reflectivepundit

Supreme Court Ruling on Habeas Corpus: Terrorists Do Not Win

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Too weak to fight and defeat the security forces of states, terrorists engage in psychological warfare with two particular goals in mind: first, they aim at frightening, intimidating, and demoralizing the citizenry; second, they hope to push the authorities in democracies to overreact and violate the most esteemed democratic values, in particular the rule of law. There is ample evidence that major terrorist events result in high levels of public fear and anxiety. This was particularly true in the wake of 9/11. And in reaction to serious terrorist strikes and threats, whether domestic or transnational, democratic states tend to curb individual freedoms in the name of preventing further attacks. In this respect, the response of the U.S. government to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by a team of al-Qaeda hijackers was no exception. Several weeks after 9/11 Osama bin Laden told al-Jazeera reporter Taysir Alluni with obvious satisfaction that “freedom and human rights in America have been sent to the guillotine.” From the perspective of terrorists, success and failure of their violence are less measured by the number of people killed and maimed than by the psychological impact on and antiterrorism responses in societies they target. Terrorists win when they persuade citizens and elites of democracies that the most fundamental values of their societies, such as openness and restraints on executive power, are weaknesses.

This week’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision that ruled in favor of Guantanamo Bay detainees’ constitutional habeas corpus right—the right to challenge their detentions in federal court--denied al-Qaeda and terrorists in general a  victory in the on-going “value battle” against the United States. Whereas certain provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act as well as “aggressive interrogation,” “extraordinary rendition,” and outright torture practices provided terrorists with ample arguments to question and ridicule America’s commitment to democratic values, the latest majority ruling was a triumph for the very essence of democracy.

Attackdogs against Clinton, Lapdogs for Obama

By Brigitte L. Nacos
The other day, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, devoted her column to defend Michelle Obama against possible future attacks from Republicans. Dowd, who was and still is along with her colleague Frank Rich one of the leading attackdog among the perennial Hillary (and Bill) Clinton haters, wrote that “Mrs. Obama is the new, unwilling contestant in Round Two of the sulfurous national game of ‘Kill the witch.’ If anyone plays the “Kill the witch” game as ugly as it can get, it is columnist Dowd—at least when it comes to Hillary. Even after Senator Clinton threw the towel and endorsed Senator Obama, Dowd couldn’t stop going after Hillary. Nor could Rich or the obnoxious talking heads on cable television—especially those on MSNBC.

The attacksdogs against Clinton are lapdogs for Obama.

All during the campaign, female pundits were as sexist as their male counterparts in their united front against Hillary. And they fought mightily against those who accused them of gender bias. Dowd closed one of her recent columns with yet another defense against the charge of the mainstream media’s gender bias, when she wrote that Clinton “didn’t lose because she was a woman. She didn’t lose because
America isn’t ready for a woman as president. She lost because of her own — and her husband’s and Mark Penn’s — fatal missteps.”

Don’t believe it.

Even Katie Couric who knows a thing or two about gender bias in the media, especially when it comes to the coveted positions of TV-network anchors, said the other day,

“However you feel about her politics, I feel that Sen. Clinton received some of the most unfair, hostile coverage I’ve ever seen.”

According to one account, “Couric went on to say that latent sexism contributed, in part, to Hillary's defeat. She referred to one ‘rominent member of the commentariat’ who said he ‘found it hard to be objective when it came to Obama.’

‘That's your job,’ she remembers thinking when hearing this, before suggesting that he ‘find another line of work.’”

For these remarks, I am sure, Katie will be put through the wringer one way or the other by those in the media who can’t overcome their gender prejudices..

Obama: Of Celebrities and Star Appeal

By Brigitte L. Nacos
As I came to terms with the reality that there will not be a first female presidential candidate or female president for a while—and perhaps not in my life time; as I pondered  the choice between Senators Obama and McCain; as I figured that I cannot vote for Mr.McCain or leave the presidential line on the ballot blank; and as I have concluded that Mr. Obama is the best choice now, I read in an Associated Press dispatch that Barack Obama picked “President Kennedy's daughter Caroline to help him choose a [candidate for] vice president.”

I took a deep breath and wondered whether this was a joke. I have no negative feelings towards the Kennedys. Quite the opposite. But I do have a problem with a presidential candidate and his camp that obviously make decisions based on the input of perfectly fine persons who are well connected—politically, socially, and financially-- but have no track record whatsoever in politics and policy-making. Their qualification is celebrity and star power.

The choice of Ms. Kennedy as part of an important advisory panel reinforces the impression that part of Mr. Obama’s success is based on his appeal as a polit-star and his significant support by and reliance on celebrities and what one might call a pop movement. This tend happens to come at the expense of substance.
Perhaps, Mr. Obama and his crew picked Caroline Kennedy to thank the ailing U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy for his early endorsement. Perhaps, her role will be that of a prominent figure-head. But if that is the case, Senator Obama could have made her honorary chairperson of something less important now or later instead of part of a group that will reportedly come up with recommending the vice-presidential candidate. Just look at current Vice-President Dick Cheney and you know how important the second person in command can be.

Many so-called political experts told us in the last 24 hours that Barack Obama has a lot of work to do in order to unite the Democratic Party and win the support of Clinton supporters. I for one was ready to forget the outrageous overt or covert charges by Obama campers that women in my age bracket are not supporting Mr. Obama all along because they are outdated racists and feminists, or bitter failures.

But now, I am more sure than yesterday that  Senator Obama has indeed a lot of work to do in the months before Election Day—particularly, but not only in the selection of those who advise him on important matters during the general campaign and in preparation for his now possible presidency. Moreover, he needs to show better judgment than in the past in selecting those he associates with. 

Bill Clinton Hurt Hillary ‘s Quest for the White House

By Brigitte L. Nacos
I do not know, and do not want to know, what is going on in former president Bill Clinton’s head or elsewhere in his sagging body. But this much is clear: he has not helped but rather hurt his wife’s efforts to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination and the White House. It is quite possible and perhaps likely that he wanted to help Hillary’s cause, but one cannot help but recognize that he should have rather devoted his time to his own post-presidential causes and stayed out of Hillary’s campaign. 

As it is, the man who has been called the first Black president because he was able to relate to and communicate with African-Americans like no other chief-executive before him managed to cause or at least contribute to the perception that the Clinton camp “drew the race card” in the heated competition between Hillary and Barack Obama.

There is no doubt that the leading mainstream media organizations are full of people who did not and do not hide their preference for Senator Obama and who used every opportunity to whack Senator Clinton and Ex-President Bill Clinton—even by misinterpreting and blowing remarks made by the Clintons and their aides out of all proportions. 

But after taking so many shots below the belt during his eight years as president, Bill Clinton should have known how to play the media game to his wife’s advantage. Instead and probably unwittingly, he hurt his wife’s chances. It will be up to psychiatrists and psychologists to figure out how and why this happened. 

As far as I am concerned the last proof of Bill Clinton’s damaging behavior with respect to his wife’s campaign was his stunning remark today—one day before the last two primaries of the Democratic Party. According to press reports, the former president said at a stop in South Dakota, one of the last two primary states, “"I want to say also that this may be the last day I'm ever involved in a campaign of this kind.”

In other words, Bill Clinton threw the towel at a time when Hillary was still campaigning her heart out to make a strong showing in both South Dakota and Montana.

If Bill Clinton would have kept his mouth shut during the campaign (a lesson that Michelle Obama learned quickly after the uproar over her controversial statements), his wife may have won the nomination race.

It's Official: Obama is Bush

by David Epstein

With today's results in Puerto Rico, Hillary has retaken the lead in the popular vote. So we're now back
in 2000, with the role of Bush being played by Obama, the role of Gore being played by Clinton, and the role of Florida being played by, well, by Michigan and Florida.

The only question is whether the superdelegates are going to play the role that the Supreme Court played and call the election for Obama even though the popular vote is against him.

But wait, there's more. This isn't an election, of course -- it's a nomination process designed to yield the candidate most likely to win the general election. You would think that with things as tight as they are, the Obama people would feel obliged to make a positive argument about why their candidate fits this description, especially given his weak polling in swing states, and related J-curve problem that I noted earlier. But no, like Bush before him, he keeps talking about his delegate advantage and "playing by the rules," conveniently ignoring the fact that the superdelegates are part of the rules too.

The question still stands: will the superdelegates do their job, or go the path of least resistance, like the Supreme Court did eight years ago?

Obama’s “Victory” and the Democratic Party’s Undemocratic Rules

By Brigitte L. Nacos
The Founding Fathers established an electoral college for the election of presidents based on the votes allotted to each state in the union. It was not exactly a democratic solution in that it allowed for the election of a chief executive who did not win the nation-wide popular vote. When this happens as in 2000 when Al Gore won more than half-a-million million more popular votes than George W. Bush, the “winner’s” legitimacy is questioned—at least by those who supported the “loser.” In order to keep the states on board, the Framers compromised on several counts. 200 years after the U.S. Constitution was framed and with the experience of the 2000 debacle fresh on their mind, the Democratic National Committee did not have concerns like the Framers and should have democratized the party’s presidential primary rules and respected the one-person-one-vote principle. Instead, the party continues to allowed the allotment of delegates in the primaries and caucuses of the states to violate the most fundamental democratic requirement. As a result, with yesterday’s decision by the party’s Rules Committee to recognize the primaries in Michigan and Florida, Senator Hillary Clinton has officially won more popular votes during the nominating process than Senator Obama who was nevertheless allotted more delegates during the intra-party selection process.

To be sure, it is too late for this year’s nomination to design a primary system that does away with the flawed caucuses, does not allow Republicans and Independents to participate in the intra-Democratic competitions, and divvies up delegates according to the popular votes in states and territories.

And don’t expect that this will happen at the Democratic Party’s convention in Denver or thereafter. Yesterday’s meeting of the Rules Committee (now firmly controlled by the Obama camp as is the  Democratic National Committee) gave Senator Obama everything he could have hoped for, especially in the case of Michigan primaries. Although Clinton, whose name was on the ballot, won 55% of the vote there and Obama, who took his name on the ballot, did not receive any vote, the Rules Committee awarded Hillary Clinton with 69 delegates and Barack Obama with 59 (each with ½ vote per delegate at the Denver convention). How, in heaven, can you insist that a percentage of the votes is given to a candidate whose name was not on the ballot?

Well, the Obama camp did and prevailed. That's why I would not expect from those responsible for this exercise in the Democratic Party’s undemocratic rules of the game to push for reforms in the service of democracy.

Much was said during and after yesterday’s disappointing meeting about the need and prospect for party unity by Obama supporters on the Rules Committee and even some Clinton backers. But in view of the undemocratic primary process, Hillary Clinton’s lead in popular votes, and the stunningly unfair and undemocratic Michigan ruling, it will be very difficult—if not impossible—to unite the party—even against Senator McCain and his Bush-like agenda.

A Few Thoughts on McClellan's Book

by David Epstein

A few things puzzle me greatly about the publication of and hullabaloo surrounding Scott McClellan's new book, "What Happened." In no particular order, here they are:

1. Why does everyone pay so much attention to the fact that it was Politico.com who got an advance copy of the book and published some key quotes from it? Frank Rich, for instance, in his column today on the topic, makes a point of the fact that Politico "broke" the story.

Now, I believe in giving credit where it's due, but over the past decade or so I noticed that the first organization to announce anything acts as if it's just exposed Watergate. What did Politico do here? They bribed a bookstore employee to give them a copy of a book that was already finished and was scheduled to be released in a few days. They didn't tell us anything we wouldn't have known anyway, and they did nothing remotely approaching investigative reporting to do it. So why treat the organization as if it has suddenly acquired the stature of a major news outlet? Can someone who works in media help me out here?

2. If you look at the video clips of McClellan as press secretary, it's clear that he was one of the people who lied to us, the public, about what was going on. Then he has the nerve to blame the press, in part, for what happened?

The question he needs to be asked is, "Scott, you say that the press were 'complicit enablers' of the run-up to the Iraq War. But you were one of the people who kept spewing the administration line to everything question that reporters tried to raise. So what magical questions could the press have asked you that would have made you stop lying and, instead, tell the truth about what was going on? And if there were no such questions, then what right do you, of all people, have to hector the press on this?" It's almost obscene.

3. The title of the book is "What Happened," and as the editor of Perseus Books, McClellan's publisher, said in an interview, this was the question they pushed McClellan to answer: how could have things gone so wrong?

But why is this an interesting question any more? We know that things went wrong because the people in power sucked. They were mendacious, egotistical, self-aggrandizing bastards who didn't really give a damn about public policy. What would you expect? This is exactly the type of person you don't want in office, and it's why the Republicans are going to be voted out of power decisively in November.

And if McClellan was peripheral to the policy making process he perhaps shares less of the blame for what went wrong, but how could he tell the press with an apparently straight face that he knows Karl Rove is a man of the highest ethical standards, so he couldn't possibly have had anything to do with the Plame affair? No one, and I mean literally no one, in Washington believed Rove was just some innocent nice guy who would never engage in political shenanigans. This crosses the line between being idealistic and being criminally naive.

Where Things Stand: Clinton Has the Better Chance to Win the General

by David Epstein

As the primary season winds down, it's useful to take a look at the whole picture on the Democrat's side. In just about all respects, the race was a tie, as illustrated in the figure below. After the last set of primaries, Obama leads in the popular vote by 50.1% to 49.9%.* Due to the arcane delegate allocation formulas, this lead is magnified to 52.5% to 47.5% in the pledged delegate count.

As the figure shows, these leads are miniscule compared with the range of possible outcomes. Still, if that were all we had to go on, Obama could make a claim that, no matter how close, he's the winner, and that's that.

But this isn't taking place in a vacuum. The point of a primary is to pick the candidate with the greatest chance of winning the general election. Period. And to this end, Clinton has the strongest cards on her side of the table. First, as the figure shows, she leads in the electoral college votes of the states she's won by a whopping 308 to 221, or 58.2% to 41.8%. Moreover, as I explained in my last post on this topic, Obama has a "J-curve" problem; he's winning the states that were either strongly democratic or strongly republican in the past two elections, while Clinton is winning the swing states. If you're a democratic strategist, this makes you worry that he won't run as well in Clinton in the states that count for reversing the results of the last two elections.

Again, this argument has nothing to do with the race of voters, the race of candidates, their gender, and so on. It's just the obvious set of numbers to look at when you're trying to prove which candidate will do better in the general election. Obama should make a substantive argument as to why he thinks he's better positioned to win in November, or so the right thing by the party and just exit the race in favor of Clinton.

* Of course, these days, you can't give primary results without explaining how you're dealing with all the "tricky" state results. I'm counting Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington by estimates of the popular vote, since no official results were released. I'm counting Florida straight up, as this is, statistically, about where the result would have been if you extrapolate from similar states. And for Michigan I'm using the "10% rule," which says Hillary would have won by about 10%, as she did in the other big Midwestern industrial states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey. Note that this is less favorable to Hillary than counting only her votes in Michigan and none for Obama, or counting her votes and giving him the "Uncommitted" vote. Either of these methods put her in the lead for the popular vote, but I don't think they're realistic, and as a superdelegate I'd want a fair estimate of what the result would have been if those two states had voted regularly, like all the others, and this is probably the best guess.

Bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and Al Qaeda: Irrelevant?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Last summer President George W. Bush spoke at an Air Force Base in Charleston, S. C. It was another of his “al-Qaeda speeches” in which he emphasized the grave terrorist threat from al-Qaeda, its affiliates in Iraq and elsewhere to justify the continued Global War on Terror—especially in Iraq. By my count, in that particular 3505-word and less than 30-minute speech the President mentioned al-Qaeda 91 times, Osama bin Laden 23 times, and Ayman al-Zawahiri and other al-Qaeda and alleged al-Qaeda leaders 18 times. Since then, bin Laden’s core terrorism organization that is hiding out and operating from the mountains of Pakistan regained strength according to the National Intelligence Estimate. But whereas President Bush, his administration and the news media hyped every bin Laden message, when al-Qaeda Central was weakest and trying to recover from its post-9/11 fate, Washington’s decision-makers and the media have all but ignored bin Laden’s latest communications—in spite of his organization’s reported revival. Thus, when the second bin Laden audio tape in two days was released last weekend, it was not commented on by high administration officials and not included in the media’s “breaking news” items.

At first sight, one would applaud this waning attention to the publicity-hungry al-Qaeda leadership. After all, terrorist strikes and the threat thereof are most of all means to intimidate foes and impress friends and potential supporters. Moreover, leaders of terrorist organizations strive for legitimacy on the domestic or the world stage—or both. When the heads of government react publicly and swiftly to such communications, they treat the bin Ladens and al-Zawahiris of the world like legitimate leaders and unwittingly enhance their status among those in whose name they claim to act.

Yet, I wonder about this sea change from public over-attention to al-Qaeda messages to mostly ignoring such communications in public discourse.

The following lines are from an on-line ABC News report by Brian Ross and Rehab El-Buri (headline: “New Bin Laden Tape: Who Cares? Al Qaeda Leader Losing Relevance”) about one of bin Laden’s latest audio tape releases:

“Isolated and in hiding, Osama bin Laden's taped messages no longer have the power to send shivers through the Western world. The release overnight of his third audiotape message of 2008, timed to the 60th anniversary celebration of the founding of Israel, provided proof the al Qaeda leader is alive but also showed his desperate attempt to remain relevant.

‘He's definitely found himself on the back burner,’ said former FBI agent Brad Garrett, an ABC News consultant. ‘It's a case of measured irrelevance. We used to do back flips when one of his tapes would arrive but no longer,’ Garrett said.”

Someone Should Tell Bush What "Appeasement" Really Means

by David Epstein

The discussions so far of the outrage caused by Bush's remarks in Israel center around the President's breaking the norm of not conducting domestic politics on foreign soil. What has received less attention so far is the fact that Bush is using words that he -- and his speechwriters -- apparently doesn't know the meaning of.

Read the statement in question again:

Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.

We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

The senator in question is William Borah (R-ID), and if you know what you're talking about, then the word you expect to hear describing his comment is "hubris," not "appeasement." To appease someone is to concede something to them in return for the expectation of future concessions; this was Chamberlain's mistake in the Munich accords. What Borah was suggesting was -- well, it's hard to know exactly what he was thinking of, but he certainly wasn't saying that we should have bought Hitler off in return for promises of good future behavior.

So what should we make of Bush's remarks? Do they mark a shift in US policy that we will no longer have talks with bad guys since this is nothing more than appeasement? Will we break off all communications with North Korea tomorrow? Will we disavow the negotiations with Libya that recently bought us success? Of course not -- no one expects Bush to make sense any more. And it's probably better that way; we're much better off for the next eight months having the rest of the world ignore all of Bush's comments regarding US international policy.

By the way, Bush's stupidity has a ripple effect on all the right-wing drone commentators -- they don't know what they're talking about either. One of them got called out, hilariously, by Chris Matthews here.