Shanda

This McCain campaign attack on Barack Obama for being "soft on genocide" on the same day he's visiting the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem is, as Robert Wexler says, pretty shameful. Especially because the comment they're using to attack him simply recognizes the limits of military capability to deal with genocide, and the need to build multilateral coalitions and use all the tools of diplomatic pressure to bear. This is why Obama actually has a better score on legislation about the CURRENT GENOCIDE happening in Darfur than McCain; because he understands it in a global context.

I thought J Street's response was a good one:

We are shocked and dismayed by today’s exploitation by aides to Senator John McCain of the memory of the Holocaust while Obama was visiting Yad Vashem in Israel.

It is one thing to have a legitimate disagreement over keeping American troops in Iraq for sixteen months or a hundred years.

It is another to shamelessly exploit the sacred memory of six million victims of the worst crime in human history to score political points in the heat of a partisan election campaign.

There is definitely an "Obama is an anti-Semite who isn't committed to Israel" undercurrent to all of this. I mean, this ridiculous flap over Obama making fliers in the language of the city in which he's appearing and appearing on the flier in profile - just like Hitler! (because imitating Hitler is a surefire vote-getter) fits into the narrative as well. While McCain's people make outrageous remarks about his commitment to stopping genocide, the fever swamps on the right compare him to a genocidist. Meanwhile, the one figure to invoke Hitler's name favorably this election cycle, radical right pastor John Hagee, just appeared on the same stage as key McCain surrogate Joe Lieberman.

One of John McCain's most prominent supporters on Tuesday praised an evangelical leader whom the Republican presidential candidate repudiated after a string of controversial remarks were made public.

Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent who frequently campaigns with McCain, said pastor John Hagee's support for Israel outweighed the remarks that led McCain to reject his endorsement [...]

McCain, in an effort to reach out to evangelicals who are among the most loyal Republican voters, accepted Hagee's endorsement in March but rejected him in May after learning that the Texas preacher once said that God allowed the Holocaust to happen because it led to the creation of Israel.

Think Progress caught the following from the Christians United for Israel event:

In response to what he termed the "pretty aggressive campaign," Lieberman said in his speech, "The bond I feel with Pastor John Hagee and each and every one of you is much stronger than that and so I am proud to stand with you here tonight." Lieberman again drew a parallel between Hagee and biblical figures, this time saying biblical heroes, unlike the demigods of Greek mythology, "are humans — great humans, but with human failings." Lieberman said that Moses had his shortcomings, too. "Dear friends, I can only imagine what the bloggers of today would have had to say about Moses and Miriam."

Yes, he just compared John Hagee to Moses. This is why nobody, not even Jews, like Lieberman any more.

What a shanda.

Don't Know Much About History

Chris Matthews' brutal takedown of some robotic wingnut yesterday was notable simply for how easy it was. Apparently asking a conservative to define the words coming out of their mouth is a question on par with the final round of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.



Of course, what the wingnut is referring to above is the President's comments yesterday in Israel, trying to stick it to the Democrats by calling them Nazi-appeasers. He used the artful phrase "an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ in discussing the times in 1939, aware but unwilling to admit that he was alluding to Republican isolationist Senator William Borah of Idaho. What he appeared blissfully unaware of was the collaboration of his own grandfather, Prescott Bush, who reaped financial reward for him and his family (including his son Bush 41 and grandson Bush 43) through sitting on boards of companies who did business with the Nazis.

(By the way, this is the biggest gift George Bush could have given the Obama campaign, so much so that I almost believe it had to have been staged.)

But less remarked upon was this amazingly ignorant comment by John McCain in an interview with Matt Bai.

as we talked, I tried to draw out of him some template for knowing when military intervention made sense — an answer, essentially, to the question that has plagued policy makers confronting international crises for the last 20 years. McCain has said that the invasion of Iraq was justified, even absent the weapons of mass destruction he believed were there, because of Hussein’s affront to basic human values. Why then, I asked McCain, shouldn’t we go into Zimbabwe, where, according to that morning’s paper, allies of the despotic president, Robert Mugabe, were rounding up his political opponents and preparing to subvert the results of the country’s recent national election? How about sending soldiers into Myanmar, formerly Burma, where Aung San Suu Kyi remained under house arrest by a military junta?

“I think in the case of Zimbabwe, it’s because of our history in Africa,” McCain said thoughtfully. “Not so much the United States but the Europeans, the colonialist history in Africa. The government of South Africa has obviously not been effective, to say the least, in trying to affect the situation in Zimbabwe, and one reason is that they don’t want to be tarred with the brush of modern colonialism. So that’s a problem I think we will continue to have on the continent of Africa. If you send in Western military forces, then you risk the backlash from the people, from the legacy that was left in Africa because of the era of colonialism.”

Of course, there is no history of colonialism in the Middle East. Except for Algeria. And Jordan. And Iran. And Saudi Arabia. And Yemen. And Bahrain. And Oman. And Qatar. And The United Arab Emirates. And Iraq, whose borders were almost randomly drawn on a British map, which has led us to the instability we see today.

(McCain, by the way, was for talking to Hamas before he was against it, another example of torching the past.)

The worst thing the conservative movement has foisted on the country is a collapse of historical memory. Our civic education here is not so robust, and our civic knowledge of history is worse. This has given wide latitude for conservatives to create their own reality, and jabber away with "facts" that consist of shibboleths and catch phrases, which by now have been ripped of all meaning outside the Manichean "good" and "bad." That's what we saw with that shameful appearance on Hardball. That's what we saw by the President yesterday. That's what we saw from McCain in that interview. And that, sadly, is a part of America. The Poor Man says it best:

It’s all like this. Everything is just like this. Some blank young person who has memorized a 5″x7″ index card of focus group-approved phrases, yelling, yelling, yelling over everyone. And you can say what you want, and be as right as you want, but he’s going to keep yelling, and yelling, and yelling until you get sick of it, and at the end of the day everybody knows that Barack Obama goes to secret Muslim church. Everything is like this. An election won’t fix it. This rules the world.

Not Wild About Harry

I felt that last night, Barack Obama made an intelligent and concrete case against mandates and for his vision of a universal health care plan focused on cost control. Then he went and dropped this mailer, which is structurally very similar to the infamous "Harry and Louise" ads from 1994.

The Obama campaign kept their hairstyles and barely even changed their clothing -- which is really quite unfair to Harry and Louise, who probably let go of the plaid years back. What's worse is that the argument they're making is applicable to any kind of universal health care arrangement, including the arrangements Obama himself will eventually have to adopt:

An "automatic sign-up," a la Medicare, would still force Americans into health care they may not want to pay for, or may feel overburdened by. Some seniors feel overburdened by Medicare's cost-sharing now. Meanwhile, Obama not only has a mandate for kids in his own health care plan -- what if the parents can't pay, one might ask? -- but he said, in last night's debate, "If people are gaming the system, there are ways we can address that. By, for example, making them pay some of the back premiums for not having gotten it in the first place." That, of course, is exactly what a mandate does. Gaming the system, in this context, means not purchasing health care. And Obama is now threatening to force them to pay back premiums. That's a harsher penalty than anything Clinton has proposed.

It's kind of a clichéd look, the couple at the kitchen table going over their bills. That's kind of why they're called "kitchen-table" concerns. I understand why many health care policy experts are flipping out about this, because Obama is using a right-wing frame against Hillary Clinton's health-care plan. But let's get some perspective. Mailers have been the attack du jour of this campaign. Clinton has dropped some atrocious mailers this cycle, the worst being the one suggesting Obama isn't sufficiently pro-choice, which is nuts. And that one had a definite impact in New Hampshire.

In addition, a mailer is not, you know, like the Nazis marching through Skokie, as Len Nichols of the New America Foundation said this morning.

Obama has the ability to make a decent and informed critique of a mandate-based plan. He doesn't have to resort to this. Then again, neither does any politician, but it seems to work so they keep doing it.

Huckabee Breaks Godwin's Law

It's a little useless to be pounding on Mike Huckabee, given that he's flat broke and is pulling out of Florida. But he's using a Southern strategy to pick up lots of Super Tuesday delegates (Alabama, Tennessee, Missouri, West Virginia), and he's still a potential Vice Presidential candidate should McCain or Romney want to pick up evangelical support. So it's important to understand that yesterday he compared America to Nazi Germany.

In a speech to the Florida Renewal Project Monday night, which in an unprecedented move was live streamed on the American Family Association's Web site, Mike Huckabee compared America to Nazi Germany. He first implored the audience to renew their "commitment to Christ" and "to our nation, to its heritage, as well as to its future," adding "do we expect the seculars [sic] to do it? Do we expect the unbelievers to lead us, and if so, how will they lead us and where?" He then engaged in an extended description of his visit to the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem with his 11- year-old daughter, who asked, "why didn't somebody do something?" Huckabee, who has called abortion a "holocaust," then issued a dire warning:

... I pray that no father ever stands over the shoulder of his own daughter and after her witnessing the decline and the fall of a great nation, writes, and sees her write these words, "why didn't somebody do something?" You see, I believe the reason we're here is because we are the somebodies. And we're to do the something and if we don't, who will? And if we don't act now, when will it happen, and will it be too late? You leave this conference with this haunting question, and pray that no one would ever ask of you or of me, why didn't somebody do something.

It is beyond dangerous to give someone with this worldview even a slice of federal power.

World's Dumbest Argument

I wish I had the energy of those in the liberal blogosphere who have gone beyond the call of duty to take apart Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Granimals to What's For Dinner Mom? Alex Koppelman in Salon gave Goldberg enough rope to hang himself with an interview about the book, and in the first line he proudly describes the book as "a revisionist history," seemingly with no sense of irony. You almost have to look away from the interview as if it were an actual car wreck, especially in moments like this:

He points out that this organic food movement, the whole-grain bread operation, the war on cancer, the war on smoking, that these things were as fascist as death camps and yellow stars. They were as central to the ideology of Nazism as the extermination of the Jews. Now, that is not the same thing. And I want to be really clear about this: That is not the same thing as saying that banning smoking is as morally disgusting and reprehensible as trying to wipe out the Jewish people. You can say that something is as much part and parcel of an ideology and not say that it is as evil.

I mean, you wince when you see someone explain that the organic food movement is as central to Nazi ideology as killing 6 million Jews, while trying to also say that it's not the same thing. And there are more and more of these intellectual cul-de-sacs, like when he tries to call problem-solving fascistic (which would certainly account for all the unsolved problems of the conservative era, no? Goldberg's trick in this interview is to broadly define any facet of what he considers contemporary liberalism as fascist, while conveniently forgetting the words and actions of actual fascists like Benito Mussolini (it's hilarious when he responds to a question about Mussolini's "The Doctrine of Fascism" by saying that he hasn't read it in a while and doesn't remember it, despite having researched and written a book, with Mussolini's name in the subtitle, about how Mussolini was a socialist and not a fascist at all. You'd think that'd be a primary text).

The Sadlynauts have the definitive takedown of this interview, complete with Hitlet smiley face ratings. But I want to also note John Holbo's review of this absurdly broad argument, which takes in so many facets of what Goldberg dislikes about liberalism as fascism that he basically creates a globe full of fascists (in that, he's a doughy Holden Caulfield):

What explicit definition of ‘fascism’ is Goldberg operating with, if any? To judge from reviews, the author’s own comments, his ‘results’, he must be applying the term to any sort of ‘statist’ or ‘collectivist’ political rhetoric, policy proposal, or legislative act, especially such of these as entangle the state in coercive action on behalf of ‘communitarian’ values or ‘identity’ politics: values that subordinate the individual to the whole. The trouble is: pretty much the only sort of conservative who is not going to come out fascist, under this umbrella, is (maybe) the likes of F. Hayek, when penning essays with titles like “Why I Am Not A Conservative”. Otherwise, the whole tradition of conservative thought, from Burke to Kirk and beyond, is ‘fascist’. Hillary says it takes a village, but Burke would never have settled for small-time socialism. He thundered about “the great primeval contract of eternal society.” No doubt ‘it takes a village’ is pretty weak, qua anti-fascist vaccine. But switching to the belief that you would do best to unquestioningly submit yourself to some sort of primordial, vaguely mystical, hierarchical social order is not going to inoculate you either [...]

Now we get to what is maybe an actually half-interesting point. There are two reasons why ad hitlerem arguments tend to be rude and crude. (Everyone knows Godwin’s Law is law. Here’s why, more or less.) First, the Holocaust. It’s pretty obvious how always dragging that in is not necessarily clarifying of every little dispute. Second, a little less obviously, ad hitlerem arguments are invariably arguments by moral analogy. Person A espouses value B. But the Nazis approved B. Not that person A is necessarily a Nazi but there must be something morally perilous about B, if espousing it is consistent with turning all Nazi. The trouble is: with few exceptions, the Nazis had all our values – at least nominally. They approved of life, liberty, justice, happiness, property, motherhood, society, culture, art, science, church, duty, devotion, loyalty, courage, fidelity, prudence, boldness, vision, veneration for tradition, respect for reason. They didn’t reject all that; they perverted it; preached but didn’t practice, or practiced horribly. Which goes to show there is pretty much no value immune from being paid mere lip-service; nominally maintained but substantively subverted. Which, come to think of it, isn’t surprising. How could a list of ‘success’ words guarantee success, after all?

Most people pass simple algebra classes and understand this is not a rational line of argument anymore, and go on to political debates on a different plane. Moral reprobates like Goldberg simply must pursue this faulty reasoning for little more than the scoring of poltiical points, so he makes up definitions, excludes his allies and includes his opponents, and then dares anyone to refute a logical system that only exists inside his own head. It's enervating to actually argue, and the best rejoinder is then NECESSARILY mockery. So, a tip of the cap to those doing the Lord's work here.