Connecting Dots on Jobs

Getting tired of simplistic laments about losing jobs, especially from the liberal Ed Show side. The fact of the matter is that many car jobs and defense jobs and other jobs that have to do with the 20th Century are not gonna be restored.

At least if the President is successful in minimizing wasteful defense spending and ending the tyranny of oil.

The laments will be sounding loud and clear over coming weeks and our response should be:

Be honest about it. Talk about the green economy. Talk about new professions that will deal with the coming aging of the population and the need to start building communities that do not get washed or blown away whenever the weather acts up. Talk about the new jobs that would come into being if we really did preventive health care. Talk about new modes of teaching if we really did move more toward a culture which offered more than one route toward becoming qualified.

The jobs we associate with Detroit are going away and any effort to resuscitate the automobile economy that we have known is throwing the future down the drain.

The underlying political controversy now is between the predatory and the civilized. Between those who would turn the US into the New Barbarians and those who would move us gently toward something like a Civilization where people are not ashamed to be civil, not ashamed to tolerate, not ashamed to do things that celebrate life.

We have the Cheneys of the world wishing for a nice attack to reignite the paranoia and fear around 9/11. And we have the Obamas of the world going for a new synthesis in which smartness counts for something in creating security and hope is not subject to the cynical Cheney sneer.

All we have to remember from our past is that the Cheneys of the world are no strangers my code phrase “jaws of hell”. Hit the tag for more. And that the Obama’s of the world are aware of this underside but smart enough to contain it and ward off its worst expressions.

INSPIRED BY THIS WASHPO ACCOUNT OF DEFENSE SPENDING CONFLICTS

MoveOn Torture Ad: Dumb or Smart?

Is MoveOn either being very smart or very dumb?

SEE THE MOVEON AD THAT ESSENTIALY CALLS FOR CHENEY’S HEAD AS A TORTURE AUTHORIZER

The condition under which MoveOn would be deemed smart is if it is riding a wave of public sentiment that will see its ad as a majority sentiment, despite its provenance. That would give the organization points for sensing a wave of pubic willingness to have a public prosecutor go for the guy who may have engineered torture and who now has no hesitation in admitting his role and defending it.

The condition under which MoveOn could be deemed dumb would be if the ad was seen as part of a broad movement to polarize the whole torture issue to the point that there could be no victory regardless of what was done, because the possibility of a national consensus would be foreclosed. I think it is probably in the interest of the MSM to take this position and play for a partisan, binary battle in which the rule of law is submerged in a pool of mutual right-left vitriol.

My conclusion is that what MoveOn has done is an inevitable development, just as wingnut Republicans will no doubt hit back by characterizing the torture movement as a radical left plot.

So MoveOn is neither smart nor dumb but predictable.

There is a silver lining:

A polarized brouhaha gives President Obama a golden opportunity to stand above the fray and possibly facilitate a dignified prosecution that will both say no to torture and no to the effort to turn this into a partisan free for all.

Behind John King’s Cheney Interview Meltdown

John King deserves alll the umbrage that he is getting for his Wizard of Oz performance in letting Cheney off the hook with nary a follow-up question.

From MEDIA MATTERS:

Interviewing former Vice President Dick Cheney, CNN’s John King asked Cheney several leading questions, most premised on conservative or Republican talking points, that provided Cheney ample opportunities to attack President Obama

To wit:

KING: Well, since taking office, President Obama has done these things to change the policies you helped put in place. He has announced he will close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility. He has announced he will close CIA black sites around the world, where they interrogate terror suspects. Says he will make CIA interrogators abide by the Army Field Manual, defined waterboarding as torture and ban it, suspend trials for terrorists by military commission, and now eliminate the label of “enemy combatants.”

I’d like to just simply ask you, yes or no: By taking those steps, do you believe the president of the United States has made Americans less safe?

CHENEY: I do. I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9-11. I think that’s a great success story. It was done legally. It was done in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles. President Obama campaigned against it all across the country. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.

KING: That’s a pretty serious thing to say about the president of the United States —

CHENEY: Well —

KING: — and commander in chief of the military. So I want to give you a chance, because many people will say, Vice President Cheney just said Barack Obama, President Obama is making us less safe, more at risk, which you just said. I want to give you a chance — and take as much time as you want — to prove it. Because you put that list up there, and I know you say there have been three cases, I believe, of waterboarding in the past, and you say that specific things have been prevented. I know some of this is classified intelligence, but now that you’re out of government, to the degree that you can, tell the American people, because of those tactics, because of those, yes, sometimes extreme tactics, we stopped this.

CHENEY: Well, I would say that the key to what we did was to collect intelligence against the enemy. That’s what the terrorist surveillance program was all about, that’s what the enhanced interrogation program was all about.

KING: But another 9-11, because of a tactic like waterboarding or a black site, can you say with certainty you stopped another attempt to do something on that level?

CHENEY: John, I’ve seen a report that was written based upon the intelligence that we collected then that itemizes the specific attacks that were stopped by virtue of what we learned through those programs. It’s still classified. I can’t give you the details of it without violating classification, but I can say there were a great many of them.

Cheney Jumps off A Cliff

There is a convention that has required former Presidents and Vice Presidents to be circumspect in dealing with their successors. Dick Cheney has not only ignored that but has assaulted President Obama directly in a disgustingly bad John King CNN interview.

King never asked a single followup question when Cheney made unfair and threatening statements. The substance of Cheney’s verbal screed was that he and Bush protected us and Obama is risking the future won by Bush-Cheney.

The cliff Cheney jumped off of was the one between his hidden and overt subversive character.

Cheney was a danger to our way of life as Vice President. Now he has gone to ground and essentially solicited a continuation of the mischief he promulgated and supported while in office. It is hard to wish him a soft landing under the circumstances.

John Dean on Bush Torture Crimes

THERE IS MUCH MORE HERE ON WHY WE CANNOT SWEEP THIS UNDER THE RUG

Remarkably, the confirmation of President Obama’s Attorney General nominee, Eric Holder, is being held up by Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn, who apparently is unhappy that Holder might actually investigate and prosecute Bush Administration officials who engaged in torture. Aside from this repugnant new Republican embrace of torture (which might be a winning issue for the lunatic fringe of the party and a nice way to further marginalize the GOP), any effort to protect Bush officials from legal responsibility for war crimes, in the long run, will not work.

Why? Because we are not the only country that can see our war crimes go unprosecuted.