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Saturday, February 27, 2010
 
Obstructionist

  Marc Thiessen, a former Bush-Cheney speech writer and now columnist for the Washington Post, says that President Obama is the real obstructionist in Washington these days Obama is the real obstructionist at his health-care summit. This is for the bipartisan health care conference he set up last week to hear out republican ideas. Thiessen is up-set over the set-up. That is upset that anyone would call their bluff over their complaints of being shut out of health care reform. They had few ideas on the matter and no real intention of offering even those. All their talk of scrapping the democratic plan and starting over from scratch is merely an attempt to keep any legislation from being passed before the midterm elections. The republicans are advancing the premise that Health Care Reform is unpopular and that the American people do not want it. A state of affairs that only an expensive and sustained public relations campaign relying heavily on fear uncertainty and doubt maintains. Without which (they are well aware) the polling would shift back to neutral or likelier positive.

 Thiessen's main hobby horse (  PostPartisan - Bipartisanship breaks out in Washington ) is apologizing for Dick Cheney's brutalist-lite imperial policies: continual executive wars, amorphous ruled indefinite detention,"interrogation" procedures that intentionally blur any possible boundaries. He has written a book arguing that torture is a perfectly adequate and perfectly Catholic technique, and besides water boarding isn't really torture anyway Beliefs - Marc Thiessen Gets an Earful for Waterboarding Views - NYTimes.com. This is because US military personnel are willing to undergo the procedure voluntarily. This latter is a reference to what the Navy called SERE school training (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape). Which is misleading for two reasons. In the first instance is not truly voluntary.The Navy didn't require this training of all when I was in, but only of flight crew and intelligence officers. For those it was required to stay in their assigned billet. The officer's in the squadron I was in harbored no fond feelings towards those who conducted this school. Who were for that matter not trying to break them and extract information from them. Not trying permanently shatter the psyches of newly trained officers and skilled enlisted, nor preclude the possibilities of accidental injury fatal or otherwise.  A more genuine test for equivalence would to look for for volunteers, if they were to be stamped with al Qaeda tattoos and handed over to CIA contractors (ex Blackwater) who in turn would be told they were actual terrorist killers and were in possession of certain information about a ticking time bomb. That might be a test.  

 Beyond this one of the primary failings of such enhanced interrogations and detainments is their assumption of perfect knowledge. Essentially punishment is being applied before the mechanisms for establishing guilt or intent. These would be mechanisms of jurisprudence, not coercion. Implicitly guilt is already assumed under the apologist's way. There will be reference at this point to "a state of war" or "taken on the battlefield" but behind these simple phrases there is a world of indistinct particulars that few would care to be on the wrong side of. At some point there has to be a claim, evidence for that claim, and impartial judgement of the claim.  They fired Froomkin only to hire this fool. "Post-partisan?"  More rather Post disgrace.


 At a time when Republican leaders cry crocodile tears over the "Lost Year" for the nation. and bemoan the prospect of three more before this "one-term president" is sent packing. It is worth a quick look at the principles they believe they stand on.  Libertarians in both their teaparty convention (a bunch of mad hatters) and in the conservatives convention Conservative Political Action Conference - Wikipedia proclaim loudly that regular republicans are just disguised democrats. Big government wolves in small government sheep clothing. I'm not sure if that analogy serves. Small governmenters are supposed to be rugged freebooting big dogs, Wolves of the world who don't need no stinking government looking over their shoulder. Libertarian or small-government conservative. the only real definition of this category is they are people currently without power-of-office or purse-string. If those parameters change, small no longer holds.

 Those that have closed the chapter on the era of "big government", understood a particular way - as a Lyndon Johnson style "great society" as Nordic Socialism - should understand that there are many roads to larger governments. The great society was just one. Everybody has some things they like to have money spent on, nurtured senses of natural entitlement or rules that oughta be.


  A certain size and level of involvement of engagement is needed for a government to be sufficiently and necessarily able to effect change on the society it is charge of. To be a government of, for, and by the people. To have elected officials whose names you at least know and political destinies you can to some degree change. Political power does not cease to exist if you simply decline to build a formal institution for it. Nor if removed from government does it simply pool warmly around your feet like a private fortune. It withdraws from points you have knowledge of, or can control. It goes to the wealthy private and ruthless, industrial shadows, who will have control over the shape of your lives, well-being, education and future, at their disposal. The rules and remaining institutions are theirs. These men and women, then, are your masters, your rulers, your princes.


11:43:44 PM    comment [];trackback [];


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