Kemstone's Journal

Listening to these Republican candidates talk about Obama, I often wish we actually had the kind of president they’re attacking. The paint him as some kind of progressive lion, zealously going after the super-rich on behalf of the working class, steadfastly holding to an ideology of civil liberties even if it compromises America’s safety, and systematically dismantling our empire abroad, all the while apologizing to the world for our previous transgressions. I don’t know who this person is that they keep railing against, but it’s not the Obama I know.

The fact is that the Republicans are banking on the majority of their base having a completely distorted view of the president thanks to conservative news sources like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc. These media outlets have made a calculated decision to create their own narrative about who Obama is and what he wants to do, to emphasize every tiny little thing that supports that narrative and de-emphasize, ignore, or even outright lie about anything that doesn’t.

The Obama you see on Fox News is not a real person but actually a fictional character based on the stereotype of liberals that conservatives have in their minds. He wants to raise taxes, impose strict regulations on business, cut defense, eliminate gun rights, encourage more abortions and gay marriages, read terrorists their rights, and purge all religion from the public sphere. When the Republican presidential candidates talk to their debate audiences and the crowds at their campaign rallies about Obama, they’re talking about this guy, a radically liberal president who—unfortunately for them—doesn’t actually exist.

The real Obama hasn’t raised taxes. He’s far too timid to take the political risk. He’s cut taxes across the board and agreed to extend the Bush tax-cuts for two years. He says he’ll fight to let them expire next time, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

As for the idea that he’s imposing crippling regulations on businesses, that is simply absurd. Barack Obama is the Goldman Sachs president. His entire financial team and his last two chiefs of staff have been Wall Street insiders, and according to internal memos it would appear that they dictate his every move in that area. The “historic financial reform” legislation that passed last year is widely acknowledged by bankers to be a complete joke. Not one of the people who caused the financial crisis of 2008 has been prosecuted for committing fraud, and Wall Street continues to thrive thanks to taxpayer bailouts (which Obama supported) while the rest of the country struggles.

I hear over and over again that Obama has drastically cut defense spending. Simply not true. Defense spending has increased every year since Obama took office, it’s just that the rate of increase has gone slightly down thanks to the cutting of a few strategically unnecessary projects like stealth-fighters designed to fight the Cold War. Some might say that it’s merely stretching the truth to refer to a slower rate of increase as a “cut”, but I call it lying.

And as for the whole general idea that Obama is weak on defense, consider his doubling-down in Afghanistan and the recent foray into Libya. He withdrew troops from Iraq but only because he was forced to under a treaty signed by the Bush administration which he tried and failed to renegotiate.

On gun rights, Obama has not lifted a finger to do anything about it, other than quietly write an op-ed on the issue after the Gabby Giffords shooting, in which he did not endorse a single reform that didn’t enjoy at least a 60% approval in polls. And afterwards he did absolutely nothing to attempt to initiate those reforms.

On social issues, one can point to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and pretend that Obama is the “fierce advocate” of gay rights that he claimed to be, but he dragged his feet on that issue for quite some time and he still refuses to publicly come out in support of gay marriage. And on abortion, what has Obama done? Nothing. He won’t even touch that issue with a ten-foot pole, so afraid is he of the potential criticism. But he will make it harder for young women to obtain birth control.

When it comes to the idea that Obama would rather read terrorists their rights than keep America safe, this is where the distance between the real Obama and the fictional Obama is at its widest. Not only has Obama continued the civil liberties abuses that began under the Bush administration, but he’s actually expanded them, to the point where now it’s written into the law that the president has the power to throw American citizens into prison without a trial purely on suspicion of ties to terrorism. He appeared to make a genuine effort to close down Guantanamo as soon as he took office, but when that failed he never brought the issue up again, and the prison remains open and could conceivably remain so for generations. He doesn’t do waterboarding anymore but he hasn’t prosecuted anyone responsible for that war crime, all the while bringing the hammer down on whistleblowers like Bradley Manning who dared to make the abuses of our military public. Finally, if you really want to know whether or not Obama is soft on terror, you can ask Osama bin Laden.

And lastly, there’s the matter of religion. Newt Gingrich told a crowd of supporters that as soon as he takes office, he’ll repeal every single anti-religious act passed by the Obama administration. That shouldn’t take long, as no such acts have been passed by the real Obama. The fictional Obama is the one carrying out this “war on religion” we keep hearing about. After all, that guy is secretly Muslim and born in Kenya, and obviously on a crusade to undermine America’s Christian moral foundation.

Running against a fictional character may work for the Republican candidates in the primary, but it’s going to blow up in their faces if they try that in the general election, which is exactly what Obama is counting on. If Mitt Romney accuses Obama in a debate of raising taxes, Obama will be poised and ready with the facts to prove that he has not. The same goes for the accusation that he’s cut defense, gone after gun rights, and so on. The major political advantage Obama has garnered for himself by going against his liberal base time and again on nearly every single issue is that the Republicans can’t make a fact-based attack on him for doing any of the things that liberal presidents are normally criticized for doing. The best they can do is say that he talked about doing such things in the 2008 campaign.

If they’re forced to run against the real Obama, there are plenty of things to criticize him for, but they are guilty of those same things themselves. Romney could expose every last way in which Obama has been a puppet of Wall Street, but he knows quite well that he’s running to be the next puppet of the very same interests.

But the truly funny thing is that aside from his ties to the financial industry, most conservatives would like the real Obama if they knew who he was. If you just changed the D in front of his name to an R and read off a list of the actions he’s taken since his term began, they’d understand him to be a moderate who is slightly left-of-center on some issues but right-of-center on most.

The real Obama governs like a moderate Republican of former days, before the party drifted off to its right-wing fringe. The real Obama would win a national election against any of these clowns the Republicans have put forward in this primary, and they know it. That’s why they have no choice but to run against a fictional character instead, and it’s why they’re going to lose the general election when the curtain is pulled back and independent voters get a good look at who Obama actually is.

I know I’m rather late posting this, but I went to Rome a couple of weeks ago and my head remained there long after my body returned. Even now I’m still not in much of a political mood but this story is too big not to comment on.

When I write about President Obama in my blog it’s usually to criticize him, but one thing he clearly deserves credit for is authorizing the operation that finally brought Osama Bin Laden—murderer of thousands of innocent men, women, and children—to justice. It was Obama’s national security policies that allowed us to piece together the information which led to Bin Laden’s location, it was Obama’s foreign policy that made capturing Bin Laden a top priority, and it was Barack Obama himself who ultimately made the decision to perform a surgical strike on the compound where Bin Laden was believed to be hiding rather than blow the whole place to smithereens.

It’s for this last part that I offer President Obama complete and un-tempered praise. The politically safer move would have been to send drones in to blow the whole place up, as doing so would have prevented any risk of harm to American soldiers. Had the ground operation gone wrong, Republicans would have wasted no time in spinning it as Obama’s own personal Bay of Pigs. But the president took the risk, and not only did we get confirmation of Bin Laden’s death as a result—something we could never have gotten with an air-strike—but we also spared the lives of all of the women and children Bin Laden had living at the compound with him. This is how the “war on terror” should have been fought all along—by going after the individuals guilty of terrorism and only those individuals. I am firmly in favor of any approach that enhances our national security without killing children.

The correctness of Obama’s actions in this case was in fact so abundantly clear that at first Republicans didn’t know what to do with it. It’s been their modus operandi for the last two years to simply criticize Obama for every single thing he does no matter what: blame him for not fixing the economy even though your party is obstructing all his efforts to do so, blame him for the health-care mandate even though it was originally your proposal, blame him for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan even though your president started them, and on and on. How could they possibly spin this to make Obama look bad?

It wasn’t long before some Republicans discovered a neat way around it. Since they couldn’t blame Obama for doing something they were all in favor of (although some actually did start to argue that perhaps killing Bin Laden was the wrong move), they decided instead to simply put most of the credit elsewhere—namely with the Bush administration, and specifically with regards to torture.

Now giving Bush credit for capturing Bin Laden seems, on the surface, rather laughable. This is the guy who famously said in a press briefing that he was “truly not that concerned” about Bin Laden and that he honestly didn’t “spend much time on him”. Bush argued that Bin Laden was just “one person”, and the war on terror was much bigger than that. It’s exactly this vision that’s brought America to the disastrous point we’re at now. Rather than go after the individuals responsible for 9/11, Bush played right into the terrorists’ hands by spreading our retaliation across the Middle East in the form of two massive ground wars that have not only drained our economy to the point of bankruptcy (as Bin Laden himself explained was his exact objective), but destroyed our international reputation for at least a generation.

And part of what destroyed our international reputation is the use of torture, or “enhanced interrogation techniques” as the Bush apologists like to call it. Regardless of what euphemisms they used, things like water-boarding are banned by the Geneva conventions and have been prosecuted as war crimes in the past. People outside the American bubble, not subject to Fox News and talk-radio propaganda, clearly see it for what it is and those already predisposed to hate the United States were provided with more than enough justification for their hatred. It’s not only been testified to by many actual intelligence officials such as Matthew Alexander, but it’s just plain common sense that the use of torture has created far more terrorists than it’s eliminated.

And yet many right-wingers are still so hell-bent on justifying their support for torture that they now trumpet the claim that Bin Laden would not have been captured had it not been for the use of torture. They make this claim not after examining the evidence but before they know anything about it—then grasping at whatever straws they can to justify their claims such as the testimony of former CIA head Jose Rodriguez in TIME magazine that some of the information gained by water-boarding Khalid Sheik Mohammed ultimately led to Bin Laden’s whereabouts. The White House rejects this claim and points out that it took years and many various pieces of information to find Bin Laden. You don’t have to trust the White House to recognize that logic—if torturing KSM in 2003 really led us directly to Bin Laden, why wasn’t he caught until 2011?

Not only that, but we know that KSM was water-boarded 183 times, and multiples sources report that he continuously gave out false or misleading information time after time. He apparently knew of the courier who ultimately led us to Bin Laden but even after being subjected to the water-board one hundred and eighty-three times, he didn’t give him up.

Conservatives act as though the only reason anyone could possibly be opposed to the use of torture is if we’re pacifists, hippies, or terrorist-sympathizers. As though our only objection to torture is that it’s painful for the terrorists and inflicting pain is wrong. Personally, I don’t have any qualms whatsoever about men who murder children getting tortured, and in fact I wouldn’t mind if we used actual forms of torture and cut off their fingers one by one.

The reason I’m opposed to torture is that it doesn’t work and that it’s counter-productive. It sends our intelligence officials off on wild-goose-chases, and when the fact that we torture people leaks out it damages our international reputation and provokes more violence against us. This is so obvious that it hurts, yet the media still treats this like it’s an actual debate and the war-criminals in the Bush administration have a legitimate point of view.

I understand why people like the idea of terrorists getting tortured, but because they don’t want to believe their support is rooted in pure vindictiveness they desperately cling to the claim that torture works—which simply isn’t true and won’t be true no matter how often they insist that it is.

It’s a shame that so many are so blinded by ideology and identity politics that they are incapable of giving credit to political enemies or accepting blame for those on their side. I am not a fan of Barack Obama by any stretch of the imagination but for succeeding where his predecessor failed in the effort to catch Bin Laden—and by preventing the deaths of innocent civilians in the process—he deserves as much praise as I can give him.

Those who refuse to acknowledge that Barack Obama could possibly ever do anything right under any circumstances and instead cling to the belief that torture was the reason we got Bin Laden are living lives of cognitive dissonance where facts don’t matter and beliefs are simply a matter of what feels good to them.

It’s our responsibility to not let these people control the debate, or the next conservative president won’t hesitate to use torture as well. It would have been best if we’d prosecuted the Bush administration war criminals as soon as we’d had the chance, but since that will never happen the best we can do is try to ensure that it never happens again, and that means making judgments based on what the facts tell us is true, rather than merely what we’d like to be true.

We demand smaller government (except for the defense department).

The government needs to balance the budget (as long as it doesn’t involve raising taxes).

The government better not mess with the free market (so it should let giant corporations merge and monopolize every industry).

The government needs to look out for the interests of the middle class (by letting the richest people take as large a share of the nation’s wealth as possible).

The government has to drastically cut spending (but continue to pay billions for military equipment designed to fight the Soviet Union).

The government’s primary responsibility is to eliminate the threat of Islamic terrorism (which it can do by invading Muslim countries, killing loads of civilians, and imprisoning and torturing their friends and neighbors).

The government needs to stay the hell away from religion (unless it’s to impose Biblical law on all citizens).

The government better not step between us and our doctors (unless it’s to deny us the choice to have an abortion).

The government needs to stay out of our private lives (except when they’re telling us who we can and can not marry).

The government needs to stay out of our private lives (except when it comes to tapping our phones or groping us at the airport).

The government needs to stay out of our private lives (except when they’re telling us which chemicals we’re forbidden to put in our bodies).

The government needs to do everything it can to create jobs (except hire people directly).

The government needs to do everything it can to create jobs (by cutting tax-rates for giant corporations that don’t pay any taxes anyway).

The government needs to do everything it can to create jobs (as long as it doesn’t force companies to create those jobs in America instead of overseas).

We demand smaller government (by which we mean eliminating oversight of Wall Street so that they can continue to get rich by putting the entire economy in jeopardy).

We demand smaller government (by which we mean letting corporations maximize profits by deceiving and screwing over consumers at every opportunity).

We demand smaller government (by which we mean letting the coal and oil industries cut whatever corners in terms of worker and environmental safety that they see fit).

Our biggest concern is for the well-being of our grandchildren (but it’s not even worth considering whether scientists are right about climate change).

We firmly believe in living by Christian values (except for loving thy neighbor and caring for the less fortunate).

We believe in abiding by the constitution (except for the parts about equal rights and the separation of church and state).

Our ideology is superior to all other political ideologies (because it’s based on our gut feeling that it is).

This morning I received an e-mail from the Tea Party Nation (I get several e-mails a day from them, actually, but this one caught my eye) with a link to a short column about the trial of Guantanamo detainee Ahmed Ghailani, written by someone named Judson Phillips.

For years, the Bush administration opposed trying terrorists in civilian courts. They said that liberal judges could create havoc with these trials and turn them into farces.

The left said, the terrorists could be tried in civilian courts. What could go wrong?

Well, today, we just found out.

For those of you who don’t know, Ghailani is accused of bombing two U.S. Embassies in East Africa in 1998. The star witness for the prosecution was found due to information the military obtained by water-boarding Ghailani, which the judge—a Clinton appointee named Lewis Kaplan—ruled made him ineligible to testify. After all, if the authorities can just go around torturing people to pick up key witnesses in criminal cases, that opens up the door to some very unpleasant possibilities for all of us. As long as we don’t allow the fruits of torture to be used as evidence in criminal trials, we give the authorities a darn good reason not to torture anyone.

Of course, not torturing suspected criminals just doesn’t fly in Tea Party-land:

Ghallani was on the receiving end of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” In other words, he was water boarded. Good for him. I doubt the 224 people killed in those attack or their families would really care whether this terrorist received “enhanced interrogation.”

That’s not the point, Judson. This isn’t about the 224 people killed in the attack (may they rest in peace). It’s about the six and a half billion other people in the world who look to America as a model of human rights. It’s about being an honorable nation, a nation that does not need to resort to barbaric and criminal activities like water-boarding to protect ourselves and bring justice to crime victims. We are supposed to be better than that.

It’s also for the sake of our troops, Judson. If we not only torture our enemies but flaunt the fact that we torture them, what’s to stop our enemies from torturing our troops when they get their hands on them? Why shouldn’t China torture every American spy it captures, if our government sanctions this activity? If we torture prisoners, we lose the right to morally condemn anyone else for torturing us.

Mr. Phillips goes on:

Judge Kaplan is… wait for it. Drum roll please. Judge Kaplan is a Clinton appointee. I know that comes as a shock to everyone that a liberal president would appoint a liberal judge. And when a liberal judge has the chance to hurt America, guess what. He does not hesitate.

Yeah, liberals just hate America and we try to help the terrorists every chance we get. Clinton himself did his best to destroy America by appointing anti-American terrorist-sympathizers to every position he possibly could, and now his evil plans are finally coming to fruition. Now the terrorists might think that they won’t be tortured if we capture them, that we’ll actually give them a fair trial. We wouldn’t want that, would we? We want all Muslims to believe that we’re at war with their religion and that we’ll torture and humiliate any Muslim we manage to get our hands on. That’s the message we want to send.

The dumbest lawyer in America, Attorney General Eric Holder said he remains confident terrorists can be prosecuted in civilian courts. As Dr. Phil would say, how’s that working out for you?

You may want to check your spelling and grammar before accusing others of stupidity, Judson, but as for prosecuting terrorists in civilian courts I’d say that’s working out just fine. If your end-goal is to execute as many Muslims as possible, maybe not. But if your end-goal is justice, that’s far more likely to come from a civilian court than a secret military tribunal. Using evidence obtained through torture violates core principles of justice. If we have to let a few guilty men go free to protect even one innocent person from torture, that’s a price we should be willing to pay.

Since the first terrorists were captured after 9/11 and put in Guantanamo, liberal lawyers have lined up to help the terrorists. Their help has not simply been limited to trying to make sure they got a “fair trial,” but to help them identify (and endanger) CIA operatives, expose classified information that helps the enemy and generally give aid and comfort to those who want to attack America.

Here we go again with the “liberals hate America” theme. They couldn’t possibly be interested in justice—they’re merely trying to make America more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Standing up and defending those who would destroy us doesn’t make the enemy reconsider his image of America as an evil empire, but it gives them “aid and comfort” (translation: these lawyers are guilty of treason and should be hanged). “The Americans let one of us go because he was tortured?” they’ll say. “Those freedom-loving bastards! If they’re willing to release their enemies for the sake of their principles, they must be weak. Time to attack!”

No, Judson. Torturing people and prosecuting them behind-closed-doors (not to mention locking them away for years and years lest they get out and plan another attack) is weak. Potentially putting ourselves at risk in order to live up to our principles is the very definition of courage. Your position is one of cowardice.

Of course they refuse to see that. To them it’s not cowardice, just plain malice:

Ghallani is not an American citizen. He does not deserve the protections of the United States Constitution. He deserves to rot in a cell some where for the rest of his miserable life. But, if the liberals have their way that will never happen.

First of all, if you’re going to write a column about this you might want to check to make sure you’re spelling the guy’s name right.

Second of all, we should extend our civil rights to everyone—not just American citizens. Why? Because that’s the kind of country we are, or at least the kind we should be. The rights that our forefathers fought for were not supposed to be special privileges that they would grant themselves and nobody else—they were believed to be unalienable rights, bestowed upon all human beings by their Creator. The revolution was fought for the sake of rights that our founders believed they already had—that all people inherently have—to make a separate country where those pre-existing rights would not be violated.

The Tea Party (quite ironically when you consider the origin of their name) wants to go back to the days of monarchy when the chief executive could imprison, torture, and execute anyone seen as a threat without giving them the slightest chance of proving their innocence.

Of course none of that matters to the Tea Party. This is what’s really important:

The media reported that when Judge Kaplan announced his decision, Ghallani smiled.

I bet he did.

Frankly, Judson, I don’t give a damn if he smiled. Maybe Ghailani does deserve to rot in a prison cell for the rest of his life, but that’s not the point. This is a far bigger issue than Ghailani or his victims. This is about justice and human rights. It’s about who we are as a nation, and whether we abide by our own principles even if we don’t like the results.

Sorry, but if you are tortured, you do get a pass. Hopefully there’s enough evidence to convict Ghailani without relying on the torture-tainted stuff, but if not then we have to let him go free. It’s the best way to prevent our military from torturing people in the future, if the fact that our torturing people is an extremely effective terrorist-recruitment tool isn’t enough.

There is no good reason not to try terror suspects in civilian courts. They should be treated like common criminals like everyone else. Elevating them to “enemy combatant” status adds to the impression that they are Holy Warriors, makes it easier for Al Qaeda to recruit, and when coupled with torture undermines the basic principles Americans live by.

Obama has done many things in terms of national security that enrage me, but appointing Eric Holder to the position of attorney general and allowing him to try terrorists in civilian courts is not one of them. At least in this regard, he’s getting us back on the right track and wiping away some of the stains of the Bush administration. We liberals (not all of whom hate America) need to have his back on this issue and be prepared to meet the ignorant howling of the right-wing with our own arguments, which have the virtue of being based not only in fact but in the very ideals that our nation was founded on.

“Turn on the TV!” James shouted as he entered my college dorm room. “The war is starting!”

Are you serious? I’d just turned the damned thing off about a half hour earlier, getting sick of waiting for the fireworks that for all I knew wouldn’t be coming at all. I’d been glued to the TV all day, watching the cable news networks count down to the moment Bush’s 48-hour deadline for Saddam to leave Iraq reached 0:00. What an anti-climactic moment that had been. Once it came, the reporters started to remind everyone that this was just the count-down to the end of Bush’s cowboy-diplomacy deadline—that the actual fighting might not begin until the next day or later.

Thanks to James, I hadn’t completely missed the historical moment I’d been waiting for all day. The beginning of a war that might come to define my generation.

More than six years later, James reached me through a Facebook chat and informed me that he was enlisting in the military. That he’d very likely be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, but he’d given it a lot of thought and decided it’s what he wanted to do. The terrible economy had cost him his job a year earlier and in spite of his college-degree he couldn’t find any work elsewhere. The military seemed like his best option.

Throughout the years I’d also occasionally ponder joining the fighting, usually in my darkest moments when life seemed too overwhelming to figure out how to live it on my own. After graduating college with a relatively useless degree in philosophy, I spent the next couple of years just trying to figure out how to kill the remaining time I had left before death. The likelihood that there were far more years ahead of me than behind me would at times fill me with despair. I never seemed to fit in this world. What was I supposed to be doing here?

Important things were always happening, of course. Mostly too big to wrap my head around, too big to do anything about. Ever since September 11, the instant I heard someone in my high school classroom say the words, “They hit the second tower” I knew that I was probably one of those human beings cursed to live in interesting times. My sense of personal responsibility increased tenfold on that day and the weeks that followed.

After overcoming my initial reaction of anger and rage at the terrorists, I’d thought about it and decided that the best thing for the United States to do would be not to retaliate. We should go after the people responsible for the attack, but not invade an entire country. Not drop bombs that would kill innocent children and make those people hate us even more. After 9/11 we had a chance to show the world what an honorable nation we could be—to refrain from flexing our military muscles and instead focus only on the individuals responsible for the crime.

That was not a very popular position at the time, but I stood my ground and made my case to anyone who would listen. I pointed out that if we were in fact going to war, it would be people my age who would be doing the fighting. I asked everyone if they’d be willing to die for this cause. At that time, most said yes. Ultimately, most never did.

Had I believed in the cause, I might have enlisted. Had this been an event like Pearl Harbor in which my country had been attacked by an actual army from an actual nation that posed an actual existential threat to us, I would have followed in the footsteps of the “greatest generation” and gone to fight and die for my country.

But I never thought this was a noble cause. I didn’t think the fighting in Afghanistan was necessary, and I found the invasion of Iraq to be even less justifiable. If you’re going to put yourself in a position from which you might actually have to kill people—from which you might actually end up killing children—you’d better have a damned good reason, I thought. And giving my life a sense of purpose or direction never seemed good enough.

Those who’ve fought in these wars have my undying respect and admiration, but I just can’t make myself believe that their efforts have been for a good cause. They haven’t been fighting and dying for freedom. They haven’t even been fighting and dying for the United States of America. They’ve been fighting and dying (and killing and maiming) for Blackwater and KBR, for the military industrial complex, for neoconservative ideologues, and for multi-national corporations who have a vested interest in permanent warfare.

I could never be a part of that. All other considerations aside—the sense of accomplishment, the pride of my family, the benefits of being a veteran—none of these would be worth the sense of responsibility that I’d have to carry with me for the rest of my life for having been a part of one of history’s greatest crimes. And the invasion and occupation of Iraq was and always will be a crime in my mind, regardless of how it ultimately turns out.

But that doesn’t mean I consider the soldiers criminals. Far from it. They were following in the footsteps of their fathers, doing what they saw as the most noble thing they could do. In a sense I envy them. When the last decade becomes nothing more than a distant memory and the wars another chapter in the history books, they’ll be able to tell their grandchildren that they were there—that when their country made the call they stood up and answered it. No matter what the politics, that’s something to be proud of.

And what did I do? I partied with my college friends, I moved to California and relaxed on the beach, I flew to Germany to teach English to businesspeople, and I started a blog.

The Iraq war technically ends today. I’ve come a long way since that night in my dorm-room when James and I watched the bombs falling on Baghdad. I’m still not sure which direction my life is going, but I’m always thinking. These are interesting times, and the sense of historical responsibility is still nagging at me. And if I won’t fight, it seems all I can do now is write.

To all of my fellow millennials who fought in Iraq, who were injured, who died, or who watched their friends die: this one’s for you.

I know this is ancient history already, but I’ve been meaning to comment on it for days and more important stuff got in the way. I promise this isn’t as unimportant as it will seem at first.

So all the way back at the beginning of last week, Sarah Palin sent out a tweet regarding the plans to build an Islamic mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero:

Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate

Totally ignoring the substance of what she was saying, the Twitterverse apparently responded with resounding laughter over the completely made-up word “refudiate”. Palin then responded with another tweet trying to mitigate the damage from the first:

Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real

Seeing as how “refute” makes no sense in that context, that didn’t really help. Finally she offered up this gem:

“Refudiate”, “misunderestimate,” “wee-wee’d up.” English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!

Immediately all of the focus shifted to the absurdity of Palin comparing herself to Shakespeare (not to mention the choice of “wee-wee’d up” as an example of a great new word). That is indeed hilarious, but it’s not the real issue. I’m going to give her a pass on the surface and condemn her on the substance.

For one thing, “Refudiate” is actually a great word. It even applies to what I’m doing in this blog post. It’s a combination of “refute” and “repudiate”—two things that often go together. So I will refute the idea behind Palin’s original tweet and repudiate her for saying it—thus refudiating her.

Here’s the thing: Why would a mosque a couple of blocks from Ground Zero “stab” any reasonable person “in the heart”? The tacit claim made in this statement is that the same people behind the 9/11 attacks are the people who want to build a mosque near Ground Zero—that all Muslims are guilty of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Refutation: Not true at all. Are all Christians guilty of every crime ever committed by Christians throughout history? I didn’t think so. Are all Tea Partiers guilty of racism because some of them hold racist signs? I didn’t think so. So how can you claim that all Muslims are guilty of what a small segment of radicalized, violent Muslims decided to do? If an entire group of people bears full responsibility for what a small segment of that group does, then the whole Tea Party is racist and all Christians have a lot of blood on their hands.

Repudiation: Shame on you, Sarah. You’re contributing to the already massive level of intolerance on the part of Americans towards Muslims. By equating the word “Muslim” with “Terrorist” you’re inviting further violence against Muslims, and possibly even an attack on the mosque they’re building near Ground Zero—which, incidentally, will be home to a perfectly mainstream, peaceful branch of Islam that would no doubt condemn the actions of the 9/11 terrorists, as would the vast majority of all Muslims around the world. What you said is divisive and ignorant and you owe all Muslims an apology.

But thanks for the great new word! Now whenever someone says something both factually and morally wrong, we can refute and repudiate them at the same time! Refudiation! Got to celebrate it!

This story is small potatoes, but it got me angry enough to want to launch into a quick rant. Chez Pazienza’s rant on the Huffington Post is better, but mine will be shorter.

CNN’s well-respected Middle Eastern affairs editor, Octavia Nasr, was fired last week for something she tweeted. A member of Hezbollah, “Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah” (with a name like that he must be pure evil) died last Sunday and Nasr tweeted that he was “One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot”. This is poorly-worded to be sure, but that’s the nature of Twitter—you are limited to 140 characters so there’s not much room for attaching caveats and explanations.

After being pounced upon by neoconservatives, Nasr wrote an article explaining that she was referring to the cleric’s liberal views on the treatment of women in Islamic culture, e.g. that honor killings are wrong. But by then it was too late and CNN fired her because she was now tainted as a terrorist-sympathizer.

More infuriating than the story itself was the comments section. The Huffington Post is pretty liberal, but plenty of conversatives go to comment and I couldn’t believe how many people were blasting her for saying anything positive about anyone associated with Hezbollah—they were quite literally accusing her of treason.

This is what’s wrong with so many Americans—they have this overwhelming need to classify everyone as either good or evil, and will tolerate absolutely no nuance. This Muslim cleric, because we was involved with Hezbollah—classified by the US and the EU as a terrorist organization—must be completely evil and anyone who says anything positive about him must be evil too. It doesn’t matter that he was also a champion of women’s rights and that this is what the positive comment was for. Terrorist = Evil and that’s all there is to it.

These ignorant assholes have to realize that there are fucking shades of gray in this world, and that as soon as you demonize a person or group of people as “pure evil” you lose any chance of actually working with or influencing them. This cleric was exactly the kind of Muslim leader those of us in the West need to work with: an open-minded guy who we may disagree with on 95% of the issues, but who is at least willing to stand up to his own religious organization for what he believes is right.

But some think the only way to deal with “these people” is just to kill them, never mind the fact that you’re just making martyrs and new terrorists. CNN had a perfect opportunity to raise consciousness about this kind of thing, and instead they buckled under the weight of conservative pressure and ran scared. They are pathetic.

Quiz your friends who don’t follow the news: “True or false–the president can have an American citizen killed without arrest or trial.” Doesn’t sound right, does it? Well, it’s true:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests,” said one former intelligence official.

I doubt anyone is surprised that Bush implemented this policy, but how about the fact that Obama is letting it continue?

Haven’t heard much about that, have you? Of course not. Most liberals go out of their way not to think about all the ways in which Obama is just like Bush, and abusing executive power is a big one. The constitution grants the right of due process to every American citizen, but the president has decided to give himself the authority to ignore the constitution when it comes to terrorism suspects and skip all that annoying trial-by-jury business. Now he can just leap straight from suspicion to execution.

But surely this only happens in very rare and extreme cases, no? According to the Washington Post article cited above, only three American citizens are on the assassination list.

But just this week, deputy White House national security advisor John Brennan said that dozens of Americans have joined terrorist groups. Presumably they are all fair game for targeted assassination.

“So?” you might be thinking. “These guys are terrorist traitors. They deserve to die.” Maybe so, but they also deserve a trial. Not because of their actions but because the right to a fair trial is a basic human right, the kind we fought and died for when we freed ourselves from monarchy two centuries ago.

Thanks to Bush, we’ve turned the clock all the way back to 1775 when the chief executive of a nation had the power to arrest, detain, torture and execute anyone he wanted to, no questions asked. Thanks to Obama, this is not just a one-off thing–a momentary lapse of principle by a single adminstration–but is now firmly entrenched U.S. policy.

As of now, the president may only be using it on terrorists on foreign soil, but it’s a clear progression from that to using it on terrorists on U.S. soil, to just plain criminals on U.S. soil, to anyone the administration sees as a threat. If we let this power go unchecked, there could very well come a day when you could be taken out by a sniper without warning just because the president doesn’t like you.

From somewhere in Hell, the spirit of King George is laughing.

Watch out—I feel a big ol’ rant coming on. Republicans have been making the argument that the biggest problem with the way we go about dealing with alleged terrorists is that we read them their Miranda rights, and the so-called journalists who interview them are treating this as though it’s a legitimate concern. That leaves it to obscure bloggers like me to point out how mind-bogglingly retarded that claim is (sorry, Sarah) and call them out on what they really mean.

The argument is obscenely simple, which is necessary for the peanut-sized brains of their Tea Party constituents to understand it. When the authorities read a suspect his rights, they tell him he has the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney. Presumably, any suspect in his right mind would immediately decide to take advantage of those rights and refuse to give up any information until they get a lawyer. Thus giving ample time for any of their terrorists friends who may have been involved in their sinister plot to escape, or possibly detonate another bomb that the authorities don’t know about.

Is that logical? Sure. But if you think about it for more than two seconds, you can see what utter bullshit it is.

First of all, so far these guys have only built one bomb at a time, and they haven’t seemed to be doing a very good job of it. Second of all, they seem to be acting alone except for some training and/or financial support from terrorist groups abroad. But even if there were other bombs or other people involved, reading a suspect his Miranda rights does not decrease the likelihood of the suspect talking.

Why? Because there’s a fucking difference between reading someone his rights and giving someone his rights. These sons of bitches have the right to remain silent whether you tell them or not. And honestly, do you really think any of these assholes actually don’t know what rights they have under American law? All they have to do is watch one episode of Law & Order or any other crime show on television, or watch just one action movie, and they’ll know. It’s not some big secret. And anyone who takes months to plot and plan to commit a crime in the United States probably knows what his rights will be if he gets caught. Just because they might be Arab doesn’t mean they can’t understand English.

Furthermore, the police have ways of getting people to talk in spite of their right to an attorney. All they have to do is explain to the guy: “Look, we caught you red-handed. You are going to be convicted, and you’re going to be executed. The only chance you have of being shown any leniency at all is to tell us everything you know. Cooperate now and we may show you some mercy later on.” Stunningly enough, this has seemed to work so far. It worked with the Underpants Bomber and it worked with the Times Square bomber, both of whom have given up very valuable information even after being told—as they already fucking knew—that they could remain silent if they chose to.

When I heard Attorney General Eric Holder say that they were going to consider the possibility of no longer Mirandizing terrorism suspects, my head nearly exploded. What the fuck, Obama? Is there no republican talking point, no matter how insane or ridiculous, that you won’t kowtow to if they shout loud enough? Seriously—has this country ever had a more pussy-ass administration? It actually makes me respect Dick fucking Cheney, who never gave a shit what the other side was saying. He may have done the wrong thing 100% of the time but he just went ahead and did it, criticism be damned. Here you have an administration that has actually gone and legitimized the right-wing’s brain-dead moronic cries of Miranda putting our national security in jeopardy, even though they could destroy this argument with one two-minute statement.

Of course, what republicans really want is not just to stop reading suspects their rights but to actually deny them these rights in the first place. We’ve now got Joe the cold-blooded murderer Lieberman introducing legislation that would strip alleged terrorists of their American citizenship. Great idea, Joe. Let’s just revoke someone’s citizenship if they’re accused of terrorism before we actually have a trial to determine if they actually are terrorists. You know, I could probably get enough people—mostly unhealthy Americans between the age of 55 and 65—to bring a terrorism case against you. It may be groundless, but it would be enough to strip you of your citizenship if your disgustingly un-American legislation actually passed.

But it’s completely pointless anyway, as the right to remain silent is not exclusively for American citizens in the first place. If a British citizen commits a crime in the United States, he gets the Miranda rights too! Why? Because this is America, asshole, and that’s how we roll. We have a system of justice based on principles of fairness and due process. You are innocent until proven guilty, no matter what nationality you are. If we want to grant these rights exclusively to ourselves, we’d be the biggest nation of hypocrites on the face of the earth.

Why don’t Joe and the republicans just come out and say what they really mean? It’s not about Miranda rights at all. What they really think is that we should be torturing the shit out of these people, wringing every last bit of information from them as we possibly can before allowing them to lawyer up. Why won’t they say that? I honestly have no idea. Apparently they think that might be going too far. Don’t worry, republicans, after eight years of Bush’s war on terror and eight seasons of 24, you’d be surprised at the percentage of Americans who believe that torturing suspects is a great idea.

And if you want to make the argument that we ought to use torture to get information from terrorists, then by all means have at it. I’ve already ripped this argument to shreds as well, but at least it makes more sense than the brain-dead proposition that reading a terrorist his Miranda rights makes us less safe.

Look republicans, I understand it’s your job to find fault with everything the administration does, but in cases where it’s clear that they’re actually doing a good job—as in catching and extracting information from terrorists—you may just want to hold your tongue until they actually make a mistake. This is America, guys, and you have the right to shut the fuck up. I suggest you use it.

I’m sick and tired of conservatives acting like their position on foreign policy is one of strength while Obama’s is one of weakness, when in fact it’s the exact opposite. They need to be called out for the despicable cowards that they are.

In my last piece, I wrote about the fundamental differences between liberalism and conservatism as attitudes towards the government’s role in society, and my analysis was very broad and not focused exclusively on the United States. I wanted to give conservatism fair treatment as my goal was to get both sides to recognize what common ground we might have. This week I’m going to focus on conservatives only in the United States and their attitudes on foreign policy, and I’m not going to be nearly as kind. My goal here is not to spark a dialog but merely to rant about something that’s been sticking in my craw since all those republicans started throwing a hissy-fit over Obama’s new nuclear policy last week.

For those of you who don’t know, Obama announced that Russia and the United States had both agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals by a third. Purely a diplomatic move, but enough for the republicans to jump all over it and claim that somehow only being able to destroy the world 66 times over instead of 100 makes us all less safe. But much more importantly, Obama declared that we would not use nuclear weapons to retaliate against a nation that attacks us if that nation does not itself have nuclear weapons and is in compliance with international treaties. So if Zimbabwe attacks us, we promise not to nuke them. As for the real threats—Iran and North Korea—we can still nuke them because they’re not in compliance with the treaties.

Of course the republicans are going to ignore those caveats and completely distort Obama’s position to the point of absurdity. Everyone from Newt Gingrich to Sarah Palin was saying that Obama was somehow stripping this nation completely bare of its defenses. “He said he won’t retaliate if another country attacks us! He’s basically inviting other countries to attack the United States and telling them we won’t do anything in response!”

Actually—no, that’s not what he said, you unbelievable dipshits. He said we won’t use nuclear weapons to attack a country that complies with international nuclear treaties. In other words, you give countries an incentive to comply with those treaties, thus reducing the threat of nuclear war. He didn’t say we wouldn’t retaliate at all. But just ignore that. Sean Hannity insists that’s what he said—and Hannity would never misrepresent the president’s position.

All of this is stuff you already know if you follow the news. Plenty of ink has been spilled over the disingenuousness of republicans on this issue. They’ve chosen to go with their old narrative of “democrats are weak on defense” so they’ll pounce on anything that smells the least bit like weakness, including not reserving the right to drop H-bombs all over Zimbabwe if we feel like it.

But I feel like something very obvious has been largely ignored in all the analysis of this issue, and it goes far beyond the nuclear news of last week. I really wish republicans would get called out on this more often, because it strikes right at the heart of the image they like to present and completely undermines their posture of strength in the face of the president’s weakness: these people are cowards.

Last week I wrote about the underlying principles between conservatism and liberalism, but I left out the underlying emotions behind those attitudes. In terms of economic policy, liberals are motivated by compassion and conservatives by selfishness. In terms of foreign policy, liberals are also motivated by compassion (let’s not drop bombs on innocent civilians unless we absolutely have to) but conservatives are motivated by fear.

Obviously, Gingrich and Palin are just playing political games and I doubt they’re seriously afraid that Zimbabwe is going to invade, but the people who take them seriously do have such fears. There are a lot of brown people walking around in turbans on the other side of the world and they all spend their entire day plotting and planning the best way to slaughter Americans. You never know when a loose nuke or some kind of biological weapon is going to find its way to the Palookaville Wal-Mart and kill all your neighbors. The only reason the Wal-Mart is still standing is because George W. Bush kept us safe for so long—fighting them over there so we wouldn’t have to fight them here—but now Obama is doing everything he can to undo what Bush did. He is a secret Muslim, you know.

But even the conservatives who aren’t batshit crazy like that are still motivated by fear. Reasonable commentators like Bill O’Reilly have consistently supported things like water-boarding and other forms of torture, and there couldn’t possibly be a more cowardly position than that. Since the birth of our nation we’ve abided by certain principles and not torturing prisoners has been one of them. Liberals have remained true to this principle, saying first that torture doesn’t work but more importantly, even if it did work we’d rather maintain our honor and be slightly less safe than sinking to their level—going “to the dark side” as Dick Cheney so famously put it. Conservatives, on the other hand, have acted like frightened children. Please, torture them! Torture them all! He had a bomb in his underpants! He might know where more bombs are! How could you just read him his rights and give him a lawyer when there could be more underpants bombers on the way to the Wal-Mart as we speak?!!

It’s really pathetic, and they should be called out on it far more often than they are. Instead, we let them get away with acting as though they’re the strong ones, the ones who are willing to do ‘whatever it takes’ to protect America. Newsflash: that’s not strength. That’s the definition of cowardice—to be willing to do whatever it takes to stay safe.

It’s like a soldier who grabs a civilian to use as a human shield against the bullets flying at him, and when the civilian dies he says, “See? I had the strength to do whatever I had to do to save myself. If an innocent person had to die, so be it. I’m still here. See how strong I am? Where’s my medal?”

So now they’re twisting it around and saying that Obama’s new nuclear policy is a sign of weakness, as though dropping nuclear bombs on a country with a fraction of our military power is the bravest thing in the world. No, you fucking assholes, that’s the most cowardly thing you could possibly do.

The strongest, bravest thing to do would be to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether and have a level playing field. Now, if you attack us, we have to fight you through conventional means. And it’s not like our conventional army isn’t the strongest in the world by far anyway. Do we really need nuclear weapons to fight Iran or North Korea? It took us about a week to march into Baghdad—it wouldn’t take too long to get to Tehran or Pyongyang either—no nukes necessary.

But Obama didn’t even say we wouldn’t use nukes against Iran or North Korea—his declaration was specifically designed to exclude those very countries from the exemption from nuclear retaliation. So what are you still screaming about? Calm the fuck down already. If Kim Jong Il really scares the piss out of you so much, you can still drop a nuclear bomb on his head.

You’d think we could all just agree that we shouldn’t use nukes on a country with no nuclear weapons, but apparently not. The conservatives are too scared to even concede to that. They want to reserve the right to nuke anybody and everybody, as anything less would be weakness.

For the last time—your position is the weak one. You are the cowards. You are the ones who want to bring a bazooka to a fist-fight. And if that’s not cowardice, I don’t know what is.