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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Carragher who wrote (15896)	11/11/2003 8:06:58 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793671

said a lot of them where in the pipe line and coming out of training. maybe even as high as 140,000 trained iraq troops. I saw a headline that said the Iraqi troops now outnumbered ours. We have to be careful not to get into the Israeli/Lebanon situation where we allow Shite troops to run wild in Sunni Neighborhoods. I posted the other day that the reporters on the "Cris Matthews" show last Sunday all agreed about the General dislike of the Military for Bremer.

To: John Carragher who wrote (15896)	11/12/2003 6:23:02 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793671

Good comment by Professor Bernstein. Italics added. Anti-Anti-Left-wing Extremists: Reading through some blog posts, emails, and accompanying comments responding to some of my recent posts, I notice that there are many "anti-anti-left-wing extremists" out there. Before the Soviet Union fell, many on the liberal left were "anti-anti-Communists;" they had no particular sympathy for the Soviet Union, but they generally neglected to criticize the Soviets, and also often criticized conservative anti-Communists. Anti-anti-Communists came in two basic flavors: (1) those who thought that Communism was a side issue, a distraction, compared to the real issues facing the U.S.--"How dare you focus on Communism when millions of people in the U.S. have no health insurance?!"; and (2) those who were concerned that any criticism of Communism would play into the hands of the "extreme" anti-Communists, who had too much influence over the government and were a greater threat to world peace and stability than were the Soviets. So now we have "anti-anti-left-wing extremists" who come in similar flavors: (1) those who think talking about left-wing extremism is a distraction from the real issues facing the country ("how dare you talk about "the growing threat to civil liberties from antidiscrimination laws" when John Ashcroft is trampling on civil rights, the media is controlled by large corporations, and millions of people have no health insurance?!"): and (2) those who are afraid that any criticism of left-wing extremism will play into the hands of the already-way-too-powerful Bush (or in some cases, Sharon) Administration ("ANSWER isn't a threat to world peace, the Bush Administration is."). My view is that left-liberals do themselves no favors by engaging in Popular Frontism with the likes of ANSWER or MEChA, or even in failing to vigorously condemn them. In the end, Howard Dean liberals and George Bush conservatives are all part of the same broad "liberal" family, while racialists, Communists, and other left-wing extremists are fundamentally illiberal, and should not be given any political quarter. It's shortsighted and a bit foolish to argue that because an ideological group lacks significant political power right now that it should therefore be ignored, even if it has a strong ideology, a foothold in some major societal institutions, and a record of success, especially on specific issues, elsewhere. In the heat of ongoing political battles the fundamental consanguinity between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans can be easily forgotten, but it shouldn't be. My political views are not especially close to either Dean's or Bush's but I'm not afraid that either of them would put me in a concentration camp if he had the power to do so. (And yes, for the same reason both George Bushes should have tossed Pat Buchanan out on his tuchas and out of the GOP before he left on his volition, and conservatives who dally with groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens should be ashamed of themselves. And some conservatives went way overboard in their rhetoric on Clinton, just as some liberals are doing now with Bush.) volokh.com