, the art community is always congratulating itself for being ‘daring,’ by mocking Christ,” says the rightie, “but this is territory that’s apparently a bit too scary for them, as art mocking Muslims is exceedingly rare.”

First, if the rightie had to go back nearly 20 years for an example of how the “art community” is “always” mocking Christ, maybe it’s not as common as he/she thinks. And Tristero has some examples of western art that mocks Muslims, although art mocking religious/ethnic groups generally isn’t as common as it used to be. Badmouthing of the Prophet by Christians possibly occurs as often, if not more often, than the “art community” mocks Christ, however.

Meanwhile, John Hinderaker is quaking with indignation over Democratic congressional candidate Coleen Rowley’s web site.

(If the name Coleen Rowley sounds familiar — yes, it’s that Coleen Rowley. Notice that Hinderaker doesn’t mention Rowley’s heroic past.)

The screen capture on PowerLine depicts Rowley’s opponent, John Kline, as the Colonel Klink character from the old television series Hogan’s Heroes. (Young people: Hogan’s Heroes was a comedy. Klink was an idiot and the foil of most of the jokes.) Kline complained that it depicted him as a Nazi, which Hinderacker calls a “despicable slander.”

I’m sure Hinkeraker was just as outraged when Saxby Chambliss ran campaign ads placing Max Cleland side by side with Osama bin Laden. Or, maybe not. But Glenn Greenwald documents some other situations in which righties hurled the “N” word at lefties, yet somehow that was all right. “Maybe Rowley should have spread rumors that Kline has a black baby and then it would have been OK,” says Glenn.

(Full disclosure: I called Michelle Malkin a goose-stepping, fascist toady in my previous post, but that’s because she is one.)

Anyway, this cutting-edge controversy alerted me to a blog post on Coleen Rowley’s campaign site that tells us Kline wants to replace Ulysses Grant’s picture with Ronald Reagan’s on $50 bills.

Kline’s is the most recent in a wild spree of proposals and bills that congressional Republicans proposed in the wake of President Reagan’s passing. Other various proposals seek to memorialize Reagan on the:

– Dime (replacing Franklin Roosevelt)
– Half-dollar (replacing John Kennedy)
– $10 bill (replacing Alexander Hamilton)
– $20 bill (replacing Andrew Jackson)
– $1, $2, and $5 coins

Kline’s particular legislation has been praised by ultra-rightwing-insider Grover Norquist’s feverish Reagan Legacy Project — which takes an ironically Leninist approach in attempting to memorialize the former President whom the project credits for virtually single-handedly ‘crushing the Communists’.

Washington on the $1 bill and Lincoln on the $5 bill are still safe, it seems.

Many appreciate the symbolism of FDR on the dime, recalling the Depression hit “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime?” and the March of Dimes that raised money to end polio. Alexander Hamilton was the first secretary of the treasury and did a brilliant job of it, and he deserves to be on money somewhere. Andrew Jackson, who campaigned relentlessly against the national bank, is probably spinning in his grave about being pictured on a federal reserve note; let him spin, say I. And I enjoy seeing Grant’s picture on the $50. Well, I enjoy seeing $50, period, especially when somebody is handing it to me. But Grant’s life story was one financial disaster after another, and I’m sure he’d be pleased to to see himself looking fat and prosperous on $50 bills.

Ms. Rowley goes on to say some kind words about the General, which makes her good people in my book. So I sent her campaign a donation.