Pelosi gets a reaction at Netroots Nation

Politico managed to get this story right, Nancy Pelosi booed, heckled at Netroots Nation 2013 06/22/2013:

As Pelosi was saying the country needs a “balance” between security and privacy, Marc Perkel, a 57-year-old activist from Gilroy, Calif., started shouting at Pelosi during her answer and was escorted out of the room.

"It's not a balance. It’s not constitutional!" he yelled. "No secret laws!"

Others in the room began shouting as well, saying things like "Leave him alone!" or "That's what a police state looks like right there!"

The moderator, Zerlina Maxwell, worked to quiet the crowd by saying audience members needed to submit questions via Twitter rather than shouting them out, but Pelosi said she didn't mind.

"I welcome the challenges that people pose because I think that those questions must be answered," Pelosi said.

She was further booed when she said Snowden did break the law by leaking the information he revealed.

"As far as Snowden: he did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents," she said.

I was in the audience because I usually attend the Netroots Nation conventions. The video is here, Saturday Noon Keynote - Ask The Speaker 06/22/2013:

Pelosi's appearance was set up as a question-and-answer format. At about 43:30, the interviewer/moderator, Zerlina Maxwell, asks about Edward Snowden and the NSA spying. After four minutes of a dissembling answer by Pelosi, at about 47:30 you here someone interrupt to try to focus her response, which Maxwell actually should have been doing. Security made the guy leave the hall, which was dumb. He was being technically rude but you hear Pelosi even say it's all right, and she was responding to his comment. (It's not as though Pelosi has never been mildly heckled in her career before. She's San Francisco's Congresswoman, for God's sake!) Her answer was Obama Party-line all the way, including on Snowden, with a few meaningless verbal nods to "transparency". I'm guessing the boos she gets on Snowden were as much directed toward security removing the guy as to her answer. The booing comes just after 50:30.

But I'm glad Pelosi caught some static at this from what is usually a naturally sympathetic audience for her. The Netroots Nation staff likes to schedule this kind of interview-style appearance with senior officials. But they're also tempted to put people who aren't really that good at it in charge of doing the questions and apparently give them direction to toss softball questions. Which particularly irritates me, because it's supposed to be a convention of us obnoxious bloggers who bitch about the mainstream media doing that kind of thing all the time. Maxwell pretty much went moot after the crowd got a little unruly there and hardly asked another question. Pelosi had to go extemporaneous for half an hour or so, which of course politicians are happy to do. (You can see my grouchy real-time tweets from the event here: http://twitter.com/brucemillerca)

It's not impossible to do. Joan McCarter from Daily Kos was the interviewer for Harry Reid in 2010. She was respectful but asked him appropriately challenging questions.

Appearances like that are a chance for the interviewer to raise concerns that are of particular interest to the netroots. And the Netroots Nation participants, if not always the staff, mostly understand themselves as progressives who are not only criticizing Republican obstructionists but pushing Democratic officials to take progressive stands on important issues. Anyone doing these "Ask The Speaker" type interviews need to press the official to address those kinds of concerns.

Because if a politician, even the most progressive ones, walk away from these events thinking, oh, these people are fine with how I'm handling things because they just applauded and nobody even offered challenging questions, they'll figure they have that constituency in their pocket. The good thing about that appearance with Pelosi is that she not only got some pushback directly from the crowd. But because Politico picked it up as "Nancy Pelosi booed, heckled at Netroots Nation 2013," at least for a few moments it will register on the minds of the Beltway Village and, more importantly, Members of Congress that this could become a political pain in the ass for Democrats. And that's a good thing!

Pelosi started off her presentation by talking about the amateurishness of the Congressional Republicans and their leadership over last week's farm bill vote. But she also has reason to complain about the amateurishness of Maxwell's moderation and the way security acted. I've been present at public meetings where a group directly intended to disrupt it. And in cases like that, yes, you do at some point have to require the hecklers to leave.

But this wasn't a public meeting where the local Tea Partiers for Militant Ignorance can just show up and try to shout the speakers down. People attending Netroots Nation have to pay a registration fee, $205 for the 2014 event if you register right now. And you have to show your registration tag to enter the events or even the exhibit hall. Participants also are typically flying to the convention location and paying for a three or four nights hotel stay. Many are sponsored in some way. But it means that the local shut-ins who spend their days listening to Rush Limbaugh and FOX News aren't going to be wandering into the speeches in large numbers to shout down speakers.

Throwing someone out for shouting out a relevant question or challenge when the speaker herself who is being heckled is saying that it's all right and she's responding to his challenge is just dumb. Amateur hour, as Pelosi was saying about the Republicans on the farm bill. So was Maxwell's scolding the heckler and later those who booed by telling them to fill out a question card. It came off the Netroots Nation equivalent of the suggestion box, the most basic of ways companies who don't give a flying flip about their employees' opinions but want to make the barest of pretenses of doing so.

Pelosi is obviously one of the top professionals in the political world. But compared to her peers, she typically not especially effective in interview situations. Plus, in her position as Minority Leader in the House, she's generally expected to reflect something like a consensus Party position on issues. That means that an interviewer in a Netroots Nation forum like that needs to be prepared both to keep her focused in her responses and to have some sense for her interviewing style. Maxwell didn't seem to be prepared on either count. And even to a casual observer, Pelosi's waving two pieces of paper that no one could read and explaining that Obama's spying is okay because he has some kind of secret warrant from a secret court for it was pretty lame. Maxwell should have stepped in after a minute or two of that rambling and asked, well, pretty much the question the heckler asked.

Netroots Nation needs to step up their game on that kind of appearance.

Or just let Joan McCarter do those interviews. She knows what she's doing and knows how to prepare for them.

Tags: domestic spying, joan mccarter, nancy pelosi, netroots nation 2010, netroots nation 2013, zerlina maxwell

Debt-ceiling fight shows that reality matters

Robert Kuttner, The Joys of Fanaticism The American Prospect Online 07/29/2011:

The events of this month suggest that we are living through a momentous and needless catastrophe in the making. With the economy already very fragile, the Republicans are willing to push it off a cliff, and a weak Democratic president seems unable or unwilling to stop them.

As I've suggested in an earlier piece, what comes to mind is World War I, with the mutual miscalculations and bluffing games that led to a calamitous war that nobody wanted.

It is also truly chilling to watch one of America's two parties increasingly dwell in a parallel universe, where facts don't matter, and a kind of carnival atmosphere of let-it-burn prevails.

Joan McCarter has this to say on the impasse of Friday morning (Reid: 'It's really time that they legislate' in the House Daily Kos 07/29/2011):

To use the analogy of the "grown up in the room," somebody needs to take control of the pre-school that's taken over the House.

The grown-up in the room right now should say "enough," and put the 14th amendment on the table, take everything else off.

Sounds right to me.

The recklessness of the Republican Wrecker Party is the main problem. But Barack Obama is President of the United States and he is doing a very poor job in exerting his leadership as the leader of a democracy facing a authoritarian wrecker Party like today's Republicans. Robert Reich states it well in The Empty Bully Pulpit 07/27/2011:

How did we get into this mess?

I thought I’d seen Washington at its worst. I was there just after Watergate. I was there when Jimmy Carter imploded. I was there during the government shut-down of 1995.

But I hadn't seen the worst. This is the worst.

How can it be that with over 9 percent unemployment, essentially no job growth, widening inequality, falling real wages, and an economy that’s almost dead in the water — we’re locked in a battle over how to cut the budget deficit?

Part of the answer is a Republican Party that’s the most irresponsible and rigidly ideological I’ve ever witnessed.

Part of the answer is the continuing gravitational pull of the Great Recession.

But another part of the answer lies with the President — and his inability or unwillingness to use the bully pulpit to tell Americans the truth, and mobilize them for what must be done. [my emphasis]

If the Democratic Party hadn't crippled itself in various ways, senior leaders of the Party would be meeting with Obama about now and tell him that he either needs to take a clear stand that he will use his 14th Amendment powers to protect the 14th Amendment obligation to meet the financial commitments of the US government, or to announce that he isn't running for a second term while he pursues this train wreck of an approach on his own. But that would only be effective if there were a credible threat within the Democratic Party of a strong primary challenge to him. And there's not: another way the Democratic Party has inflicted severe damage on itself.

Tags: barack obama, debt ceiling, democratic party, robert kuttner, robert reich

More details emerge on the search for Bin Laden

Joan McCarter has a very good roundup of commentary on the Bin Laden search and eventual kill, plus worthwhile comments of her own: Congratulations, Mr. President. Now bring the troops home Daily Kos 05/08/2011.

A couple of good recent descriptions of the hunt are Marc Ambinder,
The Secret Team That Killed bin Laden National Journal 05/02-03/2011 and Peter Finn, Ian Shapira and Marc Fisher, The Hunt: A different sort of search requires a new set of tactics Washington Post 05/06/2011. Joan comments:

For all its frightening implications for potential domestic surveillance, the point is that this successful raid should be described as an intelligence and police operation, as a "surgical" special forces operation that relied on good intelligence, careful cooperation, and not brute military force. Despite the valiant efforts and sacrifice of the 100,000 troops we've got in Afghanistan, this operation wasn't a success because of their boots on the ground. ...

Osama bin Laden wasn't found and killed because we still have tens of thousands of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, or because we are at war. This successful operation provides the justification and the opportunity for President Obama to end both the fighting wars (the mission really has been accomplished) and the false war, the war on terror.

End them both and let America be America again, without the constant fear, the ongoing erosion of civil liberties, the construct as America as victim.

And bring the troops home. [emphasis in original]

Ambinder makes an informative observation about Special Forces missions; "DevGru" refers to Naval Special Warfare Development Group, better known after the final Bin Laden mission as SEAL Team Six:

DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units. They report to the president and operate worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directives. Though the general public knows about the special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most JSOC missions never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a British aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens (a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the military remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several dozen JSOC operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several years. Their names are released by the Defense Department in the usual manner, but with a cover story -- generally, they were killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan. That's the code.

And another sign of the decline of military accountability:

JSOC costs the country more than $1 billion annually. The command has its critics, but it has escaped significant congressional scrutiny and has operated largely with impunity since 9/11. Some of its interrogators and operators were involved in torture and rendition, and the line between its intelligence-gathering activities and the CIA's has been blurred.

How many media outlets have you seen or heard highlighting that aspect of the story during the understandable praise and gushing over the team that finally got Bin Laden?

Tags: joan mccarter, osama bin laden

Social Security financing and the current state of play on whether the Obama Administration will defend or oppose Social Security

Bush lying in 2005

Joan McCarter at Daily Kos is paying close attention to the Social Security story, as she does in OMB Director Jacob Lew: Social Security isn't the problem 01/22/2011. One of the latest items on that front comes from Obama's director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Jacob Lew, in the form of a USA Today op-ed, Social Security isn't the problem 01/22/2011. Given the White House's duplicity with labor and other parts of the Democratic base on the public option in health care reform in 2009-10, I find myself looking very closely at even the reassuring statements the Obama Administration issues on Social Security. Especially after all the leaks/trial balloons we've seen suggesting they were willing to endorse Social Security Phaseout.

One of the signs of how dishonest and pathetic the national narrative even on Social Security has become came from President Shrub Bush in 2005, when he was on his brief, failed drive to end Social Security. Here's an amazing statement from his appearance in Parkersburg, West Virginia on 04/05/2005:

I have just come from the Bureau of Public Debt. I want to thank Van Zeck, Keith Rake, and Susan Chapman. Susan was the tour guide there at the Bureau of Public Debt. I went there because I'm trying to make a point about the Social Security trust. You see, a lot of people in America think there's a trust, in this sense -- that we take your money through payroll taxes and then we hold it for you, and then when you retire, we give it back to you. But that's not the way it works.

There is no "trust fund," just IOUs that I saw firsthand, that future generations will pay -- will pay for either in higher taxes, or reduced benefits, or cuts to other critical government programs.

The office here in Parkersburg stores those IOUs. They're stacked in a filing cabinet. Imagine -- the retirement security for future generations is sitting in a filing cabinet. It's time to strengthen and modernize Social Security for future generations with growing assets that you can control, that you call your own -- assets that the government cannot take away. (Applause.) [my emphasis]

Even by Cheney-Bush levels, this was astonishing dishonesty. And the President had to assume there was a bad dysfunctional national media to think he could get away with a claim like that. This AP story of that day at least managed to slip in an explanatory paragraph, explaining how the Office of Public Debt Accounting's Susan Chapman helped him do a disgraceful little dog-and-pony show: "Chapman opened the second drawer and pulled out a white notebook filled with pseudo Treasury securities — pieces of paper that offer physical evidence of $1.7 trillion in treasury bonds that make up the trust fund."

As Jocob Lew explains succinctly in USA Today:

When more taxes are collected than are needed to pay benefits, funds are converted to Treasury bonds — backed with the full faith and credit of the U.S. government — and are held in reserve for when revenue collected is not enough to pay the benefits due. We have just as much obligation to pay back those bonds with interest as we do to any other bondholders. The trust fund is the backbone of an important compact: that a lifetime of work will ensure dignity in retirement.

If investors around the world had believed, if the Chinese government that is loaning bizillions of dollars to the US had believed the President of the United States on that day in 2005 when he said that debt instruments backed by the full faith and credit of the US government were "just IOUs" that could not be considered real assets of a trust fund, just papers "stacked in a filing cabinet," the dollar would have plummeted immediately in international markets. The government borrowing costs would have soared through the roof.

Nothing liked that happened, because everyone in the world who understands what it means to have a security backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government knew that Bush was just blowing smoke out his ass. The stability of dollar, the financial health of the economy, depended at that moment on every serious investor around the world knowing that the President of the United States was being blatantly dishonest about the most secure investments offered by the US government.

It's a sad sign of how degraded the political conversation in the US has become that it seems like a breath of fresh air when the senior budget official states out loud what every investor in the world knows, that US Treasury bonds are "backed with the full faith and credit of the U.S. government." They are universally considered the safest, most "vanilla" financial security in the world.

For the same reason that Bush could lie in the faces of every American citizens about the Social Security trust fund being "just IOUs", the claim from the anti-Social Security crowd in - very sad to say - both parties that Social Security contributes to the deficit is not true. The Social Security trust fund is a separate legal entity from the federal General Fund. Social Security has been running a surplus for years, because of the 1983 Social Security bipartisan agreement to adjust the funding stream to cover the retirement projections the baby boomers. By investing those surpluses in the safest investment vehicles on the planet, US Treasuries, the trust fund was loaning money to the general fund and reducing the federal deficit. The general fund would have had to have borrowed the same amount of money from somewhere even if the Social Security Trust Fund had irresponsibly invested its surpluses in, say, gold coins from some place like the marginally-legitimate Goldline products that Glenn Beck hawks today.

As those bonds mature and the Social Security Trust Fund collects the interest and redeems the principal, they will use it to fund current commitments. None of that makes any difference to what the general fund had to borrow in the past or has to borrow now. Unless the financing mechanism were fundamentally changed from what it currently is, the general fund is in no way committed to cover Social Security obligations as such. It is committed to pay back US Treasury bonds, whether held by the Social Security Trust Fund, the Chinese government, or the Koch brothers' personal portfolios.

That means it was also a flat-out lie in that 2005 speech when Bush said, "Social Security was designed as a pay-as-you-go system, not as a trust system." (I know, Bush lied, the sun comes up in the east every morning.)

As Lew summarizes the point on Social Security and the federal deficit:

The problem is not Social Security; the problem is the mismatch between outlays and revenues in the rest of the budget. Closing that gap and paying down our debt will take tough choices, and the president's budget makes them. Strengthening Social Security is an important, but parallel, issue that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible. But let's not confuse it as either the cause of or a solution to our short-term fiscal problems.

Given my lack of confidence that the Obama Administration is willing to fight for Social Security, I can't help but wonder if even a statement like that may include weasel-words, i.e., "strengthening Social Security." After all, Bush also lied in that 2005 speech by saying he wanted to "fix the problem", "make Social Security permanently solvent for a younger generation", and so on. Both Democrats and Republicans opposed to Social Security frame their phaseout schemes as strengthening the program, fixing it, making it more secure, and yadda, yadda. Weasel-words won't defend Social Security against the phaseout advocates who want to take the US back to the 1920s when retirement was a luxury for the wealthy.

Still, Joan is right to look on the bright side on this particular statement from the Administration. The defenders of Social Security need to reinforce good behavior by Democrats, after all:

The problem there is the horse already left the barn on the revenue side of things [the federal deficit] with the tax-cut deal. Yes, there's a mismatch between outlays and revenues and the deal allows that mismatch to continue. Complicating this more for Social Security is the payroll tax holiday, and the revenues that will be lost for the program during a time when high unemployment is already creating a hit on it. So the difficulty for the administration in trying to create a parallel process for budget negotiation in which Social Security is strengthened is going to be next to impossible. Getting Social Security strengthened in this environment is going to be a massive challenge. At this point, just leaving it out of the negotiations entirely seems to be the saftest [sic] bet.

All that aside, good on the White House for getting out the facts on Social Security. More of that from all of our Dems, please. [my emphasis]

But looking on the bright doesn't mean we have to be unrealistic about what we're seeing on the bright side, either. We're celebrating that it's a refreshing moment when a senior member of a Democratic Administration makes a straightforward statement defending Social Security.

Tags: jacob lew, joan mccarter, social security

Apologizing for being liberals?

Back in the days of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, when what we now know as the "culture war" was spawned, liberals weren't just being trashed by conservatives. They were also actively criticized by antiwar activists, civil-rights and Black Power supporters, and others who saw themselves as part of the New Left. The Gene McCarthy/Robert Kennedy trend within the Democratic Party coalesced around George McGovern's candidacy, advocating a "new politics", which meant a break from many of the assumptions of "Cold War liberals".

Much of that criticism was justified. Democratic Party liberals in the postwar era advocated anti-lynching laws, supported Truman's desegregation of the military and backed Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Act of 1957 (LBJ was Senate majority leader then). But it took the pressure of the civil rights popular movement, including those rude and unruly African-Americans young people who sat in at the lunch counters and so forth, to push them the Democratic and Republican liberals (the latter once existed) to embrace the decisive Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And even then, the liberal Democrats shared their Party with the Southern segregationists.

And the Vietnam War was very much a liberals' war almost as much as conservatives' in the early years. It was very obviously the Kennedy and Johnson administration who vastly expanded the American war effort in Vietnam from the covert ops of the Eisenhower years to massive military presence at the time Johnson left office.

So there's lots of critical analysis that can and should be done on those years and the failures of the American liberalism that actually existed in practice. Even in these days, I feel the need of some extra identifier like "Jacksonian democrat" to remind myself that real existing liberals can fail to defend democratic and pro-labor causes with the partisan zeal they deserve. Two sad recent examples: the minority of Congressional Democrats (yes, it was only a minority) who voted for the October 2002 Iraq War resolution, which provided political cover but not legal authority for the invasion Bush launched in March 2003, and the reluctance by many liberals to raise a stink to high heaven about the Cheney-Bush torture policy.

But I don't think it's necessary for liberals to apologize or repent for things they never did. Or to concede conservative talking points about the failings of The Liberals which have only the narrowest of factual bases.

Eric Alterman does some of the best work around on the shortcomings of today's Establishment press. He's a well-informed, critical-minded liberal and a good writer, including his Altercation blog. But he also seems to be unable to shake off an aversion to anyone identifying him with those dirty [Cheney]ing hippies of "culture war" lore.

TPM Cafe has a discussion going this week on Alterman's current book Why We're Liberals. I've linked some of the individual contributions below. Joan McCarter responds to an argument of his that seems to echo a number of the factually-challenged assumptions of the "culture war" slams on liberals:

I'm a liberal, and an unapologetic one. I won't apologize for the liberal past of my forbearers [sic]. I won't apologize for the fight against poverty. I won't apologize for demanding a rational foreign policy that kept the U.S. a respectable member of the family of nations. I won't apologize for standing up for a woman's right to make her own decisions about her health care. I won't apologize for believing passionately in the right to privacy for all Americans.

I particularly won't apologize for the fight for civil rights. I certainly won't apologize for being appalled and repulsed by the fact that torture has been added to our nation's repertoire of "intelligence gathering tools." And I won't apologize for having full-throatedly opposed George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, a war based on lies.

This position makes sense. Someone who advocates those ideas doesn't need to apologize for the images that conservatives conjure up in their heads to demonize liberals. Otherwise, you quickly slide into the "FOX liberal" mold, e.g., "I'm a liberal on most things, but ...", "Liberals need to start reaching out to people of faith instead of ignoring them ...", etc.

The experience of the Iraq War in particular has lead me to a far more critical view of US policies in the Cold War period's than before the war, or at least a far more critical mood. And also more skeptical of military interventions, even in concert with allies or for "humanitarian" or genuinely democratic causes. Both liberals and conservatives need to get a far more realistic view of the limits of American military power, become far more skeptical about war and defend international law (including for the US) with far more dedication.

I definitely have a critical view of real existing Democratic liberals in those regards. But when it comes to agreeing with the criticism that liberals are "elitist" coming from partisans of the Republican Party, whose core operative principle is to free billionaires from the burden of having to pay taxes to support their country - that I'm not so inclined to do.

But McCarter seems to have some honest-to-Andrew Jacksonian impulses when she writes:

Again, liberals have made mistakes, but they pale in comparison to what the Republicans have wrought. Out of control deficits and a devastated economy. Another quagmire of a war and what's worse, a war we entered on the basis of lies. A destroyed international reputation. A failing infrastructure. Torture. It's less important that we treat our opponents with respect than that we shine a bright light on the depth and breadth of the mess they have created.

Sounds about right to me.

At TPM Cafe, Alterman quotes a passage from a speech of John Kennedy's during his 1960 Presidential campaign, suggesting plausibly that Democrats today could make good use of the same approach:

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal"? If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then . . . we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the -people--their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties--someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."

While we're on the subject, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in his 1960 election pamphlet for JFK, Kennedy or Nixon: Does it make any difference? offered the following perspective on how healthy democratic practices at home are essential to foreign policy strength, as well:

Above all, [Kennedy] realizes that national strength includes much more than armies and weapon systems. It depends essentially on long-run factors - on the education and health of our people, on the guarantee of their equal opportunity, on the growth of our economy, on the development of our resources. These all seem to him wise and necessary objects of national investment. Nor does he feel that such things can be postponed to some more propitious time. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to solve our problems. As Lippmann has said, "Once you've failed to educate a child, you've failed, and you can't make that up later." Kennedy's view, it is clear, is that affirmative Presidential leadership is desperately required - to bring about, through the traditional democratic means of Congressional action, a better allocation of our resources; to assure equal rights to all our citizens; to revolutionize the moral tone of the country; to inaugurate the new epoch of national progress. ...

Kennedy is surely right. It is no accident that America has had its most effective moments of world leadership when our foreign policy has expressed a visible reality of American performance. The words of Wilson and Roosevelt went straight to the minds and hearts of the people of the world, while the words of Eisenhower and Nixon fall on deaf ears, not because Wilson and Roosevelt had better words (though this was the case too), but because their words were underwritten by their deeds. The fact that Wilson and matters to the world. It was Wilson's New Freedom which validated his Fourteen Points, as it was Roosevelt's New Deal which validated his Four Freedoms. The effect of TVA, for example, on the imagination of aspiring peoples everywhere has been incalculable. It is Adlai Stevenson's record as an American liberal which makes his the most influential American voice to the outside world today. But what is authentic idealism on the lips of men who have won the right to talk about freedom and opportunity and social justice becomes the sheerest moralism and hypocrisy when uttered to the world by people notably indifferent to such things in their own land. Men who address righteous sermons to the world while at home they tolerate [Joseph] McCarthy and Little Rock [violent resistance to desegregation] and West Virginia poverty and the rest are bound to strike others as ineffectual figureheads or sanctimonious frauds. (my emphasis)

Republican polemics now commonly try to contrast the "tough" JFK foreign policy with the allegedly weaker version of today's Democrats. But Kennedy never embraced the crazy, militaristic idea that negotiating with a potential adversary was not only wrong but weak and cowardly. Much less the notion that war and the threat of war were the only meaningful tools in dealing with actual or potential adversaries.

Where Does American Liberalism Stand Today? by Eric Alterman 05/19/08

About those "Mistakes" by Joan McCarter 05/20/08

Tags: eric alternman, jfk, john kennedy, joan mccarter, liberalism