SmartRemarks

On June 12, even as the election in Iran was happening and sweeping everything else out of the news cycle (a subject on which much digital ink has been spilled, to which I have nothing to add except that it’s nice to see a population care enough about democracy to take to the streets over it; that Obama has been responding to the situation with admirable discretion; and that the conservatives criticizing him are idiots who understand nothing about public diplomacy and would probably still attack him if he released a statement celebrating motherhood and apple pie)… the Obama administration did something unfortunate that produced an incensed reaction from observers in the civil liberties and GLBT communities.

Namely, the Department of Justice submitted a legal motion [pdf] putting this administration on the record defending the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, and arguing to dismiss Smelt v. United States, the first same-sex-marriage related case to reach the federal courts.

This isn’t about the merits of equal marriage per se (which Obama has long been on the record as opposing, unfortunately). It’s a challenge to the validity of DOMA, under which the federal government (and other states) are not obliged to recognize same-sex marriages that are legally constituted in states that allow them (as is the case with these plaintiffs)—never mind that pesky “full faith and credit” clause, among other Constitutional provisions. It is, in short, a law that formally enshrines discrimination.

It was a bad law when Bill Clinton signed it, and it’s a worse one today now that the situation it contemplates is not merely hypothetical. And it’s a law that candidate Obama loudly opposed.

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Tags: Constitution, DOJ, DOMA, equal marriage, GLBT rights, Obama

Where did we leave off? 

I was writing about the difficulty of finding something meaningful to say in the wake of all the full-time, professional political bloggers out there. Too often I feel like I’m just offering a synthesis of what others have said, rather than any new insight.

Perhaps I’m holding myself to an arbitrarily high standard. Posting seems easier on political discussion forums, where I can just spout off some quick impressions of the issue of the day without necessarily worrying about providing proper background and context for everything, and where the ebb and flow of responses from other posters guides the structure and flow of the discussion, rather than having to organize it entirely on my own. Nonetheless, I ramble on… 

Thus:  I was also writing about the political environment in which the Obama administration operates, and the political pressures that have led the president to make some decisions that are very disappointing in the eyes of civil libertarians, and indeed of concerned citizens in general. Which, in the wake of events this past week relating to the disposition of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, leads us to the perplexing questions:

Why has Barack Obama backtracked so quickly from so many of the progressive policy expectations of his supporters?

and, moreover,

WHY does the mass media keep treating Dick Cheney as a credible public figure?

One of these questions may seem deeply relevant, the other facile… but the answers are connected at a deep level.

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Tags: blogging, climate, Congress, conservatism, Constitution, Dick Cheney, energy, Guantanamo, health care, international, journalism, libertarianism, media, Obama, Reid, Republicans, torture

My recent posts on Star Trek brought me more readers than anything else I’ve written in months, but unfortunately I don’t have anything new to say about that right now.

My posts about politics, by contrast, usually draw markedly less traffic than the ones about pop culture. Nevertheless, I enjoy the topic, and certainly don’t intend to stop writing about it.

The problem with writing about politics, however, is perhaps the same one that leaves my readership diminished:  there’s already so much other good political analysis out there in the blogosphere. The conventional wisdom found in the corporate media punditocracy, especially on television, is seldom worth the attention of thinking people, of course… but while it’s easy enough to ignore David Broder or Chris Matthews, David Brooks or Joe Klein, there’s a lot of genuinely sharp, insightful political commentary being done online these days. It often seems that by the time I’ve informed myself sufficiently about some new development to form an opinion, Glenn Greenwald or Jane Hamsher or Digby or any of a dozen others has already said everything I could, in pithier style and with better documentation.

(And then there are the folks spouting off from the other side, whose arguments are seldom as thorough but frequently much more infuriating. They too make demands on one’s time. Or, as one of my favorite cartoons puts it…) ->>

So it’s hard to keep on top of breaking news… but looking back later to consolidate information and analysis isn’t necessarily easier (think “drinking from a fire hose”), and still leaves me wondering whether such reflections really offer any fresh insight.

—

Here’s a For Instance. For several weeks now, I’ve been meaning to write about the subject of the OLC torture memos, and the furor both before and after their release, in light of how it reflects on the Obama administration’s lamentable hesitancy to repudiate some of the worst excesses of the previous administration. Let’s review.

Way back on March 3, things were looking good. On the very same day it was revealed that the CIA, back in 2005, had deliberately destroyed 92 interrogation videotapes in violation of a court order… we also learned that Attorney General Eric Holder had not only formally denounced waterboarding but also released nine previously secret Bush-era memos, in which John Yoo and other OLC apparatchiks asserted remarkable expansions of executive power, such as (e.g.) that the president’s “power to suspend treaties is wholly discretionary,” and that the Fourth Amendment (prohibiting search and seizure without probable cause) does not apply to domestic military operations. 

The ACLU (which had filed FOIA requests on both the videotapes and the memos) hailed the release, but insisted that for a full accounting of the previous administration’s excesses, “dozens” of other even more incendiary memos still needed to be released. And less than three weeks later, it appeared that at least some of them would be forthcoming, as on March 21 Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball reported that

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos [from 2005] that will lay out, for the first time, details of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration…

And that’s when the shit really hit the fan.

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Tags: Dick Cheney, Eric Holder, international, media, morality, Obama, OLC memos, Republicans, torture

Wednesday was Barack Obama’s 100th day in office. Everyone else has been talking about it. Why not me?

A hundred days is a pretty arbitrary number, of course. But ever since FDR used it as a marker in 1933 for taking quick action against the Depression, it’s been a convenient hook on which to hang stories about new presidents. Few of them compare to FDR, of course. Then again, few are up against the kind of problems he was.

These days, though, the times make the comparison seem a bit more apropos.

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Tags: Afghanistan, climate, diplomacy, DOJ, energy, EPA, FDR, George W. Bush, Obama, Timothy Geithner

Just another quickie, passing along some cheery news that left my jaw hanging open. In a shocking reversal of standard bipartisan practice, Secretary of Defense Gates actually wants to scrap some overpriced, unneeded weapons systems. Talk about a move that’s long overdue!

From WaPo (complete with all of Dana Milbank’s melodramatic-yet-frivolous stylings):

“We will end production of the F-22 fighter,” Gates announced matter-of-factly in the hushed Pentagon briefing room yesterday, dispatching Lockheed Martin’s $140-million-a-pop aircraft without even a hint of regret. “For me,” he added, “it was not a close call.”

…But the understated delivery obscured the boldness of what Gates was attempting: Calmly and methodically, he posed a direct challenge to the military-industrial complex.

Boeing’s Future Combat Systems fighting vehicles — kaboom!

Lockheed’s multiple-kill vehicle: killed.

Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics’ DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer with Raytheon electronics? Gates sunk their battleship.

The Lockheed VH-71 presidential helicopter and Boeing’s C-17 cargo plane? SecDef shot them down, too.

He even wants to cut back on the use of private contractors and return to a focus on civil-service professionals!

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Tags: federal budget, military, Obama, Robert Gates

Just a quick post to say hear, hear!!

President Obama told reporters in Turkey that America is not defined by any one religion. “I’ve said before that one of the great strengths of the United States is, although as I mentioned we have a very large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values,” said the president.

Also on Monday, the Associated Press reports, “Obama, making his first visit to a Muslim nation as president, declared Monday the United States ‘is not at war with Islam’ and called for a greater partnership with the Islamic world.”

Video also available at the link.

I fidn this every bit as heartening as the callout to nonbelievers in his Inaugural Address. It’s nice to have a president who actually understands the concept of diversity—not only globally, but the kind that begins at home.

Tags: Obama, religion

I don’t necessarily buy the notion that public discontent with the recent AIG retention bonuses, or with Wall Street’s role in the economic meltdown overall, is a signpost of resurgent populist feeling. (It takes more than fleeting moods to swing public sentiment in lasting ways.) Nevertheless, a lot of people apparently do, across the political spectrum… or at least find it convenient to say they do. The right wing, in particular, has familiar anti-populist memes ready and waiting.

This week’s Newsweek attempts to cover every possible point of view on the subject in nine separate essays, but they’re all wrapped in a cover that frames things in terms of “POPULIST RAGE,” in a big scary headline. In the conservative American Thinker, Richard Baehr expresses things more baldly, in a piece entitled “Class War In America”:
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Tags: conservatism, economy, Obama, populism

There’s been a lot of interesting political commentary going on this past week (just check out the industrious writers on my blogroll), but I admit that I haven’t felt inspired to chime in on it. Sometimes the weight of public affairs just seems overwhelming, and it helps to step back and focus on personal matters. However, there is one political meme that keeps recurring lately, in the public discourse and thus, also, in the back of my mind. It’s ubiquitous in the establishment press and on the internet; it came up repeatedly last week in Obama’s second press conference, and again today on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. And it’s certainly prominent in Congress.

Here’s the meme:  that Obama’s budget is too ambitious, since it dramatically increases the national debt (by what the CBO projects to be $9.3 trillion over ten years, as has been widely reported). That we’re all “fiscal conservatives” who naturally agree that deficit spending is A Bad Thing, and therefore that Congress clearly needs to scale spending back from what Obama has proposed.

There’s a simple question going unasked here:  why? Nothing about this meme is as self-evident as those who echo it seem to assume. 

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Tags: conservatism, Depression, economy, FDR, federal budget, financial crisis, Galbraith, history, Obama

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner today announced a new plan that will allegedly help stabilize the financial markets, restore institutions’ balance sheets, and thus ease the credit crunch with all its attendant ripple effects. It’s an unwieldy construct with multiple parts, but ultimately a lot of it comes down to using taxpayer money to help purchase “toxic assets.” (E.g., CDOs backed by MBSs, the stuff hedged by all those CDSs. Isn’t it fun to play with the new lingo we’ve all learned these last few months?)

The stock market seems to love the plan, seeing as how it surged several hundred points today. But does that mean it’s a good thing? 

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Tags: bailout, banking, economy, financial crisis, mark-to-market, Obama, Paul Krugman, Timothy Geithner

We’re all welcoming the arrival of spring, but in the Persian world, it’s not just a change of seasons, it’s a major holiday, a new year celebration known as Nowruz. And President Obama seized that occasion today to release a public message to the people and government of Iran, focusing on the theme of new beginnings in relations between Iran and the United States.

The three-minute message (released in English but with Farsi subtitles) can be viewed here or read here. It’s no understatement to call it a rhetorical masterstroke.

Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria wrote a column last week that elicited considerable debate, in which he framed Obama as moving to reverse the Bush administration’s “imperial foreign policy”:

As George W. Bush’s term ended, he had few defenders left in the world of foreign policy. Mainstream commentators almost unanimously agreed the Bush years had been marked by arrogance and incompetence. “Mr. Bush’s characteristic failing was to apply a black-and-white mind-set to too many gray areas of national security and foreign affairs,” The Post editorialized. … There was hope that President Obama would abandon some of his predecessor’s rigid ideological stances.

In its first 50 days, the Obama administration has naturally been consumed by the economic crisis, but it has nevertheless made some striking shifts in foreign policy. Obama announced the closure of Guantanamo and the end of any official sanction for torture. He gave his first interview as president to an Arab network and spoke of the importance of respect when dealing with the Muslim world — a gesture that won him rave reviews from normally hostile Arab journalists and politicians.

These initial steps are all explorations in the right direction — deserving of praise, one might think. But no, the Washington establishment is mostly fretting, dismayed in one way or another by these moves. The conservative backlash has been almost comical in its fury. … 

The problem with American foreign policy goes beyond George Bush. It includes a Washington establishment that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise as treason and negotiations as appeasement. Other countries can have no legitimate interests of their own. The only way to deal with them is by issuing a series of maximalist demands. This is not foreign policy; it’s imperial policy. And it isn’t likely to work in today’s world.

Zakaria’s certainly right about the overreaction from the establishment. It’s as if, after years of demonstrating how their approach = Epic Fail, the neocons nevertheless can’t fathom the idea that someone might want to try a different approach. For my own part, though, I’ve found Obama’s foreign policy to be not nearly as divergent from Bush’s as it ought to be:  too much of it seems like a continuation rather than a repudiation. For every overture toward Russia about useless missile shields on on side, there’s a risky buildup in Afghanistan on the other.

Nevertheless, as Zakaria accurately notes, Obama has at least taken some “steps… in the right direction.” And this is a huge one. As Glenn Greenwald puts it, “it’s inconceivable that anything like this video would have been possible at any point during the last eight years.”

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Tags: diplomacy, international, Iran, Obama