Done Dems?

Lieberman and Clark are smelling the coffee. Wes Junior enjoys the campaign while it lasts.

Comments

[Steve in CO]

I like Wes Jr's bluntness. The media has, despite his apoligists' protests, given George Walker Bush a very big pass.

[sam]

"We sacrificed a hell of a lot for this country over 34 years. We lived in a damn trailer when I was a freshman in high school."

If Bubba Clinton is the democratic standard, than I say Clark is presidential material!

The media has, despite his apoligists' protests, given George Walker Bush a very big pass.

Patriots don't express negativity towards a sitting war time prez. Get with the program or pack the bags for Gitmo!

[Steve in CO]

Patriots don't express negativity towards a sitting war time prez. Get with the program or pack the bags for Gitmo!

Sam,

You're kidding right? The problem is, we are at war with ourselves as much as with Al Qaeda, or are you too patriotic to admit that?

Steve

[Kevin Carson]

Uh, I think Sam's remarks were intended as sarcasm. But there are plenty of people who would make such a statement without irony.

Back when Kennedy commented on the Iraq war as something cooked up in Texas for political reasons, Joe Scarborough was aghast that any American would make such a statement "about the Commander-in-Chief in Wartime." He used that phrase several times, and you could hear the capital letters in every repetition. In the period before the war, when Daschle suggested that Bush might be misleading the public into war for less than honorable reasons, Laura Ingraham called it borderline treason. And right after Colin Powell's UN address, Bob Barr (with whom I generally sympathize) said that "loyal Americans" had the duty to give their "Commander-in-Chief" the benefit of the doubt in all his claims about what was happening the other side of the water's edge.

Never mind the inconsistency of Daschle and Kennedy on past Iraq policy, or their own arguably mendacious motives.

I am absolutely outraged by the suggestion, in all three of the above incidents, that Americans have some kind of "patriotic" obligation to believe the government when it's dealing with foreign affairs. Not to mention the American exceptionalism implicit in the assumption that the following are beyond the realm of possibilty, and that suggesting them is beyond the pale:

1) an American government lying to promote corrupt interests;
2) that foreign policy, as much as domestic policy, is subject to Acton's law, and that both alike may reflect special interests;
3) that the same corrupt ward heelers distrusted by small government republicans when they make domestic policy might be similarly untrustworthy in regard to foreign policy; and
4) that the U.S. government is a species of the genus government, and subject to all the moral failings of that genus.

The belief that one has a duty to stop one's ears and suspend one's critical faculties, in such circumstances, reminds me of the duty of all good Party members to perform doublethink when direct experience of reality calls into question the Party's claims.

[Kevin Carson]

According to the Constitution, BTW, the President is "Commander-in-Chief" only of the regular armed forces and the militia in national service--not of the country as a moral entity. That people like Scarborough and Barr toss the term around in that sense is just another indication of the Caesarism that our political culture has absorbed since 1941 or so.

[thoreau]

Kevin-

You filthy lefty traitor! To think that the government would ever lie to us about anything involving national security! Sure, they'll lie about everything else, but not that! National security is the only legitimate function of the federal government, and so it's the only place where they must be trusted.

[dj of raleigh]

> The problem is, we are at war with ourselves as much as with Al Qaeda,

[Andrew]

There probably ARE realistic limitations on immediate political debate in some societies facing an existential threat-- but the existence of the American republic, her immediate survival, has probably not been at stake at any time since the Civil War (when in fact, and despite Lincoln's foibles, elections were held in the Union, and voters were offered a real alternative). And certainly this isn't the case now.

There are also more restricted priorities when large numbers of American soldiers and sailors are in real jeaprody, as in WWII...when whole fleets could sink in the Pacific, Marine divisions were ground to hamburger on individual islands. and an army could have been lost in D-Day week.

(Perhaps, at the outset, an American Army was trapped in the Korean peninsula, and again right after the Chinese intervention.)

But even during VietNam, the safety of the whole bloc of troops committed could not seriously be a concern. No case whatever can be made for the immunity of decision-makers in the kinds of conflicts America engages at the present.

I don't know any hawks who talk this way in this forum-- I don't see how it would make any sense in the context...this would be a weirdly unpromising place to take such a tack.

[Jean Bart]

Andrew,

The last thing politicians want is questioning their foreign policy adventures.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Wes Jr. sounds like a bit of a wing-nut. His family lived in a trailer for a year, ergo his dad should be President?

Okay...