“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.
Ted Sorensen: A Time to Weep
Commencement speech at the New School University in New York on May 21, 2004
This is not a speech. Two weeks ago I set aside the speech I prepared. This is a cry from the heart, a lamentation for the loss of this country’s goodness and therefore its greatness.
Future historians studying the decline and fall of America will mark this as the time the tide began to turn – toward a mean-spirited mediocrity in place of a noble beacon.
For me the final blow was American guards laughing over the naked, helpless bodies of abused prisoners in Iraq. “There is a time to laugh,” the Bible tells us, “and a time to weep.” Today I weep for the country I love, the country I proudly served, the country to which my four grandparents sailed over a century ago with hopes for a new land of peace and freedom. I cannot remain silent when that country is in the deepest trouble of my lifetime.
I am not talking only about the prison abuse scandal, that stench will someday subside. Nor am I referring only to the Iraq war – that too will pass – nor to any one political leader or party. This is no time for politics as usual, in which no one responsible admits responsibility, no one genuinely apologizes, no one resigns and everyone else is blamed.
The damage done to this country by its own misconduct in the last few months and years, to its very heart and soul, is far greater and longer lasting than any damage that any terrorist could possibly inflict upon us.
The stain on our credibility, our reputation for decency and integrity, will not quickly wash away.
Robert Freeman: If You Want More Debt Vote Republican
One of the most successful deceits of the past thirty years is that Republicans are the party of “fiscal discipline.” In fact, Republicans are the party of fiscal wreckage. Simply put, Republicans love deficits and debt. They have buried the country with them. They expand them with orgiastic fervor every time they get the chance. Until we come to grips with this simple truth we will never gain control of our fiscal destiny.
In 1980 the national debt stood at $1 trillion. Over the prior 204 years, the nation paid for the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the build-out of an entire continent, the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, and the better part of the Cold War. And through all that, we still only borrowed $1 trillion.
But over the next 12 years of relative peace and prosperity, Republicans Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush would quadruple the national debt, to $4 trillion. They did it by dramatically lowering taxes on the wealthy and furiously expanding government spending. This isn’t even economics, it’s arithmetic: bring in less income while spending more money, and the result is debt. Mountains of it.
Glenn Greenwald: The wretched mind of the American authoritarian
Decadent governments often spawn a decadent citizenry. A 22-year-old Nebraska resident was arrested yesterday for waterboarding his girlfriend as she was tied to a couch, because he wanted to know if she was cheating on him with another man; I wonder where he learned that? There are less dramatic though no less nauseating examples of this dynamic. In The Chicago Tribune today, there is an Op-Ed from Jonah Goldberg — the supreme, living embodiment of a cowardly war cheerleader — headlined: “Why is Assange still alive?” . . . .
There are multiple common threads here: the cavalier call for people’s deaths, the demand for ultimate punishments without a shred of due process, the belief that the U.S. is entitled to do whatever it wants anywhere in the world without the slightest constraints, a wholesale rejection of basic Western liberties such as due process and a free press, the desire for the President to act as unconstrained monarch, and a bloodthirsty frenzy that has led all of them to cheerlead for brutal, criminal wars of aggression for a full decade without getting anywhere near the violence they cheer on, etc. But that’s to be expected. We lived for eight years under a President who essentially asserted all of those powers and more, and now have a one who has embraced most of them and added some new ones, including the right to order even American citizens, far from any battlefield, assassinated without a shred of due process. Given that, it would be irrational to expect a citizenry other than the one that is being molded with this mentality.
Robert Reich: The Real Center of American Politics: A Reflection on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
The true center of American politics isn’t found where most of us agree. We fiercely disagree. That’s not a problem. Democracy assumes disagreement.
The true center is about how we resolve those disagreements. Most of us believe we should work them out respectfully.
We don’t believe in winning political arguments through bullying, name-calling, lying, intimidating, or using violence.
In other words, the political center isn’t about what we decide; it’s about how we decide. A central tenet of American democracy is a commitment vigorous debate, done honestly and civilly.
That’s why some of what we’ve been witnessing recently is troubling.
E.J. Dionne Jr.: Victories that are hardly mandates
It was just four years ago that the Democratic Party began its comeback in what now seems like another country. . . .
The classic middle-ground voter who will swing this election – moderate, independent, suburban – has always been suspicious of dogmatic promises that certain big ideas would give birth to a utopian age. This voter is looking for simpler and more realistic things: a bit more security, a bit more income, and renewed confidence that the future will be better than the past. Such voters still haven’t found what they’re looking for.
Edmund Morris: The Tea Party Last Time
The past may be a foreign country, as L. P. Hartley famously observed, but at least one of its landscapes – the political scene on election eve, a century ago – looks familiar to this time traveler.
Having ridden, in a sense, on the campaign train of Theodore Roosevelt, as the former president barnstormed in behalf of Congressional candidates in 1910, I am struck by some parallels between then and now. That year, the party dominant in Washington and in most state governments was the G.O.P. However, Democrats in those days could comfortably have accepted Newt Gingrich as their chief ideologue. (By the same token, I think T. R., reconstituted today, would support Mr. Obama. He had many of the racial prejudices of his generation, but he profoundly admired any black man who prevailed against them.)
Instead of Republican and Democrat, therefore, I’ll borrow Charles Dickens’s terms “Buff” and “Blue” to denote mutually contemptuous political opposites. The Buffs were in charge of Congress, and a Buff stalwart, William Howard Taft, was president. T. R. himself was Buff, and had chosen Taft as his successor. He now regretted this, feeling that Taft was much too comfortable with tycoons, lobbyists and pro-business lawmakers
Andy Worthington: Torture Is Finally Mentioned on the Last Day of Omar Khadr’s Sentencing Hearing at Guantánamo
Everything about the last week’s events at Guantánamo has been deeply disturbing. On Monday, in defiance of international obligations requiring the rehabilitation of child prisoners, the US government – under President Obama – fulfilled the deepest wishes of the Bush administration, and persuaded Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, to plead guilty to charges of murder in violation of the laws of war, attempted murder, spying, conspiracy, and providing material support to terrorism, in a plea deal that apparently involves an eight-year sentence, with Khadr serving one more year at Guantánamo before being returned to Canada. . . .
He was also required to stay silent in the face of compelling evidence that these dubious-sounding war crimes to which he signed his name were not in fact war crimes at all, and were only invented by Congress in 2006, as former Guantánamo military defense attorney Lt. Col. David Frakt explained last summer. In addition, he also had to overlook the fact that, when the Commissions were revived last year, defense secretary Robert Gates added a new twist to the fictional war crimes so that, as Lt. Col. Frakt explained in April this year, “a detainee may be convicted of murder in violation of the law of war even if they did not actually violate the law of war.”
Hiroaki Sato: Why Does Distance Ameliorate a War Crime?
NEW YORK – One aspect of the modern sense of war, be it delusional, duplicitous or both, was palpable in two articles paired at the top of the front page of The New York Times toward the end of September. The headline of one said “Drug Use Cited In Killings of 3 Civilians”; the headline of the other, “CIA INTENSIFIES DRONE CAMPAIGN WITHIN PAKISTAN.”
One had to do with old-fashioned murder by infantrymen on the ground, the other with ultramodern murder by electronically operated vehicles in the sky. Those involved in the former sometimes face charges of war crime. Those involved in the latter face no such bother – though they may be at times “criticized” for their incompetence.
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