Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Robert Reich: After the Midterms: Why Democrats Move to the Center, and Republicans Don’t

If Republicans succeed in taking over the House and come even close to gaining a majority in the Senate, expect calls for the president to “move to the center.” These will come not only from Republicans but also from conservative Democrats, other prominent Democrats who have been defeated, Fox Republican News, mainstream pundits, and White House political advisers.

After the 1994 midterm, when Democrats lost the House and Senate, Bill Clinton was told to “move to the center.” He obliged by hiring the pollster Dick Morris, declaring the “era of big government is over,” abandoning much of his original agenda, and making the 1996 general election about nothing more than V-chips in televisions and school uniforms.

It happened in the 1978 midterm when Democrats lost ground and Jimmy Carter was instructed to “move to the center.” He obliged by firing his entire cabinet, apologizing for the errors of his ways, and making the 1980 general election about absolutely nothing.

Johann Hari: The real reason Obama has let us all down

On the night he won, I too shed a little tear; but the people weeping today are those having their homes repossessed

For two years now, most of the good and honorable people who desperately wanted him to beat John McCain, as I did, have watched his actions through a distorting haze of hoping for the best. So when Obama set us all up for another global crash by refusing to reregulate the banks or stop even their riskiest practices, we looked away. When Obama set us all up for more terror attacks by trebling the troops in Afghanistan and launching a vicious air war on Pakistan that is swelling the ranks of jihadis, we didn’t want to hear it. When Obama set us all up for environmental disaster by refusing to put the brakes on his country’s unprecedented and unmatched emissions of climate-destabilizing gases, we switched over to watch will.i.am’s YouTube rejig of the President’s “yes, we can” speech. And when a week from now he is beaten at the mid-term elections, after having so little to show the American people, by a group of even more irrational Republicans, we will weep for him. . . . .

Yes, on the night Obama won, I too felt that great global ripple of hope, and shed a little tear – but the people weeping today are those having their homes repossessed in the Rust Belt and their homes blown to pieces in the SWAT Valley as a direct result of Obama’s decisions. They are the ones who deserve our empathy now, not the most powerful man in the world, who has chosen to settle into and defend a profoundly corrupt system, rather than challenge and change it. It’s long past time to put away your Obama t-shirt that and take out your protest banner.

Daphne Eviatar: Gitmo Guilty Plea Is a Sad Day for U.S. Rule of Law

This morning I sat in a U.S. military commissions courtroom in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and watched the first child soldier charged by a Western nation since World War II plead guilty to crimes he was never seriously accused of. If the guilty plea of Omar Khadr this morning was a face-saving effort by the U.S. government, it was a sad day for the rule of law in the United States. . . . .

For the U.S. government, the guilty plea was a way to save face. After all, the Obama administration knew that it was a political embarrassment for its first military commission trial to be of a child soldier – a contradiction of its obligations under international law to rehabilitate child soldiers rather than punish them. The administration also knew that the charges against Khadr were all legally dubious – invalid under international law and a violation of the ex post facto clause of the U.S. Constitution. Khadr’s guilty plea allows them to rack up another “win” for the military commissions, pushing the total to a whopping five convictions in the last eight years. By contrast, U.S. civilian federal courts have convicted more than 400 terrorists in that same time period. This doesn’t exactly tip the balance.

Still, no matter how you look at it, this plea makes a troubling statement about the United States’ respect for the rule of law. Although as part of his plea agreement Omar Khadr has waived his right to appeal his conviction or to sue the United States for his confinement or treatment, a dark cloud continues to shadow this case. That cloud will continue to conceal the truth about Omar Khadr’s treatment at the hands of his U.S. interrogators; and it will ensure that the validity of his conviction, and the integrity of the military commissions themselves, remain in doubt.

E. J. Dionne: The Scandal of 2010

Imagine an election in a Third World nation where a small number of millionaires and billionaires spent massive sums to push the outcome in their preferred direction. Wouldn’t many people here condescendingly tut-tut such a country’s “poorly developed” sense of democracy and the inadequacy of its political system?

That, of course, is what is going on in our country as you read this. If you travel any place where there is a contested race for the House or Senate, you are bombarded with attack ads, almost all against Democrats, paid for by groups that do not have to reveal where their money comes from.

What we do know from enterprising journalism and the limited disclosure the law requires is that much of this money is donated in large sums from a rather small number of wealthy individuals.

Stanley Kutler: Tea Party Robber Barons

We are witnessing, we are told, a groundswell of anger from a spontaneous, grass-roots movement against the president, Congress, Democrats, socialists (are commies extinct?), the debt, higher taxes, the “takeover” of the health system, and on and on. But the tea party appears to be as bothered by the policies of Franklin Roosevelt as those of Barack Obama.

Disenchantment on the left, meanwhile, is muted and hardly reported. Liberals have been disappointed by President Obama’s initial appointments, his compromised health measure, financial system regulation that offered no remedies to prevent a recurrence of our financial distress, retention of Bush-era policies on detainees and failure to shut down Guantanamo.

The media repeatedly invoke grass roots and other code words to describe the tea party. Tell a lie often enough and it is believed. Our media wizards must realize that with the revelations of high-powered funding and the involvement of Republican operatives, the characterization of the tea party as a spontaneous, ground-up movement does not fit; nagging facts nevertheless must bow to pursuing the “colorful.”

Dean Baker: Keeping Fear Alive: The Deficit Hawks Push Their Agenda

The deficit hawks must believe that they are in the home stretch of their drive to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits since they seem to be pulling out all the stops. The attack on Social Security and Medicare is heating up, with the opponents of these programs going the route of straight up xenophobia and racism.

The latest shot from the deficit hawks is an ad sponsored by the Citizens Against Government Waste. This ad is apparently being widely shown on TV in addition to being available over the web. It shows a classroom in the year 2030 in which a group of Chinese students are hearing from their teacher about the reasons that great countries decline. Their list is the Roman Empire, the British Empire and the United States.

The teacher explains that all these great empires forgot the principles that made them great. The teacher tells the students that the United States tried to spend and tax its way out of a Great Recession, that the government took over health care and major industries. The teacher then says that because the US built up huge debts “they now work for us,” prompting laughter from the students.

George Monbiot: The Tea Party Movement: Deluded and Inspired by Billionaires

By funding numerous rightwing organisations, the mega-rich Koch brothers have duped millions into supporting big business

The Tea Party movement is remarkable in two respects. It is one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has seen – and the biggest Astroturf operation in history. These accomplishments are closely related.

An Astroturf campaign is a fake grassroots movement: it purports to be a spontaneous uprising of concerned citizens, but in reality it is founded and funded by elite interests. Some Astroturf campaigns have no grassroots component at all. Others catalyse and direct real mobilisations. The Tea Party belongs in the second category. It is mostly composed of passionate, well-meaning people who think they are fighting elite power, unaware that they have been organised by the very interests they believe they are confronting. We now have powerful evidence that the movement was established and has been guided with the help of money from billionaires and big business. Much of this money, as well as much of the strategy and staffing, were provided by two brothers who run what they call “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”.

Ellen Knickmeyer: WikiLeaks Exposes Rumsfeld’s Lies

In the dark morning hours of Feb. 22, 2006, a group of unknown attackers detonated bombs in the northern Iraqi city of Samarra, bringing down the golden dome of a revered Shia Muslim shrine.

A few hours later, I drove through Baghdad and watched the country descend into civil war. Then the Baghdad Bureau Chief for The Washington Post, I drove with Iraqi and American colleagues to Sadr City, the sprawling slum on the outskirts of the city. We watched hundreds of black-clad religious militiamen, waving their AK 47s in the air and calling for revenge, in what would be the start to a campaign of sectarian killing and torture.

During visits to Baghdad’s morgue over the next two days, I saw Sunni families thronging to find the bodies of loved ones killed by the militias. The morgue’s computer registrar told the grim-faced families and me that we would have to be patient; the morgue had taken in more than 1,000 bodies since the Samarra bombing, and was way behind on processing corpses.

Here’s the thing, though: According to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commanders, it never happened. These killings, these dead, did not exist. According to them, reporters like myself were lying.

Sara K. Gould and Susan Wefald: Out Cry: Ending Violence Against LGBTQ Youth

Another week, another name to add to the list of gay children dead by their own hands. The newest entry: a young woman by the name of Aiyisha Hassan.

Aiyisha was nineteen years old. She was Black, a former student at Howard University. Though media reports describe her as a lesbian, friends say she was struggling with her sexuality — struggling to come to terms with expressing a sexual identity that could have left her ostracized from her family and friends. Acquaintances put her in touch with a group that might have helped her find a community of loving support, but for whatever reasons, Aiyisha Hassan still felt terribly alone. And last week, she became the latest headline in the rash of reports detailing the suicides of LGBTQ teens.

Aiyisha Hassan: Gay — and dead at nineteen.

Would that she were the only one. In the past five weeks, nine LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer) teens, including Aiyisha, have taken their lives out of what we can only imagine is the greatest desperation about what life as a gay individual might hold. In many cases, these were young boys who had been taunted mercilessly about their “effeminate” demeanor; they were children who had been bullied to the point of breakdown, and who — often despite the best efforts of their parents — were offered little protection from teachers and school administrators, who harbor their own beliefs about who and what is acceptable when it comes to sexuality and gender expression.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: A Worse Record Than Saddam’s

It could fuel terrorism, recruitment into jihadi cells, suicide bombers and ugly attitudes towards the West. But keeping the stories hidden was always wrong

Bad boy Julian Assange, the pretty, blondish founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks was hugely admired when he uncovered oppressors and political chicanery in places like China and Kenya, but now he takes on Western duplicity and crimes. Can’t have that. This spawn of Beelzebub, say our masters, a traitor whose insolence is a crime against the secretive states of the US and UK. Disregard the pique and dyspepsia of officialdom. It is a distraction, smoke from fires deliberately started to stop us seeing what lies before us.

The audacious website first released confidential and candid material on the hellish war in Afghanistan and now opens up a new front, more than 400,000 classified US files documenting the previously untold horrors of the Iraq war. Revealed are countless atrocities and the deaths of 66,000 Iraqi civilians at the hands of US and British soldiers and Iraqi personnel who had joined the allies. Men were burnt, some had parts removed, others were killed slowly; women were shot, children too, killed before they grew. Anything goes, it seems, during a military conflict and no questions are asked. As an Israeli army trainer said, when asked about the death of Rachel Corrie, the young, pro-Palestinian activist mown down by an Israeli tank: “During war there are no civilians”.