Michael Moore and the Democratic Party

Decentists and other ex-lefties, US politics
Published on

Michael Moore is the creator of the most succesful documentary ever released in the US, a movie that grossed more on its opening weekend than any other documentary did during its entire theatrical run and which did so while being run in less than 900 theatres.

This documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 was the first documentary to gross over 100 million dollars, was the first to sell more than 2 million copies of the DVD on the first day of release.

More importantly, it was the first mass media examination of many of the important issues surrounding
the war in Iraq.

The man himself is one of the few unwavering left wing voices in the US mass media, somebody who has never sold out to the Republicans, never attempted to be a Republican-lite.

Why then should the Democratic Party disassociate itself from him?

The answers can be found easily when you read Peter Beinart’s nasty little piece of scaremongering: he longs for the good old days of commie-bashing:

On January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at Washington’s Willard Hotel to save American liberalism. A few months earlier, in articles in The New Republic and elsewhere, the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop had warned that “the liberal movement is now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own destruction.” Liberals, they argued, “consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West.” Unless that changed, “In the spasm of terror which will seize this country … it is the right–the very extreme right–which is most likely to gain victory.”

[…]

But, over the next two years, in bitter political combat across the institutions of American liberalism,
anti-communism gained strength. With the ADA’s help, Truman crushed Wallace’s third-party challenge en route to reelection. The formerly leftist Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled its communist affiliates and The New Republic broke with Wallace, its former editor. The American Civil Liberties Union (aclu) denounced communism, as did the naacp. By 1949, three years after Winston Churchill warned that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe, Schlesinger could write in The Vital Center: “Mid-twentieth century liberalism, I believe, has thus been fundamentally reshaped … by the exposure of the Soviet Union, and by the deepening of our knowledge of man. The consequence of this historical re-education has been an unconditional rejection of totalitarianism.”

A sort of noxious anti-communism then, updated for the 21st century. Peter Beinart is one of those though, realistic no-nonsense foreign hawks at the New Republic whose main achievement seems to be helping Bush confuse the “war against terrorism” with invading Afghanistan and Iraq, with Michael Moore and MoveOn.org substitute for the communists as the enemies of liberalism ™:

When liberals talk about America’s new era, the discussion is largely negative–against the Iraq war, against restrictions on civil liberties, against America’s worsening reputation in the world. In sharp contrast to the first years of the cold war, post-September 11 liberalism has produced leaders and institutions–most notably Michael Moore and MoveOn–that do not put the struggle against America’s
new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for a better world. As a result, the Democratic Party
boasts a fairly hawkish foreign policy establishment and a cadre of politicians and strategists eager to
look tough. But, below this small elite sits a Wallacite grassroots that views America’s new struggle as
a distraction, if not a mirage. Two elections, and two defeats, into the September 11 era, American
liberalism still has not had its meeting at the Willard Hotel. And the hour is getting late.

It is disgusting to see somebody who has been so wrong on so many occasions in the past four years to be accusing one of the few effective American leftwing people of well, being a traitor. This is why the Democratic Party is in trouble, because of this elitist cliche of idiots, shut away safely inside the
Beltway or in the Ivy Leagues, who have no clue about the real world and who don’t really care about what is happening there, as long as their cozy lives are not disturbed. It’s sickening.

The war in Afghanistan

US foreign policy, War on Afghanistan
Published on

Oh look, three years after the fact, the war in Afghanistan is hot again … in the leftwing blogs:

Am I arguing that on balance I think the Afghanistan war was “wrong?” Honestly, I don’t even know enough to answer that question. I supported it at the time, even though I had justifiable misgivings about the details, but the question isn’t whether it was “justified” in some simplistic sense- it’s whether we achieved desirable and necessary aims at a minimum of cost which couldn’t otherwise be achieved.

This New Republican desire to marginalize the peaceniks is simply the identical logic and rhetoric which led them to be marginalized during the march to Iraq. We see how well that worked out. The peaceniks weren’t necessarily right on Afghanistan, and while I was an Iraq peacenik it wasn’t necessarily the case at the time that I was right. However, in both cases the country would have been better served if we’d had a wider and more comprehensive debate on the goals, wisdom, purpose, methods, and post- conflict planning than we did.

Opposition to the war in Afghanistan was in fact a legitimate position, even if it was the wrong position, and could have been an honest position by people who weren’t simply knee-jerk anti-war, or america-haters, or people who, like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, thought we got what we deserved on 9/11, or anything else. People may have thought there were better ways to punish those responsible and to combat terrorism, whether or not they were correct.

Atrios, in response to a post by Kevin “objectively wrong on Iraq” Drum:

If the Taliban’s refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden after 9/11 wasn’t enough to justify military action, I’m not sure what is — and I think it’s fair to say that anyone who loudly opposed the Afghanistan war is just flatly opposed to any use of American military power at all.

Drum’s position is ridiculous on its face, but Atrios’ isn’t much better. Look at the stated aims of the
Afghanistan war: kill or capture Osama Bin Laden, destroy Al Quida and its allies in the Taliban, bring
“democracy and freedom” to Afghanistan. Have any of these been fulfilled? Could any of these be fulfilled by military action?

Of course not.

My position at the time was that a war against Afghanistan would only hurt the country even more, would not destroy Bin Laden Al Quida and would be bungled by the Bush administration. I believed then as I do now, that terrorism is better fought by the police than it is by soldiers, that bombing Afghanistan to the stone age, again was an overreaction and a sideshow, a distraction. The US could not be seen to be helpless in the face of the September 11 attacks and had to do something, even if this was the wrong thing to do. Meanwhile, it offered a nice smokescreen for Bush and co to implement their real plans, to start the preparations for the war against Iraq, not to mention the extralegal torture ring they establish in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and in client states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Pakistan.

It was understandable that liberals would support this war, understandable but wrong. I really think this is somewhat obvious three years on, with Afghanistan in as much turmoil as before September 2001, Al Quaida actually stronger and Osama Bin Laden still on the loose.

Red Cross accuses US of torture at Guantanamo

American Gulag, torture
Published on

According to the Financial Times, the Red Cross has accused the US government of using torture methods at Guantanamo Bay:

The International Committee of the Red Cross has accused the US of using psychological and physical
pressure to interrogate prisoners at its detention centre in Guantánamo Bay in tactics tantamount to
torture.

Following a June visit to Guantánamo, the ICRC raised concerns that interrogators were using harsh
techniques which were affecting the health of the detainees, according to a person familiar with the
situation.

The ICRC report, which the Bush administration received in July, criticises the US military for allowing doctors at Guantánamo to facilitate interrogations by providing interrogators with detainees’ medical records. The report is also understood to criticise the military’s use of humiliation and solitary confinement for extracting information.

We already knew that this was going on from the moment the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo and even before, in Afghanistan itself. We even knew that medical personnell, like “doctor” Louis Louk were playing a less than savoury role. What I am wondering is why some people can support the US in their actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere knowing about this, yet can still call themselves leftists without feeling ashamed.

To me the Iraq war is a litmus test; if you are a true leftist, you oppose it. If you do not, you’re not.

Proud of Britain

Labour sleaze, UK politics
Published on

Aren’t we all proud of Britain? Apparantely not so the Labour Party (sic) who threatened the patriot who put up the Proud of Britain website, just because they have a much inferior initiative of their own, to which I will not link.

Meanwhile, could it be that the Labour Party has a scandal on his hands, now that a certain Home Secretary has been accused of all sorts of not so ethical behaviour? Who would have thought that such a moral crusader could be so hypocritical? Certainly not me…

Meanwhile, some other news that perhaps might make you less proud of Britain, or at least its current government. It turns out the Blair administration may have known all about naughty Mark Thatcher and co’s plans to …ummm…. “spread democracy” to Equatorial Guinea. Remember, only a loon or a conspiracy theorist” (oooh!) would think this had anything to do with oil.

Mind, with Iraq not being the surefire property it once seemed to be, who can blame mr. Blair for trying to diversivy his investments?

Conspiracy theories

Numpties, War on Terror
Published on

Lenin’s tomb reports that an Observer poll revealed most Brits believe ther bush administration knew about the September 11 Attacks and allowed them to happen.

I have not seen any responses to this news yet, but they are not hard to imagine. Frothing at the mouth denunciations from the right wing war supporters, hand wringing apologias from the liberal , moderate, “sensible” anti-war people, and tut-tutting by the “leftwing war supporters. (Case in point…). They will have one thing in common: a (faked) outrage that people are so silly as to believe in *gasp* conspiracy theories, as if US governments have never conspired against their own citizens, Operation Northwood and MK-Ultra not withstanding.

Despite these denounciations, we should not be too fast in rejecting the very real possibility that Bush and co “allowed” the attacks to happen, or at the very least did not try very hard to prevent them. The Bush administration has proven to have no problems with lying or causing the deaths of innocent bystanders to realise their policy goals, after all. Sure, they may have just been very incompetent, locked into a Cold War mindset that only regarded state actors as dangerous, but there are just too many nagging things about the attacks to completely disregard the option that more was going on.