Blue People

I Was There First

This month's Harper's has a lead story about the distinctions between "workers" and "players". Very good article, but I would like to point out that I had the basic point quite a while ago, when I was talking about "fault lines". At some point I talked about how George W. Bush and the Republican Party were on the wrong side of "the most fundamental fault line of all, that between those who have to work for a living and those who don't". That one sentence doesn't do justice to the whole of the article, but it's a good substitute if you only have a bumper sticker to write on.

On a related note: the new "American Prospect" has an article about some polling (and analysis) done by a couple of progressive entrepreneurs, which looks like it is finally making sense about the confusing and contradictory vectors that are driving American culture and politics today. This could be the real deal, the framework that finally allows progressives to make some electoral progress in an environment that often seems truly forbidding.

I'll have more after I've read the entire article.

The Threat

One of the things that very distinctly separates the right from the left is in their assessment of the threat posed by Islamic terrorism. The right - with some help from sometime leftists like Peter Beinart - treats the threat as existential, as the only issue worth discussing. Clearly George Bush takes this line, as he argues that he can circumvent any legal or constitutionl restraint on presidential power as long as he can credibly claim to be acting as "commander in chief".

While those on the left are equally serious - witness Simon and Benjamin's new book "The Next Attack", they don't believe that terrorism can threaten the very existence of the USA, not like the Soviet Union could, with its arrays of ICBMs. Not only that, but most on the left don't believe that we should warp our very identity as a nation in the effort to combat terrorism, thus the opposition to certain provisions of the "Patriot" act. Some like to quote Patrick Henry: "Give me liberty or give me death".

The question that needs to be asked of those on the right is: if the threat is everything you say it is, why are you so averse to an honest and in-depth analysis of how that threat came to be? Too many - like Bill O'Reilly - are totally unwilling to consider the possibility that our own foreign policies had anything to do with the rise of Islamic terrorism, which leaves them in the curious position of shouting vociferously about a threat whose existence they are totally unable to account for. They just "hate us", no reason given, and apparently none needed.

Well I'm sorry, but as the bombs keep exploding and the people keep dying (almost 200 in just the past two days), that's just not good enough. It's clearer than ever that we - by which I mean Bush and company - are completely out of our (their) depth in Iraq, that we've created a situation that is rapidly devolving into sheer anarchy, and that we have neither the intellectual, moral, or physical resources to improve the situation. We are going to have to get on our knees and beg the world community to step in and provide the kind of assistance that is quite obviously beyond us at this point. I don't think anyone wants the instability of Iraq to spread to any of its neighbors, one of which is, lest we forget, Saudi Arabia.