Obama's Perpetual Mulligan

If there's anything the recent ridiculous Nation/Mark Ames/Yasha Levine incident has revealed other than absurd tribalism or that Mark Ames is the Gwar of journalism, it's that liberals have been giving the Obama Administration a pass on civil liberties violations in favor of pointing out how conservatives did the same thing when Bush was President.  From a Harvard Law Bulletin Jeri Zeder review of Charles and Gregory Fried's new book, "Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror":

The book explores three issues presented by Bush administration policies, primarily from ethical but also from historical and legal perspectives: torture; eavesdropping, surveillance and the right to privacy; and executive prerogative.

f course I think the work the Fried's are doing is great in principle, and I haven't read the book, but this passage in the review ignores the fact that, while the Obama Administration has closed Gitmo and opted for Stalinist show trials instead of secret dungeon torture, the Administration has escalated da warz and the intrusiveness of our security state.  There has also been the unprecedented step taken of ordering an American Citizen to be assassinated.  I mean, holy shit, we're talking like these issues of Executive power are all in the past and the real question now is how do we clean up the mess and deal with the fallout.

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"This is America, and We Don't %^$#*& Torture!"

What's a torture article without a medieval engraving?After posts on Hitler and how objective truth is like Santa Claus, I figured I'd try something more cheerful: let's talk about torture.  As you may have guessed, I'm opposed to torturing prisoners to obtain intelligence, but not for the reasons you might think; frankly, the rights of a mass-murderer are not at the top of my list of priorities, so who cares about the humanitarian aspects; seriously, who cares? (Although there's one caveat I'll get around to discussing later.)  But even without considering humanitarian reasons, there are still plenty of excellent reasons not to torture prisoners.  (For the purposes of this analysis, let's go ahead and consider waterboarding torture, though I did that when I was in New Zealand, and it was mad fun.)  

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Conservatism Eats Itself

The point of view Texas just correctedThe Texas school board's new curriculum continues the tragic decline of modern American "conservatism" as a movement with intellectual heft and consistency of thought.  Conservatives once imagined that they stood athwart the breach that threatened to replace individualism, inherited values and freedom with the top-down collective conformity of the Soviet Union.  Now, the right indoctrinates the young before college to counter the propaganda of the liberal intelligentsia, brands anyone that opposes extra-legal torture as "soft on terror" and attempts to "bureaucracize" language by calling torture "enhanced interrogation" and capitalism "free-market enterprise."  It is a tragedy that conservatives would embrace propaganda and torture, reducing their legacy of strident opposition to Communism and its evils to froth of partisanship.  Communism was evil because of what it did, not why it did it, if we do evil then we are no better.  If only more people were temperamentally conservative - humble, careful and limited in their approach to politics- rather than ideologically conservative, which amounts to a shopping list of positions their team supports.

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Reflexively Wrong

The reaction to the failed bombing of a Detroit bound international flight has proven to be more sobering than a fresh reminder that the world is never perfectly secure.  President Obama demonstrated that he will ramp up the useless airport security apparatus to protect his Achilles heel, a second 9/11 that would instantly doom his presidency.  Conservatives embraced Cheney's extraordinary philosophy by complaining that the law wasn't broken.  The media chose to ignore the human interest story - Jasper Schuringa, the heroic passenger who ripped the bomb away from Farouk Abdulmutalla and dragged him out of his seat - in favor of a controversy about what Obama could have done to prevent the attack.

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Anti-gay Shia Death Squads in Iraq

Rumors of horrible anti-gay violence in Iraq has been filtering out for months, but this articles has all the gory details.  While the glue in anus murders and barbaric torture jump off the page, the part that really shocked me was their systematic torturing to learn about the underground gay culture.  The clear parallel to our own system of kidnapping and torture to build a database about the underground terrorist network shows that our brutality has been met in kind.  That the 130,000 troops we still have there can't protect this vulnerable minority, who are an orphaned interest in Iraq, shows how limited our position is now.  Any attempt to help them might actually increase their isolation and danger. When we leave, the lives of most Iraqis will be much worse than it was before we came, even under a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein. In the meantime, expedited immigration for gay Iraqis would allow more of them to escape from the Middle Ages barbarism still alive and well in Iraq.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan