"The tough guy who got his ass kicked with 'Twitter'"

Yes, it's true. I just steal all my material from Sullivan. Because he's a badass like that.

Force as a governing philosophy, same as it ever was

This is what it looks like.

Bloody Saturday in Tehran









"in Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat - blood everywhere - like butcher" - Allah Akbar



And this is how the law is and always has been used by those who abuse power.

Fershteh Ghazi (Iranbaan):

“Head of parliament’s judiciary committee: Mousavi accountable for illegal protests, can be pursued legally.”

“Iran MP: Ground ready to legally pursue Mousavi for ‘acting against national security.”

“Head of the Judicial Commission of Majlis has requested the judicial pursuit of Mir Hussein Mousavi.”


Just in case you weren't sure what you were signing up for.

The spoils of power. Enjoy.

Barack Obama, Come to Save the Day

From my pal, Foutsc and his buddies over at Nietzsche is Dead.



Kind of foolish our expectations of Presidents and political folks of all stripes, if we'd step back to think about it, a moment.

The lucky thing is that they can only be in office, and swimming in the waters of their own bullshit, for a short time. And then we can move on to a new Messiah.

Kind of dumb for Americans to behave this way, don't you think?

Maybe we're better off standing on our own two feet.

And expecting our government to treat us like grown-ups rather than like wards of their largesse. And power.

I know you are, but what am I

Pluck beams from your own eye before plucking splinters from the eyes of your neighbors. Isn't that what Jesus said?

Apparently, Michael Barone, as usual, didn't get the memo.

The Adolescent Angst of Barack Obama

"There is a tendency for newly installed presidents, like adolescents suddenly liberated from adult supervision, to do the exact opposite of what their predecessors did. Presidents of both parties indulge in this behavior, though Democrats who campaign as candidates of hope and change are more likely to do so.

Some of this is a legitimate response to the political process: Voters tend to elect presidents who seem to possess qualities and views they thought lacking in their predecessors. But some of it, and especially in the case of Barack Obama, seems to come from an adolescent-like confidence that everything done by those who came before is (insert your own generation's expletive here).

We have seen this spectacularly in the dozen days since the June 12 Iranian election. Back in July 2007, Obama said that he would meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other tyrants without preconditions. Grownup squares like George W. Bush wouldn't talk to these guys, so as the avatar of the generation of hope and change, Obama would. Obama figured he was cool enough to get the mullahs to agree to renounce nuclear weapons and all that hate stuff...

...A regime of tyrants dedicated to hatred of America, Britain and Israel is not going to be persuaded to abandon a central goal by even the most dazzling display of adolescent charm.

The other example of adolescent rejection of a policy has come on missile defense. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Democratic politicians opposed missile defense on the grounds -- mistaken in my view, but arguable at the time -- that it would destabilize the balance of nuclear terror between the United States and the Soviet Union. Democrats have clung to that position even after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Obama, as a senator and presidential candidate, joined them, routinely expressing doubts that missile defense could ever work.

As president, he has singled out missile defense for cuts, even in the face of missile launches by North Korea and evidence of continuing missile development by Iran. Bush abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and pushed ahead on missile defense, so it must be bad even if there's no U.S.-Soviet balance of terror to destabilize anymore.

Fortunately, there has been some adult supervision: Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in anticipation of a North Korean launch, has activated missile defense operations in Hawaii.

Obama has not taken an adolescent approach across the board. Despite the yearning of many Democrats for American defeat in Iraq and withdrawal from Afghanistan, he has pushed for something like victory in those theaters.

But he is persistent in seeking negotiations with the mullahs and obviously disinclined to increase the small chance of the far more promising outcome of regime change. Plus, Obama shows a continued distaste for missile defense when tyrants are aiming missiles at us and our friends.

These moves show an adolescent determination to renounce the policies of those who came before, no matter what. As parents know, it takes time for an adolescent to grow up."

Could everyone in the room raise their hands who is honestly confident that what Michael is demonstrating in this column is grown-up behavior?

Is this what Michael teaches his children? To mock those he disagrees with rather than engage them honestly? To mock their President when they disagree with his policies?

Mocking opponents is hardly a conservative beam. Beams aplenty to go around on this one.

But is this really what grown-up behavior looks like? Really?

The irony, here, is that Barack has never spoken of Michael Barone in such terms that I have ever heard. I've never heard him be so dismissive of anyone.

Because, Michael, what you are missing, here, is that he really is the grown-up in the room on this discussion. I may disagree with him. On many things.

But the truth is that I trust Barack Obama to be a grown-up and honestly engage me around those disagreements much more honestly and respectfully than I would ever expect from you.

And that is how a grown-up behaves. Whether your children have an appropriate role model for those qualities or not.

Jesus would be a good role model to consider on this one, Michael. I really don't remember him talking about the Pharisees this way. I remember him disagreeing with their policies. But I don't remember him trying, lamely, to mock his way through a discussion that he really just didn't understand very well.

Barack is doing a fine job on Iran, is the simple fact of the matter. He's not making huge inroads. But neither is he taking us as clearly backward, by any objective standard, as his predecessor was. His concerns about making the United States the issue rather than the corrupt Iranian elections the issue is clearly legitimate and being borne out to any honest observer, even if you would prefer a different approach. And, regardless, on the larger issue, he happens to be right. It really doesn't matter what the U.S. President does other than speak honestly and let the Iranians resolve this issue as a matter of Iranian democracy and not as a matter of American swagger.

What is terribly ironic about Michael's column is just how blind he is to how little maturity and thoughtful engagement his thinking demonstrates in that piece. As if black were white and white were black.

A lot of that going around these days. Longer we bullshit ourselves, the more get to pretend, I suppose.

In the meantime, perhaps we should take the ramblings of folks like Michael Barone as seriously as they deserve.

And, thankfully, we have a President of the United States who can and will do just that.

Courage

It goes without saying that what we are witnessing in Iran is a demonstration of enormous courage.



Very moving to see real courage challenge the cowardice of power and the corruption it reaps.

Would that liberal democracies of the West would show similar courage.

Liberty, like love, is easily taken for granted. But, like love, it is where real courage lies.

I
Have
Learned
So much from God
That I can no longer
Call
Myself

A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim
A Buddhist, a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of Itself
With me
That I can no longer call myself
A man, a woman, and angel
Or even pure
Soul.

Love has
Befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turned to ash
And freed
Me

Of every concept and image
My mind has ever known.

-Hafiz, Sufi poet (1315-1390)

The politics of irrationality

Do you think either of these parties will take a moment to notice that neither of them are getting anything they want?

Palestinians angered by Netanyahu peace terms

Probably not. How sad and foolish the road that power politics paves.

Force as a governing philosophy, the saga continues

For those in the West - especially those doing so and perversely calling themselves "liberals"; where is George Orwell when we need him - this is what it looks like.

North Korea sentences US reporters to 12 years labor

I also want all immigration hardliners to take note. Their logic is the same. It is as ugly there as it is here.

It's such a clever game, isn't it? We give the harshest sentence for something that shouldn't even be sentenced. And then we show mercy. So everyone knows what nice guys we are.

That is what will likely happen here. Washington will engage diplomatically. The journalists will be released for some condition from Pyongyang. And we will continue the dance of dominance and resistance and all of the ugly manipulations of power until we secure what we really need which is a better working relationship with the DPRK, which does not allow them to bully either their Southern neighbors or anyone else for that matter, but which focusses on peaceful, constructive engagement that facilitates free markets and democratic reforms, and perhaps lays the groundwork for some realizable and verifiable assurances around the development and use of nuclear weapons, patiently and far more effectively than the foolish beyond words dance of aggression that we have been engaged in for the last several years.

This nonsense needs to end. The current cycle of provocation takes us farther away from resolution not closer.

It is time to move beyond the wrongheaded and counterproductive policy of aggressive diplomacy to get to something that will actually work.

What is at stake

I really wish people in America and all the liberal democracies would stop talking about liberty as if it didn't matter. If there is any one movement that should offer some reminder that it does, the '89 protests at Tiananmen should be the one.

China, 20 Years After Tiananmen Square: Liberty Has Many Faces

My favorite story:

"Li Yi, 11

Rising seventh-grader

Li Yi yearns for the kind of freedoms familiar to most kids. 'In my eyes, freedom means that parents don't force me to do something I don't want to do,' he said.

Yi loves to paint. He dreams of one day designing clothes or buildings. His parents, however, think the apparel business is too hard. There could be many years when Yi would receive no orders for his clothes. "They don't think I draw well," he confided.

Instead, his parents want him to graduate from a good university and join a big, stable company. But that doesn't interest him.

'I want them to understand what's in my mind,' he said."

Acton was right. Power corrupts. But before it does, we're not all that different.

For those who take the courage of those kids for granted, fuck you very much.

For everyone else, real progress this way lies.

The Big Us and the Little Us

Charlie Cook in the current National Journal (via Frontpage magazine, strangely; if anyone is guilty of what Charlie is concerned about in this column, outside of the Nation and Democracy Now, it is David Horowitz and his hateful ilk over at Frongpage).

Enough with the Selective Outrage

"Someone recently asked me what, after all these years around politics -- 25 years of covering politics, 37 years involved in one way or another -- I liked best and what bothered me the most.

To my alarm, I found myself exhibiting far more passion in delineating what I didn't like: the increasingly hateful tone of the discourse, the hypocrisy of selective outrage and the feigning of disgust over behavior of an opponent while turning a blind eye when it occurs in one's own party.

To be sure, one can go back to the earliest days of our country to find hateful behavior in the discussion and execution of American politics. But there is far more today than when I worked on my first campaign as a senior in high school in 1972 or worked on Capitol Hill while attending college starting in 1973.

People rarely stop at simply disagreeing now. For many, if someone has a different position on an issue, it isn't enough to think them wrong -- they must be stupid; they must be corrupt; their motives must be questioned. Just believing someone is wrong isn't sufficient anymore.

Disclosure and embarrassment were once considered enough punishment. Now, we want investigations, "truth commissions" and punishment, what some have come to call the criminalization of the political process. It isn't enough to beat someone. You must try to throw them in jail or, at the very least, cost them a fortune in legal fees. The fact that neither side can afford that level of scrutiny seems lost on many.

The problem with this, beyond simply being narrow-minded, is that it makes it harder for those individuals to work together on some other issue where they might actually agree. The way Capitol Hill and politics is supposed to work is that while we may disagree on X today, we might agree and work together on Y tomorrow.

But the growing relish and intensity of ad hominem attacks makes such a scenario more difficult to achieve, leading Congress to become increasingly dysfunctional, regardless of which party is in charge...

...It's watching these kinds of things that make long-time observers cynical and jaded. There is so much to be faulted and so much hypocrisy from each side that it would strike me as difficult to, over a long period of time, see either side as that of truth, justice and prudence. It comes down more to which side is the lesser of two evils, the sides changing with some degree of regularity."

Charlie seems to argue for more equitable scandal-mongering among both parties within their own ranks.

I'm pretty clear that the scandal-mongering is the problem.

What is so difficult about learning to be decent to one another?

Nothing, is the answer. We just don't want to do it. For fear that the world will become an ugly, scary place if we do.

Too late, I say.

When I was a little boy, there was this really wonderful book I read after Sunday School called the Big Me and the Little Me. It was all about the choices we make when we face tough situations in life. To be the Big Me or the Little Me. React like a spoiled and destructive child. Or take a deep breath and be the Big Me in the face of the difficulties of life.

Only to find out that, when push comes to shove, on the big questions, many people too often choose the Little Me. No matter how old they get.

It's long past time for us to get bigger than this.

A good start

Lots of people in politics, around the globe, have similar mea culpas to offer up for undermining reasonable, open-minded, and open-hearted discussion and engagement.

How I (and Other "Pro-Life" Leaders) Contributed to Dr. Tiller's Murder

How refreshing that some of us have to courage to do so.