Obama & 9/11

From Paul D. Boin at rabble:

It has been said that the first casualty in war is the truth. This usually pertains to the propensity for about-to-be warring nations to conjure up a pretext for war that can be justified in the public mind. Often this means that the truth is compromised prior to the shedding of blood. When terrorists strike, however, blood is drawn first, and the victim’s pretext for retaliation is determined second. In the midst of both war or terror truth can be compromised by the selective exclusion of important information, the elevation of hearsay or opinion to the status of fact, or by the outright fabrication of misinformation. In this regard, our governments and our mainstream news media have much to answer for.

While it could be argued that the terrorist act already constitutes the pretext for a retaliatory response, any response is an exercise in decision-making. Even our basest and seemingly automatic human responses still inextricably involve a series of choices. Do we, in the case of the United States and its allies, respond immediately? Do we confirm, beyond a reasonable doubt, who the terrorists were? Do we retaliate (punish) in a manner that is equal to the initial terrorist act (crime)? Are we also going to sacrifice the lives of innocent civilians in our chosen response? Who is to participate in this retaliatory action? And what range of repercussions may follow from our chosen response?

Written September 18, 2001

Read Boin’s article, What Would Obama Do? Revisiting 9/11 here

Right-wing MSM

From Michael Massing at the Coumbia Journalism Review blog:

In the weeks following the election, the debate over the issue of media bias, and of whether the press was overly kind to Barack Obama, has continued to swirl. Much less attention has been paid to another, more troubling aspect of the coverage, and that’s the relentless and malevolent campaign that the right-wing media waged against the Democratic candidate. Few people who did not regularly tune in to the vast, churning combine of bellowing radio hosts, yapping bloggers, obnoxious Web sites, malicious columnists, and the slashingly partisan Fox News have any idea of just how vile and venomous were the attacks leveled at Obama. Day after day, week after week, these outlets worked determinedly to discredit and degrade Obama, accusing him of being a Muslim, a Marxist, a radical, a revolutionary, a socialist, a communist, a thug, a mobster, a racist, an agent of voter fraud, a black-power advocate, a madrasah graduate, an anti-Semite, an enemy of Israel, an associate of terrorists—even the Antichrist. Supplemented by a flood of viral e-mails, slanderous robocalls, and Internet-based smear campaigns, these media outlets worked to stoke firestorms of manufactured rage against Obama and the Democrats in what was perhaps the most concerted campaign of vilification ever directed at an American politician.

In light of Obama’s victory, one might be tempted to let it all pass. That would be a mistake. For the effects of that campaign remain with us. What’s more, the campaign itself is still going on.

Read the rest here

via wood s lot

QotD

… if we are to have peace in the world, men and nations must embrace the nonviolent affirmation that ends and means must cohere. One of the great philosophical debates of history has been over the whole question of means and ends. And there have always been those who argued that the end justifies the means, that the means really aren’t important. The important thing is to get to the end, you see.

So, if you’re seeking to develop a just society, they say, the important thing is to get there, and the means are really unimportant; any means will do so long as they get you there? they may be violent, they may be untruthful means; they may even be unjust means to a just end. There have been those who have argued this throughout history. But we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.

It’s one of the strangest things that all the great military geniuses of the world have talked about peace. The conquerors of old who came killing in pursuit of peace, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, were akin in seeking a peaceful world order. If you will read Mein Kampf closely enough, you will discover that Hitler contended that everything he did in Germany was for peace. And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.

Martin Luther King

The Brain and the Doppelgänger

From David Biro at the Literature, Arts and Medicine blog:

One of the most exciting, recent discoveries in science has been the mirror neuron. First isolated in monkeys and later found to exist in human beings, these neurons (and groups of neurons) are active not simply when we are moving and emoting but when we observe others moving and emoting. Our brains, as it were, re-enact or mirror the movements and emotions of other people as we watch them. Although scientists are still working out the implications of this extraordinary finding, it is almost certain that the brain’s mirroring system contributes to the profoundly social nature of human beings and may well be responsible for many of our greatest collective achievements: language, social institutions, and culture (4).

Many scientists also believe that neuronal mirroring can reflect in two directions, illuminating both the external world (of others) and the internal world (of self). By constantly observing and imitating others, we not only learn about them but about ourselves: How we see and think of ourselves; the meanings we ultimately give to our most intimate and “unsharable” experiences like pain; indeed the ongoing project of human creation in general as it works to fill the world with things that possess the capacity to reflect our humanity (5).

Thinkers like Sartre, Foucault and Lacan may have been exquisitely prescient. Mimesis may well turn out to be a prerequisite or stepping stone to self-knowledge. We observe, reproduce, impose patterns, and thereby understand. We can do this with objects that happen to cross our field of vision…  But we could also do this on a more sophisticated level. If a potential doppelganger doesn’t exist we can invent one … as many artists do in their poems and paintings. After finishing his masterwork, Flaubert is famously reported to have said of his creation: Emma Bovary, ces’t moi. The re-production leads to recognition. The same thing that painters do perhaps more self-consciously in their self-portraits and in the case of Frida Kahlo, her double self-portraits. Here the dictum of philosopher Nelson Goodman is most transparently realized: Comprehension and creation go on together (6).

Read the whole thing here

If Obama Could Get This Right …

From Tom Englehardt:

Yes, we now know the ever grimmer statistics: more than 1,400 dead Gazans (and rising as bodies are dug out of the rubble); 5,500 wounded; hundreds of children killed; 4,000 to 5,000 homes destroyed and 20,000 damaged — 14% of all buildings in Gaza; 50,000 or more homeless; 400,000 without water; 50 U.N. facilities, 21 medical facilities, 1,500 factories and workshops, and 20 mosques reportedly damaged or destroyed; the smashed schools and university structures; the obliterated government buildings; the estimated almost two billion dollars in damage; all taking place on a blockaded strip of land 25 miles long and 4 to 7.5 miles wide that is home to a staggering 1.4 million people.

On the other side in Israel, there are a number of damaged buildings and 13 dead, including three civilians and three soldiers killed in a friendly-fire incident. But amid this welter of horrific numbers, here was the one that caught my eye — and a quote went with it: Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, chief of staff of the Israeli Army, told Parliament on January 12th, “We have achieved a lot in hitting Hamas and its infrastructure, its rule and its armed wing, but there is still work ahead.”

Work? The “work” already done evidently included a figure he cited: more than 2,300 air strikes launched by the Israelis with the offensive against Hamas still having days to go. Think about that: in a heavily populated, heavily urbanized, 25-mile-long strip of land, 2,300 air strikes, including an initial surprise attack “in which 88 aircraft simultaneously struck 100 preplanned targets within a record span of 220 seconds.” Many of these strikes were delivered by Israel’s 226 U.S.-supplied F-16s or its U.S.-made Apache helicopters.

In addition, the Israelis evidently repeatedly used a new U.S. smart bomb, capable of penetrating three feet of steel-reinforced concrete, the bunker-busting 250-pound class GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb. (The first group of up to 1,000 of these that the U.S. Congress authorized Israel to buy only arrived in early December.) In use as well, the one-ton Mk84 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) and a 500-pound version of the same. These are major weapons systems. Evidently dropped as well were “Dime (dense inert metal explosive) bombs designed to produce an intense explosion in a small space. The bombs,” reported Raymond Whitaker of the British Independent, “are packed with tungsten powder, which has the effect of shrapnel but often dissolves in human tissue, making it difficult to discover the cause of injuries.”

Keep in mind that Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups are essentially incapable of threatening Israeli planes and that the Israelis were using their airborne arsenal in heavily populated areas. Though the air war was only one part of a massively destructive assault on Gaza, as a form of warfare, barbaric as it is, it invariably gets a free pass. Yet, if you conduct an air war in cities, it matters little how “smart” your weaponry may be; it will, in effect, be a war against civilians.

See Tony Karon on Obama’s Gaza Opportunity

From Komunyakaa

From a reflection on the personal politics of race written by Yusef Komunyakaa on the eve of Obama’s inauguration:

One of the earliest memories I have that directly regards skin color and racism takes me back to another family of blacks who were almost white. The Lorence family had light hair and eyes — mother and father, two girls and one boy. We children weren’t close friends, but sometimes we’d play together. I remember most vividly one summer when I was about 9. It was a Saturday afternoon. Leonard, the brother, wasn’t with us. His two sisters and their cousin visiting them from Detroit were there.

Three of my brothers were with me. All seven of us were sitting in the back of the public bus where “colored” people sat during those Jim Crow years. Maybe we were talking about Superman or a soul music group called Little Anthony and the Imperials. I remember that we were going to see a matinee at the State Theater — maybe “Hop-a-long Cassidy.” And I also remember the bus driver hitting the brakes and leaping to his feet. He charged to the rear of the bus, yelling, “You little girls gotta come up front.” The bus sat on the side of the street, pulsing like a big, striped turtle. The girls sang out all at once, saying: “We have to sit back here with our cousins, our friends.” I remember the driver’s face turning scarlet. I remember him stomping back up to the front of the bus, mumbling cusses and throwing himself into the driver’s seat. I remember him leaving rubber on the August pavement. I remember feeling hurt inside. I remember a jolt of anger, and I remember not knowing why.

Read The Colors in My Dreams

via Silliman’s Blog

McGovern to Obama

From the Washington Post:

As you settle into the Oval Office, Mr. President, may I offer a suggestion? Please do not try to put Afghanistan aright with the U.S. military. To send our troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan would be a near-perfect example of going from the frying pan into the fire. There is reason to believe some of our top military commanders privately share this view. And so does a broad and growing swath of your party and your supporters.

True, the United States is the world’s greatest power — but so was the British Empire a century ago when it tried to pacify the warlords and tribes of Afghanistan, only to be forced out after excruciating losses. For that matter, the Soviet Union was also a superpower when it poured some 100,000 troops into Afghanistan in 1979. They limped home, broken and defeated, a decade later, having helped pave the way for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is logical to conclude that our massive military dominance and supposedly good motives should let us work our will in Afghanistan. But logic does not always prevail in South Asia. With belligerent Afghan warlords sitting atop each mountain glowering at one another, the one factor that could unite them is the invasion of their country by a foreign power, whether British, Russian or American.

I have believed for some time that military power is no solution to terrorism. The hatred of U.S. policies in the Middle East — our occupation of Iraq, our backing for repressive regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, our support of Israel — that drives the terrorist impulse against us would better be resolved by ending our military presence throughout the arc of conflict. This means a prudent, carefully directed withdrawal of our troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and elsewhere. We also need to close down the imposing U.S. military bases in this section of the globe, which do so little to expand our security and so much to stoke local resentment.

We cannot evade this reckoning…

Read the rest here

Swearing

There are a few conversations going on about the oath of office that didn’t go so smoothly for Barack Obama, some of them interesting, most of them – not so much.

Beginning in the latter category, from best to worst, Adam Liptak:

People will argue about what the failure to utter the words in the precise order required by the Constitution means. But it will be an academic argument. It is not clear who would have standing to raise the argument that Mr. Obama had not become president as a consequence, and it is hard to believe that any court – or other body – would want to adjudicate the question.

It’s beside the point.  It’s not the oath that makes the President, it’s the Constitution.  At twelve noon on the 20th of January, one President becomes past, the President-elect becomes present even if no one says or does a thing.  The oath, by the way, does not include the words “so help me God”, which Justice Roberts posed as a question:  “So help you God?”.  The oath has to be sworn before the President can execute the office.  Historically, it has not always been uttered at the inauguration, as in the cases of Lyndon B. Johnson, who did it on an airplane at Love Field in Dallas (Sarah T. Hughes did an excellent job of providing Johnson with manageable prompts), and Calvin Coolidge, who was at his Dad’s house in Vermont when President Harding died.  His Dad was a Notary Public and he swore Calvin in.  There is no recording, so we’ll never know if he did it right.

Then this from comments at Reuters Blogs:

Who cares about misplacing a word. That is insignificant. What really matters,as t harrison points out, both Roberts and Obama have violated the part of the oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” when Obama either can’t or won’t prove that he is legally able to take office. Roberts should be impeached and Obama prosecuted.

The above-named “t harrison” had said, in part, this:

Any departure from our Republic’s Constitution is treasonous.

Another theorist posits that Roberts did it on purpose:

Possibly Mr. Roberts wanted to trip up the President at this momentous occasion. President Obama obviously knew the right order, but felt he should follow the lead of Mr. Roberts. Shame on Mr. Roberts.

It was a conspiracy:

I believe Roberts messed up on purpose. He wanted to give his conservative cronies something to banter about – they could say that Obama didn’t know the Presidential Oath, but Obama didn’t take the bait.

Like the gameshow host in “Slumdog Millionaire”, who tried to persuade the young hero to give the wrong answer, Justice Roberts tried to get Obama to say the wrong words.

Here’s my favourite:

Perhaps it was a tribute to the outgoing President who was famous for his malapropisms, n.k.a. Bushisms. Of course, neither of these gentlemen can mangle a phrase with the literally effortless ease of Mr. Bush, our first President for whom English was a second language. Unfortunately, he did not have a first.

There have been ongoing discussions at American Creation about the addition of the words “so help me God” to the oath.  A secular activist named Michael Newdow actually sued to bar Justice Roberts from saying the words, since they don’t appear in the oath of office as set out in the Constitution.  Here’s Tom Van Dyke:

Newdow’s initial bid for an injunction was denied on First Amendment grounds of Obama’s right to free expression of religion. It’s possible that by turning the phrase into a question, Justice Roberts may have found a clever way around Newdow’s very narrow argument that the Chief Justice, as a government official, cannot issue religious tests. Since one may swear or affirm in taking the oath, to tell the Chief Justice beforehand that one intends to swear might be enough to dodge the prohibition against religious tests.

Now, whether that argument would hold up throughout the appeal process, who knows? But I have no doubt that the Chief Justice rephrased “So help me God” as a question precisely with Michael Newdow and his ilk in mind. Or perhaps it was President Obama’s idea. I think we’ll find out more about this…  

 

Hmmmmm.

By far the best discussion of the flubb has to be this one, from Language Log:

Chief Justice John Roberts’ administration of the presidential oath to Barack Obama was far from smooth. Early reports differ in saying who stumbled: NBC and ABC say the flub was Roberts’, while the AP says it was Obama’s. I think both men were a bit nervous, and the error that emerged from their momentary disfluency came down to a problem of adverbial placement.  

 

Read the rest here

UPDATE:  Obama and Roberts do it over

UPDATE II:  And the beat goes on

QotD

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
English novelist (1812 – 1870)

On Inaugurating Obama

From Silliman:

I have my own reservations and concerns about the new administration. When I first endorsed Obama on February 11 of last year, I did so not because I thought he was the most progressive of candidates, but because he was the one I thought had the best chance of winning. Policy wise, he was best candidate on one issue – Iraq – but quite thoroughly one of the pack among that particular group of Democrats on everything else.

Right now, my biggest concerns are that the new president won’t get the best advice from his cabinet of mostly recycled Clintonites…

[...]

So I’m holding my breath. I think the immediate challenges before us are horrific, and our options aren’t all that many. Further, there remains a tremendous amount of unfinished business in this country, a nation in which black men are still more likely to go prison than college, where women still earn less than their counterparts, where nobody wants to admit to the genocide of native peoples on which this nation was built, and where many gay & lesbian citizens are far from equal in the face of the law.

Still, today is a day when we can all feel the pent-up demand for change that exists in our society. And we can see that as a people we’ve taken a concrete step, however timorously, toward unleashing those forces. I think we’re in for some very interesting times.

Read the whole thing here