In rejecting Bush's military tribunals for terrorism suspects, the high court ruled that even a wartime commander in chief must govern within constitutional confines significantly tighter than this president has believed appropriate.Ah, what understatement. Go read this.
Friday, June 30, 2006
No Kangaroo Tribunals! A Governing Philosophy Rebuffed (washingtonpost.com, 6/29/06):
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Playing politics. It's a peculiar time in the U.S. as far as the war in Iraq goes. The far away war is considered to be a massive political liability for the current administration, but traditional knee-jerk patriotism keeps surfacing to cloud the issue of what can be done about it. With our largely docile media, a politician can get away with saying just about anything.
The popular approach has been: the war = our soldiers. So if you oppose the war, you are not "supporting the troops" (of course, the troops who disapprove of the war do not count, because they do not officially exist for political purposes). This is a completely simplistic and nonsensical statement: the same people who put the troops in harms way, cut their pay, cut their benefits, and refuse to treat them for war-related illnesses claim to hold the moral high ground in 'supporting' them. But the media represents this as true, and so it is widely accepted. Even after Vietnam, in which a few soldiers discredited the war effort in the eyes of the media (rather than the powerful who caused the war in the first place), it sort of became okay to support the WAR without supporting the troops as an awkward, temporary workaround.
The fundamental war/troops confusion from Vietnam is being revived and applied to the current war. Staying on Message -- Nixon's Message (washingtonpost.com, 6/27/06) is an interesting read. Here's a sample to induce you to read the entire opinion piece:
The popular approach has been: the war = our soldiers. So if you oppose the war, you are not "supporting the troops" (of course, the troops who disapprove of the war do not count, because they do not officially exist for political purposes). This is a completely simplistic and nonsensical statement: the same people who put the troops in harms way, cut their pay, cut their benefits, and refuse to treat them for war-related illnesses claim to hold the moral high ground in 'supporting' them. But the media represents this as true, and so it is widely accepted. Even after Vietnam, in which a few soldiers discredited the war effort in the eyes of the media (rather than the powerful who caused the war in the first place), it sort of became okay to support the WAR without supporting the troops as an awkward, temporary workaround.
The fundamental war/troops confusion from Vietnam is being revived and applied to the current war. Staying on Message -- Nixon's Message (washingtonpost.com, 6/27/06) is an interesting read. Here's a sample to induce you to read the entire opinion piece:
Today Republicans in general and Karl Rove in particular have resurrected the Nixon game plan. They are not mounting a point-by-point defense of the administration's plan for Iraq, not least because the administration doesn't really have a plan for Iraq. When Senate Democrats brought two resolutions to the floor last week, each calling for a change in our policy, the Republicans defeated them both, but they pointedly failed to introduce a resolution of their own affirming the administration's conduct of the war. That, they understood, would have been a loser in the court of public opinion. Instead, they walked a tightrope: not really defending the war per se but attacking the Democrats for seeking to end it. This was Nixonism of the highest order.Go read this, and see how world events can be reduced to simplistic characterizations for the game known as politics.