An Anti-Hillary Crusader Can't Be Bothered With Mere Facts

Fed up with Andrew Sullivan's anti-Hillary raving, I hadn't visited his blog for a while. Checked it out today and was immediately confronted with this little tidbit:

A Good Question

Gets to the nub of Clinton's privilege, and inability to actually persuade anyone of anything: Is there a single member of the U.S. Senate besides Hillary Clinton for whom it was the FIRST elected office?

Maybe Liddy Dole, another marital nepotist?

You might think that, before posting an item like this (which, though couched as a question, clearly and tendentiously implies a NO answer), Andrew might consider glancing at the list of current U.S. senators on Wikipedia. Links make it easy to check their bios. This exhausting ten-minute process reveals that those currently serving for whom the U.S. Senate was the first elected office include:

Mel Martinez (R-FL)
Susan Collins (R-ME)
Ted Kennedy (D-MA)
Chuck Hagel (R-NE)
Elizabeth Dole (R-NC)
Kent Conrad (D-ND)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Robert Bennett (R-UT)
John Warner (R-VA)
Jim Webb (D-VA)

I don't think all these senators got there because of their spouses. But I guess Andrew Sullivan considers any factoid that he can use to attack Hillary Clinton "too good to check."

Sullivan: "Racism Is A Thing Of The Past--Just Ask Your Local Racist"

I guess it's nice that Andrew Sullivan has fallen in love with Barack Obama--it's a big step up from George W. Bush--but does he really think that this is a telling argument in favor of Obama's electability?

A reader writes: "The next person that tells me that the American people will not elect a black person to the Presidency will be asked to name five specific people--family, friends, acquaintances, neighbors, co-workers, you name it--who will not vote for Obama because he is black. I will then volunteer to contact those people to give them an opportunity to defend themselves against this tired, old, self-aggrandizing libel." I seem to have more faith in the American people than some Democrats.

If the reader's challenge is supposed to demonstrate that there is no more racism among American voters, then I guess one could also prove that there is no more homophobia or sexism in America by visiting five notorious gay-bashers or wife-beaters and asking them for a public confession.

If this is the best stuff you can come up with, Andrew, you really are putting up too many posts every day.

The Literal Insanity To Which The Logic Of Torture Leads

Via Andrew Sullivan:

"Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud,"--Deroy Murdock, National Review.

Have you noticed that the pro-torture right has gone from saying that torture is abhorrent to saying that torture isn't occurring to saying that torture is not torture to now saying that torture is "something of which every American should be proud". And why not indeed? The Cheney logic is impregnable: the president is not bound by the law or the Geneva Conventions; torture reveals information that allows the government to seize individuals who might at some point commit terror attacks; the president's job is to prevent terror attacks. Torture is thereby a good.

This is indeed the inevitable logic of tyranny. In the ante-bellum South, the same logic was applied in defense of slavery, until ultimately even Christian clergymen could be found to assert that slavery not only was not an evil but was a positive good.

As you might expect, the best evisceration of this logic came from Lincoln:

The sum of pro-slavery theology seems to be this: "Slavery is not universally right, nor yet universally wrong; it is better for some people to be slaves; and, in such cases, it is the Will of God that they be such."

Certainly there is no contending against the Will of God; but still there is some difficulty in ascertaining, and applying it, to particular cases. For instance we will suppose the Rev. Dr. Ross has a slave named Sambo, and the question is "Is it the Will of God that Sambo shall remain a slave, or be set free?" The Almighty gives no audable [sic] answer to the question, and his revelation--the Bible--gives none--or, at most, none but such as admits of a squabble, as to it's meaning. No one thinks of asking Sambo's opinion on it. So, at last, it comes to this, that Dr. Ross is to decide the question. And while he consider [sic] it, he sits in the shade, with gloves on his hands, and subsists on the bread that Sambo is earning in the burning sun. If he decides that God wills Sambo to continue a slave, he thereby retains his own comfortable position; but if he decides that God wills Sambo to be free, he thereby has to walk out of the shade, throw off his gloves, and delve for his own bread. Will Dr. Ross be actuated by that perfect impartiality, which has ever been considered most favorable to correct decisions?

But, slavery is good for some people!!! As a good thing, slavery is strikingly peculiar [sic], in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself.

I suppose slavery is now no longer "the only good thing" that no one wants for himself. We can add waterboarding to the list.

A Few Conservatives Grow Up . . . Better Late Than Never

As you may have heard, the rightwing blogosphere is up in arms over an article in The New Republic in which a US soldier in Iraq recounts cruel and vindictive actions he witnessed by other soldiers embroiled in that nightmarish warzone. Conservatives like Michelle Malkin are furiously (and so far unsuccessfully) trying to dig up dirt on the writer in an attempt to discredit him--because, after all, it's important to pretend that every single American soldier is a paragon of nobility, kindness, self-discipline, and mental stability, right?

As usual, Digby has one of the best comments on the whole affair:

Why are so many of these people [i.e. right-wing "defenders" of the troops] such children in these matters? Rod Dreyer read "All Quiet On The Western Front" a couple of weeks ago and was so moved that he actually felt compelled to write a column about it. (I did too. In the eighth grade--only I called it a book report.) I guess I thought everyone knew that war was a crazy, fucked up enterprise filled with great drama and boredom and courage and loss of humanity and that most of the simplistic mythic clap trap that society uses to compel young men into doing it was pretty much propaganda. Sure, it still has to be done sometimes and it takes great physical courage and commitment to throw yourself into the meat grinder, but that doesn't change the fact that it is, on many levels, a total debasement of your humanity. Like most things in life, it's complicated.

I, of course, have never been to war. But that doesn't mean that I have no knowledge of it. Human beings have been at it for some time now and they've left quite a record. Nothing that Private Beauchamp wrote in that piece [in The New Republic] had not been written before by some other soldier in some other war. (That doesn't excuse the behavior, of course, which hasn't been acceptable behavior for soldiers for centuries, if only because of the lack of discipline.) But if you have the habit of reading books you will have come across descriptions of war that make your hair stand on end and you will know that nobility and honor sometimes seem like quaint concepts from another life in such circumstances. It isn't shocking in the least that otherwise decent people could lose that decency during wartime and it certainly doesn't surprise you that those who already have a light grip on conscience (or sanity) would behave in ways that would make us recoil in horror in our everyday lives.

Like Digby, I am startled by the incredible naivete of right-wing war defenders. She and I are about the same age, so I guess we've had the innocence gradually knocked out of us over the past half-century. Still, you would think that people who hold themselves up as commentators on world affairs would read an occasional book and think about it.

For further evidence of how stunningly naive some right wingers are, consider the series of posts that Andrew Sullivan has been running, built around conservatives' confessions of the false beliefs they have gradually abandoned during the last four years of the Bush administration. It got started this way, with Sullivan citing a post by the same Rod Dreher (not Dreyer) that Digby mentioned:

Rod Dreher asks what certainties people have abandoned these past few years in Iraq. His list:

1. Having been absolutely certain that the war was the right thing to have done, and that we would prevail easily, I am no longer confident that I can discern when emotion is affecting my judgment unduly.

2. I no longer implicitly trust governmental institutions, including the military--neither in their honesty nor their competence.

3. I no longer believe the Republican Party is superior in foreign policy judgment to the Democrats.

4. I no longer have confidence in the ability of our military, or any military, to solve deep cultural and civilizational problems through force alone. I mean, I thought nothing could stand in the way of the strongest military fielded since the days of ancient Rome. No more.

5. I have a far greater appreciation for how rare and fragile liberal democracy is, and a corresponding revulsion at the American assumption that it's the natural state of mankind. Which is to say, the war has made me rethink my ideas about human nature, and I'm far more pessimistic now than I ever was.

Now, a couple of these beliefs are perhaps forgiveable, like #3. (I never shared it, but I can imagine a sensible defense of the notion that Republicans generally show better foreign policy judgment than Democrats.) But I find most of them amazing in their naivete.

Did Ron Dreyer--a newspaper columnist and published book author--actually believe that governmental institutions deserved his "implicit trust"? Then what the hell did he think all the checks and balances in the Constitution were there for?

Did he actually think that the military could "solve deep cultural and civilizational problems through force alone"? Doesn't merely stating this idea expose how shallow and implausible it is? How on earth can force alone reconcile groups that hate one another, produce justice, or create democracy?

Did he actually believe that liberal democracy "is the natural state of mankind"? Did he think that the earliest humans foraging for food on the Serengeti conducted free elections, jury trials, and parliamentary-style debates before going hunting for wildebeest?

And as for the very first item on his list: One of the most fundamental rules of intellectual honesty is to rigorously question one's most cherished beliefs--especially when they happen to reinforce one's emotional leanings. If you don't understand this and try your best to practice it, you have no way of knowing whether anything you think is valid.

I don't consider myself a particularly profound thinker, but I outgrew Dreher's simplistic beliefs around 1962, when I was nine years old.

Maybe our conservative pundits should consider learning a little something about the realities of life before offering the rest of us their wisdom about it--and especially before lecturing Democrats on how "naive" and "soft-headed" their ideas about foreign policy are.

Andrew Sullivan Has a Fainting Spell Over Hillary's "Ruthlessness"

As I've noted before, I haven't signed on to the Hillary campaign or to any other as of yet. And there are certainly plenty of grounds for criticizing Hillary, especially from the left, most notably her vote in favor of the Bush Iraq authorization, her support for the idea of a long-term US troop presence in that country, and her general hawkishness.

Having said all this, I am truly fed up with the constant criticism of her that is supposedly related to her "character," "temperament," or "lack of leadership." Whenever I examine these complaints closely, they seem to boil down to rehashing of scurrilous rumors about her and Bill's personal life mingled with vapid, unspecific whining about the fact that "I just can't warm up to her" or "There's something I just don't like about her."

Today's volley against her by Andrew Sullivan (he launches one practically every day) is typical. He recounts an anecdote about Hillary's political operation and sums up its moral in these words: "Don't mess with her or her cronies. They're ruthless."

And what happened to demand the use of the word "ruthless"? Did thugs hired by Hillary beat up dissidents? Did they disseminate vicious lies about some enemy in order to cause him to lose a job or to destroy his marriage?

No, it turns out that what happened was that someone made a critical comment at a Hillary fund-raising event in Los Angeles and in response received a "smattering of boos and gasps that were directed my way." (Follow the link and read the account for yourself--I swear that is all that happened.)

This is "ruthlessness"? I guess it is if you've already decided that for some reason you can't stand Hillary's guts.