After nearly two months of deliberation, some have criticized the Obama Administration of foot-dragging a decision on Afghanistan. As a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, I could not disagree more. If the previous administration had put such care into its approach toward Iraq and Afghanistan, we might not be facing the difficulties we face today.

An informed decision is not the same as indecision. Given the complexities of securing Afghanistan and turning the tide against the insurgency, it is critical that our commander-in-chief understand the nature of the challenge, and I applaud the president for taking the time to acquire that understanding.

But to succeed in Afghanistan, we need more than a president who understands what we’re up against. We need the American people to understand. To achieve this understanding, I would suggest that there are two major trends in our favor that the American people ought to know.

First, Pakistan has finally recognized the need to confront al Qaeda and the Taliban within its own country, conducting significant operations over the last year to retake Taliban controlled territory.

This is a tremendous shift by Pakistan, which has historically funded terrorist organizations aimed at attacking India. They are in the fight against terrorism now. This gives us the opportunity to crush al Qaeda and the Taliban in the region, with Pakistan attacking them from its own territory in the east, while U.S. and allied forces attack from the West in Afghanistan. This is a vice we should tighten.

Second, America now “does” counter-insurgency. The attitude, tactical skills, and operational ability needed to defeat an insurgency are very different from the conventional warfare abilities that have guided our military thinking since World War II.

Leaders such as Generals Petraeus and McChrystal have recognized this fact and begun to conduct military operations accordingly. The Army and Marine Corps also gained counter-insurgency skills the hard way, during the Iraqi crucible, learning that the key to defeating insurgents lies in protecting the population.

Success in Afghanistan will only come if the Afghan people see the U.S.-led mission in a positive light, which requires the military to put a premium on protecting people. With a counter-insurgency strategy firmly in place, securing this long-term support has now become a possibility.

Of course, these developments alone do not guarantee easy success in Afghanistan. There are, however, no real alternatives. The two most popular suggestions – walking away from Afghanistan or returning to a failed “counter-terror” strategy – carry far too much risk.

Walking away from Afghanistan would be a disaster. We did that once before, after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in the 1980s. The result? Without an American hand in the region, Afghanistan disintegrated into chaos. Pakistan supported the least bad path toward stability, the Taliban. The Taliban eventually gave legal sanctuary to al Qaeda, which used Afghan territory to prepare the 9/11 attacks.

Were we to leave Afghanistan now, the region would spiral out of control once again. Except this time, Pakistan is a nuclear nation. Getting out of the game now would allow extremists to get closer to nuclear weapons, a decidedly unacceptable situation.

Similarly, a counter-terrorism approach to Afghanistan is no real solution. We have been trying that for eight years, with large unit operations to hunt bandits, and drones to kill Taliban and al Qaeda leaders. Though we have eliminated a significant number of bad guys, we have also alienated a lot of fence-sitters, and the insurgency has grown stronger. Clearly, we need a new approach.

So what should that approach look like? First, the U.S. must commit to defeating the elements of the Taliban who would either challenge the legitimate governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan, or harbor members of trans-national terrorist organizations.

Then we need to follow up these commitments with troops and time. Give General McChrystal what he needs to get the situation under control, and the time he needs to train more Afghan forces. The sooner the Afghans can protect themselves, the sooner we can bring our troops home.

There won’t be a Victory-Afghanistan day that we will all be able to look back on thirty years from now. We live in a different world that includes a different kind of war and a different kind of victory. But the path to that 21st century victory is on the table right now. A steadfast commitment from the United States will ultimately help the Afghan people to pursue a better future for themselves and bolster our security by denying safe haven to terrorists and extremists.

On my trips abroad, I have rarely found an Indian restaurant that would satisfy my native taste buds. In the West, there has been a “curry” revolution and its impact has been the most in Britain. However, there is a growing realization that Indian cooking is not just meant to set your tongue on fire or titillate the palate, it actually mixes common sense with the ancient science of Ayurveda, gaining popularity as alternative medicine.

“Ever since the first British curry house opened its doors (the country now has an estimated 9,000 Indian restaurants) Indian food has become synonymous, in many minds, with the macho pursuit of tongue-bothering spice and fattening takeaway blowouts washed down with gallons of beer,” reports The Independent.

“Of course, there is another side to Indian food, and in recent years a small but determined group of cooks have sought to break through the stereotype.

“Monisha Bharadwaj is one of Britain’s top Indian cooks and an award-winning writer. Her latest book, Healthy Indian in Minutes, is mouth-watering collection of dishes… ‘The majority of British takeaways do not offer the best example of good Indian cooking,’ Bharadwaj says. ‘But you have to think about what they are. When they first opened, curry houses were catering to people who were used to eating heavy food with all its gravy, cream and stodginess. Takeaways offered something similar but with added spice.’

“But Bharadwaj says there is a growing demand for something different. I meet her in Hounslow, where she moved from her native Mumbai 22 years ago. As well as writing she now runs a cookery school in her kitchen. ‘More and more people want to cook home-cooked Indian food that’s fresh and healthy,’ she says. ‘They know that it is something different but they don’t know what it is because you can’t get it in restaurants.’

“Bharadwaj’s courses are proving a hit with everyone from housewives and husbands short of inspiration to top chefs looking to expand their repertoires.

“Bharadwaj is particular in the kitchen but that’s just how she learned to cook. Indian home cooking is governed by rules, some of them common sense but others more complex and founded on the ancient Indian science of Ayurveda. First recorded more than 5,000 years ago, the world’s oldest known system of medicine casts the kitchen as an apothecary in which herbs have healing powers.” More here…

Amazon website has this to say about Bharadwaj’s book: “People often see Indian food as greasy, fatty and labour-intensive, but everyday Indian home cooking is neither unhealthy nor difficult to prepare. Monisha Bharadwaj will prove that it is in fact a highly nutritious, gentle cuisine that has always included natural and whole foods such as whole wheat flour, raw cane sugar, lots of vegetables, beans, lentils and any number of healing spices.

“Indian eating is based on the ancient science of Ayurveda, a system of holistic living that is the oldest form of medicine known to man. Broken down into straightforward chapters – curries, dry dishes, light one-pot meals, salads and raitas, chutneys and relishes, drinks and sweets – ‘Healthy Indian in Minutes’ will give readers the tips and strategies they need to cook healthy home-style food in a matter of minutes.” More here…

It seems an outlandish thought at a moment when you cannot turn on your television without hearing government spoken of as almost an alien creature. It is cast as far removed from the lives of average Americans and more likely to destroy the achievements of private citizens than to accomplish anything worthwhile.

True, we don’t apply our anti-government sentiments to at least one group of Americans who draw government paychecks: our men and women in uniform. All the polls show they are, deservedly, held in high esteem. But civilians who do the daily work of government are more likely to be referred to as “bureaucrats,” “time servers,” and various unprintable things than as public servants.

This has not always been the American way. There were important eras in our history when citizens in large numbers were drawn to government service with a sense of mission and exhilaration. The New Deal was certainly such a time and so were the days of the New Frontier and (it is unjustly derided now) the Great Society.

They came in part — take note, President Obama — because they were inspired by leaders who made it a point to call them into government. Caroline Kennedy has said that when she was growing up, “hardly a day went by when someone didn’t come up to us and say: ‘Your father changed my life. I went into public service because he asked me.’”

But inspiration is not enough. The military, after all, does not rely solely on patriotic feelings to build its force, and neither should the civilian parts of government. One of the most powerful incentives the military has is the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, which offers assistance to those seeking higher education. It’s time for a civilian ROTC.

That’s the idea of a bipartisan group of Senators and House members who are proposing to create the Roosevelt Scholars program, named after Teddy Roosevelt. Reps. David Price, D-N.C., and Mike Castle, R-Del., have introduced a bill in the House, and a similar measure is expected in the Senate this week from Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and George Voinovich, R-Ohio.

Although there is sentiment to include undergraduates in the program, the House bill is aimed at graduate students, because the federal government has a special demand for highly qualified employees who are otherwise attracted (and heavily recruited) by the private sector. In exchange for generous scholarships in fields such as engineering, information technology, foreign languages and public health, the scholars would commit to three to five years of service in an agency of the federal government.

“With the aging of the boomers and those who responded to Kennedy’s call to service, we need to replenish the government work force,” says Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service.

Stier, a one-man evangelizing squad on behalf of government service, notes that the government must fill 273,000 “mission-critical” positions in the next three years. This will require vast improvements in the way government recruits and a new willingness to invest in its work force.

The military, he says, gets roughly 40 percent of its officer corps through ROTC. It makes sense to undertake a comparable investment in the civil service.

In the small and underappreciated world of those who care passionately about improving government’s performance and prestige, there are competing visions of how to achieve this. One group of activists and legislators has been pushing to create a Public Service Academy, modeled after the military academies, to prepare a new generation of leaders in government.

It’s a good idea and would send another powerful signal that government work is and should be valued. But with the extraordinary constraints on the federal budget, the prospects of the large investment that would be required to build a new institution are not exactly rosy. A civilian ROTC would be a good first step. The Roosevelt program has the benefit of drawing on the entire higher education system’s capacity to produce specialists.

The Roosevelt program could also be an antidote to two debilitating trends in our politics. It would push back against the tendency of politicians to deride government (an odd habit, since politicians are themselves engaged in government service). And it might open the way for a bipartisan achievement at a time when such endeavors are in very short supply.

This column is copyrighted and licensed to run in full on TMV. (c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group

Editor’s Note: This was supposed to run yesterday but due to a glitch it’s publication on TMV was delayed.

Ziad Haider is an MPA/JD candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and Georgetown Law, and a Truman National Security Fellow. He conducted field research on governance in FATA with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in the summer of 2008 and previously worked as a foreign policy advisor in the U.S. Senate.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent three-day visit to Islamabad and Lahore highlighted the ongoing challenge of conducting diplomacy in Pakistan. For a nation whose partnership is vital to U.S. security, the fact that 64% of Pakistanis view the U.S. as an enemy represents no small problem. As the White House reassesses its “Af-Pak” strategy, it is important to clearly define U.S. interests in Pakistan and to chart a new course in US-Pakistani relations that places a greater emphasis on diplomacy.

The U.S. has two vital interests in Pakistan. The first is to combat extremism. This includes al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the associated domestic terrorist groups that threaten Pakistan’s stability. A corollary to this threat is the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

The second is to ensure regional stability for three reasons: to avoid a conflict between Pakistan and India that would force Pakistan to redeploy troops from west to east and detract from the war in Afghanistan; to avoid a conflict between Pakistan and India that may escalate up the nuclear chain; and to improve regional relations so that Pakistan no longer feels the need to retain militant proxies as leverage against its neighbors.

In combating extremism, the U.S. has been relatively successful at securing Pakistani operational support in Afghanistan, including the transit of vital supplies; getting Pakistan to eliminate key al Qaeda leaders; and nudging it to confront internal threats such as those in the Swat Valley.

While domestic dynamics have driven many of these decisions, U.S. diplomacy has played a role. These successes were accomplished through a mix of coercive and soft diplomacy ranging from a “with us or against us” choice at the onset of the invasion of Afghanistan to the lifting of sanctions and generous provision of military assistance.

On regional stability, the U.S. has successfully engaged in short-term crisis management. These include external crises such as the 2001-2002 Indo-Pak military mobilization and the more recent standoff between the civilian government and opposition over the restoration of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Breakthroughs were respectively possible due to high-level and intensive interventions by Secretary of State Colin Powell and by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Yet U.S. diplomacy has also failed in significant measure. The U.S. has been unable to alter the Pakistani army’s strategic calculus. The army continues to retain the Taliban and other militant groups as a hedging strategy against Pakistan’s neighbors and a seemingly inevitable U.S. drawdown.

U.S. diplomacy has also been unable to generate support among Pakistanis who harbor deep grievances: historic US support for military rule, “abandonment” and sanctions in the nineties, the invasion of Afghanistan, drone strikes, and U.S. policies in the Middle East. This tortured and at times distorted public narrative has impeded robust cooperation with Pakistan’s fragile democratic government.

Lastly, the U.S. has failed to take a long-term view in addressing regional dynamics. Historic fissures remain, such as the Pak-Afghan border dispute and Indo-Pak grievances, including Kashmir. The military imperative of fighting a war in Afghanistan has eclipsed the diplomatic imperative of tackling the root causes of insecurity in the region.

So how does the U.S. leverage diplomacy to strengthen its relationship with Pakistan based on “mutual interest and mutual respect?” Here are four key elements to consider.

First, U.S. diplomacy must focus on the Pakistani people. The Kerry-Lugar bill that tripled economic aid was an important start; patience and public diplomacy are required to reap the dividends.

Second, the U.S. must also advance the resolution of core regional issues, including supporting the resumption of the Indo-Pak composite dialogue as well as an eventual Af-Pak dialogue on the status of the Durand Line.

Third, the U.S. must manage the visibility/invisibility paradox. This entails balancing a lower profile to avoid appearing overly intrusive with being sufficiently visible to secure the public dividend of development initiatives and to demonstrate sustained engagement. As reflected in the Kerry-Lugar debate, the U.S. must also walk the fine legislative line between accountability for taxpayer money and perceived dictation infringing on Pakistani sovereignty.

Lastly, however, the U.S. must be honest about why Pakistan matters. Stretching back through the Cold War, the U.S. has always seen Pakistan through a security lens. This raises an inescapable question: can the relationship ever be sustainable if it pivots on avoiding negative outcomes instead of achieving positive ones? The way this question is answered or reframed will define the bilateral relationship beyond the current crisis of the hour.

For now, a democratic and prosperous Pakistan at peace with itself and its neighbors is critical for U.S. national security. To this end, as in Afghanistan, the U.S. is essentially fighting a form of counter-insurgency in Pakistan – minus the troops. This further necessitates a surge in U.S. diplomacy toward Pakistan to secure a more willing and able partner.

By Daryl Cagle

I’m holding my breath. I’m now into my third month of waiting for Apple to approve my iPhone app. Yesterday I heard from Apple that they need more time to think about it.

My app is pretty cool; it is called “MSNBC.com Cartoons” and it features a real time news feed of political cartoons by top cartoonists from around the world. My app will be supported and promoted by MSNBC.com along with their other iPhone apps … that is, if Apple approves it.

It seems I have plenty to worry about. Apps for the iPhone have been multiplying at an exponential rate, with over 100,000 now approved. Developers are looking to strike it rich with the next “iFart,” but as the sheer numbers of apps explodes, the chance of an app being a hit becomes more remote and frustration with Apple’s app approval process grows. Developers have to invest in creating a finished app before submitting it to Apple, which can arbitrarily trash the investments and hopes of aspiring developers – as happened to a friend of mine this week.

My buddy Tom Richmond, the brilliant Mad Magazine artist, just finished drawing 544 caricatures of members of congress for an app called “Bobble Rep.” The app works as a directory of every congressman, displaying their contact information by zip code or by the GPS location of the iPhone user. Shake the iPhone and the rep’s head “bobbles.” It is a cute app, and the caricatures are not unflattering. Apple rejected “Bobble Rep.”

A letter from Apple explained the rejection:

“… We’ve reviewed Bobble Rep – 111th Congress Edition and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.14 from the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement which states:

“Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

A screenshot of this issue has been attached for your reference.”

Ray Griggs, the producer of the “Bobble Rep” app, suffered a blow as he saw his investment in programming and in 544 Tom Richmond cartoons arbitrarily flushed away. Griggs writes, “I wonder if they saw my website (www.iwantyourmoney.net) that promotes the iPhone app and rejected the app because I am making a Republican Documentary. Are they trying to shut me down? (Just speculation. However, it is uncanny that the “offensive” page image they sent me is of the California reps.) Is there anything on this page that could possibly be found offensive?”

My cartoonist buddy Tom Richmond writes, “Clearly this app does not ‘ridicule public figures’ and is violating nothing, but Apple has decided the world must be protected from the insidious subversiveness this would force upon the public and the brutal, heinous ridicule that my cruel, cruel caricatures would subject these politicians to.

Hard to believe that anybody could be this blind. Maybe they just have a monkey doing the approval of their apps, and he throws a dart at a dartboard with “approved” and “rejected” targets on it and whatever it hits is the fate of that app. That would explain how they could approve an app with a cartoon baby picture and when you shake the phone hard enough the baby dies. Yes, that one got through only to be yanked after some outraged people complained, but no way are a bunch of flame-throwing caricatures going to get through!!!

Unbelievable.”

Prolific iPhone app developer Brian Stormont has this advice for hopeful app applicants:

“Don’t make any jokes about political figures, past or present, in either your app or the description in iTunes. Apple will most-likely reject your app.”

Apple would seem to be a bi-partisan offendee. App developer Brandyn Brosemer reports that his “iBush” app was rejected for the same reason. The app was a collection of actual George W. Bush quotes that the reader could scroll through.

Another Apple political app rejection is “MyShoe” which allowed users to throw shoes at President Bush.

Studies show that people use the iPhone differently than other mobile devices – they read news content on the iPhone and tend not to do so on other phones. The iPhone’s market share for news and opinion is dominant, while all other phones have an insignificant market share. Although any publisher can decide what content he wants in his own publication, Apple’s phone-news monopoly brings with it a public trust and responsibility in controlling content for a whole category of media.

And with my own political cartoons app review dragging on, I’m still holding my breath.

Turning blue now.

Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com; he is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons as well as 50 other cartoonists, at www.caglecartoons.com are syndicated to more than 850 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. Daryl’s books “The BIG Book of Campaign 2008 Political Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2010 Edition” are available in bookstores now. His column is copyrighted and licensed to run on full on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

Apple cited this image as “objectionable” in a rejection letter to “Bobble Rep” developer Ray Griggs.


And here are screenshots from the “Bobble Rep” app, ©RG Entertainment, Ltd., Artwork by Mad Magazine’s Tom Richmond.

This GUEST VOICE piece is by Rafael Jesús González from California, on Veterans’ Day 2009. It is a perspective on ’supporting the troops’ …or not. I brought it here to give a small x-ray into how one family’s three generations of soldiers is evolving nearly ninety years after what was supposed to have been ‘the war to end all wars, World War One’

…GUEST VOICE by Rafael Jesús González
I am leery of being asked to honor veterans of almost any war, except as I honor the suffering, the being of every man or woman who ever lived.

I am sick of “patriotism” behind which so many scoundrels hide.

I am sick of war that has stained almost every year of my life.

Especially now, in the midst of yet another unjustified, immoral, illegal, untenable, cynical, cruel war our nation wages in Iraq, in Afghanistan.

I am impatient with fools who ask whether I “support our troops.”

What does it mean to “support our troops”? What is a troop but a herd, a flock, a band? What is a troop but a group of actors whose duty it is not to reason why, but to do and die?

In the years I served in the Navy and Marine Corps as a medic, I never took care of a troop; I took care of men who had been wounded and hurt, who cut themselves and bled, who suffered terrible blisters on their feet from long marches, who fell ill sick with high fevers.

If to support means to carry the weight of, keep from falling, slipping, or sinking, give courage, faith, help, comfort, strengthen, provide for, bear, endure, tolerate, yes, I did, and do support all men and women unfortunate enough to go to war.

Troops, I do not. If to support means to give approval to, be in favor of, subscribe to, sanction, uphold, then I do not. The decision to make war was/is not theirs to make; troops are what those who make the decisions to war use (to kill and to be killed, to be brutalized into torturers) for their own ends, not for the sake of the men and woman who constitute the “troops.”

I honor veterans of war the only way in which I know how to honor: with compassion; with respect; with understanding for how they were/are used, misled, indoctrinated, coerced, wasted, hurt, abandoned; with tolerance for their beliefs and justifications; with efforts to see that their wounds, of body and of soul, are treated and healed, their suffering and sacrifice compensated.

I never refuse requests for donations to any veterans’ organization that seeks benefits and services for veterans. I honor veterans, men and women; not bands, not troops.

__________
CODA
A Note On Evolution in Family Viewpoint As Cultures Evolve, or Lag
by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés…

So much turns and evolves in the generations of a military family, in any family that has a hand in trying to ride the culture before them. I think of Tyrone Steels’ family (He is TMV’s site admin and a writer) which has layers of civil rights marchers, black panthers, quiet shy people, bold outspoken people, and those who do not entirely conform to the previous generations’ ideas about politics and conduct of life in the public sphere.

And yet, they care for one another, and for others. There are many families who honor and respect each other–and others– even though their ways of seeing the world, their ways of conduct in the world, differ.

Veterans’ Day is not just a day of remembrance. It was literally meant as THE day on EARTH that there would never again be war. It was originally to fasten the idea to the wall of humankind that the world had just experienced in sorrow “the war which would end all wars.” Amongst many, the belief was that so great were the horrors, depredations, and devastations of WWI, the piles and piles and piles of the bones of the dead across the world, that all horrified just souls, were saying, Never war again.

So the history of Veterans’ Day grew from bloody world soil. When the First World War officially ended June 28, 1919, the actual fighting had already stopped… it has become legend that it stopped on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month the previous year. Armistice Day, as that ‘end to war’ was known, later became a national holiday, and in 1954 (the year Rafael Jesús González, the author of the above piece, graduated from high school), the name was changed to Veterans Day to honor all U.S. veterans of all wars.

Rafael Jesús González’ grandfather Benjamín Armijo from New Mexico was a veteran of WWI, “an old man who seldom spoke and [who wore] his cap of The American Legion. (He was also Republican.) Three of González’ uncles, Roberto, Armando, and Enrique, fought in WWII. As a child missing his uncles, González remembers his uncles photos “on my grandmother’s home altar, very handsome in their uniforms; endless rosaries and litanies the women in the family regularly met to pray; and the three blue stars that hung in the window.”

His uncle Roberto, tío Beto… came home with ulcers and los nevrios, nerves. His uncle Armando, tío Pana, in the Infantry division… served in the Pacific Theater, and Guadalcanal. His uncle Enrique, tío Kiki, the youngest, in the Airborne Division, the “Screaming Eagles”, served in the European Theater and parachuted into the taking of Germany.

And after that war ended, “they came home, tío Pana into a hospital, sick with malaria which affected him throughout this life; tío Kiki with a malady in the soul not so easily diagnosed, hidden in his quiet humor, gentle ways. All my uncles were gentle men, in all senses of the word.” And Beto, Pana, Kiki were of a time that men felt they were made less if they were to speak of pain, of what they had seen, what they had done…

And thus comes before us with his writing today, the once little boy who witnessed the grit of gentle strong soldiers in his own family, and he now, Rafael Jesús González, is himself an old man. And he writes, as you read above… an evolution of thought and feeling, rinsed through many generations of soldiers’ courage and compassion.

There’s a lot of bragadoccio in some who claim to be veterans, but it’s far more often that a war vet is like González’ uncles, grandfather, González himself: reflective, not knowing all the answers, thinking, doing what is within their reach to truly touch and not just talk. I’ve not yet met a WW II vet who calls himself from ‘the greatest generation,’ which is actually the title of a book created by Tom Brokaw and the marketing department of his publisher.

But I have met many WWII vets who are warm men, who are real and human and good, and who push away any inflated moniker that separates them from other ordinary humans who have once upon a time done one or more extraordinary things and under duress. The grief of war is not that the superhuman are killed. The grief of war is that souls who are sweet and complicated and all that is utterly and divinely human… are slaughtered.

Returning to the headline: It’s easy to take sides, ’support the troops’ or not… but it’s grown into a trite phrase/question for many. Rather, seeing behind the either/or of that limp litmus, just for a little bit, was the intent of this article I placed for you here. A small x-ray of one aspect of one family of soldiers from three different generations.

Blessed Veterans’ Day
dr.e
military wife (DH 21 years USAF, now at VA processing prostheses for vets)

By s d liddick

In the spring of 2009 I embedded with the U.S. Army’s 1-63 Combined Arms Battalion, in the small town of Mahmudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad. The town is a cardinal point on what American soldiers have termed the Triangle of Death. Within a month I was offered a de facto embed spot with the Iraqi Army (IA), by General Mohammed, commander of the 17th Division. I quickly/wordpress-engine/files/2009_November/murdoch_rupert.jpeg accepted and we determined that I would stay with one of his sub-commanders, Colonel Wisam Wisam, the Lieutenant in charge of the 2nd Battalion of the 25th Brigade.

Those young Iraqi officers carried me on dozens of missions, kicking in doors and unearthing stashed 500-pound bombs. They carried themselves more or less professionally despite lack of training and a tremendous paucity in equipment and funding (the officers I followed into dark houses during those raids didn’t have rifles as the Battalion couldn’t afford them, and would normally breach doorways with nothing more than a sidearm resting on their hip). They also lacked a fundamental understanding of the media-military relationship and showed me an uncomfortable level of candor, especially in their treatment of prisoners. The following is a series of journal entries from that assignment.

First Lieutenant Hamid is the S2 (intelligence officer) at Second Battalion Headquarters. He’s in his late twenties and he carries himself with the self-assured swagger of Patton. He knows two phrases in English and he says them with an impeccable American accent: “Hooooly s—,” and “What the f——?” It took us a while to break through barriers—mainly because Hamid came off as haughty—but when they came down I found him to be a loyal and amicable friend.

Language barriers are fickle things and because of them Hamid and I had a couple of awkward situations. From the start, I was a novelty at Batallion Headquarters. Most of the young soldiers and officers I lived with had never had one-on-one interaction with Americans. U.S. soldiers, officers and contractors were like aliens to them, mystical and unimaginably wealthy beings they’d come to know through television and rumor. Most of the Iraqis flocked to me with the eager curiosity of children. Hamid, on the other hand, was reserved from the beginning.

Batallion Headquarters is a renovated Baath Party Headquarters building near the heart of Mahmudiyah (a cardinal point on the Triangle of Death, now the Triangle of Yawns). Sand bags line the first floor windows, a number of walls show large cracks and the building’s new paint job looks rushed and amateur. The place reminded me of a dilapidated U.S. fraternity house. And that analogy ran deeper than the looks of the building. While the enlisted men were eager and curious, some of the officers (Hamid chief among them) came across as aloof and suspicious of me—just as the majority of American soldiers did at first.

I knew why the Americans reacted the way they did—they were being cautious and they were distrustful (our military-media arrangement, after all, had historically been abused by both sides). The Iraqi soldiers clearly had little idea that speaking with the media could be dangerous. The majority of the Iraqi officers were the same way—save for Hamid and a small group of others—and by the end of my assignment they’d let me see things (particularly the torture of detainees) that made me uncomfortable. They continually flirted with putting me in a position where I might have to report on illegal activities I didn’t want to.

Hamid’s job was both dangerous and important. Almost all of the battalion’s offensive efforts came out of the intelligence that he generated and turned into actionable strategy. He lead the majority of the raids that came out of headquarters and he was certainly on the radar of the local net of Al Qaeda operatives; he was a high value target. That importance, I think, combined with a universal arrogance given to military officers (these are men who commit to their jobs with their lives and who are generally the best and brightest of their generation) lent Hamid an air of entitlement and privilege.

It wasn’t so much that Hamid was suspicious of my intentions or my ability to put him in hot water with the reports I filed. Rather, after thirty years of tyrannical rule, the Iraqis seemed to have little notion of the power of the press or the fact it could jeopardize their careers. I think Hamid was simply a product of his time and place: in a rampantly masculine society, he held a highly regarded position and he carried himself accordingly. After several weeks and many late night sessions in the planning room, watching Turkish soap operas and listening to the officers chatter and laugh in Arabic (as they ate copious amounts of lamb shish kabobs and rice), the barriers began to crumble.

Despite my almost complete lack of ability with Arabic, I found that dance is an international language. The Iraqis are zealots for television and Arabic music video stations play incessantly (after 30 years of tyranny—with just two stations to choose from—every household, café and building in contemporary Iraq is sure to have a TV and a satellite dish). There was always vibrant and lively music piling out of the TVs at headquarters and the Iraqi soldiers and officers were engrossed when I’d start dancing to it. I was heavily bearded at that time and dressed in an Arabic dishdasha and I think they were mildly astounded that an alien American could look so much like a Muslim.

Like all of the Iraqis, Hamid was beguiled with my dancing and it wasn’t too long before I was doing it at his request. He began taking me for rides with his convoy as they reviewed manned checkpoints throughout the town (we drove in a small Japanese pick-up, Hamid and his driver in the front and me and a young soldier with a Kalashnikov in the back). Apart from those checkpoints we would often stop at the market, or we would visit one of the company headquarters complexes in town, or stop by the residence of one of Hamid’s friend. Within a month I’d become Hamid’s own dancing monkey—compelled to act (which often included swinging my prayer beads above my head and gyrating my shoulders Iraqi style) on his command.

Hamid’s personal attendant and bodyguard was a large Iraqi man with a healthy paunch who was probably in his mid to late-30s. He was an enlisted man with a family tucked away somewhere in Iraq, and he seemed unequivocally committed to Hamid. That man would laugh till tears came out of his eyes when Hamid would turn up the radio, turn around and tell me in broken English to dance. By that point I’d learned the words (or some of them) to several of the Arabic songs I liked and I’d belt them out from the back seat, with a turban wrapped around my head and a dress-like dishdasha flowing all over the back seat. I’d launch into animated swinging (moves I’d learned from Arabic journalists in Baghdad) and Hamid and his cadre would start clapping, singing and laughing.

“Hoooly s—,” Hamid would yell, as I’d belt out the words to a song. “Whaaaat the f——–?”

The situation wore on my nerves till the point I wanted to tell Hamid to find another monkey. But that wasn’t in the cards. Hamid was an incredibly rich source—he was the epicenter of the action coming out of headquarters—and what’s more I respected him. Despite that haughty, better-than-you attitude, I accompanied him on dozens of missions and I was highly impressed with his aplomb. Standing outside a gate in the dark, as soldiers silently swarmed over a suspected Al Qaeda or JAM (Jaish Al Mahdi army, the militia of anti-American cleric Muqutada Al Sadr) safe house, Hamid would look over at me and smile. He’d whisper the one other English mantra he’d come to know—“Good mission?, Good mission?”—and then give the order for his platoon to breach the door.

Hamid was always the fourth or fifth man in the house (a classic example of leading from the front) and he never carried more than a nine-millimeter sidearm on his hip. The thickest body armor he wore was his standard issue cammies. I loved being with the Iraqis because I could see and do anything I wanted. While the Americans were skeptical and worried about taking me on offensive missions (what might happen to me, what might I see?) the Iraqis had no media-born compunction. I think I could have showed up for one of those raids in nothing more than boxer shorts and my body armor and the commanding officer would have let me join the action.

If I was impressed with Hamid’s phlegm, I was doubly impressed by the young kids (17, 18, and 19 years old, with glaring lack of education and perpetual smiles) who were on the point of those breaching teams. When the Americans went into one of those suspected terrorist safe houses, they went in armed to the teeth and with powerful night vision. Because the electricity was normally out (rolling blackouts were the reality in Iraq and most places only got eight hours of power a day) the Americans had a definite advantage on the inside of those soupy black rooms. The Iraqi Army (IA) was sorely lacking in equipment and many of its soldiers carried dilapidated AK-47s that had been confiscated in raids. They had nothing like night vision.

Those young men (boys really) would take the breach order from Hamid and kick in what amounted to the doors of oblivion. And waiting for them on the other side was the Wild Card of fate. Usually the flip of that card turned up only a dark house full of sleeping people. Every mission I went on, within minutes of the breaching of those doors there would be a small group of young men lined up on the patio, shirtless, scared and disheveled, with sleep still heavy in the eyes.

The young men would inevitably deny their identities and until proper IDs were turned up in the house, Hamid would yell and berate them. The clock was always ticking and tension escalated by the minute. The longer the Iraqi soldiers remained on the property, the greater the chances of an armed response from terrorists. Colonel Wisam Wisam, the Second Battalion’s Commanding Officer, may have ruled daytime Mahmudiyah, but Al Qaeda and the JAM owned the night.

Women would begin milling around the property, whispering and talking to themselves nervously in the dark (they knew if those young men were carried away, they might never be seen again … the Iraqi justice system showed little leniency for terrorists). They would pitifully beg clemency from the soldiers. Then the inevitable abject and distraught wailing would ensue as soon as one of the young suspects was grabbed and cuffed and hauled off. At that point, we’d get the hell off the property ASAP.

But those benign endings were never guaranteed. Enough young Iraqi soldiers had been motivated (Marine Corps terminology for killed) on those breaching exercises—either through Improvised Explosive Devices, booby-traps or waiting gunmen—that the danger of a quick end to a soldiers life was like an awkward companion that wouldn’t go away. Unlike the Americans, when those young Iraqis kicked in doors and swarmed in with AKs leveled and index fingers teasing triggers, they went in blind. They swarmed without sight into dark and foreboding dwellings with the likelihood that unknown numbers of antagonists were waiting for them there, adjusted to the dark and mentally prepared for their face-to-face meetings with Allah.

I always went in on Hamid’s hip and found a firm wall or some kind of cover as soon as I could. And every time I was impressed by the fearless determination and supple maneuvering of those four-man teams of kids that breached those strange thresholds without question. It wasn’t till the end of my time with the Second Battalion that I discovered Hamid had been kidnapped and roughed up by JAM-friendly Iraqi soldiers on his own base. That’s the reality of the fragile state of reconstruction security in Iraq.

Everybody knows that JAM and Al Qaeda have both infiltrated the Iraqi Army—the Americans I was stationed with before the IA assignment warned me explicitly that I would be living and breathing with operatives from both organizations while embedded with the Iraqis. It was my friend Lt. Ahmed who explained that Hamid had been sequestered in one of the dilapidated barracks rooms that surround headquarters and beaten by a group of JAM sympathizing soldiers. He was beaten badly but not killed (an Iraqi interpreter once explained to me that when Al Qaeada and the JAM torture you, they start with the feet and work their way up, to ensure you live longer and endure more pain).

The story of Hamid’s scare (not his only one) gave new insight into his personality. The danger in his world is ever-present—even in the safest of places. He is a young man who is good at what he does (respected by both the Iraqi upper brass and American commanders) and he knows the bad guys are actively gunning for him. Once a month he leaves the sanctity of the base for his home in southern Iraq; every other waking moment he’s basically on duty. The reality is, there’s little to do for the soldiers in their “off” hours as kidnapping is a ubiquitous threat. Hamid is not only married to his job … if the job isn’t carried out successfully (by the entire Iraqi Army) there will be no place for him or his people in the country’s future.

Sometimes after long hours of sitting in Colonel Wisam’s plush office (more of a diwan than a military barracks) and talking, in broken English, about Iraq, its history, its people and its wars, I’d cut through the diminutive kitchen at the rear of the building and let myself out the back door. Moving in flip-flops (the closest thing I had to the sandals common Iraqis wear) and lifting my dishdasha so as not to trip going up the steps, I’d head to the second floor that held the officer’s rooms. The Command Operation Center was there (a room with a couple of maps and dilapidated radio equipment) and a TV that was always on.

I’d duck my head in to see if any of the officers were catching a show and then mosey down the hall. Just like a fraternity house, most rooms were knotted with clusters of young officers, eating or drinking chai tea—always smoking—and laughing and smiling. They’d look at me with eager smiles and invite me into their rooms, but just as often I’d amble the thirty yards to the other end of the hall to see who was present and accounted for. Almost inevitably, from the far end of that wide corridor, I’d hear a deep laugh and the resounding bellow of Hamid, taking another Iraqi officer to task with his impeccably American English.

“What the f——-,” I’d hear, which was usually followed by a rapid-fire string of Arabic recriminations before he finished with a drawn out “Hooooooly s—.”

S. D. Liddick is one of the national writers of the year with the City and Regional Magazine Association. He’s been on international assignment for Rolling Stone and San Diego Magazine (where he was website editor before leaving for Iraq). His investigative articles have garnered dozens of awards with the Society of Professional Journalists, including half a dozen Best of Show nods. In 2006, he won the Sol Price Prize for Responsible Journalism after being jailed in pursuit of a story. In 2008 and 2009 he spent eight months in Iraq (five months with American forces, two months with the Iraqi Army and a month living with sheiks in Anbar Province). More at www.sdliddick.com.

By Daryl Cagle

The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians still looms large in political cartoons around the world, with an endless flow of cartoons from Arab countries showing monster-Israel assaulting, eating, crushing or somehow decimating the poor Palestinians. The dove of peace has been killed by Israel in every imaginable cartoon — crushed, squeezed, stabbed, burned, eaten. Poor bird.

The conflict goes on forever, long after every original cartoon idea has been exhausted. Americans don’t see much of these cartoons because they would be regarded here as anti-Semitic at worst, or as the same thing over and over, at best.

I just got back from a speaking tour in Egypt, Israel and the Palestinian territories. At my first event in Cairo I spoke to a group of Egyptian journalists who brought a newspaper up to me, proudly pointing out that in Egypt, editorial cartoons are often printed big and in color on the front page of the newspaper. The cartoon they showed me would make an American editor choke; it showed a spitting snake, in the shape of a Star of David; inside the snake/star was a peace dove, trapped behind bars, and above the snake, in Arabic, were the words, “It’s not about the bird flu, it’s about the swine flu.”

I explained that in America this cartoon would be regarded as anti-Semitic, and it would never be printed. The Egyptian journalists were emphatic, explaining to me that the cartoon was about Israel, not about Jews — an important distinction to them.

“Israel isn’t mentioned anywhere in the cartoon,” I said.

“But we all know the Jewish star is the symbol of Israel,” they responded.

I said, “It is a religious symbol. It is the same as if I took the star and crescent off of the flag of Pakistan and drew a similar cartoon, saying it was about Pakistan.” The journalists didn’t respond to me, my comment was such nonsense. I continued, “This cartoon seems to say that Jews are snakes and pigs.”

“No, no! We have lots of symbols for Israel that we all know, like the Jew with black clothes and a big hooked nose!” one of the Egyptian journalists insisted with some passion. “We like Jews, we just don’t like Israel!” The Egyptian journalists all continued to insist that I misunderstood what the cartoon meant.

I later had an opportunity to meet with a group of Palestinian editorial cartoonists in Gaza by teleconference. I sympathize with their plight; the poor cartoonists had almost no outlets to print their cartoons. One of the Gaza cartoonists showed me a cartoon he was proud of, showing an alligator eating a dove. I told him I didn’t understand the cartoon, and he explained that the alligator was blue, “which everyone understands to be Israel” and the dove had green wings, “which everyone understands to be Palestine.”

I tried to come up with some advice for the Gaza cartoonists on how to get their work published. I suggested that they could submit their work to international publications, but that it would be tough if every cartoon was another Israel-monster cartoon. The cartoonists responded to say that in Gaza, they are under siege, and they don’t care to draw anything else.

I suggested that the Gaza cartoonists need to coax Western editors into printing their cartoons, and they would do well to consider some other angles; for example, drawing about their personal experiences and day-to-day difficulties. Palestinian cartoons criticizing Hamas and Fatah are rarely seen and would get reprinted.

I explained to the Gaza cartoonists that when the Israel/Palestine conflict is big in the news, and we post cartoons about the topic on our site, our Web site (www.cagle.com) traffic goes down. Americans are not very interested in events that happen outside of America, especially when it is the same news story, year after year. I told them that the most popular topic ever on our site was Janet Jackson’s boob, and that our readers really like cartoons about cute puppies. Hearing this, the Gaza cartoonists stared at me blankly, and then urged me to organize an international exhibition of cartoons that highlight their plight at the hands of Israel.

I spoke with one West Bank Palestinian cartoonist, Amer Shomali, who lost his gig with his newspaper because he insisted on drawing cartoons critical of Fatah; he was so frustrated that he rented a billboard to post a Fatah cartoon that his newspaper refused to publish. The billboard was swiftly taken down.

I met an excellent West Bank cartoonist, Khalil Abu Arafeh who draws for Al Quds, the big newspaper in the West Bank; he makes his living as an architect. Another talented West Bank cartoonist, Ramzy Taweel, breaks the Israel-monster cartoon mold, drawing about everyday life in the West Bank; his cartoons are seen only by his friends on his Facebook page. Ramzy could use some more Facebook friends; I encourage everyone to befriend him.

It is tough to make a living as a cartoonist anywhere these days — especially tough when the world has grown weary of what you want to say, when a market for your work doesn’t exist where you live, and when passions run high.

The fact that there is still a market for cartoons about cute puppies and cats who like lasagna probably doesn’t make the Palestinians feel any better.

Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com; he is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 850 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. Daryl’s books “The BIG Book of Campaign 2008 Political Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2010 Edition” are available in bookstores now. Read Daryl’s blog at www.blog.cagle.com/daryl.

Jared Stancombe is a 2009 graduate of Indiana University, where his studies focused on peace and conflict studies in Northern Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. His other academic interests include counterinsurgency and complex military operations. He is currently an analyst for a U.S. government agency responsible for national security and is in the officer selection process for the United States Marine Corps. He lives in Washington, D.C.

**********

As the insurgency in Afghanistan continues, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) nations are seeking to dramatically increase the number of soldiers and policemen in the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police. With embedded ISAF soldiers, these fresh Afghans can learn through combat how best to secure their country for a better future.

However, the neo-Taliban insurgency has deliberately targeted training centers for the ANA and ANP, as well as centers of government administration. Despite the dramatic rise in recruitment among Afghan National Security Forces, the insurgency continues to use acts of terrorism and coordinated violence to actively challenge the rule of law of the legitimate regime.

The Neo-Taliban insurgency is essentially waging classic insurgent warfare in an attempt to isolate the population away from government influence. They are succeeding. While many Afghans do not see the Taliban favorably, they are essentially forced to accept their rule. They secure the roads, protect the opium crops, and in some areas even open up hospitals. While the insurgents do not have the resources to create adequate non-military governmental institutions, something is better than nothing, and some Afghans see the Taliban as a better alternative than the corrupt and weak Karzai regime.

The counterinsurgency must focus on bottom-up changes, focusing on the population, while seeking to create policies and doctrine that will institutionalize the focus on distinguishing between those we can buy off or negotiate with and those we must alienate from the population. More troops and resources are required for this effort; however, the Karzai Administration must meet us in the middle in creating reform that establishes government legitimacy with the population.

No amount of ISAF resources will substitute for leadership. Karzai must step up and start talking to the various tribes and incorporate them into the democratic process while providing basic services to show results and rewards for their participation. These could come in the form of proving water treatment facilities, building roads and schools, and providing the resources necessary to educate the future of Afghanistan into trades that could help rebuild their shattered country. But the government is unable to manage projects that could alienate the insurgents from the population.

Just as the Palestinians voted for Hamas, the Afghans are choosing the Taliban because they view the government as corrupt and unable to provide the basic needs and services they require. While ISAF forces are working hard to root out the insurgents, the government is full of corruption, which makes it unable to provide political solutions after stability operations are conducted. They are essentially unable to meet us in the middle, and, if they continue to fail, our efforts may be in vain.

(Cross-posted from The Reaction.)

by Jon Wells

The drama over the special election in NY-23 has taken a variety of surprising turns over the past few weeks. The Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, was selected by a county board of GOP supervisors and got a load of initial cash and support from the national Republican establishment. But a plethora of her policy stands made many in the base question why she was selected in the first place. There are her positions on social questions that rub many the wrong way (including winning an award from Planned Parenthood), but besides that, she also favors card check and the stimulus package.

Many in the national GOP electorate reacted with growing anger after already being served with a moderate Republican candidate in the presidential race who fared rather poorly. Complicating matters was the presence in the race of a Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman. After the national spotlight was shone on Scozzafava, and after Hoffman began to make significant gains in the polls, several national figures endorsed Hoffman, including Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, and George Pataki. Other party leaders, seeming motivated more by party affiliation than policy positions, continued to stick by Scozzafava, like RNC chair Michael Steele and Newt Gingrich.

On Friday, however, beaten back by plummeting poll numbers and an influx of national cash and ground support for Hoffman, Scozzafava dropped out of the race. She shortly endorsed her Democrat opponent, Bill Owens, apparently after urging from numerous members of the Democratic party, including Sen. Charles Schumer and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. It’s hard to see how her endorsement, along with its coordination with national Democrats, blunts any criticism that Scozzafava was basically a Democrat with a different letter after her name; indeed, it underscores the truth of it.

The NRCC and the RNC look like huge dupes for blowing $1 million on a candidate that angered their national base and ended up stabbing them in the back anyway. Now the headline is a predictable, “Is there room for moderates in the GOP?” It was the same blather that was spouted after Arlen Specter defected, but like Scozzfava, his defection solidified criticism that he was basically a Democrat with a different letter after his name. Never mind that many of Scozzafava’s position are more in line with a liberal Democrat than a moderate Republican, but it returns to an issue that many are trying to foist on Republicans in the hope of reducing their appeal and their influence.

I would respond that a political party must have a set of core principles that it must expect its members to adhere to the majority of the time, and the local GOP ran a candidate that in many ways is indistinguishable from the Democrat. On one level it may be advantageous to have more numbers in your caucus, but if the liberal GOP rep goes to Congress and votes with the Democrats on the big issues like health care reform, cap and trade, and card check, then nothing of substance is gained at all. Instead, you’ve jeopardized your party’s goals at the expense of the base’s trust, all for the sake of having a few more people with the same letter after their name on your team.

There are some places where a more moderate candidate is absolutely necessary to win. NY-23, which has voted reliably Republican for quite some time, wasn’t one of those places. If this had remained a two person race, many probably would have grumbled but been OK with a Scozzafava win. But with the presence of Hoffman, it was too much for conservatives to see the national party prop up a liberal candidate at the expense of an actual conservative in the race.

It may be that this will be the right’s Ned Lamont moment, although that’s a somewhat flawed analogy as Lamont was the liberal faithful’s answer to a sitting incumbent that didn’t fit their tastes. In any case, I have no idea how this race will turn out. PPP says Hoffman has a double digit lead, but a lot of other polling outfits have the race much closer, and while the late momentum seems to be in Hoffman’s favor, I’m not going to say anything for sure.

Now the shouts are coming that this race shows the GOP is becoming too ideologically driven and the base too needful of “litmus tests” for its candidates. This criticism rings hollow as most of the Democratic agenda in Congress is coming straight out the liberal playbook with threats against moderate members to go along if they know what’s good for them. No, the question that NY-23 poses isn’t whether the GOP can be more inclusive in its principles, it’s whether the party will have any principles at all.

Whether Hoffman wins or loses, the message has been sent to the GOP leadership that an “R” after the name isn’t enough any more. Whether that’s “inclusive” enough for some is immaterial because a party cannot merely become the milquetoast version of its opponent to survive. Instead of statistically based pandering, it needs bold contrasts and recognizable differences, and more importantly, it needs workable ideas and solutions. NY-23 showcases the vast divide between the expectations of the Republican base and the cynical vision of the RNC leadership.

If it is to have success in 2010 and 2012, the GOP can’t simply bank on Democratic failure. It must provide positive solutions of its own. But beyond that, Bush’s second term and McCain’s candidacy utterly disillusioned a vast swath of the conservative base, and if the GOP is to flourish, it cannot continue to be not just apathetic but antagonistic toward its core voters. Regardless of whether Hoffman wins or loses, NY-23 may represent the beginning of a shift away from political expediency and back toward principled leadership.

Jonathan Wells is a 28-year-old husband and father who lives in Ohio and has a day job in the microbiology field. He notes that he tends “be conservative in most of my views, but by no means do I bear blind allegiance to a political party.” He stresses that he is open-minded and encourages “any civil disagreement (or uncivil agreement) any of you would care to express.” He likes to make people think – and does so on his blog Wellsy’s World.

Poking the Cobra

Raging Moderate, by Will Durst

Now is the time for all good men to put their hands together, pull them apart and rapidly put them back together again, and repeat, to give props to the president for not curling up into a fetal position with a “Kick Me” sign taped to his butt. You know. Like a Democrat.

He’s taking it straight to his perceived enemy, calling both Fox News and Rush Limbaugh radical and out of the mainstream, making the two crazier than a preacher at a whorehouse with a parishioner working the door. Because that is exactly what they say about him. Methinks there may be a bad case of “can dish it out but not take it” going around.

Conservative commentators are retaliating by lobbing charges of extreme partisanship at the president. Claiming he totally ignored his campaign promise to be “a uniter, not a divider.” Oh wait, that wasn’t him. That was the other guy. Sorry. You remember the last guy. Now there was someone who reeked of non-partisanship. At least I think that’s what it was.

No idea what the right-wing radio dudes expected Barack to do in response to their incessant taunting and baiting: clap his hands over his ears and make la-la-la noises until the bad people stop talking nasty about him? Lie down on a fire-resistant, humanely braided Persian rug and whimper himself to sleep? Or pull a John Kerry, who while being swift-boated in August ‘04, spent the entire month on his back waiting for a big, old tummy rub. You know. Like a Democrat.

Though he lacks military service, Barack Obama seems to grasp the concept of “target acquired.” Obviously, this sustained adversarial offensive is all part of a choreographed campaign to marginalize critics. An effort to paint the GOP as a wee bit of a sliver of a party, chock full of pro-rape, white, Southern ditto-heads and fringe-licking extremists. Following the script perfected by that fabled wartime tactician: Karl Rove. If you’re going to steal, take from the best.

It must be said that refusing to appear on Fox News does seem to fly in the face of the president’s official policy to open a dialogue with all evil-doers. Which normally, he does. Iran. Hamas. North Korea. Syria. Everyone it seems, except Rupert Murdoch. “If we want fair and balanced, we’ll get our fair and balanced from MSNBC, thank you very much.” Not very Peace Prize-ish if you ask me.

It’s a tricky game, this riling the rabble that Obama is playing. You got to be awfully careful when you poke the cobra. Fortunately he’s got the extra long pointy sticks that are David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel to do the dirty work. Another problem is both sides know that as the rhetoric ratchets up, so do the ratings. But studies prove helping Limbaugh hurts Republicans with Independents, so it’s a calculated gamble. On the order of picking the Raiders to cover, on the road.

A final concern is all this fresh flummery could cause Rush to bloat up to dirigible size and then explode, which some experts say may force the evacuation of the entire Eastern Seaboard due to fears of Oxycontin contamination. But most importantly, Obama needs to keep in mind the advice my father regularly spouted after his third six-pack: never get in a fight with an ugly person; he’s got nothing to lose. You know. Like a Republican.

Will Durst is a San Francisco-based political comic who writes sometimes. This is one of them.

Catch his new, one-man show “The Lieutenant Governor from the State of Confusion,” appearing at a performing arts center near you.

Durst is a political comedian who has performed around the world. He is a familiar pundit on television and radio. Check out willandwillie.com for the latest podcast. Will Durst’s book, “The All American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing,” is available from Amazon and better bookstores all over this great land of ours. Don’t forget to check out his rooftop comedy minutes at: http://www.rooftopcomedy.com/shows/BurstOfDurst. Copyright ©2009, Will Durst, distributed by the Cagle Cartoons Inc. syndicate. This copyrighted column is licensed to run on TMV in full.

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

On October 13, we lost a resolute champion of the law, a man who left his impact on the lives of untold numbers of Americans.

His very name made his life’s work almost inevitable, a matter of destiny. William Wayne Justice was a Federal judge for the Eastern District of Texas. That’s right, he was “Justice Justice.” And he spent a distinguished legal career making sure that everyone – no matter their color or income or class – got a fair shake. As a former Texas lieutenant governor put it last week, “Judge Justice dragged Texas into the 20th century, God bless him.”

Dragged it kicking and screaming, for it was Justice who ordered Texas to integrate its public schools in 1971 – 17 years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision made separate schools for blacks and whites unconstitutional. Texas resisted doing the right thing for as long as it could. Many of its segregated schools for African-American children were so poor they still had outhouses instead of indoor plumbing.

This small town lawyer appointed to the federal bench by President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered Texas to open its public housing to everyone, regardless of their skin color. He looked at the state’s “truly shocking conditions” in its juvenile detention system and said, repair it. He struck down state law that permitted public schools to charge as much as a thousand dollars tuition for the children of illegal immigrants.

And Justice demanded a top-to-bottom overhaul of Texas prisons, some of the most brutal and corrupt in the nation. He even held the state in contempt of court when he thought it was dragging its feet cleaning up a system where thousands of inmates slept on the dirty bare floors of their cellblocks and often went without medical care. The late, great Molly Ivins said, “He brought the United States Constitution to Texas.”

Some say that justice stings. William Wayne Justice certainly did – and his detractors stung back with death threats and hate mail. Carpenters refused to repair his house, beauty parlors denied service to his wife. There were cross burnings and constant calls for his impeachment.

After he desegregated the schools he was offered armed guards for protection. He turned them down and instead took lessons in self-defense.

You need to understand that while so many Texans have fought and are fighting the good fight in the Judge Justice tradition, others believe in the law only when it sides with them. They long for the good old days of Judge Roy Bean, the saloonkeeper whose barroom court was known in the frontier days as “the law west of the Pecos.” His judicial philosophy was simple: “Hang ‘em first, try ‘em later.”

The present governor of Texas seems to be channeling Judge Bean. During his nine years in office, Rick Perry – “Governor Goodhair” as Ivins called him – has presided over more than 200 executions, dwarfing the previous record of 152 set by his predecessor in the Governor’s Mansion, George W. Bush. (The most, it is said, of any United States governor in modern history.)

Lethal injection is practically a religious ritual in Texas. In fact, before their sentencing verdict that will send Khristian Oliver to die in just a couple of weeks – on November 5th, to be exact – jurors in the East Texas town of Nacogdoches consulted the Bible and found what they were looking for in the Book of Numbers, where it reads, “The murderer shall surely be put to death,” and, “The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer.” Although it was noted that referencing holy writ was an inappropriate “external influence,” two appeals courts upheld the jury’s sentence and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

Governor Perry will do almost anything to please the vengeful crowd in the Coliseum with their thumbs turned down. Did we mention that next year he’s up for re-election? When it turned out recently that five years ago the state may have wrongfully executed a man for a crime he didn’t commit, Perry pulled some particularly shady moves.

In February 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was put to death for allegedly setting a fire that killed his three young daughters. Governor Perry has willfully ignored evidence from top arson investigators that the blaze was not homicide but an accident.

Now Perry has fired the chairman and three members of the state’s Forensic Science Commission just as they were about to hear further scientific testimony that might prove Willingham’s innocence. This week, Perry told reporters that the controversy is “nothing more than propaganda from the anti-death penalty people across the country.”

They can be short on mercy in Texas. All the more reason to mourn the loss of Justice – William Wayne Justice. Rest in peace, your honor.

Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.

Frankie Sturm is communications director at the Truman National Security Project and a free-lance journalist.

I work with veterans on a daily basis. Lately, I’ve been burning the midnight oil as part of Operation FREE, a coalition of veterans groups and national security organizations that are looking to raise awareness about the links between climate change and national security.

We’re right in the middle of a nation-wide bus tour, with veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan talking to local media, veterans groups, and civic organizations. But as we made our way to Pennsylvania, all hell broke loose.

We decided to invite all members of the Pennsylvania state legislature to meet us on the bus to talk with our veterans. It was a seemingly innocuous and run-of-the-mill invitation. But the response we received from state representative Daryl Metcalfe (R-Cranberry Township) was hardly run of the mill:

Subject: Re: Veterans for American Power Bus Tour coming to your state

As a veteran,

I believe that any veteran lending their name, to promote the leftist propaganda of global warming and climate change, in an effort to control more of the wealth created in our economy, through cap and tax type policies, all in the name of national security, is a traitor to the oath he or she took [to] defend the Constitution of our great nation!

Remember Benedict Arnold before giving credibility to a veteran who uses their service as a means to promote a leftist agenda.

Drill Baby Drill!!!
For Liberty,
Daryl Metcalfe
State Representative
Veteran U.S. Army

That’s right, veterans who support clean energy are “traitors.” Yikes. As it turns out, this isn’t Representative Metcalfe’s first foray into the absurd. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he opposed a resolution declaring Domestic Violence Awareness month in Pennsylvania, fearful of a “homosexual agenda.” He also refused to support a vote to honor the 60th anniversary of a Muslim group in the state because “Muslims don’t recognize Jesus Christ as God.”

For anyone who thinks this is unacceptable behavior, I’d like to invite you to strike back!

If you’d like to sign a petition that demands an apology for his remarks about U.S. veterans, please click here.

Or if you’d like to bombard his offices with calls, emails, and letters, you can check out the contact info on his website.

Of course, it’s unlikely any amount of phone calls or emails will change this guy’s mind. But at least we can make sure he knows that slandering good Americans comes at a steep price.

(Originally posted at The Huffington Post .)

Moreover, the sour mood that has gripped the nation’s politics could only further turn off the young. This means that the decision of Republican congressional leaders to put up a solid front of opposition to Obama could be highly functional for a party that would rather see younger, more progressive voters ignore Election Day.

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, offered a straightforward formula: “When Republican voters and older voters get angry, they vote,” she said. “When younger voters get angry, they stay home.”

Thomas Bates, vice president for civic engagement at Rock the Vote, a group that mobilizes young Americans to go to the polls, shares Lake’s worries. “For people who were energized in 2008, it was a time of hope and optimism,” he said. “And when you get to the brass tacks of governing, the atmosphere in the process of legislating has become poisonous. That makes political engagement as unappealing as possible.”

More than is often appreciated, the electoral revolution that brought Democrats to power was fueled by a younger generation with a distinctive philosophical outlook. Put starkly: if only Americans 45 and over had cast ballots in 2008, Barack Obama would not be president.

Obama took 66 percent of the vote among voters under 30, according to the exit polls, and beat John McCain 52 percent to 46 percent among voters aged 30 to 44. But voters 45 to 64 split narrowly (50-49 for Obama), and voters over 65 went to McCain, by 53 percent to 45 percent, giving McCain a net advantage in the over-45 set. Voters under 30 were the only age group in which self-identified liberals outnumbered conservatives.

And lost in the usual grumbling about how young people don’t vote, voters under 30 accounted for a slightly larger share of the 2008 electorate than did voters over 65. In 2008, the torch really was passed to a new generation.

But will the young hand the torch back in 2010?

That prospect petrifies Democrats already worried about lower participation by the young in this year’s governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey.

Lake has been scouring municipal election results this year and does not like what she sees: “a dramatically lower level of turnout from Obama surge voters,” a reference to the new participants inspired by Obama last year.

She called back some of the young electoral dropouts in her own studies to see why they were pulling away from politics. She cites the answers from three of them as revealing: “One of them said, ‘I’m tired of politics, I need a rest.’ A second said, ‘When is Obama up again?’ The third said, ‘I don’t like what any of them are doing in Washington, opposing Obama’s agenda.’”

Lake is worried that Obama and his team have shied away from giving their supporters an “interpretation” of the fight in Washington, and sees their outreach to the under-30s as, at best, only “intermittent.” The battles in Washington could mobilize rather than turn off Obama backers, she said, if they understood that the president was resisting forces trying to block the changes he promised in the campaign. “If you are getting things done, then the discord doesn’t matter,” she said.

Linda DiVall, a Republican pollster, also sees the malaise among the young as “a factor that’s inhibiting Democrats right now,” and said that soaring unemployment, which has had a particularly damaging impact on the young, could weaken their loyalty to Obama “if they believe he hasn’t done anything to change the job situation.”

But for Rock the Vote’s Bates, the biggest problem could come if Democrats give up on trying to turn out the young until the next presidential election. “It’s like a party for which you send an invitation to people, those people show up — and then you get mad at the people who don’t show up, even though you didn’t send them an invitation,” he said.

Fred Yang, another Democratic pollster, said his party has to realize that it will not win “just by getting our usual suspects out to vote, we have to expand the pool.” The old politics of ignoring the young is simply not an option.

This column is copyrighted and licensed to appear on TMV in full. (c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group

Editor’s note: Due to a technical glitch, the proper byline did not appear on this post when it first went up on TMV. This was quickly fixed. TMV regrets the error.

The Finance Committee’s vote on Tuesday to send its bill to the Senate floor vindicated President Obama’s strategy of giving Congress wide latitude to write the early drafts. Major health reform has advanced further than it ever has before.

But Obama must now abandon his preference for intervening forcefully only after House and Senate bills go to a conference committee. Instead, he needs to focus on the core goals of insuring as many people as possible and expanding, rather than contracting, the choices Americans will have under a new system.

However policy experts judge the final product, reform will be sustainable only if beleaguered citizens feel more secure, not less, and more confident than they are now that health insurance will be priced within their reach. Obama has said he will own this thing in the end. He’s right, and he has to make clear what kind of system he wants to buy.

So does Olympia Snowe. Against much conventional thinking, she realized that being the only Republican senator to vote for the bill would vastly enhance her ability to shape the outcome. Now that Democrats have gotten their lone Republican vote, they don’t want to lose her — in part because Snowe’s support will give cover to the more reluctant moderate and conservative Senate Democrats who must vote “yes” if a bill is to get through.

But what does Snowe really want? It’s not clear that even she knows the answer to that question. Many on the left are worried about how she’ll use her power. The irony is that it might take a Republican from Maine to advance causes dear to progressives — if she makes those causes her priority.

One of Snowe’s fears about the bill that emerged from Sen. Max Baucus’ committee is that it still does not make insurance affordable enough for many in the middle class. She is absolutely right to worry. The subsidies in the bill are too low — held down by Obama’s unfortunate insistence that, largely for cosmetic reasons, the final cost had to be held to around $900 billion. For an extra $30 billion or so per year, the bill could put insurance in reach for many more people.

The subsidy shortage is creating a vicious cycle. It’s not fair to impose a mandate on people to buy insurance if doing so will break the family budget. So Snowe and Sen. Charles E. Schumer have moved both to lower the penalties on those who don’t buy coverage and to protect more people from the mandate. That’s the fair thing to do, except that lower penalties mean more people opting out of insurance. This, in turn, means that more will be uninsured.

The subsidies have to rise, and if Snowe makes affordability her highest priority, as she has suggested she will, she’ll be doing everyone a favor.

Snowe also has sympathy for Sen. Ron Wyden’s desire to give those who already have coverage access to the insurance exchange the bill would establish. Here again, Snowe could do good by helping to expand people’s choices.

She could do the same by showing flexibility on creating a public insurance option. At the moment, Snowe favors only a trigger that would bring the option into being if insurance proved unaffordable for too many. But Schumer, who has emerged from this process as a champion negotiator, has been working with Snowe for months to find a middle ground acceptable both to her and to public option advocates. Much depends on the success of their partnership.

It’s true that Snowe could also make the bill worse, especially if she persists in her opposition to a strong employer mandate. The Finance Committee bill has a bizarre “free rider” provision that would penalize only businesses whose employees get government-subsidized insurance. This creates a perverse incentive for employers not to hire lower-income people, particularly single mothers. A stronger employer mandate is needed to hold the system together, and to provide financing.

Still, a bill reflecting Snowe’s core concerns would be better in most respects than a bill that didn’t, and how she chooses to use her influence will owe a great deal to how Obama chooses to influence her. It’s another reason why Obama needs to take ownership of a bill that he’ll eventually own anyway.

This column is copyrighted to run on TMV in full. (c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group

Hello Readers, Dr. Estés here, bringing you another GUEST VOICE by Mr. Elijah Sweete who tells us that Texas Gov. Perry has now replaced a fourth member of the commission investigating death row inmate, C.T. Willingham’s, potential innocence. The Governor has now in the last month, removed four persons from the investigative commission, raising the dark question about whether a sitting Governor is attempting to silence a report from an independent group regarding execution, evidences and other matters in this capital punishment case… where though the accused may be accused, he may also be, not guilty.

EXECUTION TEXAS STYLE – GUILT OPTIONAL

This is a follow up to my post last week where a number of comments questioned the propensity of Texas to execute so many.

As Dr. Estes noted in her intro to my introductory article on this subject last week, over the past 31 years 37% of all executions in the US have been in Texas, and 46% of all US executions in 2009 have been in Texas.

Some Texas-sized examples of the stampede to execution:

• Within the last month, by a 6-3 vote, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused to grant a hearing for new trial (not a new trial, just a hearing about it) after it was proven that the Trial Judge and the Prosecutor were having an affair during the trial. State of Texas v. Hood.

• Issues involving incompetent reports from the testimony of Texas Medical Examiners’ includes misidentifying gender and eye color, describing gall bladders and appendixes that had been removed years before, describing an infant as having been suffocated when it had been still born (capital murder charges against mother dropped), and a medical examiner recanting prior testimony that had put a person on death row. See Fort Worth Star-Telegram, October 2, 2009.

• On September 2, 2009, after 10 years on death row, Michael Toney was freed from a Texas prison after it was revealed that the state had withheld critical evidence prior to and at trial. There had been no physical evidence leading to his conviction.

• On August 21, 2007, the Presiding Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals left the court early and, when reached at home, refused to allow attorneys for Michael Richard to file an appeal based on a US Supreme Court decision earlier that day. As result, the appeal was not considered by the Court of Criminal Appeals and Richard was executed that night.

• Then there’s the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, believed by most credible experts to have been innocent, who was put to death five years ago in Texas. UPDATE: It was reported Sunday that Texas Gov. Perry has replaced a fourth member of the commission investigating Willingham’s innocence. Perry has now, in a four week period, replaced every commission member he can appoint. Other members are appointed by the Lt. Governor and Attorney General. See here.

• Nine different people have been freed from Texas’ death row after having been found later to be innocent.

These are but a few examples of Texas “justice”. There are many others, and it is not limited to Texas. See, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org Home Page under What’s New.

From the few examples above, you see specific cases of death sentences based on circumstantial evidence, judicial misconduct, prosecutorial misconduct and government witness misconduct/incompetence, some not discovered for 10-15 years, and at least one not discovered until after an innocent person was executed.

There is, of course, no way of knowing how many other improper convictions have gone undiscovered. So, how can this happen?

According to Professor James Liebman of Columbia University, author of A Broken System II: Why Is There So Much Error In Capital Cases: “The study found 76% of the state and federal reversals at the two appeal stages where data are available were because of egregiously incompetent defense lawyers, police or prosecutor misconduct, or misinformed and biased judges or juries.

He goes on to note that “82% of those retried after their death verdicts…were given a sentence less than death, and 9% of those retried – nearly one in ten – were found innocent.”

Professor Liebman learned one other unsurprising, but surprising fact. The unsurprising fact is that the more a state sentences people to death, the more often mistakes are made. Here’s the surprising fact: “This isn’t just a matter of numbers, this is about percentages. Everything else being equal, when death sentencing increases from the lowest to the highest rate in the study, the reversal rate increases six-fold, to about 80%.

The more often states…use the death penalty…the more likely it is that any death verdict they impose will later be found to be seriously flawed, and the more likely it is that the defendant who was found guilty and sentenced to die will turn out to be not guilty. (emphasis added). Guess which state has the most death sentences.

Texas.

One other factor to be considered. Responding to political pressure to shorten appeals and kill (execute) people faster, Congress in 1996 passed laws designed to decrease the number of appeals in capital cases. Texas passed similar laws at the same time. The result of this “fast tracking” of execution was to cut back on state court review.

Additionally new crimes were added for death penalty eligibility. In Texas you can be executed for participating in a crime where a person dies even if you were not the one who caused the death.

As Professor Liebman articulates, “The result of these changes…was to make the system worse. Courts are now trying to do more with less, with predictable results. Rather than reserve the death penalty for the worst of the worst, and spend time making sure trials are conducted fairly and completely, courts rush through trials, handing down death sentences when they are not clearly called for…hoping mistakes will get caught further down the line.”

The next step, logically, is that appeals courts are overloaded with capital appeals cases, and the heavier the backlog, the quicker and less precise the review becomes. That in turn leads to more mistakes that fall through the cracks.

For an in-depth interview with Professor Liebman see here:

With some insight given here, there is still not space to address the issue of “egregiously incompetent defense lawyers.” If Dr. Estes will indulge me, I will return with a more in depth analysis of that issue both from personal experience and studied review by others.

Opinion:
–Capital punishment is not working.
–It discriminates dramatically against the poor and people of color.
–Incompetent defense counsel, combined with law enforcement and prosecutorial misconduct, and tainted evidence, and aggravated by biased judges and juries… results in the uneven and unjust application of death penalty statutes.
–We need a national moratorium on the death penalty until these issues can be resolved to provide fair application, competent representation and unbiased results.
– If we do not act, innocent people will continue to fester on death row and be put death at the hands of the government.

______
CODA
The image above is artist Paul Fryer’s piece “Pieta.” It was recently put on display in a cathedral in Gap, France.

by Rick Moran

This is the last in my series on the state of intellectual conservatism. Previous articles can be found in order here, and here, and here, and here.

If, as we’ve discovered, intellectual conservatism has been marginalized, and its adherents are in bad odor with much of the base, then conservatism as it is advanced by movement righties must be doomed to wander the night like the headless horseman; an unholy terror riding unseen and unloved, searching fruitlessly for its head until the dawn sends it scurrying back into the shadows.

A bit melodramatic, but who can resist the headless horseman analogy?

Indeed, with the conservative base rejecting the idea that most of their critiques of Obama and the left are wildly illogical and, unreasonable, one wonders if they’re even bothering to search for a head in the first place. It’s as if they really believe that relying on anger and paranoia will win over the great independent middle and sweep them back to power, grinding the left – and their less ideological enemies on the right – into powder.

Well, all I can say is good luck with that. I have little doubt that in 2010, you could put a GOP monkey up for election against some Democrats and the Chimp would be celebrating a victory. That’s how bad Democratic prospects in some districts look at this point. The reaction against Obamacare, and the inevitable rise in taxes along with dim prospects for much of a recovery will give the Republicans a good 20 seats.

But it will take at least a gain of 40 seats to see the GOP returned to power in the House, not to mention the 11 seats Republicans need to take control of the senate. Both numbers are currently out of reach, no matter how bad the Democrats screw up.

The reason is simple; in most districts, running a chimpanzee against a Democrat won’t get the job done. In order to realize the goal of overturning Democratic majorities in Congress, it would help immensely if the GOP had a coherent, consistent, programatic agenda that would seek to address the real concerns of real voters.

Broad themes are nice but a Gingrich-like20″Contract with America” is more to the point. But given where the movement is now, what would that “Contract” look like?”

I would hope that insisting on finding the provenance of Obama’s birth certificate might be far down the list. Ditto the repeal of “death panels” in any health care legislation – if they can be found.

Indeed, promising to roll back liberal legislation might work, and it might not. A lot of opposition to health care reform may melt away once it’s passed. Democrats have history on their side in this since there has never been an instance of an entitlement being repealed once it has been passed.

Besides, while significant electoral gains are possible with a wholly negative agenda, voters would be far more enamored of a GOP platform that laid out positive legislative goals that they would wish to enact.

Frankly, I don’t see this being possible as long as enraged, populist ideologues are driving the Republican party off a cliff.

If reformers will not be listened to with regard to what is needed to regain a majority for the GOP, perhaps they have a role to play on the margins of the movement; that is, in developing the rationale for a consistent philosophy to be applied to governance.

Currently, conservatism is, in the words of R. Emmett Tyrell, a “riot of conceits.” We currently have the spectacle of movement conservatives hoping to use the courts to overturn legislation.

Steven Menashi, a public affairs fellow with the Hoo ver Institution, writing at The American Scene:

[T]he so-called Tenthers think all manner of new legislation is unconstitutional. There is no question that the courts have weakened the constitutional restraints on Congress, and it’s useful to point that out in order to guard against further attrition. But come on. The courts are not going to declare health-care reform unconstitutional. It’s just a fanciful notion that consigns its adherents to the political fringe. Federal regulation is with us, for better or worse, and conservatives should try to make it better rather than worse.

Conservatives have long argued that it’s unhealthy to use courts to decide policy questions because it removes contentious political issues from the realm of democratic deliberation. What’s more, when a political movement focuses its efforts on declaring some policy unconstitutional, it removes itself from the debate over how to craft that policy. Instead of revisiting Supreme Court cases from the 1940s, the Tenthers might want to read up on health policy.

For the same reason, conservatives should be defending the president’s use of informal policy czars. Creating a White House policy apparatus doesn’t undo the growth of the administrative state since the New Deal — that’s not going to happen anytime soon — but it’s a significant counter-measure: it helps shift the balance of power to wards unitary executive control of the bureaucracy. And that’s a change we can believe in.

These arguments against using the courts to short circuit the legislative track while opposing policy czars despite how they may help the president reign in the bureaucracy are exactly the kind of inconsistencies promoted by movement conservatives. And they are the direct result of excessive ideological zeal in that they represent an emotional need to oppose the president and congress in everything they do even at the expense of adhering to a consistent conservative philosophy.

There are many such inconsistencies in conservative principles to be found in the beliefs being touted by the base. Calling for the significant lowering of taxes when the deficit hit $1.7 trillion in FY 2009 isn’t logical (nor is raising taxes during a recession, but tell that to Obama). Nor is it prudent (a marvelous conservative value) to support massive increases in defense spending for the same reason. And how does one square the attempt to legislate morality with subscribing to Kirk’s “voluntary community” or support for an “enduring moral order” when it is crammed down our throats?

I believe these inconsistencies to be a product of a lack among movement conservatives – perhaps a fear – of self examination. Unless you turn a critical eye to the assumptions found in one’s own philosophy, the chances are good that these kinds of inconsistencies will arise and wreak havoc with the logic of one ’s beliefs.

Of course, such self examination would also reveal the paucity of critical thinking in much of their critique of the other side as well as challenging their overwrought paranoia about the effect of what Obama has been attempting to do. Would such self-criticism make it easier to see that we are not living under a dictatorship or some kind of socialist form of government? An honest, non-ideological appraisal of their own philosophy just might.

I’m not holding my breath. It appears that much of the right has abandoned reason altogether and has descended into a cave where, blind to their own excesses, they repeat the echos heard from talk radio and other pop conservatives, while failing to light a match and see where their fear and anger have brought them.

The edge of a precipice where stepping over the edge means falling into political irrelevancy.

Rick Moran is Associate Editor of The American Thinker and Chicago Editor of Pajamas Media. His personal blog is Right Wing Nuthouse. This post is cross posted at his blog.

by Michael Reagan

As our health care system is debated in Congress and we continue to face down pro-choice challenges in the bill, I want to take the time to remind all of us of another vulnerable segment of our population. This is one area in which we should be in full agreement, but still one we too often overlook: the thousands of children in need of adoption by loving families who are instead consigned to a struggling foster-care system.

These are children who have been through so much already, who have lost their parents to tragedy, to the streets, or who have been pulled through the trauma of abuse or abandonment by the very person who should love them the most. Through no possible fault of their own, these young ones have seen the hardest side of humanity, and they desperately need a steady and loving hand to guide them.

As much as we may bicker over the politics of life and the role of government in of our social services, on a fundamental level the hardship of these children deserves nothing less than our compassion, support, and perhaps the very opening of our homes. We must understand this, not as a peripheral issue, but as a true crisis of child welfare, and a battleground for our future.

In this country, there are 129,000 children waiting to be adopted. Most of those are already legally severed from their birth parents and could therefore be adopted into new families with no delays. But last year alone, over 28,000 children were left without families.

This does not need to be the case. Improvements to the adoption system in our country have made the process smoother, faster, and less expensive than it once was. Children in foster homes can be adopted without legal complications. Those who choose to adopt an infant can be paired with their child from before birth and even build a relationship with the birth mother.

Over and over again, in personal stories and in comprehensive studies, we are shown the overwhelming benefits of adoption. Children left in foster care not only struggle with being bounced from place to place in shifting relationships, but also face a terrible struggle when they leave the system and are left with no family support, no adequate resources, and a lack of practical preparation. Conversely, children who are adopted — either as infants or later in life — have proven that strong, successful families do not require ties of blood, and children can rebound from early trauma and experience deep healing and love.

Many of you know that I myself was adopted as an infant. I can think of no greater blessing than the family I was brought into, of the chance for a new life from the start. Every child is a gift from God, and every child deserves a loving family. As individuals and as a nation, we must make that understanding a priority moving forward.

I invite you to visit http://www.arrow.org/, the home of Arrow Child & Family Ministries, an organization I have been proud to partner with for many years now. There you can learn more about the pressing issues of child welfare in this country, the policies and practices for which we advocate, and the steps your family can take on behalf of these children, perhaps even making one of them your own. Together, we can protect children and benefit families for generations to come.

Nobel Peace Prize now officially a joke after Obama selection

by Jon Wells

The Nobel Peace Prize was already flirting with irrelevance after recent selections like Al Gore, Yasser Arafat, and Jimmy Carter, but after the award was yesterday announced as going to President Barack Obama, in office for only nine months and for only 12 days when the nomination period expired, the award can officially be said to mean pretty much nothing these days. It’s a shame since so many in the past have legitimately deserved recognition for their efforts – Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela and our own Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

Can anyone legitimately argue that Obama has accomplished anything of major substance period, let alone anything that puts him in the league of the likes of those people?

The Nobel Committee said Obama was given the award based on his “changing the international climate” and “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Basically, Obama promised a bunch of stuff and we like him, so here ya go! Obama himself said he didn’t think the award reflected his own accomplishments and to his credit said he didn’t think he deserved to be mentioned with other past transformational winners. The most generous of observers are claiming the award is based on the hope and promise of an Obama administration, but that returns to the question, “Has any of that happened yet?”

It’s interesting to see Democratic pushback on skepticism over the merits of an Obama Nobel Peace Prize. The DNC accused Republicans of “throwing their lot in with the Taliban” after RNC Chairman Michael Steele made light of the Obama win. Sen. Barbara Boxer continued the meme by repeating the Taliban smear on MSNBC. The Taliban did indeed say that Obama didn’t deserve the award, so grade school logic apparently allows you to equate laughing at the merits of the Nobel Peace Prize with being murdering misogynistic terrorist-loving thugs.

The only problem is who else is “throwing their lot in with the Taliban”:

* Lech Walesa, whose response was “So soon? Too early. He has no contribution so far.”
* The UK Times Online
* Mainstream news outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, who have acted as stunned and skeptical as anyone else
* Matt Lauer: “There are no major foreign policy achievements to date … In some ways he wins this for not being George W. Bush.”
* Mark Halperin, who recently gave Obama an A- on the job he’s had so far and compared his win today to Marisa Tomei’s Oscar
* CBS News

So I’m not really concerned with all the grumbling of critics being “un-American” or “unpatriotic,” particularly by folks who spent the last 8 years grousing about such terms. It seems those offended by Bush’s “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” attitude are quick to use it themselves to demonize opinions they don’t care for. The fact is that the kindest thing you can say about the win is that it’s far too premature. You don’t give awards based on expectations, you give them on results.

All of this debate focuses attention on the reality of Obama’s accomplishments, attention that the White House surely does not want. He had little when he was elected President and he has little nine months into his Presidency. To those who believe he deserves this based on some vague notion of transformational hope sweeping the globe due solely to Obama’s good intentions, smooth speeches and his general existence, I seriously question their grip on reality. I’m not mad about the prize, just confused and amused as Obama is rewarded yet again for style over substance.

I have to say I’m amused at the justifications and rationalizations being employed to explain why Obama deserved this award more than anyone else in the world, explanations that strain the limits of credibility and logic. But here’s the reason the award bothers me and why critics are speaking out about it: Obama and his supporters can and will use the Nobel Peace Prize win as a political cudgel to silence critics and throw prestige toward whatever cause the administration desires. That such a politically powerful award (for those that will now recognize it anyway) was given for so little accomplishment in the real world shows how far the Nobel Peace Prize has fallen and underscores a continuing theme of Barack Obama’s political career: reward for rhetoric and style … and little else.

Jonathan Wells is a 28-year-old husband and father who lives in Ohio and has a day job in the microbiology field. He notes that he tends “be conservative in most of my views, but by no means do I bear blind allegiance to a political party.” He stresses that he is open-minded and encourages “any civil disagreement (or uncivil agreement) any of you would care to express.” He likes to make people think – and does so on his blog Wellsy’s World.


The cartoons by Eric Allie, Caglecartoons.com,, (top) and Frederick Deligne, Nice-Matin, France, (bottom) are copyrighted and licensed to appear on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

by Rick Moran

This is the 4th in a series of 5 articles on the state of intellectual conservatism. Here’s Part I. Part II. And Part III.

There is a terrific exchange of views on the health of conservatism over at Slate between conservative writer Reihan Salam and Sam Tannenhaus (author of Death of Conservatism). Salam is author (with Ross Douthat) of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream[ that was not very well received by movement conservatives. He is also the Schwartz Fellow at the decidedly unconservative New America Foundation.

I suppose for many on the right, this kind of background disqualifies Mr. Salam from having anything relevant to say20about conservatism. No matter. I find Salam's writing to border on brilliant at times, and his insights into modern America fresh and thought provoking. I'm sure this exchange with Tannenhaus over the latter's new book will not change anyone's mind.

Salam offers a brief summary that will also familiarize readers here with the substance of Tannenhaus's book:

To summarize briefly, you offer a sharp distinction between rigidly ideological movement conservatism, which you describe as more Jacobin than Burkean in its tone and in its anti-democratic ambitions, and the more modest and restrained "Beaconsfield position" advocated by Whittaker Chambers, a man whose courage, intellect, and independence you plainly admire. These two strands, revanchist and realist, have been present throughout the history of the American right and, as you vividly demonstrate in the case of William F. Buckley Jr., often coexist in the work of leading conservative intellectuals. The book ends with the revanchists triumphant as even neoconservative intellectuals, once the arch-realists, find themselves overtaken by ideological zeal.

"Beaconsfield" refers to the peerage of Conservative Party Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield) and his school of mid-19th century reform conservatism in England that embraced measures expanding the government's purview into areas where it was previously unknown. Tannenhaus admires Disraeli, holding him up as the kind of conservative to which the right should aspire. But today, he would probably be seen as a "Big Government" conservative by the base given the numerous reforms that brought government in to play a role in education, and worker safety, while committing the definite conservative no-no back then of expanding sufferage to include almost all male heads of households.

Disraeli is usually referred to as the "Father of Modern Conservatism" - and for good reason as this 2005 piece by David Gelernter makes clear:

THUS DISRAELI FOUND HIMSELF in a position to rebuild the Tory party. How did he go about it? Reverence for tradition was central to Toryism and to Disraeli's own personality. He wanted his new-style Tory party to embody respect for tradition--wanted it to be new and old, to be a modern setting for ancient gems, a new crown displaying old jewels. This was a popular idea in 19th-century Britain, where "the future" and "the past" were both discovered, simultaneously.

Disraeli's approach was like Barry and Pugin's in designing a new home for Parliament. The old one burned to the ground (except for a magnificent medieval hall and a few odds and ends) in 1834. The new structure, it was decided, should be built of modern materials and work like a modern building with all the conveniences--but should look medieval. The intention wasn't play-acting or aesthetic fraud; it was to use the best ideas of the past and pre sent alongside each other.

The result was wildly successful, one of history's greatest public buildings. Disraeli aimed to accomplish something similar for the Tory party. His underlying thought, which defined Disraeli-type Toryism and reshaped conservatism for all time, was that the Conservative party was the national party. Sounds simple and is. But everything else followed. If you understood "national" properly, then (on the one hand) the Tories must be a democratic, "universal," progressive party that cared about the poor and working classes--since the party was national it must care for the whole nation, for all classes. But the Tories must also be a patriotic party that revered ancient traditions and institutions, again inasmuch as they were the national--and therefore honored profoundly the nation's heritage and distinctive character.

He put it like this:

"In a progressive country change is constant; and the great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary and general doctrines."

I present intellectual conservatism at its most lucid and sublime.

Perhaps here is where the schism between movement conservatives and reformists is most pronounced; the very idea of "change." Not the revanchist view that the United States should return to some unrea listic, impossible to achieve, 19th century "small government" paradise - before there was a New Deal or Great Society. But rather the idea that conservatism at its best manages change so that ultimately, it is based on the traditions - "the manners, the customs, the laws" - that are the best of any society.

Even Russell Kirk embraced this view of change in his 10th Conservative Principle:

Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world. When a society is progressing in some respects, usually it is declining in other respects. The conservative knows that any healthy society is influenced by two forces, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge called its Permanence and its Progression. The Permanence of a society is formed by those enduring interests and convictions that gives us stability and continuity; without that Permanence, the fountains of the great deep are broken up, society slipping into anarchy. The Progression in a society is that spirit and that body of talents which urge us on to prudent reform and improvement; without that Progression, a people stagnate.

[...]

Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the=2 0human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation.

I would hope that our liberal friends read the preceding and understand why conservatives cannot and will not support the Obama version of national health care reform. It is decidedly not connected to our traditions, or our customs, and in no way can be supported since it posits “change” as some kind of mythical “progress.”

Neither, however, should many on the right believe that change should always be opposed simply out of opposition to the majority. This is mindless nihilism, and is also decidedly “unconservative” if you believe that society should be constantly trying to improve itself.

I took this detour into Disraeli and the notion of “change” because it is at the heart of Tannehaus’s critique; that movement conservatism has short circuited the connection between intellectuals and themselves by rejecting logic and reason, substituting paranoi a and an incipient anti-intellectualism in its stead.

Salam responds this way:

I have a slightly different interpretation of conservatism’s excesses. For good reason, you place the conservative intelligentsia at the heart of your story. I tend to think intellectuals belong on the margins. The revanchism you lament is not the invention of conservative elites. My view is that it is rooted in the considered judgments of a small but intense and vocal minority of American voters, many of whom are white evangelical Christians living in the Southern United States. As labor economist Stephen Rose argued in 2006, these are voters who are very tax-sensitive; they tend to settle in regions with a low cost of living, where self-reliance seems more plausible than it does from my vantage point as a lifelong city dweller. Social conservatism arguably has a totemic significance; because rural red America suffers from scandalously high rates of divorce, the sanctity of marriage is a live issue. Far from resenting public moralism, the voters I have in mind consider it a vital part of a decent, well-governed society.

What you see as conservative decline strikes me as a structural consequence of our permeable democracy. In Britain, for example, large majorities of the public back the restoration of the death penalty—more, according to some polls, than in the United States, where we’ve experienced its many downsides—but an elite cross-party consensus keeps the issue off the table. For better or for worse, our system gives the most intensely committed voters a voice that can’t be ignored. We remember the movement to impeach President Clinton as the wild-eyed crusade of out-of-touch congressional leaders, yet it was also fueled by the outrage of rank-and-file conservatives. And in a similar vein, Karl Rove never imagined that opposition to same-sex marriage would cement a permanent Republican majority. It was a distraction that I’m sure he found distasteful. President Bush himself could barely stomach talking about the issue. Yet talk about it he did, in deference to the need to press every advantage.

Is it an accident that southern evangelicals (and those who sympathize with their social agenda nationwide) are the most reliable GOP voters and play such a prominent role in conservatism today? I hesitate to agree with Tannenhaus that these grass roots conservatives exhibit reactionary traits but it is hard to escape the fact that much of the right’s social agenda – anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage (and gay rights), school prayer (”God in the public square”) – is predicated on the belief that attitudes in society that have changed to varying degrees on these issues can be rolled back. I don’t know if this is “reactionary” although I don’t believe that social conservatives are desirous of the kind of “change” that would have been supported by Disraeli or perhaps even Kirk.

I hasten to add that this doesn’t make these issues illegitimate. But they don’t represent my kind of conservatism, nor that of many others.

Tannenhaus’s response is interesting:

Actually, what you call a polemic means to be an interpretive history that makes the opposite case from the one described in your account. Revanchist conservatism did not originate as a form of populist protest. Rather, it was the brainchild of the very elites you say have no influence on our politics. It was conservative intellectuals who argued that the “managerial elite” (James Burnham), the “liberal establishment” (William Buckley), or the “new class” (Irving Kristol) had seized control of American politics and later our society. This argument, in its inverted Marxism, gave theoretical shape to the unarticulated anxieties and suspicions—anti-government, anti-institutional, antinomian—of the “small but intense and vocal minority,” many of them “white evangelical Christians,” who today populate the eroding island of movement conservatism. Even today the right insists it is driven by ideas, even if the leading thinkers are now Limbaugh and Beck, and the shock troops are tea-partiers and anti-tax demonstrators.

In other words, the movement has thrived not as a top-down operation, nor as a bottom-up one, but as a convergence of shared prejudices and cultural enmities. Thus, the right’s first great modern tribune was Joe McCarthy, whose theatrical “investigations” of “enemies within” were either endorsed or indulged by each of the intellectuals mentioned above.

The same antagonisms con tinued through the Bush years. Your reading of that dismal period seems rather wishful to me. Bush and Rove built their presidency on revanchism. This isn’t surprising since Rove’s number-crunching following the 2000 election—when Bush lost the popular vote by 500,000 or more—suggested that the GOP ticket had failed to exploit the evangelical base that might have yielded a majority. No wonder Bush devoted so much of his presidency to courting social conservatives—remember stem cells, intelligent design, the faith-based initiative? Nor was Rove taken aback by opposition to same-sex marriage. On the contrary, he made it a centerpiece in the 2004 election. It is the politics of the excluded middle, or center, and it defines the right today on every stratum.

Tannenhaus believes that the intellectuals who supplied much of the substance and heft to conservatism in the 1970’s ended up embracing ideology as a means to political power, igniting the passions of the base by focusing on “enemies” and “antagonisms.” He calls it a “convergence” of the elites (most of whom are not intellectuals I might add) with the base. Who was driving whom? I agree more with Salam on this one. The entrance into politics of evangelicals, motivated by TV preachers like Jerry Falwell, was definitely a grass roots phenomenon and one of the more significant political events since World War II. Reagan largely gave lip service to the Christian right (as Roosevelt gave lip service to the far left agenda during his adminis tration), and George Bush 41 stupidly rejected them.

It was left to Bush 43 to pander shamelessly to the evangelicals, increasing their power and influence, while running a corporatist, big government administration. He was supported by conservatives largely because of his social conservatism and his hawkish foreign policy. Also, the alternative of John Kerry was unpalatable to almost all on the right.

But did this “convergence” lead us to the sorry state of intellectual conservatism today? Salam replies to Tannenhaus by positing a different explanation:

And as I suggested in my first entry, I really do think that something structural is going on: In the past, the democratic marketplace was less “efficient,” and that was in a sense a very good thing for writers and thinkers and public-spirited elected officials, who had the freedom to defy movement discipline. Our more fragmented media landscape has far lower barriers to entry, and it allows passionately engaged citizens, as well as cranks, to organize and even intimidate. When you consider that Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa fears a hard-right Internet-enabled primary challenge, his otherwise puzzling behavior in the health reform debate starts to make sense.

Throughout the book, you draw on political analyst Samuel Lubell to argue that America’s party system consists of a dominant sun, a majority party that sets the ideological agenda, and a minority moon. And like many observers, you suggest that after a long period of Republican dominance, during which Democrats came to embrace conservative insights as part of a new consensus, we have now entered a progressive era. And so conservatives face a choice: Either a new generation of Republican Disraelis will champion a Bismarckian welfare state, a view that Irving Kristol championed as late as 2003 (I disagree with your interpretation of the late Kristol, but I digress), or the movement will be doomed to snarling insignificance at the margins of our political life.

That’s a pretty stark choice but, I believe, an accurate one. Salam said in his first piece that he believed the anger of the base would “steadily work its way out in hundreds of thousands of roiling conversations in office parks, shopping malls, living rooms, and lecture halls.” And, I might add, the voting booth. It is there that movement conservatism will finally meet its own “Waterloo.”

I believe it inevitable that even if the GOP mounts some kind of comeback in 2010, it will be shortlived. The systemic contradictions inherent in the movement as well as a continued disconnect with the concerns of ordinary voters will spell defeat of what will almost certainly be a movement candidate for president in 2012. Then, the excuse that their candidate wasn’t “conservative enough” will ring hollow and they will be faced with the yawning chasm opening beneath their feet that their angry, paranoid, illogical worldview is not shared with many outside of the cocoon they have created for themselves.

Rick Moran is Associate Editor of The American Thinker and Chicago Editor of Pajamas Media. His personal blog is Right Wing Nuthouse. This is cross-posted from his weblog.