World Watching And Politics

What Is An America Hater?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Palin and some Republican surrogates are trying to equate liberalism and anti-Americanism. This week, Michelle Bachmann, newly elected Republican in Minnesota, called on the media to investigate the so-called “liberals” in Congress to determine if they were “Pro American” or  “Anti American.”  She “reasons”  that if people have negative views of the U.S. then they are anti-American.  Bachmann says “I’m very concerned that he [Obama] may have anti-American views.” She calls on the media to launch a “penetrating expose and take a look … at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-American or anti-American.”  She adds: “I think people would love to see an expose like that.”

All my life I thought the essence of democracy was the freedom of an informed electorate to demand transparency and accountability of our elected officials and policy makers.  Never once in my life did I ever think I was being an America hater by working for a better America!  Must we turn a blind eye and stay silent if we think our precious country is being led in the wrong direction?  Like the good Germans did? Even McCain is calling for change.  Does that mean he is anti-America?  It seems to me that if I didn’t care for my country I would just sit on my butt and do nothing. For the life of me, I don’t understand where this nonsense is coming from! Some deep-seated visceral fear?  Of what?

Now we have McCain’s surrogates trying to link Obama with William Ayers and the Weathermen, a radical antiwar group during the Viet Nam war. The people who lived during that desperate and bewildering time and understood the anger toward the military industrial complex hell-bent on war are still around…many later voting for Nader which threw the win to Bush…or not voting at all which still helped Bush. Although the end did not justify the means, and the deaths that occurred were tragic, it did help stop the war. (watch “Fog Of War” an award-winning 2004 documentary interview of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.) I pray these folks vote pragmatically this time.

That was 40 years ago. This is now. Ayers, along with many of his generation, has discovered that patiently working within the system is a more efficacious way to encourage change. A person deserves a second chance and recognizing that a democracy depends on an enlightened electorate, he has made the most of it…becoming a respected university professor who happened to sit on the same education reform board chaired by Obama that was funded by the Republican Annenberg Foundation (whose purpose is to advance the public well-being through improved communication)and endorsed by Chicago Mayor Daley. Ayers could have become a depressive drug-addled destitute living on the streets along with the many other dissilusioned Viet Nam war vets. But he didn’t. He had the courage to face society, get off his butt, and become one of it’s good citizens. I for one am happy that he did not succumb to nihilism but instead channeled his passion and intelligence into long term benefit for our country.

Fortunately, Obama has been vetted by earnest peers, politicos, professionals, educators,  middle America and the street alike…and by the super delegates during the primaries. And for all it’s ills, by the media.  If Obama was such a risk, these folks would have stopped him long ago. His endorsement tally was at 55 and McCain’s at 16 as of Saturday with the LA Times endorsement. Other major endorsements for Obama include those of the Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the St Louis Post-Dispatch, the Toledo Blade, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Nashville Tennessean and the Spanish-language dailies La Opinion in Los Angeles and El Diario -La Prensa in New York.

His hometown newspaper the Chicago Tribune has endorsed a democrat for the first time in its 161-year history noting that it was breaking with a long tradition but justified the shift by citing what it called Mr. Obama’s “honor, grace and civility” under pressure and criticizing Mr. McCain’s choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, which it described as a failure of judgment in which Mr. McCain put his campaign ahead of the country’s needs. “We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions,” the newspaper said of Mr. Obama. “He is ready.”

And I haven’t even mentioned magazines like the New Yorker who has only endorsed one other candidate in it’s 83 year old history or Esquire Magazine that has never endorsed a candidate in it’s 75 year history. Then there are luminaries like Colin Powell who endorsed Obama this morning on Meet The Press saying  that “I think he is a transformational figure. “I come to the conclusion that because of his ability to inspire, because of the inclusive nature of his campaign, because he is reaching out all across America, because of who he is and his rhetorical abilities — and you have to take that into account — as well as his substance — he has both style and substance,” Powell said. “He has met the standard of being a successful president, being an exceptional president.” Powell noted that McCain has been a good friend for 25 years, but expressed disappointment in the negative tone of the GOP campaign, as well as in McCain’s choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as the vice presidential nominee.  And Christopher Buckley, who, after endorsing Obama, left the conservative “National Review” that William Buckley, the godfather of conservatism, founded saying that were he alive today his father would be dismayed with the Republican party…especially for it’s pick for VP. Even Christopher Hitchens has endorsed Obama.

Please excuse the pun, but they can’t all be “out in left field.”

McCain is desperate and has nothing left in his toolbox but to galvanize the ill-informed voter over ugly sideline distractions. I just hope people read. Our country depends on it.  It was Bernard Baruch, economic advisor to Wilson, who said, “If you get all the facts, your judgment can be right; if you don’t get all the facts, it can’t be right.”

How Do We Know The World?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

 March 12 update:  This, of course, was before the crash.

A conversation with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft
Two former national security advisors look at how the world has changed.

September 28, 2008

This spring, two of the most respected figures in American foreign policy sat down to talk about the United States and its place in the world. Zbigniew Brzezinski served as national security advisor to President Carter. Brent Scowcroft was national security advisor to presidents George H.W. Bush and Gerald R. Ford. Their conversation was moderated by David Ignatius, a columnist for the Washington Post. The following are edited excerpts

* Ignatius: I want you to talk a bit more about the nature of American leadership in this very complicated world. First, is American leadership necessary?

Brzezinski: It can be a catalyst. Not for actions directed by the United States but for actions that the local community — maybe we can call them stakeholders in a global system — is prepared collectively to embrace. That kind of leadership is needed. But for that kind of leadership to emerge in America, we not only need very special people as leaders — and they do come up occasionally — but we need a far more enlightened society than we have.

I think Americans are curiously, paradoxically, simultaneously very well-educated and amazingly ignorant. We are a society that lives within itself. We’re not interested in the history of other countries.

Today we have a problem with Iran. How many Americans know anything about Iranian history? Do they know that it is a bifurcated history? There have been two Irans. And those two different periods, pre-Islamic and post-Islamic, dialectically define the tensions and the realities of Iran today. [Americans] know nothing about it.

Quite a few Americans entering college could not locate Great Britain on the map. They couldn’t locate Iraq on the map after five years of war. Thirty percent couldn’t identify the Pacific Ocean. We don’t teach global history; we don’t teach global geography. I think most Americans don’t have the kind of sophistication that an America that inspires, and thereby leads, will have to have if it is to do what this 21st century really will demand of us.

Scowcroft: I could easily just say amen. But again, this is a part of who we are and from where we have arisen. For most of our history, we’ve been secure behind two oceans, with weak neighbors on each side. Americans don’t have to learn foreign languages. They can travel as widely as most of them want and never leave the United States. So most Americans instinctively just want to be left alone. I don’t think they want to mess with the problems of the world.

Brzezinski: They want to enjoy the good life.

Scowcroft: They want to enjoy the good life.

Making The Inward Turn

Posted on by Laughingnomad

When one stops moving…constantly having one’s awareness being drawn outward when traveling…integration begins… and reflection.

I have been home since the middle of June after six months in Asia…losing myself in the mundane and thoughtless but pleasurable duties of house and home.  Pruning, raking, repairing, having things repaired and replaced, banking, filing, web surfing, visiting old friends…my son, home from Thailand for a month…for company.  But I have rented the house again and will be on my way again in November for Oaxaca, Guatemala and onward through Central and South America.  Then back to the wonderful northwest I call home…the best of all worlds I have seen so far. And in the fall onward to the Balkans and then Asia again where two of my sons live. But my feelings are conflicted…giving up this comfort.  It has taken three months this time for return culture shock to abate…and my nervous system…indeed my brain…to start operating again.

In talking about the current political climate a friend  got my wheels turning.  She mentioned transmutation.  And the masses.  For some reason I am thinking strongly of Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Message.)

this from wiki:
The slogan, “the medium is the message”, may be better understood in light of Bernard Lonergan’s further articulation of related ideas: at the empirical level of consciousness, the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message. This sentence uses Lonergan’s terminology from Insight: A Study of Human Understanding to clarify the meaning of McLuhan’s statement that “the medium is the message”; McLuhan read this when it was first published in 1957 and found “much sense” in it — in his letter of September 21, 1957, to his former student and friend, Walter J. Ong, S.J., McLuhan says, “Find much sense in Bern. Lonergan’s Insight” (Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987: 251). Lonergan’s Insight is an extended guide to “making the inward turn”: attending ever more carefully to one’s own consciousness, reflecting on it ever more carefully, and monitoring one’s articulations ever more carefully. When McLuhan declares that he is more interested in percepts than concepts, he is declaring in effect that he is more interested in what Lonergan refers to as the empirical level of consciousness than in what Lonergan refers to as the intelligent level of consciousness in which concepts are formed, which Lonergan distinguishes from the rational level of consciousness in which the adequacy of concepts and of predications is adjudicated. This inward turn to attending to percepts and to the cultural conditioning of the empirical level of consciousness through the effect of communication media sets him apart from more outward-oriented studies of sociological influences and the outward presentation of self

As I read this, I realize how deeply affected I was by my Jesuit education. Unfortunately, I am afraid that this time it has not worked to our advantage. In an interview a few years ago of Paul Newman, RIP,  Larry King asked how many good scripts came across his desk every year.  Paul sighed and replied: whereas there used to be 3-5 a year, now maybe there is one.  Larry asked why.  I think because they are all shooting for the lowest common denominator, he said.

There is a wonderful story on wiki about the title of McLuhan’s book:

According to McLuhan biographer W. Terrence Gordon, “by the time it appeared in 1967, McLuhan no doubt recognized that his original saying had become a cliché and welcomed the opportunity to throw it back on the compost heap of language to recycle and revitalize it. But the new title is more than McLuhan indulging his insatiable taste for puns, more than a clever fusion of self-mockery and self-rescue — the subtitle is ‘An Inventory of Effects,’ underscoring the lesson compressed into the original saying.” (Gordon, p. 175.) However, the FAQ section [1] on the website maintained by McLuhan’s estate says that this interpretation is incomplete and makes its own leap of logic as to why McLuhan left it as is. “Why is the title of the book The Medium is the Massage and not The Medium is the Message? Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter’s, it had on the cover ‘Massage’ as it still does. The title was supposed to have read The Medium is the Message but the typesetter had made an error. When McLuhan saw the typo he exclaimed, ‘Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!’ Now there are possible four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: Message and Mess Age, Massage and Mass Age.”

Speaking of.

Finally…a non-threatening younger woman in high places. (sarcasm) Has anyone ever commented on Madeleine Albright’s clothes?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/26/AR2008092600859.html?wpisrc=newsletter

In contrast, I was particularly struck when Obama got out of that black limousine  in dark glasses and expensive dark suit, and walked with that confident Harvard stride to get on the plane for Biloxi Mississippi. There was something subliminally appealing (to me) with his clothes bag casually slung over his shoulder…hanging onto it with two fingers. Cosmopolitan.  But not Everyman. That shot will forever stick in my mind.

The Palin Doctrine

Posted on by Laughingnomad

The Bush Doctrine of preemptive war is the first time in history that America has given up on diplomacy as a cornerstone of foreign policy.

The problem is not that Palin didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was in the ABC interview by Charles Gibson, but that she hadn’t thought about what “preemptive” war and what it means for the country…and that is no end of wars started by the U.S. any time it feels threatened…like the one in Iraq. Palin has indicated the U.S. must attack any country that appears to be threatening.  Is this what we want?  Think about it.

Sunday Sept. 14, 2008 10:48 EDT
Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

Where is the debate over the Bush Doctrine?

Before it became clear that Sarah Palin had never heard of it, nobody — including the presidential candidates themselves — ever had difficulty answering questions about what they believed about the Bush Doctrine, nor ever suggested that this Doctrine was some amorphous, impossible-to-understand, abstract irrelevancy. Quite the contrary, despite some differences over exactly what it means, it was widely understood to constitute a radical departure — at least in theory — from our governing foreign policy doctrine, and it is that Doctrine which has unquestionably fueled much of the foreign policy disasters of the last eight years.

In 2003, the American Enterprise Institute’s Thomas Donnelly wrote an article entitled “The Underpinnngs of the Bush Doctrine,” and argued that “the Bush Doctrine, which is likely to shape U.S. policy for decades to come, reflects the realities of American power as well as the aspirations of American political principles”; that it “represents a reversal of course from Clinton-era policies in regard to the uses of U.S. power and, especially, military force”; and “the Bush Doctrine represents a return to the first principles of American security strategy.” Donnelly had no trouble understanding and articulating exactly what the Bush Doctrine meant: namely, a declaration that the U.S. has the right to — and will — start wars against countries even if they have not attacked us and are not imminently going to do so:

Taken together, American principles, interests, and systemic responsibilities argue strongly in favor of an active and expansive stance of strategic primacy and a continued willingness to employ military force. Within that context, and given the ways in which nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction can distort normal calculations of international power relationships, there is a compelling need to hold open the option of — and indeed, to build forces more capable of — preemptive strike operations. The United States must take a wider view of the traditional doctrine of “imminent danger,” considering how such dangers might threaten not only its direct interests, but its allies, the liberal international order, and the opportunities for greater freedom in the world.

Put more simply: ” The message of the Bush Doctrine — “Don’t even think about it!” — rests in part on a logic of preemption that underlies the logic of primacy.” A few months earlier, Norman Podhoretz wrote a long cover story for Commentary — entitled “In Praise of the Bush Doctrine” (sub. rq’d) — in which he argued that “To those with ears to hear, the State of the Union address should have removed all traces of ambiguity from the Bush Doctrine.” He, too, pointed out the obvious: that from this point froward, the U.S. “would also take preemptive action whenever it might be deemed necessary.” The extreme deceit that lies at heart of neoconservativism is vividly illustrated by the willingness of their leading lights — such as Charles Krauthammer and NYT “reporter” Michael Gordon — suddenly to proclaim that the Bush Doctrine is far too amorphous for Sarah Palin or anyone else to be able to opine on it, even after their Godfather years ago declared that “all traces of ambiguity from the Bush Doctrine” have been removed for “those with ears.”

That the Bush Doctrine is both clear and central had continued to be accepted fact into the 2008 election. In January of this year in New Hampshire, Charlie Gibson himself asked the presidential candidates about their views of the Bush Doctrine during the primary debates he hosted. Nobody had any trouble answering it:

How Stupid Are We?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

 From Crooks And Liars blog:

The latest Pew Survey on News Consumption, which is conducted every other year, was released yesterday.   Most notably, there was a great section of the report on news-consumer knowledge and sophistication.

About half of Americans (53%) can correctly identify the Democrats as the party that has a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. In February 2007, shortly after the Democrats gained control of the House after a dozen years of GOP rule, many more people (76%) knew the Democrats held the majority.

The public is less familiar with the secretary of state (Condoleezza Rice) and the prime minister of Great Britain (Gordon Brown). About four-in-ten (42%) can name Rice as the current secretary of state. The public’s ability to identify Rice has not changed much over recent years: In April 2006 and December 2004, shortly before she was sworn in, 43% could correctly identify her.

The prime minister of Great Britain is not well known among the public. Just more than a quarter (28%) can correctly identify Gordon Brown as the leader of Great Britain.

Overall, 18% of the public is able to correctly answer all three political knowledge questions, while a third (33%) do not know the answer to any of the questions.

…how humiliating this is to the nation overall. Personal Note:  In contrast, as I travel around the world and talk to English speaking people from other countries, invariably I can hold an intelligent and informed conversation in which Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove,  Powell and others are well-known.  They know because our foreign policies have a direct impact on them.

Crooks And Liars:  “But one-in-three Americans got all of the questions wrong. For all the talk about the Democratic Congress, barely half the country knows there’s a Democratic majority.  Maybe my perspective is skewed because I just finished reading Rick Shenkman’s “Just How Stupid Are We?” but at a certain point, the political world is going to have to come to grips with the fact that a striking percentage of the electorate has no idea what’s going on.”
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Mad Cow Disease Or…?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

The demonstrators are still at it in South Korea, I see on CNN tonight.

When I was in Hanoi this month I was sitting on the front steps of my guesthouse waiting for a van to take me on a day trip when all of a sudden a tall, young good looking guy appeared at my side. He was obviously Asian, but never knowing if you are talking to an American, or an Asian from some other country, I asked where he was from. South Korea he said. Then we traded travel stories.  He is traveling long-term.   He has excellent English and is obviously well-educated. Hmmm, well-to-do, I thought. He wissoft-spoken…not anything like his older countrymen that I have come across.  I said that I had noticed that a lot of South Koreans weren’t happy these days. He laughed. Oh, yeah, he said, we don’t like your country selling your beef to us. But, I said, we aren’t getting sick from Mad Cow Disease. Then we get down to it.

South Korea has a strong long-held tradition of dissent. My son’s best friend, Mike, who lived in Seoul for 10 years teaching English told me once that many young demonstrators are paid by in-country interest groups, like the many unions, to demonstrate. Every week almost, there is a demonstration against something…they’ve got it down to an art, he said once.

However, in this case South Koreans are not so much unhappy with the U.S. as they are with their own new President. He has disappointed them. He is not conforming to the will of the people on many issues, my friend in Hanoi said. Like why do we have to buy beef from the U.S. which competes with our own farmers. And your beef is more expensive than ours. Why does our president have to do everything the U.S. wants? Seems his new president is a little too chummy with us. You wouldn’t know this from listening to the media reports in the U.S. But, he said, we have a soft spot in our hearts for you Americans because you defended us in the Korean War. Then we talked about how the U.S. wants a lot of things from many countries. Then his van arrived. I have to go, he said, as we shook hands and said goodbye. As he darted for his ride, he looked back and said, “I don’t want to leave you!” Of course I loved that conversation! This is one of the great moments when traveling.

Instant Run-off Voting

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Wikipedia says instant Run-off voting is a voting system used for single-winner elections in which voters have one vote and rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first preference rankings, the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated and that candidate’s votes redistributed to the voters’ next preferences among the remaining candidates. This process is repeated until one candidate has a majority of votes among candidates not eliminated. The term “instant runoff” is used because IRV is said to simulate a series of run-off elections tallied in rounds, as in an exhaustive ballot election.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

Sounds good to me! What do you think?

Return To Oregon

Posted on by Laughingnomad

After 19 hours traveling from Bangkok to Tokyo to Portland, I am finally home…of course still waking up at night and napping during the day…a vicious cycle.

This is what I have come home to:

Retired Major General Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.

Now, CNN’s Barbara Starr reports: “One thing perhaps worth noting in this report, is the forward, the preface to the report was written by retired major general Anthony Teguba. He’s the army general that led the investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. in this report the general says, ‘there is no longer any doubt that the current administration committed war crimes.’ The only question is whether those who ordered torture will be held into account. pretty tough words from a man very well regarded inside the army when he conducted the investigation into Abu Ghraib. For its part, the pentagon continues to say that it deals with detainees in a humane fashion, that there is no policy towards torture, and if there was any misconduct, any abuse, it was in violation of government policy. But this report clearly is a pretty damning indictment if it stands on its own.”

Note: Just before I left Bangkok I was told that to get a visa to Burma an American now has to apply for it in Washington D.C.

Press Conference on Burma

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Tuesday May 27 2008

Dr. Surin Pisuwan, Secretary General, ASEAN, reporting at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in Bangkok Thailand on the donors’ conference Sunday with Gen. Than Shwe of Myanmar and UN chief Ban Ki Moon in Yangon. The key issue has been the loosening of strict controls on foreign aid workers pressing for unfettered access to the disaster zone. To counter Burmese fears of “hidden agendas” by Western workers, ASEAN has agreed to coordinate all relief efforts.

What has been achieved is far more than what was expected. A new humanitarian “space,” however limited, so that ASEAN with the support of the UN can engage with the Myanmar authorities. That humanitarian space needs political support because in and of itself it cannot be sustained. The secty general of the UN and ASEAN has asked for the full cooperation of the aid community.
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“The River of Lost Footsteps”

Posted on by Laughingnomad

The Bangkok Post review says that this timely book by Thant Myint-U, published by Faber and Faber London, rewrites 3,500 years of Burmese history “in order to enrich today’s debate on Burma and establish a strong base for future analysis and consideration.”

The author is critical of the “absence of nuance” and the “ahistorical” nature of current debate on the country. Therefore, Myint-U focuses on why Burma’s military machine developed into such a powerful force by General Ne Win, the country’s “supremo” from 1962 virtually until his death in 2002, and why the country became so isolated.
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