Commonwealth Commonsense

FactCheck Wrong

Apparently, the web site FackCheck.org was playing loose with the facts when it debunked Vote Vets ad that claims Sen. Allen voted against body armor. It's amusing to see how the right wing neo-radicals attack the ad. As I read Media Matters’ analysis of the ad and FactCheck’s parsing of words, I’m reminded of all the times during the 2004 campaign the GOP said Kerry voted to raise taxes dozens of times, citing even bills where he didn’t vote to decrease them and all sorts of bills that were only tangentially related to taxes. Now it is the right who cries foul in its defense of George Allen because the sponsor of the bill didn't use the words "body armor."

Again, the hypocrisy of the right astounds me.

Respect

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is thought to be winning the worldwide PR world with his appearance this week at the U.N. He said many of the right things.

On Thursday, he explained that when he called for the destruction of Israel and dismissed the Holocaust as a myth, his issue was not with the Jewish people but with Zionists, "who are not Jews."

"We love everyone in the world — Jews, Christians, Muslims, non-Muslims, non-Jews, non-Christians," he said, adding "we are against ugly acts."

"Everyone is respected. But I repeat, we are against aggression, occupation, killings. ... We declare this in a loud voice," he said.

…"We support ... peace and permanent stability in Lebanon, and we will fall short of no measure in promoting this goal. Whether it's in the cultural or spiritual support that we can render or whether it is the role that we can play in the international arena, we will do our best. And this is the fundamental principle of our foreign policy, and it does not preclude Lebanon," he said.

At the news conference, Ahmadinejad also expressed love and affection for the American people, just as President Bush reached out to the Iranian people in his General Assembly speech on Tuesday. Ahmadinejad said he wished he had more time here to spend with them in person.

"The people of the United States are highly respected by us," he said. "Many people in the United States believe in God and believe in justice." He thanked the New York City police and security forces for protecting him during his stay here and apologized to New Yorkers for traffic disruptions from the arrival of world leaders to attend the U.N. General Assembly session.

But most important,

He said his country was ready to negotiate a suspension of uranium enrichment.

"We have said that under fair conditions and just conditions, we will negotiate about it," he said.

Now no one believes all those oh-so-nice things he said. Surely, his actions speak louder than words. But words are the currency of diplomacy and with his invitation to negotiate, how does it hurt us to do so? Yet, this is still a pissing match.

But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Iran must suspend its uranium enrichment and reprocessing before any full-fledged negotiations.

"Iran has been told by the international community ... that they should suspend and if they suspend the negotiations can begin. It's as simple as that. I don't think we need any further conditionality," she told reporters after a Security Council meeting on Mideast peace.

Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov makes a key point

"I think that artificial timeframes do not work," he said. "The quality of the agreement is much more important, and especially in this particular case there is no objective reason for any ultra-rush if you wish."

If you listen to the NPR’s report last night on “All Things Considered,” he sounds like a politician who, at the very least, wants respect, which is a point I’ve made before.

The same point is made is yesterday’s AP story.

Ahmadinejad said the United States' objection to Iran's nuclear program — which he claims is for peacefully purposes only — was essentially aimed at aborting his country's progress. And he said if the world stops treating his country as a subordinate, then things might be different.

"If they recognize that we too, as a nation, have rights ... the concerns too will be removed," he said.

Respect it a key issue in negotiating with the Muslim world. And why is it necessary for Iran to suspend uranium enrichment if it is willing to “ready to negotiate a suspension of uranium enrichment”? Even if they said yes before negotiations, what’s to stop them from restarting it? First and foremost, we need to find out what they want and what they’re willing to give to get it.

Because let’s face it: We have no options. We couldn’t attack Iran if we wanted to and such an attack would doom our children’s generation to decades of terrorism.

Building Democracies...Where We See Fit

Ideals and Realities Clash In Bush 'Freedom Agenda'

The timing of Bush's address on democracy to the U.N. General Assembly and the overthrow of a democratically elected government underlined the complexities and contradictions in his "freedom agenda." With the president's attention focused on the Middle East, the state of democracy elsewhere in the world does not rate as high on his priority list. In the case of Thailand, the situation is complicated by growing U.S. unease with the ousted prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.

"The president's freedom agenda is inherently selective," said Thomas Carothers, head of the democracy project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "We care very much about democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, but . . . Thailand's just not part of the story, so this falls off the map a bit."

Thailand is hardly the only example. Bush strongly supports Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president who took power in a military coup, and plans to meet with him at the White House twice in the next week. Bush will also host Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, at the end of next week despite the suppression of opposition parties, newspapers and human rights groups in the oil-rich Central Asian republic.

The administration has likewise embraced autocratic leaders in such disparate places as Azerbaijan and Ethiopia while generally tempering criticism of anti-democratic policies in Russia and China. Even in the Middle East, Bush has treaded lightly in nudging allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia to reform.

On the other hand, the White House ratcheted up its pressure this month on the repressive government in Burma. After meeting with a dissident, Bush personally lobbied to get the U.N. Security Council to put Burma on the agenda last week for possible sanctions. And first lady Laura Bush hosted a roundtable at the United Nations on democracy in that country.

When the president talks about promoting democracy, as he did in New York on Tuesday, he focuses mainly on Iraq and Afghanistan. Some other countries that he once highlighted as success stories have been dropped from his speeches, most notably Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

In Ukraine, the popular coalition that led the "Orange Revolution" of December 2004 has splintered and the new prime minister is the same one the street protests targeted. In Kyrgyzstan, the brother of the president who took office after the revolution of March 2005 has been accused of trying to frame an opposition leader by planting a heroin-filled wooden doll in his luggage.

The coup in Thailand poses the latest challenge to Bush's commitment to "ending tyranny in our world," as he vowed in his second inaugural address. Aides said yesterday that he did not mention the coup in his U.N. speech because they were still gathering information, but they did not explain why he said nothing later in the day as it became clear that the military had ousted Thaksin.

Webb on ‘Hardball’

Having read a number of posts on neo-radical blogs suggesting that Jim Webb blew his appearance on Hardball last night, I expected to hear him stumble over the question of whether he has paid bloggers. (He has at least one, Lowell Feld of Raising Kaine.) He didn’t answer the question. You could criticize him for that, but if we slammed every politician for dodging questions, we’d have time to write about nothing else.

But thanks to those Allen sycophants. Look at the clip. Webb does a great job of talking about the right issues. And he puts Matthews in his place to boot. I’ve been critical of Webb’s style. But more and more his taciturn style his beginning to look like a serious politician talking about serious issues in a no-nonsense way. He’s showing guts taking on interviewers when they ask stupid questions and looking more and more like a guy who can take on Republicans in the Senate.

Mixed Up

Amazing how often the Bush administration lies, er, I mean, gets “mixed up.”

In an embarrassing turnabout, the Department of Justice backed away Wednesday from a denial by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales of responsibility for the treatment of a Canadian who was seized by American authorities in 2002. The man was deported to Syria, where he was imprisoned and beaten.

Asked at a news conference on Tuesday about a Canadian commission’s finding that the man, Maher Arar, was wrongly sent to Syria and tortured there, Mr. Gonzales replied, “Well, we were not responsible for his removal to Syria.” He added, “I’m not aware that he was tortured.”

The attorney general’s comments caused puzzlement because they followed front-page news articles of the findings of the Canadian commission. It reported that based on inaccurate information from Canada about Mr. Arar’s supposed terrorist ties, American officials ordered him taken to Syria, an action documented in public records.

On Wednesday, a Justice Department spokesman said Mr. Gonzales had intended to make only a narrow point: that deportations are now handled by the Department of Homeland Security, not the Department of Justice.

The spokesman, Charles Miller, said the attorney general forgot that at the time of Mr. Arar’s deportation, such matters were still handled by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was part of the Department of Justice.

“He had his timeline mixed up,” Mr. Miller said.

Allen's A-Team: The New McCarthyites

Shaun Kenney has an extraordinary screed posted on the A-Team blog that is George Allen’s mouthpiece. Kenney resorts to the tactics of former Sen. Joe McCarthy.

In essence, he asks not just Jim Webb but all progressives, “Are you, or have you ever been, an anti-Semite?” I might respond, “Have you no sense of decency?” But clearly conservative activists such as Kenney have rarely had any.

The Allen team is desperate. Their candidate lied and denigrated Jews at the debate Monday in Fairfax. The Washington Post reports today that Allen knew his mother was Jewish when he refused to confirm it at the debate. He then went on to slur Jews by suggesting the question cast “aspersions” on him and his mother. It’s clear now the reporter who asked the question was on to something: Allen was apparently worried that his Jewish heritage would hurt him politically. So he lied about it. He’s now enlisted his mother to defend him. Why couldn’t he say, “Yes, my mother’s family is Jewish, and I’m proud of it”? But he sees being Jewish as a derogatory criticism, a damaging imputation.

So to defend Allen, Kenney calls Jim Webb -- and indeed all progressives -- anti-Semitic, with the same twisted logic that generations of bigots from Joe McCarthy to Lee Atwater to Karl Rove would love.

Thus former-Republican war hero James Webb morphs from Reagan appointee to Progressive Standardbearer, and the parallels between Charles Lindbergh in 1940 and James Webb in 2006 could not be more stark:

·Both advocate an isolationist foreign policy,
·Both wed themselves to progressive ideals and policy
·Once again, anti-Semitism plays a role in the approach
·Frighteningly enough, just as Lindbergh’s reputation was used as cover in 1940, so Webb’s war hero status is used as cover in 2006.

Now is all of this a bit conspiratorial? Given the themes of the progressive movement from 60 years past to today, I don’t think it’s a terrible stretch to argue that the anti-Israeli, pro-Palestine sentiment among the radical left extends into progressive approaches to policy that have existed for a century.

Kenney offers no proof, of course. He just makes the accusation that Webb must be anti-Semitic, along with the rest of progressives. And like many folks, alas some Jewish leaders among them, when they want to end arguments with those who argue that there are some legitimate concerns of the Palestinian people, they simply call them anti-Semitic.

Webb’s emphasis on anti-Semitic remarks may or may not be deliberate, but it is a thematic trend progressives have been beating for years. Ascendent [sic] in the Democratic Party, these people need to be stopped. Yesterday they were fighting FDR’s attempt to break Nazi Germany, today they take a laissez faire approach to Israel and terrorism in the name of isolationsm [sic] and “peace.” All the while, the progressive preoccupation with Jews in power remains a disgusting undercurrent in the progressive movement that deserves scrutiny — and when it surfaces, unmitigated scorn.

What “emphasis” or “pre-occupation” is he talking about? There is none, of course. But neo-radicals have learned that you simply make the charge and soon enough reporters will be asking Jim Webb, “Are you anti-Semitic? And by the way, do you still beat your wife?” If you want to shut down debate, call those who object to some of Israel’s policies or defend some of Palestinians’ objectives “anti-Semitic.” Cong. Jim Moran knows that tactic well.

If there is one thing neo-radicals like Kenney prove once again, it is their own hypocrisy. When a Democrats gets angry about the reality-challenged logic of their idiot leader, they mock Democrats’ anger. Yet, when they feel their advantage slipping away, they resort to angry libels like the Kenney post. When they are directly confronted on their twisted policies, they denigrate what they call Democrats’ dirty politics, but when their backs are up against the wall, they resort the kind of slime Kenney smears.

Have Kenney and his ilk any sense of decency? No, they apparently don’t. They also have no principles, no shame, and no agenda other than to call their opposition the ugliest epithets to save their candidate’s hide.

I recorded the HBO special on Barry Goldwater but haven’t had a chance to watch it all, though I saw the last 15 minutes as it was repeated last night. It concluded that Goldwater today would be a liberal, a progressive, and I’m sure he is turning over in his grave because of where merchants of malice like George Allen and Shaun Kenney are leading the Republican party.

Debates

Go elsewhere if you want blow by blow analysis of who won the two debates between Jim Webb and Sen. George Allen. But the bottom line is this: Neither had a major gaff, and Jim Webb, the guy many voters are just getting to know, came off as a credible alternative. You can imagine him as a U.S. senator.

That’s all he had to do in these early debates. Money will now be easier to raise, though he still has to ask at least for some of it.

Let’s face it: 90% of voters have already made up their minds. If they haven’t, then Allen is toast. The independent voters will begin to pay attention and see if Webb, whose early opposition to the Iraq War makes him prescient at best -- and a helluva lot of smarter than the Bush administration idiots at worst, has the total package to unseat Allen. In fact, on foreign policy and military issues he came across as more informed than Allen.

The biggest challenge Webb has in the near term is to hold moderate women, who may be turned off by his views on women in the military. Someone needs to tell him to stop smirking when he answers that question and to simply say (assuming I can divine his position from his parsed answer), “In hindsight, I was wrong to be so dismissive of women in combat. I remain concerned about women on the front lines, but there are important roles for women in the military” and then conclude with what he did as Sec. of the Navy and remind voters of Allen’s opposition to women at VMI.

But in the end, the debates made Webb more credible than ever.