America

Joe Klein posits:

“This is not the America I know,” President George W. Bush said after the first, horrifying pictures of U.S. troops torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq surfaced in April 2004. The President was not telling the truth. “This” was the America he had authorized on Feb. 7, 2002, when he signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention — the one regarding the treatment of enemy prisoners taken in wartime — did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. That signature led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. It was his single most callous and despicable act. It stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his presidency.

Another act that symbolizes “the national embarrassment that was his presidency”:
His and his administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina. And there’s certainly many more things that can be added to the list.

From Proverbs:

Differing weights and differing measures—
the LORD detests them both.

From Glenn Greenwald:

That’s America’s justice system in a nutshell:  the President who deliberately and knowingly violated our 30-year-old law making it a felony offense to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants has the entire political and media class eagerly defend him against prosecution.  Those who enabled him — in both parties — block investigations into what was done.  Ruth Marcus and Cass Sunstein and friends offer one excuse after the next to justify this immunity.  But the powerless and defenseless — though definitively courageous — public servant who blew the whistle on this lawbreaking is harassed, investigated, and pursued by the DOJ’s Criminal Division to the point of bankruptcy and depression.  The high-powered criminals are protected by our political elite while the whistle-blower spends years paying lawyers and devoting his mental energies to trying to fend of the DOJ’s criminal investigation.

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Sad, but true. And this is a practice that is not confined to one side or the other. It happens across the political spectrum. And it seriously undercuts the consistent rhetoric from our nation’s leaders that “no one is above the law.” That’s simply not true. It’s proven again and again that those at the top are indeed above the law because no one ever holds them accountable.

From Politico’s Joel Kotkin:

Like the 1944 pop standard says, President George W. Bush has hurt the most all those he professed to love the most — from the conservative ideologues and born-again Christians to the free-market enthusiasts, energy producers and red state political class. Perhaps no politician in recent memory has done more damage to his political base.

The most obvious recent equivalent, Richard Nixon, did cause harm to the conservative cause, but that damage was short-lived. It reflected his deviousness more than his policies. Similarly, Bill Clinton’s many personality flaws weakened the Democrats’ hold on the White House, but inflicted no permanent harm to liberalism.

In contrast, the Katrina-scale disaster that has been the Bush presidency may leave his ideological backers in the wilderness for years to come. Over the past eight years, Bush has done more to undermine conservatism than all of the country’s college faculties, elite media and Hollywood studios put together.

The late Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater — whose memory remains far more cherished than that of either President Bush — nurtured the modern brand of conservatism. Nixon employed some of these tenets, but they flourished most fully under Ronald Reagan.

Conservatism’s core values rested on notions of a strong national defense and free market economics. Bush has punctured these ideas in a way that transcends the effects of historically anomalous scandals such as Watergate or Clinton’s extramarital affairs. Bush has not only dinged the conservative car, he has totaled it.

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I would be interested to know how many previously registered Republicans fled the party under the tenure of Bush the Second. You can add my name to that list. But I’m actually grateful. His disastrous presidency jolted me out of my partisan comfort zone and freed me from blind allegiance to a failing ideology.

From Time’s Mark Thompson:

The incoming Obama Administration says it wants to shut down the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. But even if Guantánamo closes, the controversial U.S. practice of jailing suspected al-Qaeda militants and other terrorists indefinitely won’t end, because such detentions continue on an even greater scale at the U.S. military base at Bagram, Afghanistan, 40 miles north of Kabul. Approximately 250 detainees are currently being held at Guantánamo; an estimated 670 are locked up under similar conditions at Bagram.

The original U.S. prison, established early in 2002, was the main screening site for those captured by Americans and their allies during initial fighting in Afghanistan. At least two detainees died there in December 2002 after being beaten by U.S. troops. While conditions are said to have improved since then, hundreds of prisoners remain in wire mesh pens edged with coils of razor wire, and earlier this year U.S. military officials revealed that a Bagram interrogator had been convicted of assaulting an Afghan detainee who later died. Just last month, the military issued a statement saying it would investigate whether a pair of U.S. soldiers had abused Afghan detainees.

[International Justice Network executive director Tina] Foster and a consortium of other human rights lawyers will be in Federal District Court in Washington on Jan. 7 to demand that those being held at Bagram get the same habeas corpus rights — the right to know the charges against them, and to be freed if a court deems those charges insufficient — that the Supreme Court gave Guantánamo detainees last summer. Their case centers on Redha al-Najar, a 43-year-old Tunisian national who has been held without charge in U.S. military custody since May 2002. Al-Najar was arrested in Karachi, Pakistan, where he had been living with his wife and child. According to his attorneys, al-Najar spent the next two years being shifted among various CIA “black sites” before ending up at Bagram. They argue he has been held for more than six years, virtually incommunicado and without charges or access to a fair means to challenge his imprisonment. The suit asks the court to order al-Najar’s release.

As a follow up to my post from earlier today, here’s more post mortem analysis of the recent election by Guardian writer David Wiegel in which he states, “the Republican party can no longer fool itself into thinking that the US electorate is naturally slanted towards it.”

The map is breaking down, and Republicans – outside of the south and a few areas of Appalachia – can no longer count on the old red/blue district lines.

What this means in the short term is that Republicans have to give up the rosy predictions of Barone and Fund. They can no longer go after “red” districts with Democratic incumbents and hope to win a majority. In just the preliminary numbers put together by Swing State Project, there are 24 Republicans whose districts voted for Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008. Lee Terry, a Nebraska Republican, now represents a “blue” district. So does Mary Bono Mack, whose Palm Springs, California district has not been at risk since her late husband, Sonny Bono, won it 14 years ago.

And Obama’s victory turned many swing seats into safer Democratic strongholds. In 2006, liberal newspaper publisher John Yarmuth scored an upset victory in Kentucky’s 2nd district, which contains the city of Louisville and had voted only 51-49 for Kerry. This year Yarmuth won a rematch with his 2006 opponent as Obama carried the district by 13 points. Freshman Democrat Chris Murphy represents a Connecticut district that split 49-49 between Kerry and Bush but went by 14 points for Obama. Seats like these fall off of Republican target lists – strategists from both parties mark them “safe” and move on.

What does it mean in the long term? After all, can’t the pendulum swing right back? Of course it can. But it doesn’t swing by itself. It needs to be pushed by something – by a crisis of faith in the ruling party, by reforms in the opposition party, by demographic shifts that give one party a leg up.

Republicans can no longer fool themselves into thinking the country is naturally slanted toward them, or that they have a built-in majority. If the Democrats can win Hastertland, the Republicans need to figure out how to take it back, or how to win somewhere else.

It’s interesting that those who throw around pejoratives like “commie red” and “liberal pinko” belong to the party that defines itself in shades of red.

I’m not sure if it was this post or this post or some other catalyst that got Jim Martin’s dander up about election maps and 2008 election results, but he continues to blather on about how the electorate was evenly split and the last several Presidential elections being “with a margin of error of a few idiots on the far left side of reality.” In his post’s headline, he asks, “How many times do I have to show the 2008 election map?”

The answer, quite simply, is until he gets it right.

In the post, two of the three electoral maps he cites are projections from March and July — not even the final, actual election results. The last map he includes is the familiar, but deceptive county-by-county map that paints the country in a sea of red, where land mass is given more weight and importance than actual votes.

As I pointed out shortly after the election, this nation is not quite as red as it appears. When you look at a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population, the electoral map looks significantly different.

Even more, when you take the actual proportional voting margins rather than the all-or-nothing extremes shown on Mr. Martin’s cited map, you get an even more accurate picture of where the country stands — even in Oklahoma (not quite so starkly red anymore).

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To get to Mr. Martin’s claim of an evenly split electorate that was, as he called it, “with[in] a margin of error of a few idiots on the far left side of reality,” the 53% to 46% — a 7% spread — is certainly outside of most credible polls’ margins of error. It is certainly a wider margin than the 52% to 47% — a 5% spread — in 2004 and even more certainly greater than the incredible negative win margin of 47.9% to 48.4% — a negative 0.5% margin — in 2000.

Furthermore, Obama’s electoral win of 365 to 173 (+192 margin) is a significantly more decisive victory than either of Bush’s 2000 or 2004 victories — 271-266 (+5 margin) and 286-252 (+34 margin) respectively.

In both electoral college margins and actual voting percentage margins, the country was much less divided — especially given the significant Democratic gains in both houses of Congress — and certainly much less “evenly split” in 2008 than in the prior two elections.

So, Mr. Martin, you can keep showing your maps, but it doesn’t change the reality. Perhaps you aren’t factoring in the much larger margin of error of a not-so-few idiots on the far right side of reality.