An unguarded comment that tells you where the left is.
Soderberg: There's always hope that this might not work
BEST OF THE WEB
BY JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, March 2, 2005 10:53 a.m.
'But as an American . . .'
We hardly ever watch Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," but our TV happened to be tuned to it last night when erstwhile Clinton aide Nancy Soderberg, author of "The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might" (foreword by Bill Clinton, blurb by Madeleine Albright) came on. We're not sure what possessed us to turn on the sound and watch, but we're glad we did, for it was a fascinating interview. Here's a TiVo-assisted transcript of most of it:
Stewart: This book--it talks about the superpower myth of the United States. There is this idea, the United States is the sole superpower, and I guess the premise of the book is we cannot misuse that power--have to use it wisely, and not just punitively. Is that--
Soderberg: That's right. What I argue is that the Bush administration fell hostage to the superpower myth, believing that because we're the most powerful nation on earth, we were all-powerful, could bend the world to our will and not have to worry about the rest of the world. I think what they're finding in the second term is, it's a little bit harder than that, and reality has an annoying way of intruding.
Stewart: But what do you make of--here's my dilemma, if you will. I don't care for the way these guys conduct themselves--and this is just you and I talking, no cameras here [audience laughter]. But boy, when you see the Lebanese take to the streets and all that, and you go, "Oh my God, this is working," and I begin to wonder, is it--is the way that they handled it really--it's sort of like, "Uh, OK, my daddy hits me, but look how tough I'm getting." You know what I mean? Like, you don't like the method, but maybe--wrong analogy, is that, uh--?
Soderberg: Well, I think, you know, as a Democrat, you don't want anything nice to happen to the Republicans, and you don't want them to have progress. But as an American, you hope good things would happen. I think the way to look at it is, they can't credit for every good thing that happens, but they need to be able to manage it. I think what's happening in Lebanon is great, but it's not necessarily directly related to the fact that we went into Iraq militarily.
Stewart: Do you think that the people of Lebanon would have had, sort of, the courage of their conviction, having not seen--not only the invasion but the election which followed? It's almost as though that the Iraqi election has emboldened this crazy--something's going on over there. I'm smelling something.
Soderberg: I think partly what's going on is the country next door, Syria, has been controlling them for decades, and they [the Syrians] were dumb enough to blow up the former prime minister of Lebanon in Beirut, and they're--people are sort of sick of that, and saying, "Wait a minute, that's a stretch too far." So part of what's going on is they're just protesting that. But I think there is a wave of change going on, and if we can help ride it though the second term of the Bush administration, more power to them.
Stewart: Do you think they're the guys to--do they understand what they've unleashed? Because at a certain point, I almost feel like, if they had just come out at the very beginning and said, "Here's my plan: I'm going to invade Iraq. We'll get rid of a bad guy because that will drain the swamp"--if they hadn't done the whole "nuclear cloud," you know, if they hadn't scared the pants off of everybody, and just said straight up, honestly, what was going on, I think I'd almost--I'd have no cognitive dissonance, no mixed feelings.
Soderberg: The truth always helps in these things, I have to say. But I think that there is also going on in the Middle East peace process--they may well have a chance to do a historic deal with the Palestinians and the Israelis. These guys could really pull off a whole--
Stewart: This could be unbelievable!
Soderberg:---series of Nobel Peace Prizes here, which--it may well work. I think that, um, it's--
Stewart: [buries head in hands] Oh my God! [audience laughter] He's got, you know, here's--
Soderberg: It's scary for Democrats, I have to say.
Stewart: He's gonna be a great--pretty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, "Reagan was nothing compared to this guy." Like, my kid's gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it.
Soderberg: Well, there's still Iran and North Korea, don't forget. There's hope for the rest of us.
Stewart: [crossing fingers] Iran and North Korea, that's true, that is true [audience laughter]. No, it's--it is--I absolutely agree with you, this is--this is the most difficult thing for me to--because, I think, I don't care for the tactics, I don't care for this, the weird arrogance, the setting up. But I gotta say, I haven't seen results like this ever in that region.
Soderberg: Well wait. It hasn't actually gotten very far. I mean, we've had--
Stewart: Oh, I'm shallow! I'm very shallow!
Soderberg: There's always hope that this might not work. No, but I think, um, it's--you know, you have changes going on in Egypt; Saudi Arabia finally had a few votes, although women couldn't participate. What's going on here in--you know, Syria's been living in the 1960s since the 1960s--it's, part of this is--
Stewart: You mean free love and that kind of stuff? [audience laughter] Like, free love, drugs?
Soderberg: If you're a terrorist, yeah.
Stewart: They are Baathists, are they--it looks like, I gotta say, it's almost like we're not going to have to invade Iran and Syria. They're gonna invade themselves at a certain point, no? Or is that completely naive?
Soderberg: I think it's moving in the right direction. I'll have to give them credit for that. We'll see.
Stewart: Really? Hummus for everybody, for God's sakes.
We've long been skeptical of Jon Stewart, but color us impressed. He managed to ambush this poor woman brutally, in a friendly interview. She was supposed to be promoting her book, and instead he got her to spend the entire interview debunking it (at least if we understood the book's thesis correctly from the very brief discussion of it up top).
She also admitted repeatedly that Democrats are hoping for American failure in the Middle East. To be sure, this is not true of all Democrats, Soderberg speaks only for herself, and she says she is ambivalent ("But as an American . . ."). But we do not question her expertise in assessing the prevailing mentality of her own party. No wonder Dems get so defensive about their patriotism.
Interesting too is Stewart's acknowledgment of his own "cognitive dissonance" and "mixed feelings" over the Iraq liberation. It's a version of an argument we've been hearing a lot lately: As our Brendan Miniter puts it, "The president's critics never seem to tire of claiming that the war in Iraq began over weapons of mass destruction and only later morphed into a war of liberation."
Miniter correctly notes that "this criticism isn't entirely right," but for the sake of argument let's assume it is. What does it mean? President Bush has altered his arguments to conform to reality, while his critics remain fixated on obsolete disputes. This would seem utterly to refute the liberal media stereotype. Bush, it turns out, is a supple-minded empiricist, while his opponents are rigid ideologues.
Revolution Watch
Two mostly Muslim ex-Soviet states may be joining the democratic revolution, reports the Times of London: "Western observers denounced Sunday's polls in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, although monitors from former Soviet states said that they were fair."
In vowel-deprived Kyrgyzstan, opposition candidates allegedly won only three seats in the parliamentary vote. "Opposition supporters have begun protests to disrupt the second round of voting--to be held on March 13 in more than half of the constituencies. Many are calling for a 'tulip' or 'lemon' revolution comparable to Ukraine's Orange Revolution and the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003."
In Tajikstan, where the ruling party supposedly won 80% of Sunday's vote, "a coalition of opposition parties is threatening to boycott the Government and parliament unless new elections are held, but is thought to be too weak to overturn the results."
Hearts and Minds
"Our military and the insurgents are fighting for the same thing--the hearts and minds of the people--and that is a battle we are not winning."--Ted Kennedy, Jan. 27
"Thousands of mostly black-clad Iraqis protested Tuesday outside a medical clinic where a suicide car bomber killed 125 people a day earlier, braving the threat of another attack as they waved clenched fists, condemned foreign fighters and chanted 'No to terrorism!' "--Associated Press, March 1
Interestingly, the text of Kennedy's infamous speech seems to have disappeared from his Web site; the above link is to the Yahoo cache. We guess it's a good sign that he no longer stands by the speech, but we'd think more highly of him if he actually owned up to his mistake.
Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.
Mike Godwin, Meet Robert Byrd
Despite their diminishing numbers, Senate Democrats still seem determined to use a procedure called "cloture," whereby 41 senators can filibuster and prevent a vote, to prevent the Senate from acting on numerous judicial nominees who have the support of a Senate majority. Republicans are considering a change in the Senate rules to do away with the requirement for cloture in judicial nominations, a change Trent Lott infelicitously dubbed the "nuclear option."
Yesterday Sen. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat, former Ku Klux Klansman and the Senate's longest-serving member, took to the floor to denounce the idea, in terms that were overheated to say the least:
We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men.
But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler's dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that "Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact." And he succeeded.
Hitler's originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the state: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.
And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do to Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate. . . . For the temporary gain of a handful of "out of the mainstream" judges, some in the Senate are ready to callously incinerate each senator's right of extended debate.
Byrd went on to extol the filibuster as a way in which "the minority can challenge, agitate, and question," and a measure that vindicates "the power of even a single individual through the device of extended debate." Of course, this is no longer true. Although once a single senator could block action through extended debate, today 60 can cut off debate and force a vote.
It used to take a two-thirds vote, as Byrd should know from his own experience. Byrd's characterization of "extended debate" as a way to preserve minority rights is curious in light of his own history, which the Senate Web site details:
At 9:51 on the morning of June 10, 1964, Senator Robert C. Byrd completed an address that he had begun fourteen hours and thirteen minutes earlier. The subject was the pending Civil Rights Act of 1964, a measure that occupied the Senate for fifty-seven working days, including six Saturdays. A day earlier, Democratic Whip Hubert Humphrey, the bill's manager, concluded he had the sixty-seven votes required at that time to end the debate. . . .
Never in history had the Senate been able to muster enough votes to cut off a filibuster on a civil rights bill. And only once in the thirty-seven years since 1927 had it agreed to cloture for any measure.
The final vote to end debate was 71-29, just four more than necessary to cut off debate. Nine days later the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act. So the device of extended debate--used by Byrd among others--was an important reason it took nearly a century after the ratification of the 14th Amendment for Congress to make good on the amendment's promise of equal protection for minorities. To say the least, Byrd would not seem the best spokesman for the filibuster as a means of vindicating minority rights.
And what about this Hitler stuff? Is this another example of the paranoid style of politics? We suppose we could argue this either way. Certainly we've heard folks on the Angry Left invoke Nazi Germany in a paranoid vein, and it does fit with Richard Hofstadter's characterization of the paranoid's mentality: "What is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil."
On the other hand, sometimes the invocation of Hitler reflects mere intellectual laziness, not paranoia. And perhaps Byrd doesn't understand why comparing his domestic foes to Hitler is inappropriate. After all, the man is 87. Maybe he's just too old to remember the horrors of Nazi Germany.
Fool and the Gang
America-hating "ethnic studies" professor Ward Churchill finally managed to dodge disinvitation and give a speech on a college campus last night. The venue was the University of Wisconsin's Whitewater campus, and Churchill's hometown paper, the Rocky Mountain News, carried a prespeech report yesterday. Noteworthy are the contrasting responses of the College Republicans and the College Democrats:
The school's College Republicans are hosting a vigil this afternoon in honor of Sept. 11 victims outside the hall where Churchill will speak.
"He's engaging in hate speech," said freshman Greg Torres. "If you want to stand and yell that stuff on a street corner, that's one thing. But this is no different than bringing in the Ku Klux Klan." . . .
Also, just prior to Churchill's address, a student rally celebrating free speech--and Churchill's appearance--will take place on campus, sponsored by the College Democrats, the campus Green Party and the Whitewater United for Peace Party.
Last month, as we noted, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean demanded the resignation of a local Republican official who had called the Democrats the party of Lynne Stewart. Will he make a similar demand of the Whitewater College Democrats for calling them the party of Ward Churchill?
Same Reporter, Different Kerfuffle
A clarification is in order of a point in our Monday item about the Valerie Plame kerfuffle and the New York Times. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is demanding the phone records of two Times reporters not in the Plame case but in a different investigation.
Not Even Brian May?
"Queen Doesn't Recognize Famous Guitarists"--headline, Associated Press, March 2
Spot the Idiot
Yes, it's the University of Massachusetts-Amherst's Daily Collegian again. Fish in a barrel, we know, but they keep writing 'em. This one is from Amelia Sabadini:
Is doing something like forcing a 42-year-old waitress who just accidentally got pregnant and already has two teenage kids, no husband, no health care and osteo-arthritis to carry to term worth sacrificing the safety and freedom of yourself and everyone you know? Do you really have such a need to stop two consenting adults from getting married just because you don't consider their relationship to be legitimate, proper or anything other than something you watch on cable after dark, that you're willing to risk a biblical execution (stoning, burning or hanging) over it? There's just no way to oppress someone without ultimately oppressing yourself as well. You can't have your self-righteous cake and the freedom to eat it in a relatively safe, sane democratic society too.
An Automotive Fetality
"A San Jose man may face manslaughter or murder charges after a hit-and-run crash involving a pregnant 15-year-old girl," reports the San Jose Mercury News;
The girl, who was a passenger in the car allegedly driven by Louis Vincent Brackett, 19, Friday evening, delivered a stillborn 31-week-old fetus Monday. . . .
On Friday, Brackett was arrested and booked into Santa Clara County Jail on suspicion of felony drunken driving and felony hit-and-run. The district attorney's office is reviewing the case to determine whether Brackett should be charged with manslaughter or murder in the death of the fetus.
We are getting very close now to pinpointing the exact moment when a fetus turns into a child. In last week's article about the karlrovian conspiracy against Australian women, Greg Barns put it at somewhere between 22 and 32 weeks after conception:
Other groups, to support their case for a ban on late-term abortion, have taken to highlighting two rare and extreme cases in which a 32-week-old child with suspected dwarfism was aborted at the Royal Women's Hospital in Melbourne and a 22-week-old fetus was aborted in the Northern Territory and lived for 80 minutes.
Thanks to the San Jose Mercury News, we now know that a fetus is still just a fetus at 31 weeks, so the transformation into a baby occurs sometime in the 32nd week of pregnancy. Yet note that whereas according to Barns an Australian child can be "aborted," in California Brackett may be charged with "manslaughter" or "murder" for "killing" a mere fetus. We guess Australia just has a more enlightened attitude about reproductive rights. |
