Speedkill

After writing a post on the least likely candidate to win the Democratic nomination, now I’m going to write one on the most likely, Hillary Clinton.

I’m thinking that as I run through the candidates, I’m going to probably write less on the things I like about them. Being Democrats, I tend to agree with them on most things. So the positives I’ll write about will be things that are very important to me or unique positions they’ve taken that I like.

Before I begin, I’ll point out that this article on Wikipedia was very helpful.

So, the positives. Let’s start with health care. Not long ago she unveiled her health care proposal, which you can read about here and here. It’s still a little vague, but I like what I’ve read so far. It’s not a complete overhaul of our current system, which would probably be best, but isn’t politically feasible. On the other hand, it does have public insurance available to everyone, which is a plus (the few conservatives/libertarians reading this are now shaking their heads in disgust). It’s not disruptive and it’s a feasible, positive step forward.

Clinton also voted against the Military Commissions Act, which isn’t unique, but important. She’s also criticized the NSA warrent-less wiretapping program.

That’s not a lot of positives, especially when you consider the list of negatives:

• Support of the Iraq war and continued refusal to acknowledge her mistake
• Supports making flag burning illegal
• Gun control supporter
• Supports the death penalty
• Supports NCLB
• Opposes same-sex marriage
• Sees video games as a threat to morality
• Supports the PATRIOT Act

Some of those are less important than others. Most importantly, I’m skeptical of her foreign policy views. They’re pretty hawkish and interventionist. On principal, I don’t have a problem with liberal interventionism. It’s just that I’m not sure she has the requisite skepticism and resistance towards military intervention that’s necessary to keep that position from being a disaster. A lot of moderate Democrats supported the war in Iraq partially for that reason and it hasn’t worked out very well. She certainly emphasizes diplomacy more than the Republicans, which is exactly correct, but most of the Democratic candidates do that. It’s hard to find information on, but from what I can glean Clinton takes the position that terrorism is the result of poverty and educational failings in the Middle East. As I point out fairly often, this isn’t the real problem, though addressing those issues would certainly have positive benefits.

In the end, Clinton is a moderate candidate (more grumbling from my conservative readers). She’s fairly hawkish and her social positions are conservative enough to be annoying. Her economic policy has her most liberal positions, but even it isn’t that far left. A quick review makes me think she’d be a decent president, but nothing special. Better than any Republican for sure, and she’d be competent.

Disclaimer: I know Kucinich isn’t a viable candidate, so there’s no need to point that out.

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first. I agree with Kucinich on a lot of the issues and he’s the only Democratic candidate to take the correct position on some issues.

1. He’s opposed the war in Iraq since the beginning.
2. He supports gay marriage.
3. He opposed the flag burning amendment.
4. He supports universal health care.
5. He wants to end the drug war.

Of course, there are other points of agreement, as he’s a Democrat. Those are some highlights that make him stand out a bit.

He has a lot of negatives, though. This post on Daily Kos does a good job summarizing the main negatives:

1. His record on abortion is sketchy. Up until 2003, he was pro-life and had quite an anti-choice voting record. I’m skeptical of Romney’s flip and I feel the same way about Kucinich.
2. He did a poor job as Cleveland’s mayor. I can’t say I know much about this, but the quote in the Kos article is pretty stunning. It doesn’t sound like someone I want in office from a non-political competence standpoint.
3. The department of peace. This one deserves a little more comment, as it’s his most unique proposal.

Here’s the description from his website.

We can conceive of peace as not simply the absence of violence but the presence of the capacity for a higher evolution of human awareness, of respect, trust, and integrity. We can conceive of peace as a tool to tap the infinite capabilities of humanity to transform consciousness and conditions that impel or compel violence at a personal, group, or national level toward creating understanding, compassion, and love. We can bring forth new understandings where peace, not war, becomes inevitable. We can move from wars to end all wars to peace to end all wars.

Citizens across the United States are now uniting in a great cause to establish a Department of Peace, seeking nothing less than the transformation of our society, to make nonviolence an organizing principle, to make war archaic through creating a paradigm shift in our culture for human development for economic and political justice and for violence control. Its work in violence control will be to support disarmament, treaties, peaceful coexistence and peaceful consensus building. Its focus on economic and political justice will examine and enhance resource distribution, human and economic rights and strengthen democratic values.

That first paragraph is gibberish, more or less. The idea that some kind of peaceful utopia is possible and we can transform human consciousness to make it happen is absurdly unrealistic. We’re people, we’re going to fight. What need are institutions to help us be the most peaceful we can be. Longing for a full-sale transformation of society is best left to Marxists who still cling to failed utopian philosophies. Is a “Department of Peace” useful in that respect? It’s hard to see how.

A Department of Peace can look at the domestic issues that our society faces and often ignores as we focus on matters internationally. We have a problem with violence in our own society, and we need to look at it and address it in a structured way. Domestically, the Department of Peace would address violence in the home, spousal abuse, child abuse, gangs, and police-community relations conflicts, and would work with individuals and groups to achieve changes in attitudes that examine the mythologies of cherished world views, such as “violence is inevitable” or “war is inevitable.” Thus, it will help with the discovery of new selves and new paths toward peaceful consensus.

Internationally, the State Department is the proper place for what he wants. There’s no reason he couldn’t pursue his initiatives through it. Domestically, I don’t see what’s new here. We have programs to address the things he’s talking about, but they aren’t unified under and focused on by one department. I don’t buy organizing them that way, either. Kucinich sees all violence as related, but I don’t think you can really say that gang violence and spousal abuse have the same causes and can be addressed the same way. I wouldn’t mind an administration focusing more on these issues, but Kucinich’s way doesn’t seem that useful and it’s based on New Age-y nonsense.

4. Terrorism. Here’s his view:

The roots of terrorism lie in desperation. People with no hope resort to acts of indiscriminate violence. People with futures don’t typically strap on bombs to kill others. We must all refrain from condoning some acts of violence as justified while similar actions by others are dismissed as “terrorism.”

We cannot hope to end terrorism by killing terrorists. Hatred feeds on violence and killing. I understand this and am here to offer a more practical approach: to reduce poverty worldwide with bold changes in current U.S. policy. NAFTA and the World Trade Organizations have only served to increase global poverty, thus deepening one of the most virulent causes of terrorism. This is why I am calling for immediate cancellation of NAFTA and U.S. withdrawal from the WTO. For the sake of justice and wellbeing, it is time we established bilateral fair trade agreements that contain strict provisions for workers’ rights, human rights, and environmental principles.

This is flat out wrong. Studies of suicide terrorism and suicide terrorists consistently shows they commit suicided more in the altruistic mode than anything resembling desperation. They also aren’t typically poor, by their region’s standards. Some of the 9/11 hijackers were studying engineering in major universities, which isn’t really a desperate life choice.

5. Less serious negatives include his signing of a letter of solidarity with Hugo Chavez. Chavez’s commitment to liberalism is less than impressive and his economic policy is not working so well. Chavez is no monster, but I don’t think he’s someone we should be praising.

6. I’m a bit unsure of how to evaluate some other negatives he has. For example, he’s a New Ager and a Vegan. I don’t see anything egregiously wrong in his animal rights issue section, though I think that’s because he’s kinda vague. I can’t say I agree with incentives for farmers to turn to organic farming, which doesn’t appear to viable on the necessary scale and unnecessarily sacrifices perfectly safe and useful technology in the name of being natural. His religious beliefs seem to be the root of his Department of Peace proposal, which is disconcerting. His odd beliefs seem to be pushing him towards bad policy proposals.

Anyway, that’s my assessment of him. He is the farthest left of the candidates, but he has a lot of negatives that make me leery of supporting him.

There was a shooting in Idaho and it turns out that the gunman has ties to the Aryan Nations. Jay comments and Craig responds.

Let’s start with Jay’s post. He quotes Dave Neiwert to claim that the this was “certain[ly]” a political statement:

What’s clear is that Hamilton fully intended to take as many people with him as possible; that’s why he began by targeting the dispatcher’s office, where he knew he would get police response. And considering his extremist background, it is certain this was intended as some kind of political statement. It was, by most definitions, an act of domestic terrorism.

It’s not certain. That’s a completely absurd statement. As Craig points out, that’s where the shooter’s wife works. It’s perfectly consistent with a personal rampage. It’s absolutely not anything approaching “certain.”

Jay then tries to spin the whole thing into a lesson that we should take Islamic terrorism less seriously:

Furthermore, 42% of Christians consider themselves “Christians first,” not “Americans first.”

And in a post today, Greenwald notes that Americans in general are much more likely to support the killing of civilians for political purposes (51%) than U.S. Muslims (13%) and even Iranians (16%).

Do I think that all American Christians are sadistic terrorists? Of course not. That would be a simplistic generalization based on a few isolated events. In other words, the same type of generalization that has created the idea of a worldwide “culture war” pitting “Islamicists” against “civilized nations.”

Yes, the most repressive regimes on the planet are Islamist and Islamist terrorist groups are by far the largest that are bent on attacking us. Just a few isolated incidents, ya see. No cause for alarm.

You can make the case that terrorism in general is over-hyped. It is, to some degree. But to inflate right-wing terrorism in the U.S. to anything approaching radical Islam is completely asinine. To say that Islamist thought is not in conflict with the values of civilized (I don’t like using that word here, but it works) nations (you know, human rights, liberty, democracy…) is extremely myopic.

Jay ends with some happy and useless platitudes about the fight against terrorism:

So let’s fight terrorism realistically. Through policing, not culture wars. Through prevention, not eradication. And, above all, let’s remember that the best path to fighting terror lies not through anger and authoritarianism, but with civility, diversity, and democracy.

Nonsense. Civility, diversity, and democracy have never stopped suicide terrorism. It’s been stopped by ending the conflicts at the root of it. Policing is nice, but it’s simply treading water. At least he gets points for being against authoritarianism. Curbing Islamism will take cultural reform in the Muslim world.

Now, Craig’s response. He rightly attacks the characterization of the Idaho incident. Actually, it’s a generally correct post. Except for one thing:

Now, apply Occam’s Razor to the situation. He was a violent guy with a history of domestic violence and animal cruelty. He killed his wife, and people who were associated with her. It just so happened that she worked at the courthouse. I’d put odds that if she worked at Pizza Hut, that’s where he would have gone instead of the courthouse.

But, that explanation does not fit with the left’s narrative, namely that right-wing extremists are a far worse danger than Islamists.

Where did that come from? Jay’s post? Nope. Hey, it was pulled out of thin air! It’s a fuckin’ miracle!

Another thing to note, acting like a violent asshole generally and making a violent political statement are not mutually exclusive courses of action. This could be an act of terrorism. Or it might not be. Who knows? I’ll just say that I doubt it. It is possible, however.

Let’s put it this way: yes, there are right-wing terrorists in this country. No, they shouldn’t be ignored. Yes, Islamists are a bigger threat. No, right-wing terrorism is not an equivalent danger to Islamism.

Was that so hard?

This nonsense about Michael Moore going to Cuba is pretty amusing. It’s completely bizarre that we still have an embargo on Cuba.

I’m not a fan of Moore, but his current documentary about health care seems easy enough to get behind. Who thinks our health care system works?

But why is Moore going to Cuba? Yes, I know, it has universal health care. It’s also exceedingly poor and the hospitals are ill-equipped for anything but very basic medical care, if that. If Moore is dragging people down there in an attempt to extol the benefits of Cuban health care, that’s dishonest in the extreme. I guess we’ll see what comes out of it.

You probably already know this, but I’m apparently an enemy of the U.S. I don’t normally take people named “Buzz” seriously, but this one may have a point.

“You’ve got a situation where the American Left is choosing to side with Islamo-fascists,” says the Clinton aide. “What does that tell you about what their true intentions are?”

You can’t argue with that logic. I remember the day I chose to side with the Islamo-fascists. I thought to myself, “wow, these people are against everything I value: reason, secularism, liberty, democracy…that’s the side for me!”

The author is concerned about what that portends for the nation. “I think we will never win another war militarily,” he says. “We will lose our way of life, we will lose the freedoms … and liberties we have in this country if we don’t defeat the enemy from within — and that’s the American Left.”

I will not be defeated! You’ll have to do far more that detain me for protesting the war. Come on, bust out the internment camps already!

Patterson says “secular liberals and secular progressives” hate America and everything it stands for, and would much rather see the U.S. defeated than victorious in Iraq.

There’s just something about being secular that makes you hate a country built on the separation of church and state.

It’s just so hard! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to remain honest in arguing for a bizarre and twisted worldview?

Difficult enough for PETA to resort to smearing a biologist studying homosexual behavior in sheep.

PETA is nothing if not good at lurid imagery:

You heard right—OHSU experimenter Charles Roselli is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to kill homosexual rams and cut open their brains in an attempt to find the hormone behind homosexual tendencies so that these tendencies can be changed.

…

To put it simply, these experimenters believe that homosexuality is a defect that needs to be fixed, and they’re cutting open and killing gay sheep to do it. Roselli has made it very clear that he intends to use the findings of his experiments to “cure” humans next.

Right next to that is a picture of some very cute lambs. You can just imagine the mental image running through the average PETA member’s head: a drooling, psychopathic homophobe driving a knife into the forhead of a cute little lamb while screaming about eliminating the gays from the world.

Perhaps that’s just my respect for the average PETA member showing, but anyway.

The people at PETA are lacking in the area of reading comprehension, as demonstrated by the first link above.

Also, I have to just say, I’m not exactly appalled at the idea of “curing” gay people. Seems like an overly broad thing to oppose. I’m quite happy to let anyone develop and sell almost any kind of safe pharmaceutical. I’m also quite happy to allowing anyone to live according to their sexual orientation or try to live according to what they want their sexual orientation to be. If someone finds a way to change sexual orientations…I don’t really care. Of course, if that cure were to be forced upon anyone it would be monstrous. You could also see pressure for homosexuals to take the “cure” to placate uneasiness about gay people in our society, which would also be a disagreeable consequence.

In any case, I don’t think that’ll ever happen, but it’d certainly be a conundrum if it did.

I haven’t said a word about that race, mainly because a) this is Montana, not Conneticut and b) its importance seems overblown. I’m all for Lamont winning. Lieberman isn’t a terrible Senator, but he’s not entitled to his seat, as he seems to think. I think Lamont will be better. But again, I haven’t given it a lot of thought, as Bozeman is not part of Conneticut. Lieberman, of course, will now throw a tantrum and run as an independent. He will lose, of course, and he will make it very difficult for Lamont to win. I don’t care about party loyalty, so I’m not going to say he’s betraying the Democratic (as a side note, that’s Democratic) party, but he has to know he’s helping someone he disagrees with much more than Lamont.

I said this is overblown. It is. This is hardly about centrist Democrats vs. far left Democrats. Lieberman supported and continues to support a war and a president that are unsupportable. That’s not a far left position. That’s the position of a large swath of the country and almost the entire Democratic party. Ideology has little to do with most of the opposition to the Iraq war at this point. The opposition is due to the constant mistakes, distortions of reality, and refusal to treat the issue as more than partisan politics. Left, right, top, or bottom, you can recognize that. Lieberman has failed to do so. Whether he agrees with me on other points or not, I would have problems supporting someone who fails to see something I find to be obvious.

UPDATE: Also, McKinney seems to have lost, too. Fantastic. What a whack job.

North Korea launches brutal assault on the Sea of Japan. Hundreds of fish killed. North Korea claims fish were hindering autonomy. (via Rebels Are We!)

Cindy Sheehan goes on a hunger strike with a few thousand of her friends. 2,700 people all on a hunger strike at the same time? What a statement! What’s that? They’re trading off day by day, with only one person striking at a time? What the hell kind of hunger strike is this? No one cares about hunger strikes until someone looks like those Ethiopian kids in National Geographic. When actors are sacrificing for movie roles more than you are for a political cause, it’s time to rethink your priorities. (via Dave Budge)

Did you know there’s a Christian fiction award called the Christy? No, it’s not Christ-y, but I still find it highly amusing.

I wasn’t going to comment on this, but I found a copy of the op-ed in today’s Chronicle on FREE‘s site. The subject is academic diversity.

Every major university claims to celebrate diversity. And they are clearly sincere if we restrict the term to race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. However, if we include philosophical orientation and political party identification, such claims are decidedly disingenuous. Conservatives and classical liberals are rarely welcome — and Republicans are scarce.

Standard comments on the subject. Now, guess where Baden goes next. Go ahead, guess.

Got it? Ok, moving on:

“The jury on Marxism is still out.” Try to imagine how insulated, insensitive, and ignorant one appears when making this statement in public. Adults who agree that Marx’s ideas on class struggle remain relevant cluster in universities.

Those outside the academy hear denial and irresponsible idiocy, for the jury of experience returned its verdict on Marxism decades ago. For example, Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson stated, “Wonderful theory. Wrong species.” Eugene Genovese, a founder of the Conference of Socialist Scholars, noted, “The tyranny is built into the system…. We built a political movement that conquered a third of the world, with 100 million corpses to show for it.” University of Washington professor (and 2006 FREE Summer Scholar in Residence) Daniel Chirot noted of communism: once it was clear its “promise [of progress] was increasingly based on lies, its immorality became unbearable.”

Huh? My only explanation is that Baden was two paragraphs short and needed some filler. What does the fact that there are communists in academia have to do with the claim that academia isn’t diverse enough? It’s almost like Baden doesn’t think them worthy of academia. Isn’t that kind of bias what he’s arguing against?

Baden goes on to cite “How Politically Diverse Are the Social Sciences and Humanities?” It may be, as he says, one of the most careful studies, but it’s still based on only 17% of the 5,500 questionnaires the authors mailed out.

This disproportion is far more extreme in literature and the arts, while engineering is more balanced. Generally, the more subjective the field, the more collectivist or “liberal” its professors. The strong implication is that students receive a biased perspective. Horror stories of liberal intolerance to alternative ideas abound, get around, and bounce back.

Is that the implication? Are liberals more likely to be biased in the classroom? I don’t think so. We’re hardly to the point where we can make an assessment of bias from party affiliation data. We don’t have accurate enough studies. We also haven’t ruled out the effect of other factors. Maybe liberals are more likely than conservatives to seek university jobs or to even go into certain subjects. Other questions: is party affiliation really a good measure of diversity? Are all points of view equally valid? As for the last part, there are plenty of rumors. Horowitz has promoted plenty of these rumors. Many have turned out to be false or unfounded. I don’t think it’s a good idea to rely on that kind of spotty anecdotal evidence.

Baden then takes an unexpected turn and criticizes Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights.” His critique is basically that bias is so entrenched Horowitz’s idea will never work. Nothing really interesting.

Faculties are encysted and ever more culturally removed from the American mainstream. This creates tension as their views become known. Agitation for an Academic Bill of Rights is only an early sign of corrective efforts. Can we have intellectual diversity?

Why should academia reflect mainstream America? Are they supposed to study their subjects in depth and then magically arrive at what constitues popular opinion at any given moment? Maybe Baden doesn’t think they should (after all, libertarians aren’t exactly mainstream), but this is an argument that seems to come up a lot.

On the subject, Michael Bérubé’s very long post on the subject is a good read.

Well, I didn’t have the same reaction to this as P.Z. Myers did.

Sullivan’s right about the PR angle. Democrats have policies that are amenable to evangelicals and we could sell those values to them better. That’s something the religious Left (the sane religious Left, not ridiculous New Age-types) needs to do, of course, not someone like me. Sullivan also points out some other ideas Democrats could support, which is where she ventures into questionable territory:

Actually, it’s about both—a fight over which party gets to claim the religious mantle. Nationally, and in states like Alabama, the GOP cannot afford to allow Democrats a victory on anything that might be perceived as benefiting people of faith. Republican political dominance depends on being able to manipulate religious supporters with fear, painting the Democratic Party as hostile to religion and in the thrall of secular humanists. That image would take quite a blow if the party of Nancy Pelosi was responsible for bringing back Bible classes—even constitutional ones—to public schools.

Constitutional Bible classes are OK, even good. World religions classes would be even better (my high school has one of those classes every couple of years and it’s pretty popular), but Bible literacy classes are a good step. Sullivan seems to be considering unconstitutional classes, however. That is intolerable and I wonder if Sullivan really considers that good policy.

A sign that Democratic leaders are beginning to get it is the plan—promoted by leaders such as Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton—to lower abortion rates by preventing unwanted pregnancies. Full-throated support of this effort, and a recognition that abstinence education plays a role in lowering teen pregnancy rates (along with birth control), puts Democrats alongside the majority of voters on this difficult issue, and it is especially appealing to moderate evangelicals.

Myers complains that abstinence education doesn’t work. This is true, but I don’t think that’s what Sullivan is suggesting. Sex education in my high school (part of the “health” class) consisted of mentioning abstinence as the best option, but then explaining birth control. That’s good and it’s hardly a bad idea to emphasize abstinence a little bit more (it was basically just lip service in my class).

Sullivan’s recommendations are:

There is a growing recognition among mainstream Democrats and the once-quiescent Religious Left that they can reframe issues they care about in terms that appeal to religious voters. But winning over moderate evangelicals—or moderate religious voters generally—will take more than just repackaging old positions. It will require aggressively staking out new positions that can be used to demonstrate the tension within the GOP’s religious/business coalition—embracing, for instance, the Workplace Religious Freedom Act. And it means forwarding new ideas that can counter the conservative-promoted image of progressives as anti-religious—ideas like Bible-as-literature courses in public high schools, which might anger some secularists on the left but are perfectly consonant with liberal values.

Those ideas are fine, but we obviously have to be careful. Bible classes could easily devolve into Sunday school. Sullivan probably understands that. I’m not that familiar with her other writings. Still, there are ideas that appeal to religious voters that I like as well. Selling those ideas to evangelicals is not racing to the religious right, but smart strategy (then again, what the hell do I know about strategy?).

Finally, Myers charges Sullivan with wanting secularists to sit down and shut up. Kevin Drum also seems to get that. I’m not so sure she’s saying that, but if she is, I wholeheartedly agree with Myers.