On Tuesday Michael Savage spent two ours complainng about an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm" that irked him. He has long been a critic of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, who he sees as self-ridiculing Jews. He has a right to his opinion. This episode, which I did not see because I don't have television any more, was also offensive to Christians. He went on to say things like "this needs to be stopped", and "we need to do something about this", and "the government needs to do something," etc., etc. This isn't just calling for a boycott, this is a call for censorship. He admits that he meant to cancel his HBO subscription when the Sopranos went off the air but hast gotten around to it. So he's basically saying that since he's too lazy to get rid of HBO, the government suld censor it. Naturally, he will probably try to backpedal from this, like he did the autism thing, but I think it's pretty clear what he said, and it isnt a matter of "context." He ridicules Jews all the time when he's talking about Bernie Madoff, politicians he doesnt like, etc. If somebody even has a name that sounds Jewish, he starts in on where they went to school, what their parents did, what they probably ate,etc., complete with mocking accents. So I think he has probably gotten as much mileage out of the Jewish thing as people like Seinfeld have. He also occasionaly ridicules the Bible and the people who wrote it. He also admires Lenny Bruce, who offended everybody. He bragged that he doesn't use four-letter words on hs show, but big deal. First, it's against the FCC rules. Second, he manages to express pretty explicit concepts without four-letter words. (Limbaugh does it too-- a lot of his seem to have to do with sodomy and masturbation)Last night(Wednesday) he started in on it again. I turned the radio off and went to a movie. Tonight I may or not be home but won't catch the beginning of the show in any case.

I wonder if it occurs to him that this may be the reason that a lot of other right wing talk people and people in the media in general have ignored his situation with the British government?t Maybe they can't be bothered supporting a big hyppocrite and they'd have a point.

I have been trying to figure out what is the deal with Savage for a long time, partly becasue my ex-boyfriend idolized him, so I am probably unduly preoccupied with this. A while back he was reading the Hayes Code, implying that Hollywood should go back to it(with a few minor changes, of course. I guess the rule about not depicting interracial relationships was too old-fashioned even for him)

I know little about Savage. Though given the lies and exaggerations they tell about Limbaugh, Coulter, etc. I wouldn't doubt they do it to him to. Which isn't of course to say that you are wrong.

His wikipedia entry makes him out to be an interesting character with a much more diverse background than I would have thought. On one of your points though: it strikes me that if you yourself are from a particular ethnic/cultural background, you have much more of a right to make fun of it, etc.

The only experience I have with Savage is when he was supposed to be on NPR's Talk of the Nation. This was right after he was banned from entering the United Kingdom, back in May I think. He opened the show by going on a diatribe about free speech and how everyone should have the right to express themselves. However, when the first caller questioned some of Savage's views, he ridiculed him and refused to respond. He then told the host that he had better things to do than listen to people "wearing pajamas and calling from asylums." To his credit, Neil Conan told Savage that if he had better things to do, then he should "go do them." So Savage hung up. I think hypocrisy is a running theme with this man.

Edit: spelling.

Message edited by its author, Oct 30, 2009, 10:39am.

Being in favor of free speech and how everyone has the right to express themselves does not mean you have to respond to everyone or can't ridicule them, etc. I don't think that makes him a hypocrite.

Being in favor of free speech and how everyone has the right to express themselves does not mean you have to respond to everyone or can't ridicule them, etc. I don't think that makes him a hypocrite.

Really? You don't think it's the teensiest bit hypocritical for a guy with a syndicated call-in talk radio show to agree to be the guest on another syndicated call-in talk radio show on the topic of free speech, and then hang-up after the first caller?

Message edited by its author, Oct 30, 2009, 2:16pm.

Free speech is not absolute. Some people abuse the privilege.

Yeap

You don't think it's the teensiest bit hypocritical . . .

No, I don't. It's a different issue. It might be rude, or cowardly, etc., but it has nothing to do with his commitment to free speech. He didn't try to shut down their speech. Rather, he just decided he didn't want to take part anymore in the conversation. Whether or not his conduct was rude or cowardly, etc. would depend on the particulars. If he felt like the callers or the host were being abusive, for example, then it might have been perfectly appropriate to end it.

Message edited by its author, Oct 30, 2009, 3:25pm.

Yeah. Okay.

This was not a second hand report of things Savage said(like Limbaugh with the slavery quote). This was firsthand from his own show.

No one with a brain can take this man seriously. If I were a wicked, scheming liberal billionaire, I would create "Mike Savages" as a false flag attack on conservatism.

So the worst thing in the world is a talk show host who admires Lenny Bruce?

Well, maybe not the worst thing in the world.

It's not the worst thing, of course. It's just that in view of his complaints about dozens of comedians and other entertainers for their edgy material, it seems odd that he'd give Lenny Bruce a pass. I'll give you another example. When Heath Ledger(a gifted actor, in my opinion) died, Savage said many nasty things, partly probably because he disapproved of the movie "Brokeback Mountain", but also because Ledger was evidently a big partier and not married to the mother of his daughter, Michelle Williams. Yet right around the same time, he interviewed Sylvester Stallone and made a big fuss over him. But Stallone has had similar things in his personal life. He made a porn movie when he was starting out, and he's made lots of just plain bad movies. He had a baby with Janice Dickinson(not the kind of woman Savage usually approves of) and as far as I know wasn't married to her. He had a high profile relationship with Brigitte Neilson, an even more embarrassing woman. And so on. Sometimes Savage contradicts himself practically in the same show. First he likes Cindy McCain, now she's a "pill-popping hag."

I realize I'm obsessed(there's that word again) with Savage, probably partly because my ex-boyfriend, who I have not completely gotten over, idolizes him. I don't get it. Is he for real or not? If not, why do a lot of smart people admire him? It drives me crazy. To a lesser extent, I wonder what makes some of the other more colorful talk radio people, like Glenn Beck, tick.

Not to be overly argumentative, but I do know a bit more about Glenn Beck. I often watch his show. In my view, Glenn Beck is nothing like the person you are describing Savage to be. I think he's quite funny and on target 90% of the time. And he doesn't just do commentary. He's also helped to break some big stories--among them, Acorn, and that 9/11 truther card carrying commie Obama czar.

Yes, I listen to Beck when I get up early enough and would probably watch his TV show if I had TV. On balance, he has probably done a good deed galvanizing tea-partyers and stuff. Savage is extremely hard on him, by the way, and accused his of stealing material from him(he pretty much accuses everybody of that, and a few of them accuse him of it.)

A person finds 911 Truthers in all kinds of funny places. My ex-boyfriend(not the Savage fan, another one) is one, I'm sorry to say. I also heard Gerald Cilenti saying some things on an old Art Bell show that suggested he might be open to some of their ideas. One thing you never hear them address is Shanksville. What was supposed to be going on there, if it wasn't a plane that was supposed to go to DC? And it's pretty insulting to the United 93 passengers, who I consider heroes. How do they explain all of that?

I think the problem is this: talk show hosts, and people like Ann Coulter, are simultaneously political people, trying to advance a political cause (which they presumably believe is advanced by telling the truth), and people who are in the entertainment industry and thus are people whose livelihood comes from getting and keeping a big audience. These two realities are in tension.

Not if the cause has merit and your audience has a postive I.Q. Of course, if not.......

Your potential audience has an IQ which is normally distributed, and people who are three SDs on the left of the mean have a vote just as those who are three SDs to the right. But political struggle, for any ideas whatsoever, is never just a matter of a simple appeal to reason. If your enemies are making the worst appear the better cause, through appeals to emotion, you will have to match them in that medium, without, hopefully, degrading consciousness by telling untruths.

My real objection to Mike Savage and to Ann Coulter (to a lesser extent) is that I do not think that they believe a lot of what they say. What they say is said for the purpose of capturing and increasing market share.

At the moment there is a large potential market for liberal-bashing, which they take advantage of -- but they, especially Savage, do little to advance their audience's understanding of why collectivism is a bad idea when extended beyond certain limits. They simply stoke their listeners' prejudices. (Coulter in fact has a good research team, so you can learn things by reading her books, mainly the footnotes, but the way she interprets her facts is shallow and demagogic.)

I do not think that they believe a lot of what they say.

With regard to Coulter, that's quite a cynical view of her. And I would strongly disagree. She's been saying the same sorts of things for at least twenty years, during all sorts of political climates. It's true she's done well in the end. But she wasn't always a best selling author. One of her statements got her fired from National Review--a low point for that publication--but she wasn't as secure at that point in her career. I think she has more courage and honesty than most of her compatriots. And she's also of course very funny.

Message edited by its author, Nov 4, 2009, 11:29am.

She is very funny. But ... she claims not to believe in evolution. Really? She calls liberals "traitors" ... and with respect to that, I'll let the late William Buckley speak for me here:

Tailgunner Ann
A review of Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, by Ann Coulter




By William F. Buckley, Jr.
Posted December 1, 2003
This article appeared in the Winter 2003 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Arrived in Montreal, I put aside Ann Coulter's book, and descended the gangway. At the baggage claim area I spotted a newsstand. I was drawn to the headline featuring—Ann Coulter.

That day's copy of the National Post boasted Coulter at the top of the page in full color, her long blond hair southbound, interrupted only by a news headline. Alongside her picture the text was, "ANN COULTER: New York Times publisher is a traitor to U.S. Comment. A10."

Her advertised finding certainly warranted immediate examination. But I did of course wonder, as I turned the pages, whether the lure of textual tabloidization had taken over in the Post, the straight Toronto daily founded only five years earlier (and sold in 2001) by the conservative Conrad Black, now Lord Black. And I was curious to know whether Ms. Coulter had sharpened her taxonomic tools since writing the book I was reading.

She wasted no time passing sentence.

"During my recent book tour, I resisted the persistent, illiterate request that I name traitors. With a great deal of charity—and suspension of disbelief—I was willing to concede that many liberals were merely fatuous idiots. But after the New York Times's despicable editorial on the two-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack, I am prepared—just this once—to name a traitor: Pinch Sulzberger, publisher of the Times."

What followed was two ad hominem references to Sulzberger (he allegedly hadn't made it into Columbia University) embedded in a boiling-mad 600-word account of the offending New York Times editorial. She paraphrased its meaning: "When General Pinochet staged his coup against a Marxist strong man {in 1973}, the U.S. did not stop him—as if Latin American generals were incapable of doing coups on their own. And—I quote {the editorial}—'It was September 11.' Parsed to its essentials, the Times's position is: We deserved it."

I dug up the editorial in question. It was titled, "The Other Sept. 11," and undertook the dark comparison without mincing words. "Death came from the skies," it began. "A building—a symbol of the nation—collapsed in flames in an act of terror that would lead to the deaths of 3,000 people. It was September 11."

Get it? Coulter certainly got it. The overthrow of Salvador Allende on 9/11/73 had led to 3,000 deaths—the same death toll as in 9/11/01. Not immediately dead, the Chileans, but dead in the weeks and early years ahead of the military dictatorship.

So here we Americans found ourselves, on September 11, 28 years later, confronting our own tragic loss of life. The Timeswas calling on us to reflect that for all the apparent differences between the two 9/11's, a blood line ran from Santiago, 1973, to New York, 2001. The preacher's apocalyptic simile had poetical and material weaknesses.

The Chilean building in which Allende died did not, in fact, collapse in flames. The flames were doused. A random act of terror in 2001 is not the same as a coup d'etat in 1973. The staging of the Chilean coup did not call for "death from the skies." It was in fact conceived as a bloodless coup.

But all of that is by the way in an inquiry into the Coulter thinking machine, which is my mission. What she wrote was that 1) the publisher of the newspaper that 2) printed an editorial that 3) reiterated the old historical argument that denounced U.S. acquiescence in the removal of Allende, was 4) engaging moral equivalence and therefore, 5) a traitor. We don't need to come up with the weaknesses, or even the depravities, in the Times's reasoning. But even as Ms. Coulter clearly intends to shock, why shouldn't her reader register that shock? By wondering whether she is out of her mind, or has simply lost her grip on language.

What except that prompts her to come up with (or the Post to publicize) her syllogism? The man who heads the paper that employs an editorial writer who dangles the proposition that a thought given to moral equivalency is appropriate and humbling on September 11, 2003 is a "traitor"? That end-of-the-road word, bear always in mind, is hers. Coulter is a law school graduate and isn't using the "T"-word loosely. The opening sentences of her article reject any such explanation. She means to charge that Sulzberger is engaged in traitorous activity. That, after all, is what traitors engage in.

* * *

The thought-process used here is everywhere in evidence in her best-selling book, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. The book's central contention is that liberals critically situated on the American scene aren't fatuous asses—that's baby talk. They are enemies of the United States and of American freedom.

As expected, much of the book is devoted to rejecting commonly accepted charges against Senator Joe McCarthy. She gives the reader the names of a dozen indisputably traitorous actors who worked in government while concealing their ties to the Soviet Union. Quite properly, she lists Alger Hiss and Owen Lattimore as prime examples of liberal obstinacy, and she wonders very much out loud whether that obstinacy arose because these liberals were concerned with due process and the presumption of innocence and all that, or whether they were, in heart and mind, on the Soviet side in the Cold War. McCarthy simply made up the charge that Lattimore was the "top agent" of the Soviets in the United States, but that exaggeration did not mean that the evidence against Lattimore, Communist agent, was less than overwhelming.

But as one reads along, one gets used to exaggerations—not McCarthy's, but Coulter's. She is carried away. Yes, the Rosenbergs were justly and correctly executed for treason, but get a load of the language that flows from it, in the hands of Ms. Coulter. She is talking about the famous Army-McCarthy contest and focusing now on the army dentist. The McCarthy committee spotted Major Irving Peress, a Communist, who had been kept on in the army and even promoted. "When were they the army to learn? Thanks to the Army's incompetence in dealing with the Rosenbergs, nearly 300 million Americans would spend the second half of the 20th century under threat of nuclear annihilation." That is something of a stretch, for-want-of-a-nail compounded to the 10th power. The Coulter reader, impelled by the momentum of Coulter, Historian, might wonder why, in high pitch of wrath and anger, she let the army off merely with the charge of incompetence. Why not make the army traitorous, too?

She writes with scorn and derision of the critics of McCarthy and of the lengths to which many of them went, and still do. The late Brent Bozell and I spent 18 months attempting to distinguish what McCarthy had said and charged in the years we examined, and where (not often) he was indefensible. Our book was titled McCarthy And His Enemies, because we sought to make the point that many enemies of McCarthy had earned a derision and contempt that they nevertheless never had experienced in the cooler, reflective chambers of historical criticism. Coulter's rejoinders to many of McCarthy's critics are well aimed, and the offenders eminently vulnerable. In an introduction to a new edition of McCarthy and His Enemies, in 1961, I wrote that "The McCarthy business of course was deadly serious, and if it was not, there surely was no excuse either for his activities or his enemies'." I was under the mistaken impression, in 1961, that the totality of such as Richard Rovere expressed in his book Senator Joe McCarthy, would bring a critical reaction: "Can it be, indeed, that we are coming out of it?" That is, out of hysterical anti-McCarthyism? The terminal extremities of the Rovere book, I judged, "may prove to have been the great disintegrating thunderclap that shattered the storm cradle itself. Perhaps this volume McCarthy and His Enemies can now be read in the grayish light that augurs the dawn of a national composure on the subject of McCarthyism. There are already those who are embarrassed by the lengths to which McCarthy's enemies went in prosecuting their myth. Lord Bertrand Russell actually said that McCarthy had made it unsafe for Americans to read Thomas Jefferson."

Arthur Herman's Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator, published in 1999, sought to be balanced. Coulter goes in the opposite direction, sounding sometimes like Roy Cohn, whose defenses of McCarthy were in the language of biblical inerrancy: "If he said it (did it), it was the right thing to say (to do)." But as we have seen, Coulter is much, much more extreme in her judgments than McCarthy ever was, though from one particular passage of McCarthy she takes explicit encouragement, ending up on the road to Pinch-as-traitor.

Senator McCarthy, I wrote a few years ago (in my novel, The Redhunter), here and there gave evidence of being the prototypical John Bircher—the man who believes that the objective consequences of a man's deeds reflect his subjective designs. Coulter approvingly recalls the sentence from McCarthy's speech against General George Marshall that makes exactly that point. "If Marshall was merely stupid," McCarthy said, "the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve America's interests." That sentence declares, in a word, that George Marshall was in fact a Communist agent. One pauses, if only for a tiny moment. Could Ann Coulter really believe that? Naw. She is just making rhetoric, as in the Pinch-is-a-traitor column.

* * *

Yet no mention of Ms. Coulter's work should omit acknowledgment of her adroit wit in treating of political correctness. She has a lovely passage on PC's fatuity:
In early December 2001, "60 Minutes" host Steve Kroft interviewed {Transportation Secretary Norman} Mineta about his approach to securing the airlines from terrorist attack. Kroft observed that of twenty-two men currently on the FBI's most-wanted list, "all but one of them has complexion listed as olive. They all have dark hair and brown eyes. And more than half of them have the name Mohammed." Thus, he asked Mineta if airport security should give more scrutiny to someone named Mohammed—"just going down a passenger manifest list: Bob, Paul, John, Frank, Steven, Mohammed." The secretary of transportation said, "No." In fact, Mineta was mystified by Kroft's question, asking him, "Why should Mohammed be singled out?" The Federal Aviation Administration had a computer profiling system on passengers, but it actually excluded mention of passengers' race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion. (What does it have?)

There was the dogged New York Times defense of the so-called Lackawanna Muslims, brought in by the FBI and interrogated. The Times expressed deep sympathy for the detainees, and reported the dismay of their neighbors. "It was just like the Times's man-on-the-street interviews on Bush's tax plan. For the Times, an ordinary American is a sociology professor in Oregon whose wife teaches tantric sex at the community college." Coulter accosts the defense of the detained Yemeni-Americans to the effect that they were no more suspicious than the man next door with some of the data the FBI had come up with. "The prosecution's case, at least in part, is that a terrorist can be the kid next door. Yes—if the kid next door trained with al-Qaeda. Mohammed Atta lived next door to somebody, too. Don't all criminals live next door to somebody? What was the Times's point?"

There is a lot of such fun and shrewdness as this in Ann Coulter's book, but there is also mischief, which of course can be fun. Especially mischief about the other guy.

Message edited by its author, Nov 4, 2009, 4:29pm.

This is the part that drives me crazy. Do they really believe the stuff they are saying?

Well ... trying to put the best face on it I can, I assume that we're dealing here with a kind of right-wing post-modernism, which denies that there is an objective reality. It's the same sort of mentality that leads lefties to say that the US is the greatest terrorist state in the world, or that it is a police state, etc. Certain true things are taken and then compounded to the fifth power with all relevant context stripped off. The intent is, I suppose, to catch the reader's attention in a way that a more balanced statement would not.

I think that is a very good analysis, Doug, at least as to Coulter and Company.

However, as an attorney who is aware of unfortunate trends in the criminal law ever since Nixon and RICO, I think that the phrase "tending toward a police state" might have some merit. See, e.g., Three Felonies A Day, Go Directly To Jail: The Criminalization Of Almost Everything and the website www.fear.org .

Message edited by its author, Nov 5, 2009, 10:08am.

I suppose that all states "tend" in an authoritarian direction, for lots of reasons, so we always have to be vigilant to guard our liberties.

But as someone who grew up in Texas in the 1950s, where a bill was presented in the state legislature proposing the death penalty for membership of the Communist Party; and who watched as political meetings organized by the Left (including me, at the time, the folly of youth) were physically disrupted by right-wingers who were later exonerated by the court (their lawyer's defence was one sentence, which had resonance at the time: "extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice"); and who saw a political associate, Black militant Lee Otis Johnson sentenced to 30 years in prison for the possession of one marijuana cigarette; and another, Danny Shacht, sent down for a year for "impersonating a soldier" because he wore army fatigues during an anti-war "guerilla theatre" performance; and whose Unitarian Sunday School teacher (head of the local ACLU and open Socialist) had his house shot into, the bullets just missing his baby daughter;and who saw another political associate, head of the Communist Party's youth group in Austin, murdered by an anti-Communist police informant psychopath who would have gone free had it not been for the extra-ordinary (post-retirement) efforts of a (Latino) police sergeant to track him down... I think things have, overall, gotten a whole lot better.

The New (and Old) Left in the 60s and 70s were always screaming about repression, and with Nixon in the White House their fears were not entirely misplaced, but, basically, things have gotten better. We mustn't be the little boy who cries "wolf!".

But ... she claims not to believe in evolution. Really?

Didn't we just have a thread on that, launched by you if I'm not mistaken? So you're claim is that people who are against evolution don't actually believe what they're saying? Please.

The Buckley review was interesting. On the whole I think Coulter and Buckley agree on McCarthy much more than they disagree. And it certainly should be permissable within, say, conservative ranks to disagree with Buckley. Buckley's statement, "Coulter is much, much more extreme in her judgments than McCarthy ever was," is I think debatable. Among other things, their use and follow through on the word "traitor" is a bit different. As far as I know, Coulter is not advocating that Sulzberger and others like him should be subject to hearings, etc. And I think Buckley is perhaps being a bit disengenous on that matter. I don't think Coulter is suggesting that Sulzberger is a "traitor" for the Allende editorial alone. I might be wrong.

Did some people actually want the U.S. to lose in Iraq? I think so. And if you couple that with a newspaper whose biased reporting was such that those at the paper should have known that it made that prospect more likely, then it isn't clear what it is about "traitor" that is misplaced.

There's a tinge to the word that implies a kind of dishonesty. You perhaps wouldn't use it against, say, a Communist paper that was against the Iraq war. They are merely following through on their well-known and honestly expressed views. But if you claim to be fully patriotic and supportive of the troops, or whatever, while at the same time knowingly and intentionally doing things which make their defeat more likely, then I think it might apply.

The editor of a paper that covered, say, the American efforts during World War Two in the same way that the NYT covered Iraq would perhaps have been subject to arrest. Of course, current conservatives don't push for that sort of thing. Instead it's some on the left who argue for legal action against their opponents--as one of the current threads in Pro and Con illustrates quite nicely.

Message edited by its author, Nov 5, 2009, 5:28pm.

Well, Doug, given your examples, maybe so.

But I can't help but be somewhat sympathetic to a civilian who spends six years in a navy brig with no charges being brought, or some of my former clients who came within an inch of losing $10,000,000 of their pooled personal assets because the State of Arizona alleged that the funds in question were the "instrumentality of a potential fraud on unnamed Arizona investors."

As a convert to Judaism and an attorney I am always worried about the principle of the rule of law that goes: "that guy today, me and my friends tomorrow." Then there is that d**&ned universal rights prejudice that I really should give up, since no one else seems to buy into it any more.... Ah well, another day, another disillusionment......

Perhaps we can divide these examples/problems into two categories:

(1) Violations (or putative violations) of our well-established rights. A judge sentencing a political militant to 30 years in prison for possessing one marijuana cigarette was selective enforcement, or whatever the legal term was, and a violation of his rights. (He was released after four years. Still, an outrage.) These will continue forever, so long as flawed human beings run the system, so it's a continual struggle.

(2) Situations where the law is not obviously clear. Our problem with terrorists and suspected terrorists is that we don't have clear legal guidelines with respect to what to do with them. In war the law is silent, or something like that, but it's not quite a war, either. I am sympathetic to Philip Bobbit's proposals in Terror and Consent about the need to develop law to cover these situations.

Well, I understand your outrage about the examples you have given, but -

(1) Selective enforcement is a problem for which there is little or no possible remedy. So is unequal sentencing. The problem that can be remedied is that there are criminal offenses of a type which gives police, prosecutors and judges the power to arrest and incarcerate people for noncrimes such as possessing a joint, not that there are "bad" people who abuse that power. Of course there are the latter. That is the "human condition." But one need to keeps the candy away from the moral monsters in our midst.

(2) Most laws are not clear at the margins. They have gray areas, like every other human concept. The problem with "terror laws" is not that they are not clear, but that define novel "crimes" for acts which are already overly criminalized, and have been for 300 years. There are already crimes defined for murder, assault and battery, destruction of property, conspiracy, and predicate and subsequent acts associated with those other crimes. Those already established crimes are sweeping in scope, particularly the conspiracy, predicate and subsequent act crimes. There is no need for a special class of "terror crimes," unless the "need" is to place more arbitrary authority in the hands of those who administer and adjudicate laws.

People need to settle down and start thinking critically about these things rather than discovering what they mistakenly imagine to be new wrongs and presuming that there, therefore, needs to be new remedies. The real problem is that most citizens are becoming increasingly infantized and want daddy to keep them safe and give them a nice life - something which daddy is more than happy to do just so long as they remember that they are children and be nice and obedient toward their parent.

Message edited by its author, Nov 6, 2009, 7:23am.

Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that no additional laws were needed to combat terrorists within the US. It seems to me that our main problems, with respect to possible violations of legality, come from events overseas.

If we knew where Bin Laden was, and it was somewhere in the tribal areas of Pakistan, what should we do?

Well, it depends somewhat on what you mean "we knew where Bin Laden was." If we knew exactly where he was, then it would be no more of a violation of Pakistani sovereignity than we have already engaged in to send a remotely directed missile to blow him up. I take it as axiomatic that someone whose constituent parts have been scattered is no longer that much of a future "threat."

If we just know in general, however, then I suppose one would have to balance yet another mass invasion against the delight of revenge on a single person, even a single person who very well may prove to be a future danger. For me, there is really no question how that balance would be struck - and I'm not at all adverse to revenge in principle. You don't start yet another war simply to "get" one person, no matter how vile or how dangerous that person may be. It simply is not economic.

So I really don't think that Bin Laden is a special case. If you give me a loaded gun and put him in front of me he will no longer be a threat, but does that mean that I'm willing to trade off his corpse against yet more loss of liberty at home -a necessary attendant of war so far as we can tell thus far - and the lives of several hundred or several thousand rather naive 20 year olds awash with testosterone. No, it doesn't mean that at all. It comes down to a matter of practicality how much "justice" one wants at what price. That price is too high.

Message edited by its author, Nov 6, 2009, 7:25pm.

"rather naive 20 year olds awash with testosterone"?

So killing someone without a trial is okay, provided it's done in Pakistan?

As you pointed out, Doug, it is Pakistan. In the United States, the U.S. authorities have enough control to capture people, generally without loss of life. Albeit, it is not that unusual to have exchange of gun fire, even here, when trying to capture a heavily armed "suspect" who is determined not to be taken into custody. Generally peaceful apprehension of a hostile and well armed suspect is not the rule in Pakistan, particularly in the tribal areas of Pakistan. You do know that the half million dollar reward for turning in Bin Laden without violence still stands?

But let me, again, ask you about the tradeoff, Doug. Would you rather kill Bin Laden without trial or send in 200 U.S. soliders - presuming you could get them there and land them - have a firefight in which half of them were killed and a couple hundred "natives" were killed, in order to, maybe, capture Bin Laden alive? Is that the sort of justice you have in mind, tradiing off 300 relatively innocent lives to assure a trial for one man ? If not, could you be more specific as to what you have in mind.

Again, Doug, we are talking about real world tradeoffs, not what would be nice in paradise.

Message edited by its author, Nov 7, 2009, 10:31am.

No, I agree with you. When we find him, kill him. But ... this is not normally how we deal with people on the "wanted" list. That is, if someone kills an American citizen and flees to a foreign country which then tells us they cannot extradite him, we don't normally -- I think -- then try to drop a bomb on him. My point is, that this situation is something new ... not really covered by the methods we have worked out to deal with "crime", nor by the conventions of normal state-to-state warfare. I think we need new law.

And that is a very good point. It is a point I was jumping up and down about when "we" decided to invade Afganistan. Not only do "we" not typically kill people in foreign jurisdictions, but "we" also do not typically invade, conquer and indefinitely occupy said foreign jurisdictions when they are "harboring" someone we would like to either bring before a court on a capital charge and/or kill.

In fact, "we," at one time, were in agreement with the British that "we" had a policy of "harboring" those wanted for certain sorts of crimes in other nations. As I recall, for instance, "we" harbored Karl Marx for quite some time and the Brits "harbored" both Marx and Lenin. Now, of course, neither of those guys had ever committed mass murder up to that point, and Marx would never do so, but then, the notion that anyone would invade "us" or that we would invade "anyone else" for "harboring," never seemed to occur to anyone in those days. Wonder why that was........

On your specific point, however, I'm not certain that you are being 100% accurate. As I recall, Reagan sent fighter jets to shoot up targets in Libya where Ghaddafi was believed to be located iin 1986, killing and crippling some of those close to Ghaddafi and nearly missing his majesty. http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/... Given the technology of that day versus the technology of this day, that seems to be to be pretty close to what is planned for Bin Laden if his whereabouts are ever discovered. Of course, no one invaded, conquered and occupied Libya to capture Ghaddafi.....

Thinking about it further, however, I do recall something similar by George H.W. Bush in Panama in 1989. Perhaps that is where our dear ex-President and the elder Bush's son derived his Afghanistan policy, thus apparently extending the Monroe Doctrine to the rest of the world....

Fascinating how government policies move toward uniformity and consistency in the long run, isn't it? The rule of law, you know. Now if Obama just follows the policies of his predecessors, perhaps Deniro and company can enjoy an extended stay in a Navy brig without the pesky interference of bothersome counsel or that antiquated notion of habeas corpus ..... After all, we now have precedents from some of the political leaders that they most admire for advancements in Western law.

Message edited by its author, Nov 7, 2009, 7:35pm.

Marx indeed lived in the UK, and I believe Lenin attended the second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903 there for a few weeks after the delegates were expelled from Belgium, but didn't reside there; he was in exile in Switzerland during the war. But neither of them was wanted for crimes in other countries.

However, your general point is correct: both Britain and the US have harbored killers: until recently the British authorities routinely provided a safe have to Islamic terrorists, provided they directed their labors abroad and left Britain in peace; and the US was a haven for IRA men on the run from the British, and allowed IRA sympathyzers to raise money for the IRA without the intense scrutiny given to Muslim charitable (or 'charitable;) fundraisers, although I think we were less blatant about it.

As for invading and conquering other countries, or, let us say, intervening militarily in them ... I don't want to trip off polemics from our Leftist friends here, but ... Mexico, the Philippines, numerous interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, Cuba, Grenada, Panama, various Pacific Islands including Hawaii ...

Our enemies will say this just shows how uniquely wicked we are, but of course it just shows how, in this respect, we have been like other nations, and not unique at all, since the history of mankind is pretty much one of continual war and conquest, tempered by genuine progress towards something better, over the last few hundred years. But I fear I am hijacking the thread here.

I agree with your last paragraph, except for hijacking the thread. That phrase, frankly, has no coherent meaning since most internetors can't maintain a single theme for more than a few posts.

I disagree with your equation of Afganistan with most previous "interventions." True, various "humanitarian" concerns - most of which turned out to be factually false, like the rape of nuns in Cuba - were stated for prior interventions. Not true that really any previous intervention was justified solely on the basis of capturing one single wrongdoer. I am still a bit ambivalent on the Panama thing, but I believe if you look at the propaganda surrounding it you will see that there were the usual allegations of a drug ring, etc.

You may not recall the propaganda surrounding the Afgan invasion, conquest and occupation, but I recall it vividly. "No one" in the West previously admired the Taliban and most thought that they were wacko fundamentalists - which is a pretty accurate assessment. But no one had proposed "intervention" in Afganistan for that reason. Then we had 9/11, Bush's demands to "TURN HIM OVER," and the Taliban's stalling and/or statements that they didn't exactly know "where he was." The same Bush who had announced a week before that this matter was going to be handled mostly like an ordinary criminal investigation, with the particular perpetrators first identified, then obtained and tried, had a change of heart. Suddenly the GREAT CAUSE was not just against the perpetrators of 9/11 but also against the Taliban who were "haboring" them and who were thus also guilty by association. It was, literally, a "war," rather than a criminal matter. And so, here we are today.

As an afterthought it might be mentioned that I don't think anyone has ever shown that the Taliban leadership had prior knowledge of 9/11. Their great crime was simply "haboring" Bin Laden amd not immediately surrendering him when a demand was made by The Bush. There were, of course, after the fact excuses about libertating Afgan women, spreading democracy, blah, blah, blah, but the propaganda in these afterthought was so thin as to be ridiculous.

But neither of them was wanted for crimes in other countries.

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Incidentally, I'd go back and check my sources on this. If you want to add "violent" as a modifier of "crimes" then it may be true, but both Lenin and Marx had fled prosecution in other countries.

Re # 26 -Did some people actually want the U.S. to lose in Iraq? I think so.
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I am just curious, Oakes, what in your mind would have counted as "victory" in Iraq - short of mass conversion of the Iraqi people to Christianity and their wholehearted adoption of Western style parliamentarianism.

Message edited by its author, Nov 8, 2009, 3:26pm.