So Much To Say

So little time.

Sorry for not posting yesterday. Just wasn't up to it. But to make up for my absence, today I am going to bombard you all with commentary on a whole bunch of news.

1. On the "bad thematics" front, some senior Democrats are saying that domestic spying is okay, it's the way the President did it that's wrong. This is very reminiscent of the well-meaning but ineffective Iraq position during the 2004 campaign that the idea of the war was fine, but it was just badly executed. Look, you can't take a strong political position on this issue if you concede the merits of the enemy's position. Our message is simple: "Spying on Americans without a warrant is wrong, it's illegal, it's unconstitutional, and it's un-American. If we aren't going to defend our civil liberties or our way of life, then what are we fighting for?" Is that so hard?

2. The U.S. and Israel are trying to figure out how to destabilize the Hamas regime in Palestine. Look, I'm not defender of Hamas - they're pretty evil people, as far as I can tell. But should we really in in the business of telling countries that we don't like the results of their elections and trying to change them? This is what democracy is, people - you can't say it's popular sovereignty and then only accept the results when they turn out the way you like. Frankly this situation begins to look more like the U.S. trying to set up puppet governments with a patina of democratic legitimacy than really trying to develop responsible political institutions in the Middle East.

3. This focus on the Dick Cheney shooting accident is just silly. I just don't see where the political upside for us is. We should move on.

4. The medicare prescription drug plan takes 40 forms to get a drug approved. Are the Republicans trying to create a parody of big government bungling? I just can't make up my mind whether this program is an example of bad public policy, naked political corruption, or machiavellianism. But then I suppose I don't have to choose just one, do I?

5. There is more than a little gleeful condescension written between the lines of Fareed Zakaria's piece on the "decline of Europe." I don't want to get bogged down in the reality of this decline or not, although I would like to say the Europe's relative lack of competitiveness is interesting given its higher standard of living, and that its problems are almost exclusively wrapped up in its declining population. What I want to focus on instead is that if Europe goes down, so do we. America is in any meaningful sense a Western European country. We share a common history, culture, worldview, economic system, etc.If Western Europe encounters difficulties, we are going to share in them. It's long past time that we (and the Europeans) stop pretending that our futures aren't married to each other. Just because we aren't sleeping together at the moment doesn't mean that we aren't sharing the same bed.

6. The conservatives apparently outnumber liberals on Sunday talk shows. This is no big surprise - it's why I stopped watching those shows a few years ago. I used to have a Sunday morning ritual of viewing as many as I could, but during the aftermath of the Iraq War I grew so frustrated with the cheerleading that I gave it up in disgust. I'm a little less sanguine than Waldman on fixing this problem, though. Conservatives have effectively stacked the deck, and I can see them screaming bloody murder if news executives changed it. The media aren't exactly living embodiments of intestinal fortitude, y'know. As for the methods used by Media Matters, I question their data of just "identifiable" idealogues. For a real picture of balance, should you employ a middle category of "neutrals?" I suspect it would make the imbalance even more obvious.

7. E.J. Dionne just gets it wrong here. Call me an absolutist on the issue of abortion, but I fail to see what middle ground needs bridging. From the perspective of political positioning, it does make sense to emphasize the birth control angle, although I worry that it rhetorically gives away too much ground to anti-choicers (give them an inch...). But I really question this statement from Dionne:

I have more sympathy than most liberals with the right-to-life movement because I
believe most right-to-lifers are animated not by sexism or some punitive
attitude toward sexuality but by a genuine desire to defend the defenseless.
Surely that view should encompass efforts to reduce the number of abortions in
our nation.

I'm not even going to address whether this is true or not (although I have my suspicions). It doesn't matter whether someone intends for their policies to be authoritarian or discriminatory if the effects of their policies are hostile to women. I think that their ideology is motivated by these beliefs, whether their advocates are aware of it or not. Just because you don't know why you're doing something doesn't let you off the hook.

And by the way, who are these "defenseless," anyway? Doesn't that implicitly accept the (tenuous) argument that a foetus is a person? And where are these people when it comes to defending defenseless children, or minorities, or the unjustly accused, or the poor? Unless they really are "seemless garment" anti-choicers, I don't think they have enough credibility to avoid charges of hypocrisy and selective moralizing.

Okay, I've run out of material (and energy). Happy Valentine's Day.