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Let's play a political word-association game. You say "blue" and I say "red." You say "swift" and I say "boat." You say "Cheney" and I say "Welch" and you ask me what in the world do I mean. And I say that when Dick Cheney warned that the election of John Kerry would increase the risk of a terrorist attack, I immediately thought of Joseph Welch, the patrician Boston attorney who confronted Sen. Joseph McCarthy back in 1954 and asked, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" The answer in McCarthy's case was no. It is no different with Cheney.
-- Richard Cohen for The Washington Post
After two testosterone-charged conventions, try to remember that three years ago there was much talk about the "feminization" of politics. The change since Sept. 11 explains the bind John Kerry is in and why he, more than George W. Bush, is hostage to events.
-- George F. Will for The Washington Post
Here is another pair of columns that seemed oppositional but are perhaps fairly complementary, between the old fashion conservative, George Will, and another true liberal, Richard Cohen.
Mr. Cohen highlights Republican excesses when showing itself to be stronger than the Democrats on national security, as in Vice President Cheney's recent pitch about how a Kerry victory would be a provocation for the terrorists to strike at a weak Administration that is more likely to view the attack as a crime rather than an act or war.
Mr. Will brings out the proposition that we do indeed live in dangerous and threatening times, and that most American voters understand that since 9/11, an awareness which has been bolstered by the attack at Breslan, Russia. He also notes how President Bush enjoys greater confidence as being "the candidate most focused on and muscular about the world's multiplying dangers."
In other words, the scare tactics of the Republicans are excessive and corrosive, but it is a scary world.
Richard Cohen's "Red Scare, Updated":
Let's play a political word-association game. You say "blue" and I say "red." You say "swift" and I say "boat." You say "Cheney" and I say "Welch" and you ask me what in the world do I mean. And I say that when Dick Cheney warned that the election of John Kerry would increase the risk of a terrorist attack, I immediately thought of Joseph Welch, the patrician Boston attorney who confronted Sen. Joseph McCarthy back in 1954 and asked, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" The answer in McCarthy's case was no. It is no different with Cheney.
Cheney made his remarks Tuesday in a campaign stop in Des Moines, where he elevated the election to a choice not between two men or two parties, but between life and death. "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2, we make the right choice. Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney said. Somewhere, Joe McCarthy smiled.
Cheney, of course, did not point out that the Sept. 11 attacks occurred on his and George Bush's watch. All of this is in the official record. Also in the record are the warnings of various government officials -- Richard Clarke, for instance -- that Osama bin Laden was almost certainly planning an attack against the United States. Similar warnings from outgoing Clinton administration officials such as Sandy Berger were ignored by an administration that smugly knew better. It was first going to work on missile defense -- the real threat, remember?
In a way, the Des Moines statement is just more Cheney. The vice president is the Chicken Little of the Bush administration, whose dire warnings of this or that never materialize. He insisted, for instance, that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had "reconstituted" its nuclear weapons program, both a scary prospect and reason enough for war. Trouble was, Iraq had dismantled that program, which, as even Bush might fathom, is not the same thing.
It was Cheney, too, who insisted against all evidence -- or, to be precise, in the absence of any -- that a substantive link existed between bin Laden and Hussein's regime. If you only knew what I knew, Cheney essentially said, but all the agencies of government that did know what Cheney knew concluded otherwise. No matter. Once again, Cheney simply said what was politically advantageous. If Massachusetts becomes a battleground state, look for Cheney to convert to Catholicism.
The problem with Cheney's assertion about terrorism is that it makes no sense. Nothing in John Kerry's record, and certainly nothing the senator has said recently, suggests he would be any less tough on terrorism than George Bush. There is ample evidence to suggest, however, that he would not have gone off half-cocked into Iraq before finishing the job in Afghanistan. Opening up a supposed second front has not made the United States any safer. Hussein is in jail, but bin Laden is not and terrorists are striking all over the world. Under the gallant leadership of President Bush, the Marines hit the wrong beach.
The other night on the Jim Lehrer "NewsHour," former secretary of state Madeleine Albright called Iraq a mess and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger said it wasn't -- and then proceeded to describe a mess. At the moment, the United States has lost more than 1,000 service members, and whole hunks of that country are under the control of one militia or another. The situation has deteriorated so much that when Kerry promised he would try to get U.S. troops out of the country within four years, neither Bush nor Cheney quibbled. Four years? But this was supposed to be a liberation. Did we somehow miss the parades, the inauguration of Ahmed Chalabi, Martha Stewart re-creating the hanging gardens of Babylon? (A hanging garden is a good thing.)
Sorry, Henry, Iraq is a mess. And Cheney is one of the chief architects of that mess -- pride of place after Bush himself. But rather than answer for what they have done, they both prefer to resort to odious scare tactics, an updated version of the old soft-on-communism charge. Even before McCarthy, this was standard stuff in politics. As Cheney knows, when you don't have any answers, it's best not to have any shame, either.
............
George Will's "Bad News for Kerry":
After two testosterone-charged conventions, try to remember that three years ago there was much talk about the "feminization" of politics. The change since Sept. 11 explains the bind John Kerry is in and why he, more than George W. Bush, is hostage to events.
The idea, current then, that "the end of history" had arrived was partly a response to a sense that mankind's elemental economic problem -- mastering growth -- had been solved. Henceforth the tone of politics, even for conservatives of the "compassionate" stripe, would mimic the "caring professions." Everyone would be kinder and gentler, leaving no child behind.
History had supposedly lost its motor of violent, ideologically driven conflict. That theory turned on the fact of a broad consensus that modern societies must allocate wealth and opportunity through economic markets and must apportion political power through the markets of multiparty elections.
However, the past three years have been dominated by another fact: A violent, metastasizing minority rejects, root and branch, the idea that modernity is desirable. Islamic radicals taking up the cause of Chechen separatism are the latest dissenters to be heard from.
The atrocity at School No. 1 in Beslan, Russia -- the worst act of terrorism since Sept. 11 -- was one episode in Russia's 150-year struggle with Chechen separatists and involved a political "perfect storm," the convergence of nationalism, ethnicity and religion. This is redundant refutation of what Pat Moynihan called the "liberal expectancy." That is the belief that nationalism, religion and ethnicity would be of steadily diminishing importance because of the inexorable advance of modernity -- education, science, secularism, prosperity.
The Bush administration, although in many ways deeply conservative, shares that expectancy. Hence its hopes for democratization of the Middle East.
James W. Ceaser and Daniel DiSalvo, political scientists at the University of Virginia, writing in the fall issue of the Public Interest, argue that what makes Bush's foreign policy distinctive is its attempt to implement an idea. Bush says that "liberty is the design of nature" and that "freedom is the right and the capacity of all mankind." Ceaser and DiSalvo say that not since Lincoln has the Republicans' leader "so actively sought to ground the party in a politics of natural right."
Kerry is the candidate of the intellectually vain -- of those who, practicing the politics of condescension, consider Bush moronic. But Kerry is unwilling to engage Bush's idea.
Hence he is allowing Bush to have what he wants, a one-issue election. The issue is a conflation of the wars in Iraq and on terrorism in the single subject "security." Kerry is trying, and failing, to pry apart judgments about the two. But even if he succeeds, he continues to deepen the risible incoherence of his still-multiplying positions on Iraq.
In his speech last week to the American Legion convention, Kerry said that in Iraq he, as president, would have done "almost everything differently." The indisputable implication is that if he had been president since 2001, America would be in Iraq.
But when pandering to Iowa's Democratic activists last winter, Kerry placed himself among the "antiwar candidates." More recently he has said that even knowing what we do about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, he would still have voted to authorize force. But on Monday he said Iraq was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." He has said that "it would be unwise beyond belief" for America "to leave a failed Iraq in its wake" -- and that too few U.S. troops are there. But he has also said that he will bring some of them home -- "where they belong" -- in his first term. Then he said in his first year. Then in his first six months.
The New Republic, which supports him, says his position, which had been "inscrutable," is now "indefensible." He represents a party whose activists detest the war in Iraq, so he dwells on his participation in the Vietnam War, which those activists detested then or have learned to detest through liberalism's catechism. And having made a hash of his thoughts on the most serious subject, his speeches about the outsourcing of jobs appear, grotesquely incongruous, on newspaper pages carrying photographs of the broken bodies from School No. 1.
Almost any good news, about the economy or war, will help Bush. And the most likely bad news, about the war, is apt to hurt Kerry in two ways. It will make his preferred domestic policy issues seem minor and will reinforce Bush's theme that he is the candidate most focused on and muscular about the world's multiplying dangers.
Let's play a political word-association game. You say "blue" and I say "red." You say "swift" and I say "boat." You say "Cheney" and I say "Welch" and you ask me what in the world do I mean. And I say that when Dick Cheney warned that the election of John Kerry would increase the risk of a terrorist attack, I immediately thought of Joseph Welch, the patrician Boston attorney who confronted Sen. Joseph McCarthy back in 1954 and asked, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" The answer in McCarthy's case was no. It is no different with Cheney.
-- Richard Cohen for The Washington Post
After two testosterone-charged conventions, try to remember that three years ago there was much talk about the "feminization" of politics. The change since Sept. 11 explains the bind John Kerry is in and why he, more than George W. Bush, is hostage to events.
-- George F. Will for The Washington Post
Here is another pair of columns that seemed oppositional but are perhaps fairly complementary, between the old fashion conservative, George Will, and another true liberal, Richard Cohen.
Mr. Cohen highlights Republican excesses when showing itself to be stronger than the Democrats on national security, as in Vice President Cheney's recent pitch about how a Kerry victory would be a provocation for the terrorists to strike at a weak Administration that is more likely to view the attack as a crime rather than an act or war.
Mr. Will brings out the proposition that we do indeed live in dangerous and threatening times, and that most American voters understand that since 9/11, an awareness which has been bolstered by the attack at Breslan, Russia. He also notes how President Bush enjoys greater confidence as being "the candidate most focused on and muscular about the world's multiplying dangers."
In other words, the scare tactics of the Republicans are excessive and corrosive, but it is a scary world.
Richard Cohen's "Red Scare, Updated":
Let's play a political word-association game. You say "blue" and I say "red." You say "swift" and I say "boat." You say "Cheney" and I say "Welch" and you ask me what in the world do I mean. And I say that when Dick Cheney warned that the election of John Kerry would increase the risk of a terrorist attack, I immediately thought of Joseph Welch, the patrician Boston attorney who confronted Sen. Joseph McCarthy back in 1954 and asked, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" The answer in McCarthy's case was no. It is no different with Cheney.
Cheney made his remarks Tuesday in a campaign stop in Des Moines, where he elevated the election to a choice not between two men or two parties, but between life and death. "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2, we make the right choice. Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney said. Somewhere, Joe McCarthy smiled.
Cheney, of course, did not point out that the Sept. 11 attacks occurred on his and George Bush's watch. All of this is in the official record. Also in the record are the warnings of various government officials -- Richard Clarke, for instance -- that Osama bin Laden was almost certainly planning an attack against the United States. Similar warnings from outgoing Clinton administration officials such as Sandy Berger were ignored by an administration that smugly knew better. It was first going to work on missile defense -- the real threat, remember?
In a way, the Des Moines statement is just more Cheney. The vice president is the Chicken Little of the Bush administration, whose dire warnings of this or that never materialize. He insisted, for instance, that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had "reconstituted" its nuclear weapons program, both a scary prospect and reason enough for war. Trouble was, Iraq had dismantled that program, which, as even Bush might fathom, is not the same thing.
It was Cheney, too, who insisted against all evidence -- or, to be precise, in the absence of any -- that a substantive link existed between bin Laden and Hussein's regime. If you only knew what I knew, Cheney essentially said, but all the agencies of government that did know what Cheney knew concluded otherwise. No matter. Once again, Cheney simply said what was politically advantageous. If Massachusetts becomes a battleground state, look for Cheney to convert to Catholicism.
The problem with Cheney's assertion about terrorism is that it makes no sense. Nothing in John Kerry's record, and certainly nothing the senator has said recently, suggests he would be any less tough on terrorism than George Bush. There is ample evidence to suggest, however, that he would not have gone off half-cocked into Iraq before finishing the job in Afghanistan. Opening up a supposed second front has not made the United States any safer. Hussein is in jail, but bin Laden is not and terrorists are striking all over the world. Under the gallant leadership of President Bush, the Marines hit the wrong beach.
The other night on the Jim Lehrer "NewsHour," former secretary of state Madeleine Albright called Iraq a mess and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger said it wasn't -- and then proceeded to describe a mess. At the moment, the United States has lost more than 1,000 service members, and whole hunks of that country are under the control of one militia or another. The situation has deteriorated so much that when Kerry promised he would try to get U.S. troops out of the country within four years, neither Bush nor Cheney quibbled. Four years? But this was supposed to be a liberation. Did we somehow miss the parades, the inauguration of Ahmed Chalabi, Martha Stewart re-creating the hanging gardens of Babylon? (A hanging garden is a good thing.)
Sorry, Henry, Iraq is a mess. And Cheney is one of the chief architects of that mess -- pride of place after Bush himself. But rather than answer for what they have done, they both prefer to resort to odious scare tactics, an updated version of the old soft-on-communism charge. Even before McCarthy, this was standard stuff in politics. As Cheney knows, when you don't have any answers, it's best not to have any shame, either.
............
George Will's "Bad News for Kerry":
After two testosterone-charged conventions, try to remember that three years ago there was much talk about the "feminization" of politics. The change since Sept. 11 explains the bind John Kerry is in and why he, more than George W. Bush, is hostage to events.
The idea, current then, that "the end of history" had arrived was partly a response to a sense that mankind's elemental economic problem -- mastering growth -- had been solved. Henceforth the tone of politics, even for conservatives of the "compassionate" stripe, would mimic the "caring professions." Everyone would be kinder and gentler, leaving no child behind.
History had supposedly lost its motor of violent, ideologically driven conflict. That theory turned on the fact of a broad consensus that modern societies must allocate wealth and opportunity through economic markets and must apportion political power through the markets of multiparty elections.
However, the past three years have been dominated by another fact: A violent, metastasizing minority rejects, root and branch, the idea that modernity is desirable. Islamic radicals taking up the cause of Chechen separatism are the latest dissenters to be heard from.
The atrocity at School No. 1 in Beslan, Russia -- the worst act of terrorism since Sept. 11 -- was one episode in Russia's 150-year struggle with Chechen separatists and involved a political "perfect storm," the convergence of nationalism, ethnicity and religion. This is redundant refutation of what Pat Moynihan called the "liberal expectancy." That is the belief that nationalism, religion and ethnicity would be of steadily diminishing importance because of the inexorable advance of modernity -- education, science, secularism, prosperity.
The Bush administration, although in many ways deeply conservative, shares that expectancy. Hence its hopes for democratization of the Middle East.
James W. Ceaser and Daniel DiSalvo, political scientists at the University of Virginia, writing in the fall issue of the Public Interest, argue that what makes Bush's foreign policy distinctive is its attempt to implement an idea. Bush says that "liberty is the design of nature" and that "freedom is the right and the capacity of all mankind." Ceaser and DiSalvo say that not since Lincoln has the Republicans' leader "so actively sought to ground the party in a politics of natural right."
Kerry is the candidate of the intellectually vain -- of those who, practicing the politics of condescension, consider Bush moronic. But Kerry is unwilling to engage Bush's idea.
Hence he is allowing Bush to have what he wants, a one-issue election. The issue is a conflation of the wars in Iraq and on terrorism in the single subject "security." Kerry is trying, and failing, to pry apart judgments about the two. But even if he succeeds, he continues to deepen the risible incoherence of his still-multiplying positions on Iraq.
In his speech last week to the American Legion convention, Kerry said that in Iraq he, as president, would have done "almost everything differently." The indisputable implication is that if he had been president since 2001, America would be in Iraq.
But when pandering to Iowa's Democratic activists last winter, Kerry placed himself among the "antiwar candidates." More recently he has said that even knowing what we do about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, he would still have voted to authorize force. But on Monday he said Iraq was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." He has said that "it would be unwise beyond belief" for America "to leave a failed Iraq in its wake" -- and that too few U.S. troops are there. But he has also said that he will bring some of them home -- "where they belong" -- in his first term. Then he said in his first year. Then in his first six months.
The New Republic, which supports him, says his position, which had been "inscrutable," is now "indefensible." He represents a party whose activists detest the war in Iraq, so he dwells on his participation in the Vietnam War, which those activists detested then or have learned to detest through liberalism's catechism. And having made a hash of his thoughts on the most serious subject, his speeches about the outsourcing of jobs appear, grotesquely incongruous, on newspaper pages carrying photographs of the broken bodies from School No. 1.
Almost any good news, about the economy or war, will help Bush. And the most likely bad news, about the war, is apt to hurt Kerry in two ways. It will make his preferred domestic policy issues seem minor and will reinforce Bush's theme that he is the candidate most focused on and muscular about the world's multiplying dangers.
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-10 12:08 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-09-10 05:13 pm (UTC)From:We really are talking about more than bogeyman.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-11 07:29 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-09-11 07:46 am (UTC)From:And who is really in denial? Who is the one who wants to say that terrorists aren't villains, and that perhaps all we need is some therapy and understanding.
Move on to where, my friend? Most of us are compelled to focus on the world as it is...
no subject
Date: 2004-09-11 10:46 am (UTC)From:The denial, of course, is psychologically creating false demons, demonizing what need not be demonizing, dehumanizing our problems, focusing too much on extremes instead of an even, objective view. When fear takes hold as it has with terrorism, people start to view the world as black and white, us versus them...when in reality we need to be actually working on the problem instead of trying to boost our own ego as a nation. The terrorists, contrary to all this jingoism we hear everyday, are not "villains" like some Hollywood movie. They are criminals of the worst sort, no doubt. But America is no hero. It's a complex world that should not and cannot be reduced to black and white. As I've said before, terrorism is not the biggest problem of our era. Of course, you look at the number one issue for most of the moronic voters out there and you hear that it is. Most Americans need some therapy and some education...we're a diseased people, sad as that is.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-11 12:00 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-09-11 12:43 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-09-11 07:27 pm (UTC)From: