Whither the Left?

Norman Geras is a lefty I can respect. He has a heart and a brain.

http://www.normangeras.blogspot.com

[quote]
I want to say something about support for democratic values and basic human rights. We on the left just have it in our bloodstream, do we not?, that we are committed to democratic values. And while, for reasons I can’t go into here, there are some on the left a bit more reserved about using the language of basic human rights, nonetheless for many of us it was this moral reality, and more especially its negation, that played a part in drawing us in: to protest and work against a world in which people could just be used for the purposes of others, be exploited and super-exploited, worked maybe to an early death, in any case across a life of hardship; or be brutalized for organizing to fight to change their situation, be ‘disappeared’, or tortured, or massacred, by regimes upholding an order of inequality - sometimes desperate inequality - and privilege. In our bloodstream.

However, there is also a certain historical past of the left referred to loosely under the name ‘Stalinism’, and which forms a massive blot on this commitment and these values, on the great tradition we belong to. I am of the generation - roughly 1960s-vintage, post-Stalinist left - educated in the Trotskyist critique of that whole experience, and in the new expansion and flourishing of an open, multi-faceted and pluralist Marxism; educated in the movement against the war in Vietnam, the protests against Pinochet’s murderous coup in Chile and against the role of the US in both episodes and in more of the same kind. Of a generation that believed that, even though the Western left still bore some signs of continuity with the Stalinist past, this was a dying, an increasingly marginal strand, and that we had put its errors largely behind us. But I fear now it is not so. The same kinds of error - excuses and evasions and out-and-out apologia for political structures, practices or movements no socialist should have a word to say for - are still with us. They afflict many even without any trace of a Stalinist past or a Stalinist political formation.

I obviously don’t have the time or space here to rehearse all of the relevant arguments. I will confine myself to sketching some important features of the broad picture as I see it.

September 11. On September 11 2001 there was, in New York, a massacre of innocents. There’s no other acceptable way of putting this: some 3000 people (and, as anyone can figure, it could have been many more) struck down by an act of mass murder without any possible justification, an act of gross moral criminality. What was the left’s response? In fact, this goes well beyond the left if what is meant by that is people and organizations of socialist persuasion. It included a wide sector of liberal opinion as well. Still, I shall just speak here, for short, of the left. The response on the part of much of it was excuse and apologia.

At best you might get some lip service paid to the events of September 11 having been, well, you know, unfortunate - the preliminary ‘yes’ before the soon-to-follow ‘but’ (or, as Christopher Hitchens has called it, ‘throat-clearing’). And then you’d get all the stuff about root causes, deep grievances, the role of US foreign policy in creating these; and a subtext, or indeed text, whose meaning was America’s comeuppance. This was not a discourse worthy of a democratically-committed or principled left, and the would-be defence of it by its proponents, that they were merely trying to explain and not to excuse what happened, was itself a pathetic excuse. If any of the root-cause and grievance themes truly had been able to account for what happened on September 11, you’d have a hard time understanding why, say, the Chileans after that earlier September 11 (I mean of 1973), or other movements fighting against oppression and injustice, have not resorted to the random mass murder of civilians.

Why this miserable response? In a nutshell, it was a displacement of the left’s most fundamental values by a misguided strategic choice, namely, opposition to the US, come what may. This dictated the apologetic mumbling about the mass murder of US citizens, and it dictated that the US must be opposed in what it was about to do in hitting back at al-Qaida and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. (A more extended statement of my views on this subject is to be found here - scroll down to my answer to the question about Michael Walzer.)

The liberation of Iraq. Something similar has now been repeated over the war in Iraq. I could just about have ‘got inside’ the view - though it wasn’t my view - that the war to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime should not be supported. Neither Washington nor Baghdad - maybe. But opposition to the war - the marching, the petition-signing, the oh-so-knowing derision of George Bush and so forth - meant one thing very clearly. Had this campaign succeeded in its goal and actually prevented the war it was opposed to, the life of the Baathist regime would have been prolonged, with all that that entailed: years more (how many years more?) of the rape rooms, the torture chambers, the children’s jails, and the mass graves recently uncovered.

This was the result which hundreds of thousands of people marched to secure. Well, speaking for myself, comrades, there I draw the line. Not one step.

Let me now just focus on a couple of dimensions of this issue.

Humanitarian intervention. First, there is a long tradition in the literature of international law that, although national sovereignty is an important consideration in world affairs, it is not sacrosanct. If a government treats its own people with terrible brutality, massacring them and such like, there is a right of humanitarian intervention by outside powers. The introduction of the offence of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trial after the Second World War implied a similar constraint on the sovereign authority of states. There are limits upon them. They cannot just brutalize their own nationals with impunity, violate their fundamental human rights.

Is there then, today, a right of humanitarian intervention under international law? The question is disputed. Some authorities argue that the UN Charter rules it out absolutely. War is only permissible in self-defence. However, others see a contradiction between this reading of the Charter and the Charter’s underwriting of binding human rights norms. Partly because the matter is disputed, I will not here base myself on a legal right of humanitarian intervention. I will simply say that, irrespective of the state of international law, in extreme enough circumstances there is a moral right of humanitarian intervention. This is why what the Vietnamese did in Cambodia to remove Pol Pot should have been supported at the time, the state of international law notwithstanding, and ditto for the removal of Idi Amin by the Tanzanians. Likewise, with regard to Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq: it was a case crying out for support for an intervention to bring the regime finally to an end.

Just think for a moment about the argument that this recent war was illegal. That something is illegal does not itself carry moral weight unless legality as such carries moral weight, and legality carries moral weight only conditionally. It depends on the particular law in question, on the system of law of which it is a part, and on the kind of social and ethical order it upholds. An international law - and an international system - according to which a government is free to go on raping, murdering and torturing its own nationals to the tune of tens upon tens, upon more tens, of thousands of deaths without anything being done to stop it, so much the worse for this as law. It is law that needs to be criticized, opposed, and changed. It needs to be moved forward - which happens in this domain by precedent and custom as well as by transnational treaty and convention. I am fully aware in saying this that the present US administration has made itself an obstacle in various ways to the development of a more robust and comprehensive framework of international law. But the thing cuts both ways. The war to depose Saddam Hussein and his criminal regime was not of a piece with that. It didn’t have to be opposed by all the forces that did in fact oppose it. It could, on the contrary, have been supported - by France and Germany and Russia and the UN; and by a mass democratic movement of global civil society. Just think about that. Just think about the kind of precedent it would have set for other genocidal, or even just lavishly murderous, dictatorships - instead of all those processions of shame across the world’s cities, and whose success would have meant the continued abandonment of the Iraqi people.

It is, in any event, such realities - the brutalizing and murder by the Baathist regime of its own nationals to the tune of tens upon tens, upon more tens, of thousands of deaths - that the recent war has brought to an end. It should have been supported for this reason, irrespective of the reasons (concerning WMD) that George Bush and Tony Blair put up front themselves; though it is disingenuous of the war’s critics to speak now as if the humanitarian case for war formed no part of the public rationale of the Coalition, since it was clearly articulated by both Bush and Blair more than once.

Here is one approximate measure of the barbarities of the Baathist regime I have just referred to. It comes not from the Pentagon, or anyone in the Bush administration, or from Tony Blair or those around him. It comes from Human Rights Watch. According to Human Rights Watch, during 23 years of Saddam’s rule some 290,000 Iraqis disappeared into the regime’s deadly maw, the majority of these reckoned to be now dead. Rounding this number down by as much as 60,000 to compensate for the ‘thought to be’, that is 230,000. It is 10,000 a year. It is 200 people every week. And I’ll refrain from embellishing with details, which you should all know, as to exactly how a lot of these people died.

Had the opposition to the war succeeded this is what it would have postponed - and postponed indefinitely - bringing to an end. This is how almost the whole international left expressed its moral solidarity with the Iraqi people. Worse still, some sections of the left seemed none too bothered about making common cause with, marching alongside, fundamentalist religious bigots and known racists; and there were also those who dismissed Iraqi voices in support of the war as coming from American stooges - a disgraceful lie.

Good and bad consequences. Second, let’s now model this abstractly. You have a course of action with mixed consequences, both good consequences and bad consequences. To decide sensibly you obviously have to weigh the good against the bad. Imagine someone advising, with respect to some decision you have to make, ‘Let’s only think about the good consequences’; or ‘Let’s merely concentrate on the bad consequences’. You what?! It’s a no-brainer, as the expression now is. But from beginning to end something pretty much like this has been the approach of the war’s opponents. I offer a few examples.

(a) The crassest are the statements by supposedly mature people - one of these Clare Short, another the novelist Julian Barnes - that this war was not worth the loss of a single life. Not one, hey? So much for the victims of the rape rooms and the industrial shredders, for the children tortured and murdered in front of their parents, and for those parents. So much for those Human Rights Watch estimates and for the future flow of the regime’s victims had it been left in place.

(b) More generally, since the fall of Baghdad critics of the war have been pointing (many of them, with relish) at everything that has gone, or remains, wrong in Iraq: the looting, the lack of civil order, the continuing violence and shootings, the patchy electricity supply, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. Is this fair enough? Yes and no. Yes, because it has to be part of any balanced assessment. But also no if it isn’t set against the fact, the massive fact, of the end of a regime of torture, oppression and murder, of everything that has stopped happening since the regime fell. And typically it isn’t set against this massive fact. This fact is passed over or tucked away, because to acknowledge it fully and make a balanced assessment won’t come out right for the war’s critics. It just won’t stack up - this, this and, yes, also this, but against the end of all that - in the way they’d like it to.

© Or else your anti-war interlocutor will freely concede that of course, we all agree it is a good that that monster and his henchmen no longer govern Iraq; but it is too stupid a point to dwell upon, for it doesn’t touch on the issue dividing us, support or not for the war (on grounds of WMD, international law, US foreign policy, the kitchen sink). Er, yes it does. No one is entitled simply to help themselves to the ‘of course, we all agree’ neutralization of what was and remains an absolutely crucial consideration in favour of the war. They have properly to integrate it into an overall, and conscientiously-weighted, balance sheet of both good and bad consequences.

(d) The same ploy from a different angle. Since the fall of Baghdad there have been voices - both Iraqi voices and those of Western critics of the war - calling for the immediate departure from Iraq of American and British forces. One can certainly discuss this as a proposition. Would it be better for Iraq and its people or worse, such an immediate or early withdrawal? Personally, I doubt that it would be better. Indeed, it would likely spell disaster of one kind or another. From more than one survey of Iraqi opinion I’ve seen, it is the view also of many Iraqis that there should be no withdrawal for the time being, until the consolidation of an Iraqi administration. But note, anyway, that the call for a prompt withdrawal is not a call to restore the Baathist regime to power. No, it just starts from where things are now, with the regime gone. That is to say, it starts from a better starting point than would otherwise have been in place. And this is a good (but not properly acknowledged) achieved by American and British arms.

(e) If you can’t eliminate the inconvenient side of the balance, denature it. The liberation of Iraq from Saddam’s tyranny can’t have been a good, because of those who effected it and of their obviously bad foreign policy record: Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua and the rest. It can’t therefore have been a liberation. Even allowing the premise to go unchallenged - which in point of fact I don’t, since recent US and British foreign policy also has achievements to its credit: evicting the Iraqis from Kuwait, intervening in Kosovo, intervening in Sierra Leone, getting rid of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan - it is a plain fallacy. A person with a bad record is capable of doing good. There were some anti-Semitic rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. This argumentative move just fixes the nature of the act via a presumption about those who are responsible for it, sparing one the necessity of examining the act for what it actually brings about and of assessing this in its own right. It’s a bit like saying that because the guy who returned me the expensive book he’d borrowed has previously stolen things from others… you can fill in the rest yourself, and yes, it’s silly.

(f) Last and worst here. If the balance doesn’t come out how you want it to, you hope for things to change so that the balance will adjust in your favour. In the case under consideration, this is a perilous moral and political impulse. When the war began a division of opinion was soon evident amongst its opponents, between those who wanted a speedy outcome - in other words, a victory for the coalition forces, for that is all a speedy outcome could realistically have meant - and those who did not. These latter preferred that the Coalition forces should suffer reverses, get bogged down, and you know the story: stalemate, quagmire, Stalingrad scenario in Baghdad, and so forth, leading to a US and British withdrawal. But what these critics of the war thereby wished for was a spectacular triumph for the regime in Baghdad, since that is what a withdrawal would have been. So much for solidarity with the victims of oppression, for commitment to democratic values and basic human rights.

Similarly today, with all those who seem so to relish every new difficulty, every set-back for US forces: what they align themselves with is a future of prolonged hardship and suffering for the Iraqi people, whether via an actual rather than imagined quagmire, a ruinous civil war, or the return (out of either) of some new and ghastly political tyranny; rather than a rapid stabilization and democratization of the country, promising its inhabitants an early prospect of national normalization. That is caring more to have been right than for a decent outcome for the people of this long unfortunate country.

Conclusion. Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed - and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed - and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug - opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.[/quote]

[quote=“porcelainprincess”]Norman Geras is a lefty I can respect. He has a heart and a brain.

http://www.normangeras.blogspot.com
[/quote]

Amen!

[quote=“tigerman”][quote=“porcelainprincess”]Norman Geras is a lefty I can respect. He has a heart and a brain.

http://www.normangeras.blogspot.com
[/quote]
Amen![/quote]
I hadn’t meant only to preach to the choir. How about a critique from Forumosa a gauche?

Porcelain Princess:

An excellent article and well reasoned.

I seriously doubt though that you will hear back from anyone on the LEFT for two reasons:

The article targets moral equivalency and moral relativism and it is about logic, rational ideas not feelings.

I think that so much of the Left is so bereft of inate morals and ethical standards that it can only prove its “goodness” by supporting the sanctioned causes of the day. The lack of intellectual diligence and moral introspection mean that each cause that is given the stamp of “goodness” must be fought tooth and nail to the end like crying children screaming with their hands over their ears. They do not want to hear anything that opposes their (fill in the blank here with your very charming phrase regarding paradigms).

I guess you can sign me

ONE OF THE GANG OF FOUR

(but with you back doesn’t that have to be upgraded to Gang of Five?)

frederick p. smith v.

holy cripes batman. are you guys high or blind?

Reading through Geras’ article, I see that [we, the so-called Leftists] have voiced much of the same arguments and logic.

Eg Even though US in the past (and given that different administrations are more or less different governments, not like one master puppeteer behind it…except for the bureaucracy and agencies like CIA for eg that are long-lived) eg Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Granada, Nicaragua, Europe, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Nicaragua. are done “bad”, doesn’t mean we are condemning the US as a whole as some Great Satan. I don’t wholly condemn the Iraq war. time and again, i or we’ve said that this could have a positive outcome, but that is separate and distinct from the supposed reasons or “immediate causes” voiced by the war-hawks. It’s a very relative thing; very few things are absolute. This is not a 100% wrong decision to goto Iraq, there may be 30% ‘good’ to come of it. It’s the whys…

How about a little consistency! add some flour to the cake. less water… more yeast.

And then of course Geras veers into that other argument that you always like to rely on… the good ol’ but we are Humanitarian Saviors of the Iraqis… (which is partly true, but doesn’t account for a lot of things)

PP,

Interesting world view. Free Iraq! Why didn’t you just say so earlier?

Just for fun now, though, how about: Liberate Liberia?

If ever there were low-hanging liberation fruit it’s Liberia. Two-to-three thousand troops and some air support would probably save a lot of lives, prevent a lot of rapes and dispel a lot of tyranny there almost overnight. Why are we being so coy about this one? I know there’s a good reason for selecting this one out and selecting Iraq in but we don’t even seem to care about this one.

[color=blue]"Washington has already dispatched three U.S. warships to Liberia in what is seen as a supportive gesture, though there is so far no indication the Pentagon intends to commit U.S. troops to the troubled region.

Liberians have been pleading for the U.S. to intervene to stop the bloodletting, but so far the U.S. administration has only promised logistical aid for the proposed West African force.[/color]
CNN

Hi girls!

The notion that the United States administration attacked Iraq for humanitarian reasons is utter hogwash.

The United States allows attrocities to continue on a daily basis. This is nothing new, of course; and this particularism – and the disrespect and hate that it breeds – is well accepted.

Attrocities? Despots? A bad thing? Not if it furthers United States’ policies.

Not if you are Saudi Arabia, and torturing the hell out of “suspects” on bahalf of the CIA; or beheading Bangladeshi workers at the football stadium on a Friday morning. This is OK as far as the United States is concerened because it forwards its OWN SELF INTERESTS.

So now that Saddam is gone, which despot will the United States insert to maintain law and order or will it be some kind of touchy feely “democracy” like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt etc. etc. etc.

Ha! Never forget Spider-Man: With great power, comes great responsibility.

The current United States administration is struggling to grasp this point; and until it starts showing a universal concern for victims of attrocities – regardless of their perceived importance to the United States – it will continue to lose credibility and respect. Now, that is a very dangerous path to follow.

But, my point is:

Don’t think that the United States were so keen to attack Iraq because it gave a toss about the well-being of Iraqi’s – it doesn’t.

Hell, I am not “left” (whatever that construct is?). I just hate particularist policies from a nation that should have learned some lessons from the past.

Dunc

Rummy: “These prisoners must be treated in accordance with United Nations conventions.”

Lesson 1 For soldiers in Iraq: Take off the Ray Bans and look your victims in the eye.

[quote=“Kenny McCormick”]I don’t wholly condemn the Iraq war. time and again, i or we’ve said that this could have a positive outcome, but that is separate and distinct from the supposed reasons or “immediate causes” voiced by the war-hawks. It’s a very relative thing; very few things are absolute. This is not a 100% wrong decision to goto Iraq, there may be 30% ‘good’ to come of it. It’s the whys…

How about a little consistency! add some flour to the cake. less water… more yeast.

And then of course Geras veers into that other argument that you always like to rely on… the good ol’ but we are Humanitarian Saviors of the Iraqis… (which is partly true, but doesn’t account for a lot of things)[/quote]

Kenny,

The author made the point that Bush, and even Blair, while stressing the security threat posed by Saddam to us, also articulated the humanitarian threat that Saddam was to his own people. You seem to want to argue both ways.

Gavin,

That’s a good question. However, the article was authored by a “liberal” and directed at other “liberals”. The fact is, US “conservatives” do not normally agree to use US power for purely humanitarian reasons and usually only agree to use US power when US interests are perceived at risk, while US “liberals” generally only want US power used for purely humanitarian reasons and not when US security interests are at stake.

The article did not deal with the question of why a “conservative” administration doesn’t want to use US force to resolve the purely humanitarian problem in Liberia when no US strategic issues are involved (although I have seen arguments that solving the Liberian problem would be in the interest of the US and Bush is sending some assistance).

Rather, the article asked why “liberals” who only want to use US force for purely humanitarian reasons still opposed the use of US force in Iraq, when, despite the security risk posed to the US (which they say now never existed), there was also an enormous and undeniable humanitarian problem begging to be solved.

[quote=“fred smith”]
I think that so much of the Left is so bereft of inate morals and ethical standards that it can only prove its “goodness” by supporting the sanctioned causes of the day. The lack of intellectual diligence and moral introspection mean that each cause that is given the stamp of “goodness” must be fought tooth and nail to the end like crying children screaming with their hands over their ears. [/quote]

Very, very well put, Mr. Smith.

The ‘real’ Left has essentially disappeared in the Anglo-Saxon world (US, Britain, Australia, Canada). I’m talking about the Left that was concerned with preventing labor exploitation and, later, preventing discrimination. People who were Lefties in the early and mid-20th Century supported Labour in Britain and the Dems in the States because they didn’t want working class folks to be poor (i.e. FDR), and they didn’t want minorities to be disadvantaged (i.e. Kennedy/Johnson). Those people were, by and large, personally conservative- many were religious, most were anti-Communist, and most would never have supported issues such as abortion on demand and fascism in Iraq. They had a work ethic. They had traditional values.

My how times have changed. The Left is now occupied by

A) snobbish, ivory-tower intellectuals, who support everything from Fidel Castro to banning necessary medical testing on animals to stopping the Ango-Saxon world from trying to eliminate fascist dictators like Saddam Hussein

and

B) ego-centric, pseudo-intellectual young people who were not spanked hard enough as children and eventually grew up spoiled and selfish, lacking personal discipline and moral conviction. Go to any self-proclaimed ‘bohemian’ neighborhood (the Village in NY, downtown Seattle, etc.) and there they will be- the scruffy, stinky dissafected. (They need to be disinfected.)

Many of the type B variety even venture to Taiwan and become English teachers.

The Left, in essence, has indeed withered and is all but dead in the Anglo-Saxon world. What remains in it’s place and mistakenly calls itself ‘Left’ is, unfortunately, a sorry mess.

Could not agree more about Leftists today as spoiled children. The irony many do not see when they want to live some romanticized version of what they “perceive” as the great 1960s free love, rock and roll, drugs (hedonism without responsibility writ large) is that today they are the “establishment” and that the party of “ideas” is now the Republicans and that the irony is that in their own way they are the fuddy duddy sanctimonious complacent “conservatives” that their parents OR they fought against themselves in the 1960s, the generation that did not want to even contemplate change.

On a side note, I just watched Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You again last night. For a funny and ironic take on limousine liberals in New York you gotta love this movie.

[quote=“tigerman”][quote=“Kenny McCormick”]I don’t wholly condemn the Iraq war. time and again, i or we’ve said that this could have a positive outcome, but that is separate and distinct from the supposed reasons or “immediate causes” voiced by the war-hawks. It’s a very relative thing; very few things are absolute. This is not a 100% wrong decision to goto Iraq, there may be 30% ‘good’ to come of it. It’s the whys…

How about a little consistency! add some flour to the cake. less water… more yeast.

And then of course Geras veers into that other argument that you always like to rely on… the good ol’ but we are Humanitarian Saviors of the Iraqis… (which is partly true, but doesn’t account for a lot of things)[/quote]

[quote]Kenny,

The author made the point that Bush, and even Blair, while stressing the security threat posed by Saddam to us, also articulated the humanitarian threat that Saddam was to his own people. You seem to want to argue both ways.[/quote][/quote]

It’s not a matter of arguing both ways. It’s about distinguishing between the Proffered Reasons/Justifications from the Results (which include humanitarian benefits)

Just to challenge this again. These myths take on a life of their own and become TRUTH.

What exactly was US involvement in Chile? Who supplied what? Who killed who?

I strongly disagree with the assertion that Allende was this innocent little socialist who came to power and the US was only looking after its imperial interests and was solely responsible for Pinochet.

90 percent of whatever happened was in the hands of the Chilean people. Less so for Central America but then you cannot entirely disregard Soviet and Cuban support for communist Ortega, who by the way lost in a free and fair election (Carter sanctioned).

So while the debates about US foreign policy can say Chile was a negative (I disagree) as do I with the case of Vietnam (look at what came after) ditto with the Shah and Iran.

You want negatives of US foreign policy. Go back to the pre WWII era when the US was getting involved in places like Central America, the Caribbean and the Philippines and I will agree but then compared with what was going on in the world at that time, this was very small potatoes. Intervention as opposed to downright colonialism and imperialism is no big deal in my book.

Then by this standard of past misbehavior, no one from France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Japan, Belgium, etc. would ever be allowed to criticize US foreign policy or formulate policies of their own because of past misdeeds and mistakes. Is that what you are saying Big Dumc?

Tigerman,

The fact is that the US would have invaded Iraq even if Iraq were a democracy or Saddam Hussein was a benevolent despot with no human rights violations.

Liberating Iraq was largely irrelevant to the decision.

That doesn’t mean by implication that invading Iraq for reasons of national security was wrong. That’s a separate question. It only means that showcasing the liberation of Iraq as some sort of prime motivator is just hypocritical and dishonest.

What’s worse though is that this argument is so transparent that it grates and makes things more unstable because it increases the general distrust level. Honesty, good god, is always the best policy, even at this late stage.

It’s as if some individual were trying to convince us that he’s a philantropist when we all know he’s making a profit off everything he’s doing. Nothing wrong with making a profit and doing a little good as a by-product; plenty wrong though with trying to convince us that he’s doing it for philantropic reasons.

Much better left unsaid.

Since I don’t like the 60s hippie crap and bunch of free-loaders and bandwagon people that didn’t believe in peace, but only free sex, drugs, and doing diddly-squat, I guess I’m not a Lefty after all.
Btw, while middle-class white americans were having their fun (for the most part unless you got sent to jail or vietnam), most people in the world were just struggling to survive. So I guess I’m far right after all. :wink: Sieg Om!

[quote=“WarMonkey”][quote=“fred smith”]Go to any self-proclaimed ‘bohemian’ neighborhood (the Village in NY, downtown Seattle, etc.) and there they will be- the scruffy, stinky dissafected. (They need to be disinfected.)

Many of the type B variety even venture to Taiwan and become English teachers. [/quote]
(aside) Senator Bedfellow, is that you?? :slight_smile:

[quote=“Gavin Januarus”]
The fact is that the US would have invaded Iraq even if Iraq were a democracy or Saddam Hussein was a benevolent despot with no human rights violations.[/quote][/quote]
Well, sure, if Saddam Hussein was a benevolent despot who merely created biological and chemical weapons so he could gas and kill Iranian troops during a war that Hussein The Benevolent initiated, and who invaded Kuwait to seize control of its oilfields for his own pockets, well, yeah, I guess we still would’ve invaded.

Somehow I doubt that a “benevolent despot” would have started at least two major regional wars to line his own pockets, though.

The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are
in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped. Hubert Humphrey.

I’m a silk stocking liberal and proud of it. I’ve got a rolls royce, and you know what – its good for my voice. Whats wrong with coming from a bohemian background? And excuse me, most executives in Fortune 500 companies will acknowledge the fact that the private sector can’t provide all the answers. So if a liberal is someone whose parents came from the counterculture, who grew up breaking the rules rather than by abiding them, who is creative, and who wants to make the world a better place, you can count me as one. And the silly remarks about Republicans being the party of change, and the Democrats as establishment people, please!!! They are more similar than different. I think we should launch a Chistopher Hitchens" for President drive. heheheeheheh

Ta for now,
Chewy

hehehehe, but then we’d have to give him American citizenship and do away with that stupid amendment that requires Presidents to be born in the US.

Chewy Whatever:

This is the problem. You as a self-proclaimed liberal want to be the one to “give” it to the poor. Go find a nice charity and leave the honest tax payer alone. At least be honest enough to spend your own money. And IF you really cared about the poor so much surely you could sell that evil status symbol of a Rolls Royce to feed the poor with your wealth rather than demand that middle class Republican voters unwillingly do so. If you want to be lady bountiful or squire successul, dole out the alms on your own time and from your own pocket. Nothing more loathsome than government officials or silk stocking liberals that insist on doling out other people’s money ala Barbara Streisand while ensuring all her income is offshore and in tax havens, etc. etc. etc.

Then the final argument becomes, which actually does the best long term good. You give money to welfare and take care of children from unwed mothers and such. Fine, but does the problem go away or get bigger. Well in the States they know the answer to that one.

Perhaps it is interesting to compare the evil Margaret Thatcher whose policies have ensured that England is one of the most successful and vibrant economies in Europe today with less of a pensions problem than its counterparts in Germany, France and continental Europe where employment is up to twice as high and the road to reform has been postponed but eventually must be faced. So in the long run, who was kinder and more helpful to the poor in these countries. The woman who demanded reform and ensured the survival of the British economy or the German and French politicians who would not make the tough choices then and are therefore forced to make much tougher ones now.

So proudly admire yourself in your warped mirror of liberal good intentions while ignoring the end results of your largesse. And keep your hands off the hard-earned largesse of others.

[quote=“Chewycorns”]
I’m a silk stocking liberal and proud of it. I’ve got a rolls royce, and you know what – its good for my voice. [/quote]

You probably just love Teddy’s son Rep. Patrick Kennedy.

"As sometimes happens with Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.), he let his mouth race ahead of his brain Wednesday night at a gathering of Young Democrats at the Washington nightspot Acropolis. After presidential candidate Howard Dean spoke, Kennedy delivered an impassioned peroration against President Bush’s tax cut. We hear that Kennedy told the crowd: “I don’t need Bush’s tax cut. I have never worked a [bleeping] day in my life.” With that he got the audience’s attention – the dropping-jaws kind. “He droned on and on, frequently mentioning how much better the candidates would sound the more we drank,” a witness told us. “Finally, he had to be stopped by a DNC volunteer.” Kennedy’s spokesman, Ernesto Anguilla, told us yesterday: “He was talking to the crowd; it was a rally-the-troops kind of speech about the tax cut. He was energizing the crowd and got caught up in it and used an unfortunate word, which he regrets using. . . . And no one pulled him off the stage.”

washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dy … Found=true

I admire Teddy a little more than his sons, or Bobby’s kids for that matter. For all that people seem to like to Teddy-bash, one could argue that his legislative initiatives in the Senate have provided more of a long term legacy than either of his brothers. Now back to the original topic. While Rep. Patrick Kennedy’s comments were stupid, I find them somewhat amusing. Its true. He could me sipping on Mint Julips in West Palm Beach and fornicating with local beauties. However, he is noble to dedicating his time to fostering economic and social improvement among the masses.

Ta for Now,
Chewy