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POPSThe Biggest Threat to the West Lies Within Itself, Not with Islam Simon Jenkins on threats to peace and democracy. This defeatism led the American Congress to allow its president to authorise torture and detention without trial in what Senator Robert Byrd called “the slow unravelling of the people’s liberties”. It enabled a British Home Office to curb free speech and habeas corpus. It arms police, fortifies buildings and impedes the free movement of citizens. It makes every Christian suspicious of every Muslim.
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POPS"We're Not Dangerous...We're Persian!" While it's hard to beat the hilarity of his opening bit, Iranian comedian Jobrani's entire politically incorrect routine is online: 1 , 2 . Sometimes you just gotta laugh at the seriousness of the world.... (Via The Daily Dish.)
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POPSThe Terror Presidency Excerpts from the much-talked-about book by Jack Goldsmith, recounting his days of advising the White House on the legal boundaries of American executive power. Goldsmith explains how he was made to sign off on the unprecedented orders of presidential authority we know and love today. He famously was present at the dramatic hospital-room showdown on national surveillance between Gonzales, Card and a frail Ashcroft, calling it "the most amazing scene I'd ever witnessed." Goldsmith resigned 10 months in. They believed cooperation and compromise signaled weakness and emboldened the enemies of America and the executive branch. When it came to terrorism, they viewed every encounter outside the innermost core of most trusted advisers as a zero-sum game that if they didn't win they would necessarily lose.
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POPSZogby Survey Uncovers American Bias, Hypocrisy Detailed results worth viewing at source. Pollster John Zogby said, “Over my years of polling, I’ve learned that Americans tend to offer socially acceptable responses when questioned on their own views about race and prejudice. That’s why in this poll we predominantly asked people about “most Americans’” views on race and prejudice. We believe this provides a far more accurate window into how people really think about these issues. Americans are more forthcoming when discussing the problem in the context of their neighbors’ lives than in the context of their own lives.”
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POPSA Tragic Legacy And the president who vowed to lead the war for freedom and democracy has made torture, rendition, abductions, lawless detentions of even our own citizens, secret "black site" prisons, Abu Ghraib dog leashes, and orange Guantánamo jumpsuits the strange, new symbols of America around the world. New essay by Glenn Greenwald on the future legacy of America's reaction to 9/11.
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POPSRe-Thinking The War Here's looking forward to a time when clips on America's reputation are more fitting for the nation we aspire to be. When the next major terrorist attack comes, the question will simply be how much liberty Americans have left. That is a victory al Qaeda could not have achieved by force of arms. It is something they have achieved with our witting and conscious help.
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POPS An Easter Sermon on Viral Marketing By the inimitable Robert Wright. The ultimate in viral marketing was Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice. Deemed a threat to the social order, he was crucified under Roman auspices. But the Romans forgot one thing: If you face a small but growing movement that threatens the imperial order, you shouldn’t attack the men in ways that help the memes.
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POPSTen Ways to Make Sure That Peace Stays Dead Too many people on each side see the other as wholly culpable. Too many people on each side see themselves as wholly innocent, wholly victimized, ill-served by the well-meaning, abandoned by former allies, betrayed by the media, misunderstood by people who should know better, forgotten by the world. Too many people on each side see only the suffering that has been caused them. Too many people have learned to wall themselves off from the suffering that they have caused.
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POPSProminent conservative surveys the wreckage of contemporary conservatism The entire article is highly reccommended for those that want to trace the GOP's post-9/11 "stumble into neoconservatism" from an insider's perspective. Bramwell's honesty and way with words are refreshing. Until recently, it has been almost impossible for me to speak candidly about the conservative movement, for it was my strange fate to serve as director and later trustee of the movement’s flagship journal, National Review. Earlier this year, at William F. Buckley’s request, I resigned both positions. I can therefore now declare what perhaps has oft been thought but never, at least not often enough, expressed. Notwithstanding conservatives’ belief that they, in contrast to their partisan opponents, have thought deeply about the challenges facing the United States, it is they who have become unserious.
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POPSAmerican Conservative Magazine: GOP Must Go There may be little Americans can do to atone for this presidency, which will stain our country’s reputation for a long time. But the process of recovering our good name must begin somewhere, and the logical place is in the voting booth this Nov. 7. If we are fortunate, we can produce a result that is seen—in Washington, in Peoria, and in world capitals from Prague to Kuala Lumpur—as a repudiation of George W. Bush and the war of aggression he launched against Iraq.
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POPSNew Poll: Democrats Open Up Giant Gap Before Midterm Elections Government corruption, Iraq and terrorism were the three most important issues to poll respondents. They said Democrats would do a better job on all three. The party had a 21-point advantage on handling corruption and a 17-point advantage on Iraq. A longstanding GOP advantage on terrorism vanished; Democrats had a 5-point edge. Yet another set of record-breaking poll results in.
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POPSFEAR FACTOR: Crying wolf about the British airline terrorist plot Still waiting to be proved wrong that citizens were in danger of anything on August 10 besides a massive dose of manufactured hysteria. There are, of course, other details that came out, but these are the main ones; and, over the last three weeks, doubts have been raised about each one of them. If the initial story offered by Chertoff and Townsend--and their British and Pakistani counterparts--represents a house, then that house is now tottering on its foundations and ready to collapse in ruins.
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POPS"Big Talk, Little Will" - Thomas Friedman (NY Times) August 16, 2006. Friedman asking the right questions again. Here we are in the biggest struggle of our lives and we are funding both sides — the U.S. military with our tax dollars and the radical Islamists and the governments and charities that support them with our gasoline purchases
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POPSUS, UK rank 13th and 12th in fighting world poverty: CDI survey The Annual Commitment to Development Index ranks the 21 richest nations on how well they are living up to their potential to relieve poverty in the world by "assessing their policies and practices across seven areas of government action: foreign aid, trade, investment, migration, environment, security, and technology." The US scored high marks for increasing global trade but scored among the stingiest in terms of foreign aid and had the worst commitment to the global environment out of all. (Poorer countries will pay the highest cost in standard-of-living with continued global warming.) At least both the US and the UK are trending upwards in their average yearly ranking. See source for full data, description and methodology.
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POPSWW4? Don’t Flatter Them - John Derbyshire Derbyshire grants the Cold War as worthy of the moniker "WW3", but all this talk of World Wars 4, 5, & 6 is "nonsense on stilts." Leave it to grumpy, old Derbyshire to keep raining on the parade of his fellow young, flighty, reactionary neocons at the National Review with heavy doses of realism, skepticism and conservatism...in the true sense of the word. This is not a war, and by calling it one, we flatter the jihadists far beyond their deserts. No jihadist nation — let alone any jihadist group — can field an army against us. We are frightening ourselves with bogeymen.
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POPSBush blocked probe into anti-terror spying I know, you're astounded! “ The president of the United States makes the decision ,” Gonzales told the committee hearing, during which he was strongly criticized on a range of national security issues by Specter and Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, the panel’s senior Democrat.
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