1. Absolutely amazing summation of the Bush presidency by Sidney Blumenthal. A couple excerpts:
Bush's belief in an unfettered imperial presidency is apparent in his doctrine of the "unitary executive," his executive order asserting that the commander in chief under wartime can impose his will by fiat, and more than 750 signing statements stipulating that he will enforce enacted laws as he chooses. Bush's radicalism can also be seen in his advocacy of unwarranted domestic surveillance, [and] "alternative" interrogation techniques applied to detainees unbound by the Geneva Conventions against torture ("the dark side," as Vice President Cheney has approvingly called it)...
Karl Rove's strategy of extreme polarization in order to achieve maximum turnout of the conservative base requires constant agitation around the most abrasive social issues, but above all war without end...Even in Alabama, Mississippi and Texas, more than 50 percent consider his performance unfavorably. Bush has the most sustained unpopularity of any president since Herbert Hoover.
Ouch. We often get lulled into a false sense of security by Bush's failure to implement most of his agenda. We forget that what he's tried to do is move this country inexorably away from its democratic heritage. Let's try to keep that fact in our minds as we move into the midterm elections. Remember this: a "unitary executive" is commonly known as a "dictator."
2. In that same vein, here's a very excellent article in TNR about how moderate Republicans, by helping the Republicans maintain power, are aiding and abetting Bush's radical agenda and should be tossed out on their ear. Some may argue the opposite point, that Lincoln Chaffee and his ilk have been a moderating force on the Republican Party, but I don't buy it. Partisanship has its proper time and place, and for the Democrats, that time is now.
3. An article in the Economist about globalization (unfortunately, subscribers only) pretty much backs up what I've been saying about why globalization has helped the rich and hurt the middle class for the past 5 or 6 years. Here's an excerpt:
The sheer size of the emerging giants' labour forces has shifted the global capital-labour ratio (which determines the relative rewards of capital and workers) massively against workers as a group. The entry of China, India and the former Soviet Union into market capitalism has, in effect, doubled the world supply of workers, from 1.5 billion to 3 billion. These new entrants brought little capital with them, so the global capital-labour ratio dropped sharply. According to economic theory, this should reduce the relative price of labour and raise the global return to capital—which is exactly what has happened...[D]ownward pressure on wages in rich countries could continue for a long time. China still has perhaps 200m underemployed rural workers who could move to factories over the next two decades[.]
(For those of you who had trouble reading that, I'll translate: "labour" is British for "labor"...)
Anyway, this is the story: lots of workers, not enough equipment and finance, so the people who own the equipment and finance (read: rich people) get all the money, and the workers get squeezed. As I've said, I think that one (partial) solution is to boost our national savings, which increases the amount of money available for finance, and will eventually buy equipment for all those poor Chinese workers, so that our wages and their wages can rise in tandem.
4. The pope has angered Muslims all over the world by issuing a condemnation of violent jihad. Good for the Pope. Too long have Muslims asserted that any attack on the practice of spreading religion by violence (also known as "jihad") is an attack on Islam. "Moderate" Muslim clergy and authority figures waste little time in asserting that no one in the world has the right to criticize their religion, while remaining silent when terrorist groups claim Islam as a justification for their actions. That's not just a "double standard" - that's absolutism. Take this quote from a story about the controversy:
On Thursday, Turkey’s top Islamic cleric, Ali Bardakoglu, asked Benedict to apologize for the remarks and unleashed a string of accusations against Christianity.The one thing I'll miss about Bush is that his floundering, mismanaged, disastrous "war on terror" has given me and lots of other Americans a forum in which we could criticize Islam without getting singled out for fatwas or assassination - the fate of Theo Van Gogh, Pim Fortuyn, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Salman Rushdie. Bush basically took all the heat from the Muslim world, so we liberals didn't have to. But now that the "war on terror" is flopping to its ignominious end, we liberals will have to stand up on our own and say "Islam has big problems"...or risk surrendering our liberal heritage in the face of enemies who are actually willing to kill us.
Oh well.
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