Rush to Judgment

It was smart, it was articulate, it was oratorical. It was, it was all the things the educated, ruling class wants their members to be and sound like.

Rush Limbaugh on President Obama's Tucson speech

Limbaugh spoke these words while accusing conservative Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer of "slobbering" over the president's call for unity in the face of tragedy. Krauthammer's acid response ("I find it interesting that only the ruling class wants a president who is smart, articulate, or oratorical in delivering a funeral oration") was correct enough, but missed the larger point and ironically played into Limbaugh's hands: His arch, sarcastic words put himself in the role of a disdainful elite who sneers at the dittoheads who represent the real America.

I have no doubt that Limbaugh's remarks were thought out and planned in advance. He knew that he was speaking to and for a responsive audience that resents President Obama's education and intellect and, by extension, the supposed condescension and snobbishness inherent to liberalism. So, if Limbaugh was on safe ground by accusing the president of intelligence, fluency, and eloquence, he speaks for people who self-identify as being none of those things, people who see themselves as uneducated, tongue-tied, and coarse.

People who are self-loathing.

People who may wrap their ugly self-image in the ribbons and bows old-fashioned 1950s values, but whose rage belies the plain-spokeness they think they're conveying.

People who deep down -- or maybe not so deep down -- find it awfully tough to swallow the reality that the black son of a single mother has run laps around them in the game of life. This is even tougher to ingest than a similar reality about a small-town boy from Arkansas raised by a single mother, and that went down about as smoothly as a dreadnought.

People who believe that their guns actually serve as a bulwark against government tyranny, a pathetic delusion if there ever was one. A real tyrant -- a Hitler or a Stalin -- would chew these guys up, spit them out, wipe his mouth with the 2nd Amendment, and take about three seconds to forget what had happened. I've seen the people who frequent gun dealers: They could stand up to the Gestapo or the NKVD about as well as I could protect Drew Brees's blind side.

And the country has let itself be held hostage to this.

Torture Is Wrong. Period.

Charles Krauthammer's ongoing justification of torture reeks of the rationalization and intellectual selling out that produced torture in the first. For this reason alone and if you can stomach it, his latest column is worth reading. A nation can justify a torture policy, Krauthammer writes, under two circumstances:

the ticking time bomb scenario and its less extreme variant in which a high-value terrorist refuses to divulge crucial information that could save innocent lives.

But Krauthammer offers no evidence that the Bush Administration considered either justification as it sought legal validation for torture. To the contrary, the Administration appears to have applied torture indiscriminately on the questionable legal basis that the president's wartime powers were such that they overrode all limitations imposed by the Constitution and international treaties.

Krauthammer then offers an example -- and they always have one -- of an instance where the "crucial information" exception applied:

On Oct. 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered, as we now say, this enhanced interrogation explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the ('87) Landau Commission (guidelines), we would never have found out where Waxman was being held."

First of all, it's news to me that the American conduct should be governed by standards ignored in a bitter central Asian racial and religious struggle. Second, who's to say that the Palestinians did not regard Cpl Waxman as a "high value terrorist" refusing to "divulge critical information that could save lives"? After all, the Bush Administration mistakenly considered Osama bin Laden's driver as a high value. Under Krauthammer's logic, the Palestinians were justified in torturing Cpl. Waxman, which they of course were not.

Of course, if he reads this, Krauthammer will marshal his considerable skill in ad hominem attacks, accuse me of drawing a moral equivalency where none exists, and add that by doing so I had forfeited the moral ground to argue about torture at all. This line of argument raises the specter of exceptionalism, under which a nation's (in this case, Israel and the United States) singular moral standing with God is so exalted that any and all of its actions enjoy moral sanction by definition. In practice, exceptionalism serves as an excuse for a powerful nation to do whatever it wants to do to weaker nations because God is on its side. One saw exceptionalism at work in the British Empire's plundering of Asia, Imperial Japan's expansionist policy toward East Asia that touched off World War II, and the United States' Indian policy and, most recently, invasion of Iraq.

Moreover, Krauthammer barely deals with just who can decide whether his circumstances have been met. He writes vaguely about the "reasonable man" legal concept and seems to include the likes of Dick Cheney and Alan Dershowitz among them. I'll pass on that one. Moreover, I doubt that many of Krauthammer's "reasonable men" could be found in Guantanamo or the rendition prisons. We certainly didn't see evidence of them at Abu Ghraib.

He goes on to airily cite the "fact" that Nancy Pelosi knew about torture as somehow relevant to its morality because Pelosi is an elected figure. (I guess that means that Adolf Hitler was essentially moral because he assumed power by democratic means.) Pelosi has pushed back on CIA claims and has received plenty of support in doing so (see Just My Little Piece of the World here and here). Let's face it: Historically, the agency that brought us the Shah of Iran, the Bay of Pigs, and the "slam dunk" of WED's in Iraq has little reputation for either competence or probity.

Krauthammer doesn't address at all the possibility that his "standards" would lead to the slippery slope of indiscriminate torture even though it is clear that that is exactly what happened. Is it justifiable to torture an innocent person in the interests of extracting "crucial information"? What is the likelihood that torture will result in wrong information that leads to grave policy errors? Are these risks worth taking? Is torture the only means of disarming the "ticking time bomb"? Does torture expose captured American soldiers to greater risk? These questions have no place in the Krauhammerian world where you can tell the bad guys by their turbans.

Back in 2004, Dick Cheney asserted that "detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare," a claim we now know to be factually untrue (if not a lie). As this article points out, it's now known that interrogators at Guantanamo were under tremendous pressure to produce evidence of a connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. As the article points out

During the same period, two alleged senior al Qaida operatives in CIA custody were waterboarded repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times and Khalid Sheik Mohammed at least 183 times.

Did this torture produce the false information that helped justify the debacle in Iraq? Was it reasonable men putting the pressure on interrogators to justify a conclusion that had already been reached? Torture is wrong. It's always wrong. No nation, especially one that sees itself as divinely blessed, can justify it under any circumstances. The Bush Administration approved of torture because it could, because torture made the chickenhawks who got us into Iraq feel powerful. It's that simple. It's that pathetic...

Just A Song: Patty Griffin's "Be Careful"...

There just ain't no cure for the "Summertime Blues". Stupid and Contagious writes:

With its legendary guitar riff, and its combination of striking verite, innovation, elan, sparseness, and anti-establishment angst, "Summertime Blues" established a template for countless other songs, from the Fifties onwards.

In fact , it could be said that, in many ways, "Summertime Blues" opened the door for the most important music revolutions of the Sixties and, via punk, of the Seventies too. Almost all the significant artists from those periods have paid Eddie, and this specific song, glowing tributes...

Fade to gray at the foot of Canal Street...

The Decline Of Intellectual Conservatism

Leonard Pitts writes of the tattered remnants of intellectual conservatism, "Are we to regard unthinking conservatives...as the only true conservatives?" Sarah Palin, Pitts writes, is as advertised: One of us.

And by "us," I don't mean you, necessarily, or me. I mean the lowest common denominator us, the us of myth and narrative, the us of simple mind, the reactionary, ill-informed, impatient with complexity, utterly shallow us.

He commiserates with fellow pundits Kathleen Parker and David Brooks, conservatives whose criticisms of Palin invoked the wrath of the Republican rank and file. 

To my way of thinking, though, the likes of Brooks and Parker brought this on themselves. Long ago, they looked the other way as the religious right brought both fervor and anti-intellectualism to the Republican cause. No doubt believing that the mob could be controlled, they stood silent while Creationism, homophobia, and irrationality seeped into the public discourse. If Brooks' and Parker didn't exactly create the sans culottes of modern conservatism, they stood by as the rampage began. They spoke out only when their purpose was no longer served, then acted offended when the mob came for them. 

The culmination of this is, of course, the explosions of rage at recent McCain rallies. The reactionary, ill-informed us, aggrieved and resentful even when in power, see their influence and importance slipping away. Fearing irrelevancy, they howl that Obama is a socialist and a terrorist, both patently ridiculous accusations that serve to show how intellectually bankrupt Republicanism has become. Of course, when an ideology characterized by its own moral certitude had driven the country into a ditch before the financial panic made matters worse, perhaps it's to be expected that its adherents will lash out at perceived enemies rather than look to themselves.

Then there are the other conservative intellectuals -- thinkers like William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer. They long ago put their ability at the service of ideology, and now have the credibility of a party intellectual in Stalinist Russia. In a typically over the top column, Krauthammer fulminates about Obama's "associations." Krauthammer admits that Obama is neither corrupt nor racist, but argues that his unscrupulous "use" of William Ayers, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and Anthony Rezko prove how cynically ruthless Obama is at his core. That this doesn't pass the laugh test bothers Krauthammer not at all, a man who will say or write anything to advance his personal agenda of keeping the United States deeply involved in Middle Eastern politics (with the exception of Israel's Likud party, with whom we have a moral obligation to follow in lockstep).

One problem with Krauthammer's argument is that everyone has associations. For example, I find John McCain's association with George Bush, Phil Gramm, Joe Lieberman, and the "shallow us" much more deeply problematic than than Barack Obama's tenuous connection to a former Sixties radical. Were he or she to think about it in those terms, the typical voter probably agrees. 

William Kristol, a leading cheerleader for the Iraq war, also thinks Obama's associations are a legitimate campaign issue. But Kristol counsels McCain to make nice anyway, ignoring the reality that they let the wolves out of the cage a long time ago and that the anger of McCain's supporters has been an inescapable part of the story.

The Kristols and the Krauthammers served an important function in the rise of modern conservatism. They provided a useful intellectual veneer for the gutter politics of Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay, and Karl Rove. By surrendering their independence, they've lent ramshackle intellectual trappings to the savagery of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter. They are also the other half of the story that Leonard Pitts writes about, that modern conservatism is as much about intellectual dishonesty as it is anti-intellectualism...

Unbelievable...