Help MSNBC bring liberal values to the workplace

Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and Al Sharpton are some of the biggest names in televised liberal commentary, but when it comes to supporting the rights of those who work under them at MSNBC, these big names have come up rather small.

According to the Writers Guild of America East, “Producers and associate producers at Peacock Productions, NBC’s nonfiction and reality unit at 30 Rockefeller Center, have been organizing and fighting against unionbusting at NBC for over a year now.” What they want are the benefits of being in a union, such as health insurance, better pay and less outrageous hours.

“These producers and APs [associate producers] have had enough of NBC’s attempts to stop their organizing drive,” says the guild. “They are asking MSNBC hosts to do one simple thing: sit down with them and hear their stories.”

So far, that has not happened. But it is not like MSNB’s on-air talent is unaware of what their producers do to make their shows happen.

“The staff of @allinwithchris works so so hard,” Chris Hayes tweeted yesterday. “It’s a marvel to watch every day.”

Hayes should do more than just tweet about how great his producers are: he should let some of them come on his show to explain the work they do – and why they need the benefits that come with being part of a union.

“The reality of freelance employment in nonfiction TV,” said Writers Guild of America Executive Director Lowell Peterson, “is that even creative professionals face grueling hours, no job security, no benefits, and no certainty about compensation.”

As a former non-fiction television producer who enjoyed neither job security nor benefits, join me and the guild in helping draw the attention of the following hosts at MSNBC to their producers’ organizing drive – and be sure to report what you hear back:

Rachel Maddow, “Rachel Maddow Show,” @maddow

Ed Schultz, “The Ed Show” @wegoted

Tamron Hall, “NewsNation” @tamronhall

Al Sharpton, “PoliticsNation” @thereval

Chris Hayes, “All In with Chris” @chrislhayes

Lawrence O’Donnell, “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” @lawrence

Liberals should stop and frisk Bill de Blasio

Over at The Nation, a debate is raging over whether students at Brown University acted inappropriately when they shouted down New York police chief Ray Kelly, preventing him from delivering an undoubtedly dull lecture about the power and glory of stopping and frisking brown people in New York City with no more probable cause then, “they're brown and shifty eyed.”

Columnist Katha Pollitt is one who thinks the students Went Too Far. Her particularly patronizing entry in the debate, “Campus Leftists, Use Your Words,” begins by creating a false choice between heckling assholes like Ray Kelly and “informational picketing, holding a teach-in or other counter event, [and] campaigning for a speaker's of one's own.” One can do all of those things, actually, while still heckling assholes like Ray Kelly.

But Pollitt's broader point is that “campus leftists” – children – didn't win any converts by appearing to bully a poor police chief. It may have been emotionally satisfying, but radical tactics like those only suggest the left lacks for ideas. So what should have those college hot heads done? Vote Democrat and write letters to the editor and good wholesome stuff like that:

It’s fashionable on the left to mock liberalism as weak tea—and sometimes it is. But you know what is getting rid of stop-and-frisk? Liberalism. A major force in the campaign against stop-and-frisk was the NYCLU, which carries the banner of free speech for all. And Bill de Blasio, who just won the mayoral election by a landslide, has pledged to get rid of the policy and Ray Kelly too. Those victories were not won by a handful of student radicals who stepped in with last-minute theatrics. They were won by people who spent years building a legal case and mobilizing popular support for change.

This is wrong and I don't just say that as a radical leftist who thinks liberalism is weak tea compared to my anarcho-espresso. It is factually wrong. Bill de Blasio, the next mayor of New York City, has not in fact “pledged to get rid of the policy” of stop-and-frisk. What he has pledged to do is rather different. And very liberal.

Under the heading, “Fighting for Meaningful Stop-and-Frisk Reform,” de Blasio's campaign website informs us that he “has pushed for real reforms in stop-and-frisk” and called on Mayor Michael Bloomberg “to immediately end the overuse and abuse of this tactic.” So de Blasio isn't looking to “get rid” of anything but, if we're being cynical – and since we're dealing with politicians we should be – the public anger over stop-and-frisk. His issue is that the tactic is being overused and abused, not that it's being used at all. He also boasts that he backed an initiative "which significantly expanded the number of NYPD officers on the streets." Anyone know what the NYPD's been up to lately?

Like other successful politicians, de Blasio campaigned in such a way that supporters of all stripes could see what they wanted. If you don't like stop-and-frisk, you maybe read his condemnations of its “abuse” as a condemnation of the program as a whole – and he took advantage of that, benefiting from a public sick of Mike Bloomberg the same way Barack Obama took advantage of a public sick of George Bush, his mere election seen as repudiation of what came before. By now, we really ought to know better; we ought to know we should wait for concrete action before celebrating a promise; we ought to know those promises, even as weak as they may be, are made to be broken.

Meanwhile, prisoners at Guantanamo Bay that aren't stuck inside being force-fed can expect partly cloudy skies and highs in the upper 80s over the next week, with a slight chance of rain.

Syria is not Iraq (and apples are not oranges)

Like other Democratic consultants with careers to keep in mind, Robert Creamer, husband of liberal Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, is currently busy reassuring progressives that Barack Obama's desired attack on Syria will be "completely different" from the shock and awe that George W. Bush and Senate Democrats helped bring to Baghdad. And, it should be said, there's a lot of truth to that. They are, indeed, different situations occurring at different times (the US government had more allies when it destroyed Iraq, for instance).

But while the situations differ and lazy comparisons should always be avoided, Creamer's number one reason for why Syria is not Iraq is wrong in a big way. Being generous, it's the result of a lazy misremembering of history. Being realistic, it's a lie.

According to Creamer, writing for The Huffington Post:

1). The President is asking for a narrow authorization that the U.S. exact a near-term military price for Assad's use of chemical weapons. He is not asking for a declaration of War - which is exactly what George Bush asked from Congress in Iraq.

George W. Bush did not ask Congress for a declaration of war, which no president has done since WWII. He asked Congress to pass an, "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq." Barack Obama, meanwhile, is asking Congress to pass an, “Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against the Government of Syria to Respond to Use of Chemical Weapons."

Obama's request does include a clause stating that it is not intended to authorize the use of "combat" troops on the ground. At the same time, while there does not appear to be much elite interest in a full-scale occupation of Syria at this point -- though calculations on all sides of the conflict could change when the bombs start falling -- the AUMF recognizes the president's "inherent" right to use military force to counter what he perceives to be threats to national security. Limits on "combat" troops are there for political reasons, not legally binding ones.

In other words, what Obama is asking for is "exactly" what Bush asked for, which is: political cover for using the US military any way he sees fit. What's different is the target and the perception that there's no real risk of being embroiled in a quagmire: just a few bombing raids carried out in time to pick up the kids from soccer practice.

You may be not at all surprised to learn that Creamer, who somehow managed to get this basic fact wrong, is a convicted liar. Indeed, he pleaded guilty to multiple felonies for defrauding a bank. But the people Creamer is lying to now don't run banks. Defrauding the public in order to sell a war won't get him a conviction, but a new hot tub and perhaps an appearance or two on a liberal chat show.

In terms of the dishonesty involved in selling a war on it, Syria is looking a lot like Iraq, actually.

A government big enough to stop Big Pharma...

"I want our government to be big enough so that it can successfully stop Big Pharma from selling us drugs at five times the price as other countries," writes liberal commentator Thom Hartmann.

While I'm no fan of removing state checks on corporate privilege, this is a strange argument for a liberal to make as overpriced drugs are a clear result of the state -- big government -- granting corporate privilege. As center-left economist Dean Baker pointed out in his book, The End of Loser Liberalism, Americans currently spend around $300 billion a year on prescription drugs. Without state-granted monopolies in the form of drug patents, which bar competitors to Big Pharma from producing generics, that number would be closer to $30 billion.

Basically

I came across this quote today from Josh Marshall, editor of the liberal Talking Points Memo, while doing some research for a column. It's a good one.

"Basically everything Barack Obama has done since coming into office has been to unwind the thicket of commitments, practices and open wars begun under George W. Bush."

Smart take, career wise. But I bet the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Guantanamo Bay have a different one.

The liberal presidency

Go read my latest piece over at Al Jazeera, where I argue that his progressive fans are right: Barack Obama really is a liberal.

Yes, but what about Mitt Romney?

I guess my biggest problem with liberal pundits these days is their single-minded, almost religious focus on the issues that matter -- to the exclusion of almost everything else. Wherever you turn, it's always systemic injustice this or bipartisan embrace of extrajudicial murder that.

It's like, I get that the United States has placed more than 2.3 million human beings in rape cages thanks largely to a Democrat and Republican-approved racist war on the poor that takes the guise of fighting narcotics, but do we really have to dwell on it so much? Yeah, innocent people are being murdered every day as part of a war on terror that no one outside of the Washington, DC, suburbs thinks is doing anything but manufacturing even more terror, but what, for instance, does Mitt Romney's lunch order tell us about who may be his pick for a running mate? And do we even have any good jokes ready to go based on that selection? (If it's a dude, I suggest digs about same-sex couples are in order.)

And I haven't heard from Sarah Palin in a few weeks. Has any writer for The American Prospect even bothered to check her Twitter feed lately? It's time those of us on the left got our priorities straight.

Rules for reformists

With the 2012 U.S. presidential election coming up, here are some helpful rules for discussion that I have gleaned from liberals online:

1. Don't criticize Barack Obama over anything that's happening in America, because it turns out all real domestic power lies in the hands of the House of Representatives, not the president.
2. Don't criticize Barack Obama's foreign policy because that will only depress his base and help Mitt Romney, who would probably be just as belligerent (unless you believe the Democratic Party). And my god, have you seen Romney's domestic policies (editor's note: obviously, ignore point #1 when speaking of Republicans)?
3. Don't criticize Barack Obama.

Hope this helps clear things up. Now get out there and start bashing the GOP while ignoring your own complicity in a system fueled by mass murder and incarceration!

Take it away, Jello

Yeah, I read the New Republic
Rolling Stone and Mother Jones too
If I vote it's a Democrat
With a sensible economy view
But when it comes to terrorist Arabs
There's no one more red, white and blue

So love me, love me, love me
I'm a liberal

 

George Bush: Great American Progressive?

Mother Jones writer Josh Harkinson thinks the Occupy movement should get into politics. Democratic Party politics, to be specific. This is his article's money shot, the fact of the matter section around which the piece is based:

If May Day somehow leads to major political victories for Occupy, it will be the first time that an American social movement has caught fire without sending its own guys to Washington. "There really isn't any precedent for that," Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University professor who studies social movements, told me last month. Though politicians don't always fulfill their promises, history shows that social movements tend to advance when they help elect people who at least feel compelled to listen to them. Lyndon B. Johnson was not seen as a great progressive in the '60s, but his time in office coincided with the civil rights and anti-war movements. Obviously, the left hasn't fared as well under Republicans. 

Gosh, I mean. Like . . . what? If the best evidence you have for your thesis that social movements, like the one opposed to the war in Vietnam, only advance by engaging in electoral politics is fucking hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?, you don't really have much in the way of evidence. And, not to point out the agonizing, tooth-pullingly obvious, but: guy, LBJ's term in office "coincided with" the rise of the anti-war movement not because the dude once opened for Hendrix and set a trend by burning his draft card, but because he massively escalated a war of aggression that proved terribly unpopular, particularly among those he was drafting but especially among those he was ordering to be bombed and massacred by a bipartisan coalition of future American presidential candidates.

In 40 years, one wonders, will an older and wiser Harkinson casually observe that George W. Bush was an under-appreciated-at-the-time "progressive" by favorably noting his role in the rise of the anti-Iraq war movement? Will Mother Jones finally credit Bush -- like Johnson -- with spawning a social movement opposed to the bloody, immoral war he was waging? Or will that bit of current contrarianism still be considered more of a Slate thing?

The conservatism of Rachel Maddow

Once upon a time - say, three years ago - your average Democrat appeared to care about issues of war and peace. When the man dropping the bombs spoke with an affected Texas twang, the moral and fiscal costs of empire were the subject of numerous protests and earnest panel discussions, the issue not just a banal matter of policy upon which reasonable people could disagree, but a matter of the nation's very soul.

Then the guy in the White House changed.

Now, if the Democratic rank and file haven't necessarily learned to love the bomb - though many certainly have - they have at least learned to stop worrying about it. Barack Obama may have dramatically expanded the war in Afghanistan, launched twice as many drone strikes in Pakistan as his predecessor and dropped women-and-children killing cluster bombs in Yemen, but peruse a liberal magazine or blog and you're more likely to find a strongly worded denunciation of Rush Limbaugh than the president. War isn't over, but one could be forgiven for thinking that it is.

Given the lamentable state of liberal affairs, Drift, a new book from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, is refreshing. Most left-of-centre pundits long ago relegated the issue of killing poor foreigners in unjustifiable wars of aggression to the status of a niche concern, somewhere between Mitt Romney's family dog and the search results for "Santorum" in terms of national importance. So in that sense, it's nice to see a prominent progressive at least trying to grapple with the evils of militarism and rise of the US empire. It's just a shame the book isn't very good.

Read the rest at Al Jazeera.

Love me, I'm a liberal

(via Nathan Fuller)

The liberal deference to murder

"This is a very complicated case, Maude. You know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous."

Ron Paul hates women and minorities; Obama just kills and imprisons them

Sure, the guy I support blows up poor brown people on a daily basis with drone strikes and cluster bombs while backing a war on drugs responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands more, mostly poor minorities, but at least he's not a racist!

My favorite part of (trigger warning) Amanda Marcotte's characteristically angry and poorly written screed against American's favorite cranky uncle -- lulz, she calls his supporters Paulbots! -- is perhaps the line toward the beginning where she suggests only white men smoke pot and that anyone who supports or maybe just utters a non-derogatory remark about Ron Paul embraces all of his positions, the latter a particularly risky stance to take for someone who supports a guy, Barack Obama, whose administration has proposed record-high defense budgets and has deported so many immigrants you'd think Pat Buchanan and his pitchfork were in the White House.

Alas, Marcotte -- who, since she's calling someone else a racist, it should be noted once published a book that depicted indigenous peoples as brutish savages -- isn't one for sophisticated, nuanced arguments, nor is she seemingly aware of how her own crude attacks could be used against her. Her eager, slavish Democratic partisanship matched in its tediousness only by her unimaginative, "batshit"-sprinkled prose, Marcotte earlier reduced the problems with the American political system to the existence of Republicans, after all, so sophisticated political analysis isn't exactly her thing. And so in the midst of spitting venom at the mean old Ron Paul who in his old meanness forgot that hating on FEMA went out of style when Bush left office, the ever-edgy Marcotte declares of his imaginary strawmen supporters that "it's fucking disgusting to believe it's more important for dudes to have legal rights to joints than women to have legal rights to abortion," presumably addressing all three of the posters on Reddit who actually believe that.

Adopting Marcotte's line of argument, though, one could easily argue that it's fucking disgusting to believe it's more important to elect politicians who will, every two to four years, make a big show of defending a women's legal right to abortion than it is to elect one who at least won't burn little children to death with cluster bombs and won't support ramping up funding for a racist drug war that has made the United States home to the largest prison population in world history. It's especially disgusting to elevate abortion rights, by which Marcottee means the election of Democrats, over issues of war and peace when the politician you're slavishly supporting has actually done more to undermine that right with a single executive order than any Texas Republican ever has.

Now, by all means, say nasty things about Ron Paul. He's a politician! Indeed, while I've argued he's more progressive than Obama -- while adding the huge caveat that I won't be voting for him because electoral politics is a fraud -- he's nonetheless a guy who believes some pretty awful things, like using the power of the state to penalize those who cross arbitrary geopolitical borders. He's also associated with people I think can fairly be called racists and he let his name be used as the byline for some of the awful things they've written. Go ahead, call him an asshole! But -- and here's another huge caveat -- make sure that if you're doing so, you're not neglecting to mention the guy who is actually in the White House and who is actually deporting record numbers of immigrants and who is actually ordering bombs to be dropped in more than a half-dozen countries and who actually propped up the company responsible for perhaps the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Otherwise, well, you're going to come across as an asshole too.

Would Mother Jones read Mother Jones?

I'm not going to pretend this is some recent, tragic downfall; we're talking about a publication that fired Michael Moore after just four months because he refused to publish -- amid a U.S.-backed right-wing insurgency that left 50,000 dead -- a liberal hawk's hit piece against Nicaragua's Sandinistas, after all.

It's nonetheless worth noting, however, the incongruity of a magazine named for a radical activist who embraced civil disobedience in defiance of unjust laws and refused to recognize the legitimacy of the state's legal actions against her hiring a careerist Democratic pundit, Adam Serwer, who explicitly rejects the notion that those who kill as part of unjust wars of aggression are moral actors who bear any responsibility for their actions, morality being the sole province of our betters in political office. He even maintains that one's support for members of the military ought to be "unconditional," just as soldiers themselves, in his view, ought to kill and be killed without question, anything less than blind allegiance to authority being a potentially grave threat to the republic. Serwer also defended on narrow legal grounds the U.S. government's extrajudicial killing of an apparently unarmed, detained man -- an argument he defended with ripped-from-The-Weekly-Standard Chomsky and pacifist-bashing -- and, rather than respond to actual arguments that were made, mocked yours truly because I work for an antiwar group that is nowhere near as "prestigious" in his view as, hold your laughter, The American Prospect.

Unfortunately, Serwer's brand of smug apologia for the Democratic Party, mixed in with a healthy dose of condescension toward those who fail to see the electoral system and the law-making process as the be-all and end-all of political agitation, will fit right in at the modern Mother Jones. This is a formerly radical magazine, remember, that employs the invasion of Iraq-supporting, bailout-defending Kevin "I'd literally trust [Obama's] judgment over my own" Drum (warning: his writing may cause drowsiness) and which attacked Ron Paul, not over his odious views on immigration, but because the latter wants to end the war on drugs, stop arresting sex workers and would have "sought Pakistan's cooperation" in the arrest of an international fugitive, things that were once known as Standard Left-Wing Positions.

So no, I'm pretty sure that, were she alive today, Mother Jones would not be reading Mother Jones.

Juan Cole's war on anarchism

As a liberal supporter of invading Iraq who apparently believed the Bush administration's rhetoric about freedom and democracy, and felt that bombs and military occupations would be the best means of promoting it, Juan Cole sure has a lot of nerve attacking anarchism as philosophy that depends "on a naive reading of social interest." And while I have my own criticisms of right-wing libertarianism, I can't help but note the incongruity of attacking folks like Ron Paul on the basis that their beliefs will lead to privatized, corporate warfare when the wars Cole has supported and continues to support depend on legions of private guns-for-hire and defense contractors like Halliburton and KBR.

Nominally about the recent GOP presidential debate, Cole's attack on anarchy -- from "anarcho-syndicalists like [Noam] Chomsky" to the aforementioned Paul -- is perhaps a sign that liberals like him are fearful the anti-state position is gaining traction, especially given the conspicuous lack of change since liberal savior Barack Obama moved to the White House. Indeed, that would explain why, instead of addressing the world we live in now, where a Nobel laureate is waging war in at least half a dozen countries with the help of an army of private war-profiteering corporations and their mercenaries, Cole focuses our attention on a scary future where, without the state, "warmongering corporations [could] pursue war all on their own."

"The East India Companies of Britain and the Netherlands behaved that way," Cole writes. "[And] India was not conquered by the British government, but by the East India Company. Likewise what is now Indonesia was a project of the Dutch East India Company."

However, while intended as a critique of anarchism, Cole's examples only bolster the critique of the state. The East India Companies, after all, were chartered by the British government, granted trade monopolies by the British government, and had their claim to properties, most of which were looted from poor foreigners, protected by the British government. And while I won't claim to speak for Ron Paul, most anarchists -- and it shows Cole's muddled thinking that he lumps "limited government" advocates like Paul in with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon & Co. -- don't just oppose "the state," they oppose the use of violence and coercion. It just so happens that states with their claims to a "legitimate monopoly on the use of violence" tend to be the greatest purveyors of it.

If in some future anarchotopia a private corporation -- let's not get into the fact that corporations are created by the state -- should wage war, then they would be acting like states and would be opposed just as vigorously. Indeed, to an anarchist the distinction between corporation and state is the same as a Christian's distinction between God and Jesus: though taking different forms, they're one and the same, the difference academic.

While Cole's fixated on a future of corporate war, he seems unaware that a world of Big Bad Corporations waging war on the world exists right now and that, rather than checking this aggression, the state is aiding and abetting it. Liberals can rail against Blackwater/Xe all they want, but in the end its Hillary Clinton's State Department that's giving them millions in tax dollars.

Speaking of oblivious, Cole writes:

Right anarchists seem not to be able to perceive that without government, corporations would reduce us all to living in company towns on bad wages and would constantly be purveying to us bad banking, tainted food, dangerous drugs, etc.

It's almost as if he's unaware we already live in a world where Goldman Sachs exists and where wages have been more or less stagnant since the 1970s. Instead of scaring his readers away from an anarchist world, he likely just left them wondering what the difference would be.

(My Saturday afternoon ruined via BDR)

'Either way, the problem is Republicans'

The liberal blogosphere is beyond parody at this point. Amanda Marcotte, last seen remarking that when it comes to the war on terror, Obama "has been wisely if quietly winding it down" -- tell that to a Pakistani, Afghan, Somali or Yemeni citizen -- offers two theories regarding the peace president's nature: that he's a benevolent man whose glorious progressive agenda has been blocked by the evil Republicans, in which case those at fault are the evil Republicans; or that he's an evil, vile man, in which case the blames lies at the feet of . . . those evil Republicans.

I'm rather fond of the latter theory:

This theory holds that Obama passed himself off as a moderate Democrat to get elected, but is in fact a secret conservative who has been aching for a chance to destroy Social Security, amongst other programs. I found this theory a little confusing at first, because it seemed to me that his secret plan would have been easier to enact when he had a majority party in Congress, so I asked around on Twitter, and this is the explanation I got: he couldn't destroy Social Security then, because there's enough liberals in the Democratic Party that they could have stopped him. It was only after Republicans got control of the House and went crazy that he had enough cover to do what he always hoped he could do.

The problem: Well, basically the Republicans. If the batshit crazy Republicans weren't there giving secretly conservative Obama cover, none of this would be happening.

So, from my point of view, no matter what evil or non-evil lurks in Obama's heart, the problem is that this country keeps electing frothing-at-the-mouth crazy Republicans, and if voters would stop doing that, we wouldn't be having one politically provoked crisis after another. Sure, if Obama is a secret conservative, that is a problem. But we can't actually know that. But what we do know for a fact is that no matter what lurks in Obama's hearts, none of this would be happening if Republicans didn't win the House. So I think that my priorities are just fine, thank you very much.

The premise is that all Bad, Evil Ideas are the exclusive intellectual property of the GOP. There's not even a throwaway line about the Blue Dogs. More troubling, however, is the idea that -- putting aside their origin -- Democrats like Obama ought not be held accountable when they, in the liberal blogger telling of it, take GOP ideas and run with them. Indeed, it's suggested that to do so would be to engage in the mere adolescent nihilism of a Nader-voting "newly minted leftist," one who fails to recognize that one party in this country is Good, the other Evil

Notice what's missing in all of this: the half-dozen wars the U.S. is openly fighting, including that since-forgotten humanitarian intervention to stop the Next Hitler in Libya, one Obama unilaterally (and illegally) launched and for which he has yet to receive congressional authorization. Marcotte ridicules the notion of Obama as dictator, but as president he of course has massive power and could have, for instance, begun pardoning non-violent drug offenders or prevented the Treasury Department from sticking taxpayers with the bill for bailing out Wall Street. When it comes to foreign policy, he really does have dictatorial power and as commander-in-chief could start bringing the troops home immediately, which you'll recall many liberals calling for from the back bumpers of their Volvos when that other guy was president and the murder of poor foreigners was still seen as an important, moral issue.

But we lefties don't care about that kind of stuff anymore, right? The killing is not being carried out by an evil Republican, so it's explainable: Obama's only killing people because of . . . . the evil Republicans. And that makes it okay, or at least less bad. Sure it's regrettable, if we can be bothered enough to regret it, but don't you say "impeachable" if you still want to get on MSNBC.

Can't we just talk about Eric Cantor?

Just in case you've gotten any ideas about Marcotte, though: "I'm going to be accused of being a partisan shill for Obama," she acknowledges. "I just want to say that I'm really not."

So that's settled.

Liberal politics

An excerpt from Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude:

He sat in a chair between his political advisers and, wrapped in his woolen blanket, he listened in silence to the brief proposals of the emissaries. They asked first that he renounce the revision of property titles in order to get back the support of the Liberal landowners. They asked, secondly, that he renounce the fight against clerical influence in order to obtain the support of the Catholic masses. They asked, finally, that he renounce the aim of equal rights for natural and illegitimate children in order to preserve the integrity of the home.

"That means," Colonel Aureliano Buendía said, smiling when the reading was over, "that all we're fighting for is power."

"They're tactical changes," one of the delegates replied. "Right now the main thing is to broaden the popular base of the war. Then we'll have another look."

One of Colonel Aureliano Buendía's political advisers hastened to intervene.

"It's a contradiction," he said. "If these changes are good, it means that the Conservative regime is good. If we succeed in broadening the popular base of the war with them, as you people say, it means that the regime has a broad popular base. It means, in short, that for almost twenty years we've been fighting against the sentiments of the nation."

He was going to go on, but Colonel Aureliano Buendía stopped him with a signal. "Don't waste your time, doctor," he said. "The important thing is that from now on we'll be fighting only for power."

Barack Obama, speaking to a group of college students back in March:

[Lincoln’s] first priority was preserving the Union. I’ve got the Emancipation Proclamation hanging up in my office. And if you read through it, turns out that most of the document is – those states and areas where the emancipation doesn’t apply because those states are allied with the Union, so they can keep their slaves. Think about that. That’s the Emancipation Proclamation. Right?

So here you’ve got a wartime president who’s making a compromise around probably the greatest moral issue that the country ever faced because he understood that right now my job is to win the war and to maintain the union.

Well can you imagine how the Huffington Post would have reported on that? It would have been blistering. Think about it. “Lincoln sells out slaves.” There would be protests. They’d run a third-party guy.

Moral integrity is for losers. And you want to win, right?

(via Tim Cavanaugh)

'Unconditional' allegiance is for machines, not people

"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."

-- G.K. Chesterton

Merely by uttering the word "war," that which is unquestionably a crime during times of peace -- murder, for instance -- becomes socially acceptable, "legal," lifting the burden of conscience from those tasked with killing on behalf of their nation's politicians. Those who would normally be hung for the supreme moral crime of taking another's life are instead given parades and medals.

Or so that's what one writer for the liberal American Prospect believes. The law, you see, trumps morality; what you or I may think is wrong -- like murder -- is of no consequence so long as a politician and the proper legal authority (dare not ask how it gained its legitimacy) says it's alright. Responding to my recent piece critiquing the mindless paeans to the "service" of military members that pop up on every American holiday, regardless of the unjust nature of the cause they serve, the Prospect's Adam Serwer denounced my disgusting attempt to treat soldiers as regular human beings, not amoral machines. Writing on Economist writer Will Wilkinson's Google Reader feed (via Ryan Bonneville), he wrote:

The above post is attacking servicememebers as dishonorable professional killers. Those are the words they've used. We should support servicemembers unconditionally because their service is unconditional, and I have yet to hear a rational argument for why allowing servicemembers to disregard civilian authority over the military is a good idea, which is essentially what calling for civil disobedience by servicemembers is.

Just as you wouldn't support a friend "unconditionally" -- I sure hope Jeffrey Dahmer's amigos abandoned him -- I dare say members of the military ought be held to the same moral standards as anyone else and at the very least not to have their immoral behavior (for which those who send them into war bear the bulk of the burden) cheered, their "service" fawned over. The same goes for their command-in-chief. If one's involved in the carry out of unjust wars of aggression as part of what Martin Luther King described as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, the U.S. government, then we shouldn't offer them unadulterated and unconditional praise, for starters. If someone's involved in an immoral enterprise, they should be called out on it and encouraged to follow their duty as a human being capable of moral thought to not perpetrate unjust killing, not cheered on and reassured that their line of employment is right and just.

Serwer thinks he has an answer for the controversial notion that one's moral responsibilities don't end the moment of enlistment:

What if General Petraeus decides that the Afghan surge isn't big enough, so he's morally obligated to take over and make the decision for himself, to save us from ourselves? He's morally obligated to protect his country in the way he thinks is best right? Who cares what the law says?

The whole point of civilian control is to ensure that the people with guns don't get to do whatever they want, that the power given them can only be used with the consent of the political branches, elected by the people. And if you don't think that power is being used properly, than you can change that through the political process.

But no one's arguing, of course, that soldiers should merely do whatever they feel. The argument, at least as I have made it, is that killing people is wrong, except in instances of absolute self-defense, no matter what politician or politically appointed court sanctions it. Now, abiding by one's conscience is typically consistent with the whole not murdering people thing -- poor foreigner or not -- but where it differs, it's subservient to that latter, foundational principal of any truly civilized society. Again, the argument is that people ought to defy orders to kill -- and ostracize, rather than worship, the institutions tasked with carrying out the state-sponsored carnage -- not that they should kill more people if they feel like it.

And instead of wading through a corrupt political process designed to thwart change and serve the needs of the powerful, the legitimacy of which Serwer asserts but does not bother to demonstrate, it's the responsibility of all human beings with a capacity for moral thought, be they uniformed or not, to reject blind obedience authority and the "legal" facade it provides to immoral acts. The idea that only the political process is an acceptable means of challenging injustice treats the average person as but an unthinking cog in the machinery of the state, bound to abide by whatever "lawful" edicts their rulers issue, a worldview that does not allow for principled civil disobedience. We, soldier and citizen, are not entitled to determine what's right and wrong, whether it be a preemptive war or, say, the institution of slavery -- that's left to legislatures.

As I argued on Wilkinson's Google Reader feed (you have to subscribe, I believe, to see all 60-plus comments):

God forbid someone exercise their own moral conscience when it conflicts with a "lawful" order to murder given by some politician. Us proles are powerless to shape the world we live in, you see -- and thank god for that. If soldiers ignored their orders to kill, why, all those wars the U.S. has fought as a last resort and only in self-defense over the last 60 years (help me out here) may never have been fought!

In all seriousness, though, praising as honorable U.S. servicemembers' "unconditional" (and vital) role in unjust wars of aggression -- holding out blind allegiance to authority as a virtue, not a vice, completely divorced from the direct consequences of that allegiance -- perpetuates a dangerous, ignoble myth that U.S. military actions are just or honorable when they are anything but. The U.S. military is not, TV commercials aside, a better funded Peace Corps. No, that doesn't mean we ought to go around spitting on the troops; recruiters, maybe. We're all fallible human beings capable of making morally questionable decisions (particularly if we should choose to be a mere unthinking, conscienceless tool of the state, "a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity," in the words of noted anti-American Henry David Thoreau). But glorifying what the military does as a public service is a disservice to millions of dead Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Iraqis, Afghans and Nicaraguans, to name a few. If we're going to make future wars of aggression less likely, we need to stop idolizing the solider as some democratic ideal -- and maybe then there will be less people willing to suspend their better judgment and fight them.

As for the "professional killers" bit: In my experience, actual members of the military are much less reticent to admit what it is members of the U.S. military are asked to do than writers for The American Prospect.

Serwer's rebuttal, in its entirety:

We do have some job openings, but nothing quite as prestigious as writing for Code Pink, I'm sad to say.

Seems like a nice guy.

Republicans may love war, but Democrats wage it

Liberals are a frustrating, silly lot. Confronted with the fact that the man they helped elect is fighting a half-dozen wars, including a patently illegal one with Libya, their response is to . . . hey! Aren't Republicans stupid evil hypocrites! Look at Michelle Bachmann!

And so we have Obama-booster and popular liberal blogger Digby, commenting on a recent piece by Matt Taibbi about the hypocrisy of conservatives who have learned to stopped worrying and love anti-interventionism now that a Democrat's in office, writing this bit of reassuring nonsense:

Plenty of Democrats switch positions on these wars depending on who's making the case as well. But the Republican Party and conservatism in general is organized around militarism and national chauvinism to a far greater extent than modern liberalism so I'd be less inclined to trust a "conservative pacifist" to follow through than I would a Democrat.

Whoa boy, where to begin? Granted, the worship of militarism may be a bit cruder at a Tea Party rally than at a Center for American Progress policy luncheon, but the idea that jingoism is largely, if not exclusively, a conservative phenomenon is something that, well, only a liberal incapable (or unwilling) to come to terms with the reality of their movement could say.

That conservatives organize around militarism to a "far greater" extent than Democrats may be a soothing notion to party activists, especially at a time when modern liberalism's crowning achievement, Barack Obama, is daily slaughtering Pakistani civilians with Predator drones, but, even were it true, it hasn't appeared to make a damn of a difference to the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen or Somalia. Argue about the rhetoric all you want, the policies sure aren't more peaceful.

And let's just look at history, shall we? World War I, Korea, Vietnam -- all bloodbaths carried out by Democrats, by progressive heroes Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and LBJ (with an assist from JFK). By contrast, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Rethuglican, campaigned on ending a war -- and actually did it. So did the bastard Richard Nixon, albeit belatedly.

"I figured out the other day," former Republican Senator Bob Dole remarked during a 1976 debate, "if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit." Dole was widely criticized for his remarks, but he was on to something: Democrats -- liberals -- love themselves a good freedom bombing, especially when cloaked in Kiplingesque humanitarianism.

"I remember when I was a teenager reading something from the Republican National Committee that said that Democrats start wars, Republicans end them," Congressman John Duncan, a Republican from Tennessee, told me in a 2007 interview. The point isn't that Republicans are reliable carriers of the antiwar flag, but rather that conservative and liberal politicians alike are fond of embracing antiwar rhetoric -- when out of power; we know what they do when their fingers are the ones on the trigger.

As for that bit about "national chauvinism" being more or less a conservative-only thing? One need only look to Obama's recent assertion, while justifying an illegal war, that "[s]ome nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different." If that ain't chauvinism, what is?

Yes, yes, of course the Republicans are awful. And no, you shouldn't place much faith in conservative pacificism. But here's the thing: if you care about peace, you shouldn't be inclined to trust any politician, even if they talk pretty and namedrop FDR. Peace isn't a part of what politicians do once in power, regardless of which party or movement to which they claim allegiance. Instead of self-serving myth-making, liberal bloggers would do well to turn their attention to their own movement's embrace of American exceptionalism, which is marginally more sophisticated than the competition's but no less deadly.