"There are two kinds of courage in war - physical courage and moral courage. Physical courage is very common on the battlefield. Men and women on both sides risk their lives, place their own bodies in harm’s way. Moral courage, however, is quite rare. According to Chris Hedges, the brilliant New York Times war correspondent who survived wars in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, 'I rarely saw moral courage. Moral courage is harder. It requires the bearer to walk away from the warm embrace of comradeship and denounce the myth of war as a fraud, to name it as an enterprise of death and immorality, to condemn himself, and those around him, as killers. It requires the bearer to become an outcast. There are times when taking a moral stance, perhaps the highest form of patriotism, means facing down the community, even the nation.'"
The rest of the story: Welcome Home, Soldier: Now shut up by Paul Rockwell (Black Commentator 2008-06-226)
Impractical Proposals: John Edwards still wants economic justice in America
The former Democratic Party vice-presidential candidate is leading an ambitious campaign to cut poverty in America by half in 10 years -- completely in 30: <PBS' Now>.
Politics: Lincoln Steffens on citizenship
We are a free and sovereign people, we govern ourselves and the government is ours. But that is the point. We are responsible, not our leaders, since we follow them. We let them divert our loyalty from the United States to some 'party'; we let them boss the party and turn our municipal democracies into autocracies and our republican nation into a plutocracy. We cheat our government, we let our leaders loot it, and we let them wheedle and bribe our sovereignty from us. Lincoln Steffens in The Shame of the Cities.
Politics: The best Congress money can buy
"MAPLight.org brings together campaign contributions and how legislators vote, providing an unprecedented window into the connections between money and politics. We currently cover the California Legislature and U.S. Congress." -- from the website. <http://maplight.org/>
More "New and Not Improved"
Okay. I was wrong. There was a lot more anger building up on the left than was evident when I wrote the piece below (see, Obama's Online Muscle Flexes Against Him, Chicago Tribune 2008-07-08). The problem, of course, is that the senator's progressive supporters can whine and pule all they want but it won't change anything. They already gave away the store when they threw their support to him without getting anything in return. Without the availability of an alternative (Hillary Clinton and John Edwards come to mind), they have nothing to hold over him. John McCain? I don't think so. The only shocking thing is that anybody's shocked. You can only be surprised if you haven't been paying attention. BHO has been saying most of this stuff all along (well, okay, not the campaign financing stuff). This may be why Ralph Nader is doing so well in the polls, a steady 5% -- certainly enough to make the difference in a close race -- at a time when the tide is most favorable to Obama. The question remains, as it has throughout this race, what it will take to get the Democrats to end the war, establish single-payer national health, rein in the military, restore progressive taxation, and start the long, slow, costly job of rebuilding the nation's tattered infrastructure. If Obama isn't the answer, what's Plan B?
"New and Not Improved" (New York Times headline -- July 4, 2008)
The Times is shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that Barack Obama is a conventional, middle-of-the-road politician, not the second coming of Abe Lincoln and Bobby Kennedy. You may not think it's any surprise that, having safely disposed of the evil Clintons in the primaries, the Democrats' candidate has tacked right on a few issues for the general election, but the Times is deeply disappointed in the junior legislator from Illinois.
"Senator Barack Obama stirred his legions of supporters, and raised our hopes," the paper lamented in an Independence Day editorial, "promising to change the old order of things. He spoke with passion about breaking out of the partisan mold of bickering and catering to special pleaders, promised to end President Bush’s abuses of power and subverting of the Constitution and disowned the big-money power brokers who have corrupted Washington politics....Now there seems to be a new Barack Obama on the hustings....Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking, because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games."
If the paper's editorial writers really took seriously Obama's posturing about change, they are more naive even than the senator's converts on the left. Progressive idealists have an excuse in falling for his pitch. After all, if the nation doesn't find salvation by anointing the Chicago pol in November, they will be forced to fall back on the tougher job of electing a progressive majority to Congress and organizing an apparently terminally apathetic citizenry.
You have to wonder what campaign the Times has been following, though. Obama has never made a secret of who he is. Beyond the rhetoric of change and his campaign's grasp of the Internet's organizing and fund-raising capacities, he has presented himself throughout the primaries as dependably moderate -- pro-military, pro-death penalty, anti-gun control, ready to reach across the aisle -- when he has shown any interest in policy at all.
It is certainly true, as the Times says, that Obama stirred his legions of supporters by promising to change the old order of things. But this was almost entirely a matter of speechifying. In fact (and ironically, when you consider the passion with which the anti-Clinton forces hugged him to their bosoms), throughout the campaign Obama has sounded remarkably like the Bill Clinton of 1996. He did indeed speak "with passion about breaking out of the partisan mold of bickering and catering to special pleaders," but like Bill Clinton's, the likeliest outcome of Barack Obama's brand of bipartisanship will be the adoption of the conservative agenda.
Obama, the Times adds, "promised to end President Bush’s abuses of power and subverting of the Constitution" -- as who didn't? -- "and disowned the big-money power brokers who have corrupted Washington politics." It's true that Hillary Clinton couldn't find it in herself to bite the hands that fed her, but -- not to beat a dead horse -- if the Times really wanted to enlist in the fight for economic justice they wouldn't have joined the media pack in minimizing John Edwards' insurgency. In any case, about the "new" Obama the Times continues, "First,
That raises a question, however: Doesn't your willingness to kill someone in order to become president automatically disqualify you from the job? In the U.S., there are on average around 30,000 deaths annually from firearms and over 200,000 non-fatal injuries. If, as Obama wishes, handguns are easier to acquire, there will be more fatalities and more injuries . If additional crimes are made capital offenses, there will be more executions. But no one will be able to say Barack Obama is soft on crime. There will be no Willie Horton for him, if he can help it.
In any case, I hold Barack Obama in higher regard than many of his supporters. To me, his campaign makes more sense if you take him at his word that he is an ambitious moderate with little interest in policy, that he is another Democratic presidential candidate whose most attractive attribute is that he is not the other guy. There is no question that there are reasons to prefer Barack Obama to John McCain, those pesky Supreme Court appointments among them. But keeping in mind the outcome of the Clinton years, whether this makes his election the more desirable remains to be seen.
"Senator Barack Obama stirred his legions of supporters, and raised our hopes," the paper lamented in an Independence Day editorial, "promising to change the old order of things. He spoke with passion about breaking out of the partisan mold of bickering and catering to special pleaders, promised to end President Bush’s abuses of power and subverting of the Constitution and disowned the big-money power brokers who have corrupted Washington politics....Now there seems to be a new Barack Obama on the hustings....Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking, because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games."
If the paper's editorial writers really took seriously Obama's posturing about change, they are more naive even than the senator's converts on the left. Progressive idealists have an excuse in falling for his pitch. After all, if the nation doesn't find salvation by anointing the Chicago pol in November, they will be forced to fall back on the tougher job of electing a progressive majority to Congress and organizing an apparently terminally apathetic citizenry.
You have to wonder what campaign the Times has been following, though. Obama has never made a secret of who he is. Beyond the rhetoric of change and his campaign's grasp of the Internet's organizing and fund-raising capacities, he has presented himself throughout the primaries as dependably moderate -- pro-military, pro-death penalty, anti-gun control, ready to reach across the aisle -- when he has shown any interest in policy at all.
It is certainly true, as the Times says, that Obama stirred his legions of supporters by promising to change the old order of things. But this was almost entirely a matter of speechifying. In fact (and ironically, when you consider the passion with which the anti-Clinton forces hugged him to their bosoms), throughout the campaign Obama has sounded remarkably like the Bill Clinton of 1996. He did indeed speak "with passion about breaking out of the partisan mold of bickering and catering to special pleaders," but like Bill Clinton's, the likeliest outcome of Barack Obama's brand of bipartisanship will be the adoption of the conservative agenda.
Obama, the Times adds, "promised to end President Bush’s abuses of power and subverting of the Constitution" -- as who didn't? -- "and disowned the big-money power brokers who have corrupted Washington politics." It's true that Hillary Clinton couldn't find it in herself to bite the hands that fed her, but -- not to beat a dead horse -- if the Times really wanted to enlist in the fight for economic justice they wouldn't have joined the media pack in minimizing John Edwards' insurgency. In any case, about the "new" Obama the Times continues, "First,
he broke his promise to try to keep both major parties within public-financing limits for the general election. His team explained that, saying he had a grass-roots-based model and that while he was forgoing public money, he also was eschewing gold-plated fund-raisers. These days he’s on a high-roller hunt.Hard not to agree that this is a switcheroo worthy of a three-card monte hustler in Times Square. But the biggest surprise is how easily he is getting away with it. The Times deserves credit for taking him to task for what is a major sellout of reform politics; imagine the howls that would be emanating from progressive circles if John McCain or Hillary Clinton pulled a stunt like this.
Even his own chief money collector, Penny Pritzker, suggests that the magic of $20 donations from the Web was less a matter of principle than of scheduling. “We have not been able to have much of the senator’s time during the primaries, so we have had to rely more on the Internet,” she explained as she and her team busily scheduled more than a dozen big-ticket events over the next few weeks at which the target price for quality time with the candidate is more than $30,000 per person.
The new Barack Obama has abandoned his vow to filibuster an electronic wiretapping bill if it includes an immunity clause for telecommunications companies that amounts to a sanctioned cover-up of Mr. Bush’s unlawful eavesdropping after 9/11.Again, Obama has consistently backed the Patriot Act and military spending, on occasion has gone so far as to advocate missile attacks on Iran and military action in Pakistan, and has made it clear that he is no threat to the entitlements of the military state. It's more likely he was pandering in January than July.
In January, when he was battling for Super Tuesday votes, Mr. Obama said that the 1978 law requiring warrants for wiretapping, and the special court it created, worked. “We can trace, track down and take out terrorists while ensuring that our actions are subject to vigorous oversight and do not undermine the very laws and freedom that we are fighting to defend,” he declared.
Now, he supports the immunity clause as part of what he calls a compromise but actually is a classic, cynical Washington deal that erodes the power of the special court, virtually eliminates “vigorous oversight” and allows more warrantless eavesdropping than ever.
The Barack Obama of the primary season used to brag that he would stand before interest groups and tell them tough truths. The new Mr. Obama tells evangelical Christians that he wants to expand President Bush’s policy of funneling public money for social spending to religious-based organizations — a policy that violates the separation of church and state and turns a government function into a charitable donation.If you think back to the Clinton presidency, you will remember that he, too, succeeded a failed Republican administration. If George Bush had been reelected would the Congress have funded expansion of the military? Would we have had NAFTA and trade reform, welfare reform, banking reform, telecom reform? (You are permitted to assume there are quotation marks around any appearance of the word reform on these pages.) Would the Democratic Party have abandoned its four-decade-old commitment to achieving single-payer health insurance? It requires no stretch of imagination to recognize that an Obama administration will be equally inclined to bridle any liberal excesses of the next Congress.
He says he would not allow those groups to discriminate in employment, as Mr. Bush did, which is nice. But the Constitution exists to protect democracy, no matter who is president and how good his intentions may be.
On top of these perplexing shifts in position, we find ourselves disagreeing powerfully with Mr. Obama on two other issues: the death penalty and gun control.Me, too. But it's a little after the fact to bring it up now.
Mr. Obama endorsed the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the District of Columbia’s gun-control law. We knew he ascribed to the anti-gun-control groups’ misreading of the Constitution as implying an individual right to bear arms. But it was distressing to see him declare that the court provided a guide to “reasonable regulations enacted by local communities to keep their streets safe.”In 1996, Bill Clinton suspended his presidential campaign to return to Arkansas to preside as governor over the execution of a retarded man. When someone like George Bush or John McCain favors the death penalty, you think they know not what they do. But Bill Clinton is a policy wonk. He has read the same studies you have about the negative effects of the death penalty on public policy. He knows it has no deterrent effect. He knows it is wrongly applied much of the time. He knows that innocent people die. But he had seen Mike Dukakis get Willie Hortoned, and he wasn't going to let it happen to him.
What could be more reasonable than a city restricting handguns, or requiring that firearms be stored in ways that do not present a mortal threat to children?
We were equally distressed by Mr. Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court’s barring the death penalty for crimes that do not involve murder.
That raises a question, however: Doesn't your willingness to kill someone in order to become president automatically disqualify you from the job? In the U.S., there are on average around 30,000 deaths annually from firearms and over 200,000 non-fatal injuries. If, as Obama wishes, handguns are easier to acquire, there will be more fatalities and more injuries . If additional crimes are made capital offenses, there will be more executions. But no one will be able to say Barack Obama is soft on crime. There will be no Willie Horton for him, if he can help it.
We are not shocked when a candidate moves to the center for the general election. But Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games.Obama partisans who are bothered by any of this offer the reassurance that he doesn't mean what he says. He is just saying what he must to get elected. Aside from the questionable wisdom of this as practical politics (viz., the candidacies of Al Gore and John Kerry), it is a little disheartening to be asked to trust that a candidate is lying.
There are still vital differences between Mr. Obama and Senator John McCain on issues like the war in Iraq, taxes, health care and Supreme Court nominations. We don’t want any “redefining” on these big questions. This country needs change it can believe in.
In any case, I hold Barack Obama in higher regard than many of his supporters. To me, his campaign makes more sense if you take him at his word that he is an ambitious moderate with little interest in policy, that he is another Democratic presidential candidate whose most attractive attribute is that he is not the other guy. There is no question that there are reasons to prefer Barack Obama to John McCain, those pesky Supreme Court appointments among them. But keeping in mind the outcome of the Clinton years, whether this makes his election the more desirable remains to be seen.
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