Glenn repeats his citation of this passage from a NYT story:
The opposition to Mr. Brennan had been largely confined to liberal blogs, and there was not an expectation he would face a particularly difficult confirmation process. Still, the episode shows that the C.I.A.'s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base, making it difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone for a top intelligence post who has played any role in the agency's campaign against Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks.
then invokes critiques of this passage by Billmon and Digby, continuing:
to object to someone like Brennan -- who advocated and defended the Bush administration's rendition and "enhanced interrogation tactics" -- is hardly the same as objecting to anyone who "played any role in the agency's campaign against Al Qaeda." And Andrew Sullivan made a related point about an AP article by Pamela Hess which contains this wretched sentence: "Obama's advisers had grown increasingly concerned in recent days over Web logs that accused Brennan of condoning harsh interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, which critics call torture." As Sullivan notes: "no sane person with any knowledge of the subject disputes the fact that waterboarding is and always has been torture. So why cannot the AP tell the truth?"
Indeed. Jimmy Carter asked, "Why not the best?" Why can't Obama--and all of us--ask, "Why not the truth?" He wants bipartisanship? Fine. But why must bipartisanship require lies? And not just individual ones, but the whole Orwellian package that makes truth-telling virtually impossible? Why can't Obama simply and straightforwardly link the two together? Like this:
"We need to begin a new era of bipartisanship and truth."
In The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem, I made the claim that Republicans and Democrats are inverted mirror reflections of one another:
(A) Democrats are reality-based when it comes to policies, and totally out to lunch when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.
(B) But Republicans are totally out to lunch when it comes to policies, and as reality-based as it gets when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.
And I argued that there is a deeper, more specific explanation for why this is so. To lay the groundwork for that argument, I spent most of the diary laying out two related schemas for understanding human cognition in a stage-like developmental framework, and I presented an initial argument that liberalism represented a generally more advanced way of thinking about the world. In this diary, I want to take one main example-the defining example of the "war on terror"-to flesh out that argument some more by showing how the "war on terror" is heavily dependent on a low level of cognitive development. I will add some comments at the end about several other issues as well, to give the flavor of how such an analyisis can be generalzied into other areas as well. Then, in the next diary, I will look at how liberals and Democrats tend to be as clueless about politics as conservatives are about governance.
(1) There can be no war on terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, or at most a strategy of assymetric warfare. A "war on terrorism" makes as much sense as a "war on sneak attacks" or a "war on blitzkriegs."
(2) There can be no war on terror. War is terror.
Thus, it is obvious, from a moment's reflection, that the dominant political narrative of the past six years is-and has to be-a lie.
Al Qaeda was a specific organization that attacked us on 9/11. As a non-state actor, there could be no war on al Qaeda, either. We could, however, obliterate them from the face of the earth-either the smart way or the dumb way-if we had any interest in doing so. We did not.
Since I began front-paging last weekend, I've been working off of an underlying theme-that opposition to the Iraq War-however important-is not the key to a genuine realignment, but only one part of the puzzle. I wrote several diaries about the importance of economics, and this is, in a way, yet another one of them, because it's about empire and neo-feudalism. But it moves the two subjects substantially closer together.
The thesis here is simple: We are not fighting to defeat terror(ism), but to spread it. We just want 100% market share, that's all. And until the Democrats are willing to stand up and say this, in no uncertain terms, our realignment will not be complete. So if you think stabbing MoveOn in the back was bad, we have much, much farther to go than just putting that shit to rest.
Impossible as this may seem, there is a precedent for it-the abolition of slavery. Although the Republican Party originally emerged in opposition to the political power of slave states, it was not clearly committed to abolition when Lincoln won the presidency in 1860. And yet, five years later, when the Civil War ended, so, too, did slavery. Many things came together to make that transformation possible, but the key dynamic, without which all else would have failed, was that the forces of slavery were put on the defensive, and ultimately discredited themselves, even in the eyes of a white northern power structure that was still deeply stained by its own racist assumptions. And this is the key for us as well-we must place the forces we face on the defensive, and do so so decisively that they, too, ultimately discredited themselves, even in the eyes of those in high places who share certainly deeply-held prejudices in common with them.
I take as my text a recent story on Alternate that updates a story that Project Censored selected as the #1 censored story for 2002-2003-a story for which I was one of five people who wrote about it.
