Monday, August 06, 2007
Warrantless Surrender
Congress is stampeded into another compromise of Americans' rights.
Monday, August 6, 2007; A16
THE DEMOCRATIC-led Congress, more concerned with protecting its political backside than with safeguarding the privacy of American citizens, left town early yesterday after caving in to administration demands that it allow warrantless surveillance of the phone calls and e-mails of American citizens, with scant judicial supervision and no reporting to Congress about how many communications are being intercepted. To call this legislation ill-considered is to give it too much credit: It was scarcely considered at all. Instead, it was strong-armed through both chambers by an administration that seized the opportunity to write its warrantless wiretapping program into law -- or, more precisely, to write it out from under any real legal restrictions.
Administration officials, backed up by their Republican enablers in Congress, argued that they were being dangerously hamstrung in their ability to collect foreign-to-foreign communications by suspected terrorists that happen to transit through the United States. The problem is that while no serious person objects to intercepting foreign-to-foreign communications, what the administration sought -- and what it managed to obtain -- allows much more than foreign-to-foreign contacts. The government will now be free to intercept any communications believed to be from outside the United States (including from Americans overseas) that involve "foreign intelligence" -- not just terrorism. It will be able to monitor phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens or residents without warrants -- unless the subject is the "primary target" of the surveillance. Instead of having the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court ensure that surveillance is being done properly, with monitoring of Americans minimized, that job would be up to the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The court's role is reduced to that of rubber stamp.
This is as reckless as it was unnecessary. Democrats had presented a compromise plan that would have permitted surveillance to proceed, but with court review and an audit by the Justice Department's inspector general, to be provided to Congress, about how many Americans had been surveilled. Democrats could have stuck to their guns and insisted on their version. Instead, nervous about being blamed for any terrorist attack and eager to get out of town, they accepted the unacceptable. Most Democrats opposed the measure, but enough (16 in the Senate, 41 in the House) went with Republicans to allow it to pass, and the leadership enabled that result.
There is one small saving grace here: These sweeping new powers expire after six months. Of course, having dropped the audit requirement, lawmakers won't have a good way of knowing how many Americans had their communications intercepted. The administration will no doubt again play the national security card. Democratic leaders say they want to move quickly to fix the damage. If only we could be more confident that they won't get rolled again.
Labels: Democrats, spineless, warrantless surveillance
Democrats Roll Over and Play Dead... Again.
Wanted: a Constitutional Democrat
Posted August 4, 2007
On Friday, by a vote of 60-28, the Senate passed the measure that President Bush had requested to enhance his powers of warrantless wiretapping. It is said that these new powers will not cover phone calls made within the United States; but the effect of the vote is certainly to remove a constitutional check. We now have the president's word that he will act with restraint.
Two small concessions were granted by the administration to the cooperative lawmaking body. First, in the revised legislation, the attorney general is no longer the sole official charged with oversight; Alberto Gonzales will share authority with the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. Second, the change in the law is not permanent but comes up for renewal in six months.
Such allowances hardly compare to what was extracted in return. The FISA court will be permitted to review the president's wiretaps only after the fact; and the court is restricted to a generic review of the warrants, with no power to inquire into individual cases.
This latest understanding with the President (which will not be any easier to reverse six months from now than it was to oppose yesterday) was approved by sixteen Democrats to make the required majority of 60--among them Senators Bayh, Webb, and Feinstein. The unintimidated opposition was led by Russell Feingold.
By what force was the Democratic majority effectively split? The answer lies in part in the nature of President Bush's appeal to fear. He has frightened many people into believing that if America is ever hit by another attack, the blame should fall on every lawmaker who ever opposed his will on national security. The Cheney-Bush campaign of fear is relentless, but not entirely disingenuous. President Bush is frightened, and the public has seen it; Vice President Cheney is frightened, and his bunker shows it.
Intimidation apart, a cynical prudence clearly drove some of the crossover votes. Many Democrats believe the party's best strategy is to run out the clock. Let the president have everything he wants between now and November 2008; watch politely, and show a seemly disappointment; and count the profits at election time. The same goes for the president's men, from Petraeus down to Gonzales: give them all they want for the next fifteen months and see where it lands us. That is one reason why impeachment has been taken "off the table."
Of course, impeachment was put into the Constitution partly as a remedy against the rashness and ambition of just such an administration as this; the shadow of impeachment, it was supposed, might curb the desperate attempts of bad men to shore up their power by fresh adventures. But here once more the Democratic calculation appears to be: the worse it gets, the better for us in the end.
In a recent talk with liberal journalists, Nancy Pelosi offered a second kind of prudential reservation: impeachment or censure, of either Cheney or Bush, would "divide the country." That is the same species of wisdom that prevailed with Al Gore when he withheld his support from the late petitions charging voter fraud in Florida in the election of 2000. He was choosing not to divide the country.
The trouble is that Cheney and Bush are happy to divide the country. They mean to play their terrible hand to the end; and they do not take no for an answer. Compromise with them, and you are the one who is compromised. The statement by Dick Cheney in January 2007, about the impact of the election on his plans for the Middle East, showed the curious streak of frankness that marks his political character. "It won't stop us," he said.
Now, in a constitutional democracy, there are two ways of stopping the claims of a leader out of control. One is by an appeal to the voters; the other is by an appeal to the laws. The vice president (and, therefore, the president) having declared his independence of the people, it would seem that the best remaining protection is the laws. If, on the other hand, the opposition are unwilling to resort to the laws--if, from a combination of timidity and tactical reasoning, they refuse to defend their own function as lawmakers--for what purpose do they exist?
Labels: Appeasement, Democrats, Pathetic
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Enough Already with the Pathetic Excuses
by Meteor Blades
Sun Aug 05, 2007 at 05:50:52 AM PDT
I know what a lot of you 57 Democratic Representatives and Senators are going to be saying over the next month while you’re speaking on the home turf. You did it to protect Americans. You didn’t want to take a chance. You had to stand up to the terrorists. You really had no choice.
If anybody asks why in hell you chose to legalize what the Cheney-Bush team has been doing illegally since 2001, you’re going to tell us you did it for our own good. You amended the 29-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – originally passed to put some modest restrictions on agencies whose outrageous and frequently illegal behavior had been exposed by journalists and the Church Committee – to make us safe. You’re going to tell us you’ve got our backs.
You’re going to claim we can depend on you to be tough against terrorists even though you just put your foreheads to the floor at the feet of the most loathsome duo ever to sink their talons into the office of the Presidency. You’re going to tell us you couldn’t stand up to the blackmail, although that's not what you'll call it. You’re going to say Democrats can’t afford to appear weak.
At which point, if I happen to be in the back of the room, your bodyguards will probably have to drag me off. Because I cannot imagine how I will be able to quiet my laughter long enough for you to get on to the next question.
Frankly, you epitomize weak. Your every pore exudes feebleness. You are surrender monkeys. And you’ve just casually tossed away a basic protection as if it were a banana peel.
Pressed, I suspect that over the next month some of you will defend this pitiful capitulation with the argument that it’s only for six months, and that you’ll have a chance to amend the amendment, to rewrite the law more properly. You'll pretend that you won’t kiss the President’s ass half a year from now when he comes back and says exactly what he said this time: Give me what I want or I’ll blame you the next time terrorists kill Americans. Weak is bad enough. Must you be simpletons as well? How many times has he marketed this crap? How many times have you bought it? Do you also fall for those late-night $19.95 television deals for a double-set of knives that never need sharpening?
In short, what in the name of the sweet green earth makes you, in the perfect description of Glenn Greenwald, so self-destructive? What makes you think that giving in equates with standing firm in the public eye? What makes you believe that your appeasement offers the Democrats a better chance of winning a larger majority in the House and Senate, a better chance of returning to the White House? Do you really suppose that your "aye" for this law, and your other capitulations in the past seven months, will smooth the way for those of us who every other year use everything in our repertoire to persuade people that voting Democratic will change things for the better?
If your behavior were mere self-destructiveness, it wouldn’t matter quite so much. But you’re taking all Americans down with you. The White House still refuses to even say what it is doing. As Greenwald points out:
Vast abuses and criminality in surveillance remain undisclosed, uninvestigated and unimpeded because Congressional Democrats have stood meekly by while the administration refuses to disclose what it has been doing in how it spies on us. ...
Congressional Democrats know virtually nothing about how the Bush administration has been eavesdropping on our conversations because the administration refused to tell them and they passively accepted this state of affairs.
Unfortunately, you 57 are not the only Democrats at fault for enabling these unconstitutional abuses. Party leaders bear responsibility for not playing hardball. For not using every technique and every bit of clout at their command to at least attempt to block amendments like this atrocity from becoming law. You leaders don’t have to explain about the paper-thin majority. You don’t have point out that it’s important to choose your fights. Understood. But this isn’t about corn subsidies, or earmarks or resolutions establishing Soap Carvers of America Day. Constitutional protections are at stake. Most people won’t blame you for losing if you put up a good fight. But how can you expect to avoid blame when you don’t?
The Church Committee noted in 1976:
This Committee has examined a realm of governmental information collection which has not been governed by restraints comparable to those in criminal proceedings. We have examined the collection of intelligence about the political advocacy and actions and the private lives of American citizens. That information has been used covertly to discredit the ideas advocated and to "neutralize" the actions of their proponents. As Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone warned in 1924, when he sought to keep federal agencies from investigating "political or other opinions" as opposed to "conduct . . . forbidden by the laws":
When a police system passes beyond these limits, it is dangerous to the proper administration of justice and to human liberty, which it should be our first concern to cherish.
... There is always a possibility that a secret police may become a menace to free government and free institutions because it carries with it the possibility of abuses of power which are not always quickly apprehended or understood.
Our investigation has confirmed that warning. We have seen segments of our Government, in their attitudes and action, adopt tactics unworthy of a democracy, and occasionally reminiscent of the tactics of totalitarian regimes. We have seen a consistent pattern in which programs initiated with limited goals, such as preventing criminal violence or identifying foreign spies, were expanded to what witnesses characterized as "vacuum cleaners"," sweeping in information about lawful activities of American citizens.
The tendency of intelligence activities to expand beyond their initial scope is a theme which runs through every aspect of our investigative findings. Intelligence collection programs naturally generate ever-increasing demands for new data. And once intelligence has been collected, there are strong pressures to use it against the target.
There comes a time when giving in to the demolition of constitutional protections can no longer be considered a matter of being weak or unthinking. Rather it must be considered complicity.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Digby Speaks!
Those of you who know my blog know that it’s nearly impossible to draw me from my secure bunker in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica. But when I was approached by my friend Rick Perlstein about accepting this award on behalf of the progressive blogosphere, I knew it was an honor that I could not refuse. Not for myself, although I’m grateful, but for my fellow bloggers.
We are proud to be part of the great progressive, liberal tradition of Paul Wellstone, and we are grateful for your kind acknowledgment. Thank you.
As there has been a lot said recently about the netroots and our influence on the Democratic Party, this is especially rewarding. Let’s just say we’ve ruffled some feathers. We’ve been called everything from “some guy named Vinnie in a bathrobe in an efficiency apartment” to “blogofascists.” Some critics dismiss us as useless elites, the “Metropolitan Opera crowd,” or a noisy Upper West Side cocktail party for the college graduate class. Still others take us to task for our vitriolic, unhinged tone.
The other day, Tim Russert agreed absolutely with his gracious host, the concerned centrist Sean Hannity, that the Democratic Party was being unduly influenced by bloggers, who were dragging the Party kicking and screaming to the Left. Then there is the criticism that we are fascists or Stalinists, demanding that everyone march in lockstep to the edicts of our leadership – generally assumed to be Markos, of Daily Kos, who apparently directs us with secret signals deeply embedded in the code of the Daily Kos website, while we carry on an elaborate ruse of spirited political debate and disagreement in public. We are, in short, something of an enigma. I like to call this phenomenon “Irrational Fear of Hippies.” And this has, in my view, become irrational fear of political passion.
Of all the criticisms I just mentioned, that is one that we are all willing to accept. We are passionate about politics, and in this era of Republican corruption, excess, and failure, that passion sometimes manifests itself as anger. But how can you not be angry? So many institutions have failed us in the last decade that being vitriolic seems the only sane response.
And as for the idea that we are modern Stalinists, does that make any sense at all? We can’t even agree about what to call ourselves. The netroots – the progressive blogosphere – consists of a very lively and disparate group of citizens who are political observers, activists, readers, writers, entrepreneurs, communicating and organizing via the Internet. We have opera-loving liberals from Georgia, NASCAR-loving progressives from Chicago, and Grateful Dead-loving Democrats from Florida. We are from everywhere, and our common tribal signifiers aren’t social status or professional authority or region. We find each other in remote places and big cities alike, on the Internet, through our politics – period. In the blogosphere, nobody cares if you are a 70-year-old Chinese immigrant, or a 22-year-old Harvard student, or a stay-at-home blogger dad. If you have something to say, you can say it, and if it touches a chord, people will return time and again to read what you’ve written and discuss the issues of the day with others who are reading the same things.
Al Gore – a man who knows something about the Internet – wrote in his book, The Assault on Reason, “The Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish. It is the most interactive medium in history, with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to the universe of knowledge.” So while we may not be Stalinists, the Netroots is a revolution – a revolutionary, participatory democracy.
And for that purpose, the Left is more effective than the Right. Whether by temperament or philosophy, we are simply better suited to the freeform, constantly changing nature of these new political communities. Each of us finds our niche: I’m a blogger-pundit, a role for which I am eminently qualified since, exactly like pundits on television and in newspapers, I have opinions, I write them down, and a lot of people read them. Yes, that’s all there is to it. Sorry, Mr. Broder. Others have different endeavors. Bloggers Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers, for instance, are organizers of this nascent movement. They traffic in ideas that affect our ability to keep doing what we do, from net neutrality to finding a much-needed funding base for bloggers and activists. With vastly different approaches, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake are creating a new form of journalism; Talking Points is modeled on the more traditional form, and Firedoglake is mixing reporting, opinion, and direct political advocacy. Daily Kos is a virtual community that operates like a small city, offering full-stop political shopping for its progressive inhabitants. Crooks and Liars catalogues the juiciest morsels of political TV. MoveOn moves millions to action. Media Matters monitors and calls out the right-wing noise machine. And writers for liberal magazines are all blogging and mixing it up with their readers. And there are literally thousands of others out there doing all that and more – writing back and forth with their readers, linking and arguing and organizing. This is a 24/7 worldwide political discussion and strategy session.
But all of us who blog in the progressive blogosphere have a common goal. It’s the same goal of virtually everyone in this room tonight. We want to begin a new era of progressive politics and take back America. We may argue about tactics and strategy, or the extent to which we are partisans versus ideologues (and believe me, we do), but there is no disagreement among us that the modern conservative movement of Newt and Grover and Karl and Rush has proven to be a dangerous cultural and political cancer on the body politic. You will not find anyone amongst us who believes that the Bush Administration’s executive power grab and flagrant partisan use of the federal government is anything less than an assault on the Constitution. We stand together against the dissolution of habeas corpus and the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and we all agree that Islamic terrorism is a threat, but one which we cannot meet with military power alone. And yes, a vast majority of us were against this mindless invasion of Iraq from the beginning, or at least saw the writing on the wall long before Peggy Noonan discovered that George W. Bush wasn’t the second coming of Winston Churchill.
Sadly, we also all agree that the mainstream media is part of the problem. Democracy suffers when not being held accountable by a vigorous press. During the last decade, there have been three catalyzing events that drove people like me to the Internet, to research, investigate, and write about assaults on democracy itself. In 1998, the political media lost all perspective, and aggressively helped the Republicans pursue a partisan witch-hunt against a democratically-elected president and against the will of the people. The coverage of the presidential election of 2000 was legendary for its bias and sophomoric personality journalism. The press actually joined the Republicans in telling the majority who had voted for Al Gore to get over it. I don’t know about you, but I never got over it. And the third event (I don’t need to tell anyone in this room) was the almost gleeful support of the invasion of Iraq, a journalistic failure of epic proportions. If you had not been sufficiently aroused from your complacency by this time, you never would be.
The blogosphere was the natural place for many of us to turn when the institutions we counted upon seemed to be daring us to believe them, or believe our own eyes. And that coming-together set the table for the seminal candidacy of Howard Dean and all that has come since.
As it turned out, we didn’t just raise money for progressive Democrats, although many of my fellow bloggers raised a whole big pile of it from our readers all over the country. We began to push back the prevailing manufactured narratives, produced in bulk by various Republican PR shops and distributed to their talking heads in radio and television. We talked back to the media, and yes, to our own party, some of whom understood that while we were opinionated thorns in their side, we were also opinion makers, read by influentials in the everyday world of water coolers and dinner tables all over the country. We were a part of the base that could move other parts of the base, and a counter to the prevailing political stories and narratives of the day. And they know we could potentially help create a new modern political movement.
And so here we are – the famously vituperative, angry bloggers, standing before you today politely accepting this award as proud, full-fledged inheritors of the great liberal and progressive political traditions of America. On behalf of all of them and netroots activists, and especially on behalf of our dear friend, Steve Gilliard, a fighting liberal of both the old the new schools, I thank you again for inviting us to your party. Our party rages on, 24/7, all over the blogosphere, and we’d love it if all of you would stop by frequently. Thank you
Labels: Democrats, liberals, progressives
Friday, June 15, 2007
We Are Losing the Fight Over Iran
The neocons have selected the designated next enemy of the United States, and they are hard at work convincing Americans to fear Iran. The public comments we just heard Joe Lieberman utter about the need to bomb Iran are just the tip of the iceberg. They position populist right wing pitch man Glen Beck on the air nightly at CNN Headline News, ranting about Iran. They pepper Jewish media with polemics about Iran, playing up fears for Israel’s security where few non Jews will notice their efforts. They have multiple front groups widely distribute email warnings about the urgent need to stand up to Iran, playing on every fear of radical Muslims imaginable, playing "the Christian card" without hesitation, while they label Iran our arch enemy at the center of a "clash of civilizations". Republican candidates for President like nothing better than an opportunity to turn their tough act toward Tehran, where they leap frog each other to the heights of belligerency in the name of protecting America, providing cover while they safely back peddle on Iraq.
Just like they morphed Osama Bin Ladin into Saddam Hussein in 2002, neocons morph Al Qaeda into Iran today, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the new Saddam Hussein who we must be trained to fear. And it is working. They are making significant steady progress in alarming the general public about Iran. They act like slippery weasels and say "True, Iraq was never a grave threat, but Iran actually was, and now the Iranian threat is getting greater all the time. It doesn't matter if you think attacking Iraq was a mistake, because Iran is the real deal, and now we finally must face up to something we should have dealt with a long time ago"
Republican Neocons, and some of their hawkish Democratic allies, not only believe that war with Iran is inevitable AND in the long term interests of the United States, they believe that the sooner we get it on the better. To them, military and political circumstances are as favorable now as they are likely to get, with a sitting Republican President who is predisposed to use force. Neocons see history moving against American interests if the U.S. does not act boldly to rearrange the Middle Eastern map, locking in "our" Oil Supplies now before the further rise of China handcuffs America’s ability to act.
On top of their long standing desire to take Iran's government down, Republicans have another compelling motivation to shift the public’s attention onto "the threat posed by Iran". They need a threat from Iran to once again pump up national security hysteria to once again prop up the G.O.P. They increasingly can't point to "fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here", because the public sees fully the futility of our efforts to fight terrorists inside Iraq. The public knows that it was our invasion which created terrorists in Iraq, and that the U.S. is incapable of restoring order to Iraq now by sending in more American troops. So now is the perfect time to shift the focus onto Iran, which neocons conveniently blame for our failure in Iraq, and where they claim we will not have to send American troops in to protect America’s security, just bombs.
They skillfully play on the frustration American's feel watching our supposed Arab allies in Iraq's government, who seem to act like they hate each other as much as they hate us. Their covert message goes like this: "Wouldn't it just feel better to bomb the hell out of Islamic fanatics rather than climb into fox holes with them, where they will only stab us in the back? Who cares if Iranians call themselves Persians instead of Arabs, or that Iran is Shiite while Al Qaeda is Sunni? They’re all just crazy rag heads". The anti-Arab hate message fueled by images of Bin Ladin, that drummed us steadily into Iraq, now is aimed at Iran, and Democrats by and large sit by passively, allowing it to go unchallenged.
And with our own peace movement completely fixated on ending the war in Iraq, we seem to have scant attention free ourselves to directly confront the chicken hawks on Iran. So we find ourselves three moves behind them on the domestic political chess board, as their construction of the public psychological framework needed to facilitate an attack on Iran nears completion. We spend so much time talking to ourselves that we don’t always hear what others might be saying to each other. We see the American public coming around to our own views on Iraq, and unconsciously assume they must view the larger question of further conflicts in the Middle East the same as we do also. Simply put, they do not.
If the public were solidly opposed to ratcheting up tensions with Iran, if they were aghast at the thought of America attacking yet another Middle Eastern nation, do you think that the House Democratic Caucus would have, with little fanfare, stripped out a proposed amendment from their original Iraq war funding legislation (the bill Bush later vetoed) that would have forced George W. Bush to come to Congress for a vote prior to an attack on Iran? Democrats retained plenty of provisions they knew full well that Bush would veto, but they removed the Iran provision themselves out of a concern expressed by some that they shouldn’t tie the hands of the President regarding Iran. It’s the dynamics of the IWR vote repeated, but since we are giving George Bush free reign against Iran this time, that somehow makes it acceptable. And unfortunately in the minds of too many Democrats as well as Republicans, that does in fact make it acceptable.
Does anyone doubt the existence of a Pro Iranian War propaganda machine? Like all such efforts this one has separate above ground and underground paths of propagation. So some Americans on Sunday tuned into respected mainstream media news program "Meet The Press" to hear veteran United States Senator Joseph Lieberman say in somber tone:
"I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq. And to me that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people to kill our soldiers."
Meanwhile an unadulterated no holds barred version of the bomb Iran back into the Stone Age message gets circulated through a web site like "Family Security Matters: The National Security Recourse for American Families", which on June 7th 2007 posted an "exclusive"; Iran Wants War. They will have it whether we want it or not.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org...
That nifty piece of reporting is laden with sober irrefutable "facts" such as these:
"Almost every day we see news reports of al Qaeda bombing attacks in Iraq. So why do Democrats still keep calling it a "civil war"? Al Qaeda terrorists are not Iraqis fighting a "civil war." It has been reported that Iran is responsible for 80% of American deaths in Iraq, either by Iranian fighters, or by Iranian weapons and bombs provided to insurgents and al Qaeda. Neither the American government nor the press is exploiting Iran’s responsibility for these deadly attacks, which are Iranian acts of war against America and must be considered as such. This alone should provide justification for an attack on Iran."
Ah, but that was the milder part of their commentary. Before anyone has time to get week kneed about their call for war, the commentary lays out what surely they believe is a compelling justification, including this:
"We must send a message to the rest of the Islamic world that Mecca and Medina are next if the terrorism doesn't stop now. The alternative is a long and dirty war that will last for decades. Is that what we want to live with when we have the ability to avoid it? Utter devastation worked with Japan and Germany. It will work with Islam. All we need is the courage and the will to stand up and again be the strong country that we once were. We didn't get to where we are today by bowing to the will of weak foreign powers and worrying about what they think of us.
The time has come to stand up, America!
The only thing Islam respects is brutality and overwhelming force. It's how they've lived for over a thousand years. That is why Saddam Hussein and other Islamic dictators were successful for so many years. Islamic despots know what it takes to bring Middle Eastern Islamists under control. Islamists have no respect for, or understanding of, western diplomacy and a desire for peaceful solutions. Their religion forbids compromise with the West. For them, and now for us as well, it's either kill or be killed. If we don't start playing by their rules, we're going to lose big. We cannot win this war with Western morality as the overarching factor. The first priority must be winning. Everything else is secondary. "
To dismiss the above simply as talk from and to wing nuts misses an essential element of how political discourse is shaped; framing the debate. The more comments like the above are widely disseminated, the less shocking a slightly softer version of those sentiments become. The more extreme the boundaries of debate get pushed, the more reasonable and sensible comments such as those made by Joe Lieberman on "Meet The Press" start sounding. And what do most Democrats say in turn, to define their stance to broaden the spectrum of public debate on Iran? "Iran is a threat but we should be willing to talk to them, while keeping all options on the table." Does that sound like a fair and balanced debate to you, with the full range of views and perspectives well and equally represented? Or does it more resemble the programming on a certain well known cable news network?
Again, I say; we are losing the fight over Iran. The only force I see consistently and effectively weighing in to engage the public from a countervailing view point is StopIranwar.com sponsored by General Wesley Clark and VoteVets.org. They need our help. We can’t afford for them to fail.
Labels: Democrats, Iran, Iraq, Joe Lieberman, VoteVets.org, Wesley Clark
