Letters to the Editor
Ben Alpers
Published Letters: 74 Editor's Choice: 2
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Partisanship on Left and Right of the Blogosphere
[Read the article: Democrats bear responsibility for restoring habeas corpus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ben, I wouldn't limit the partisanship to the left, in fact the right leaning blogs I see are distinctly more likely to do so.
There's certainly as much, if not more, groupthink on the right of the blogosphere as on the left. But I believe that the left of the blogosphere is more institutionally tied to the Democratic Party than the right of the blogosphere is to the GOP.
I say this in part on the basis of a 2005 study done for the New Politics Institute by two prominent progressive bloggers, Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers. Entitled "The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere: A New Force in American Politics," the study concluded that one of the differences between the right and the left of the blogosphere was that the left was more partisan. Stoller and Bowers saw this as an advantage:
Progressive blogs are far more likely to identify with the Democratic Party than conservative bloggers are to identify with the Republican Party. This leads to greater contact between progressive bloggers and the Democratic Party than conservative bloggers have with the Republican Party. It also means more influence.
As I've already indicated, while agreeing about the importance of the ties between prominent left bloggers and the Democratic Party, I don't think this ultimately is an advantage for the left of the blogosphere.
("The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere" can be downloaded here: http://www.newpolitics.net/files/The-Emergence-of-the-Progressive-Blogosphere.pdf )
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Libby Was Not Just an Aide to Cheney
[Read the article: What Fred Thompson means by the "rule of law"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Not to discount the importance of Scooter Libby's position as Assistant to the Vice President (nor, for that matter, to discount the importance of the office of the Vice President in this administration), but Libby was simultaneously an Assistant to President Bush himself. Let's not forget this, lest we eventually get to the point that Cheney finds his neck on the chopping block. The fish rots from the head down. And the head is still George W. Bush.
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Impeachment
[Read the article: What will be done about James Comey's revelations?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Just heard Glenn (and Lawrence Tribe and Bruce Fein) on PRI's Open Source. It was a great show. Thanks for broadcast-whoring it, Glenn!
One point Tribe made very forcefully: there's no question that there's legal ground to impeach Bush, Cheney, and Gonzalez right now. The only reason we haven't seen impeachment on the table is political: the Democrats don't want to deal with being accused of being weak on Teh War on Terra or of engaging in a political sideshow. Both accusations are obviously nonsense. The reason to impeach, as the conservative Fein pointed out particularly effectively, is that the Constitution has been gravely threatened. And there's no more fundamental duty of Congress than upholding our system of government.
All of which, I think, makes the answer to Glenn's question -- "What will be done about James Comey's revelations? -- clear: not much...unless the American people change the political landscape enough that Democrats see impeachment as politically advantageous. I, for one, would be happy to work toward making that come about.
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Always Assume They're Lying
[Read the article: The administration's FISA falsehoods continue unabated]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Lying from this administration is, at this point, to be expected.
But the two extraordinary things about the McConnell op-ed and many similar administration statements on FISA are their brazenness...and their effectiveness. The October 2001 amendments to FISA were and are hardly a secret. Yet McConnell expects us simply to have forgotten about them. And Kevin Drum's (presumably inadvertent) repetition of administration FISA talking points suggests that McConnell has good reason to believe he can get away with this. Thanks for holding him accountable, Glenn.
The mendacity of the Bush Administration has reached the point that citizens simply have to assume that--to steal a phrase from Mary McCarthy--every word they say is a lie, including "and" and "the."
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Look to Elites, Not the Public
[Read the article: Why Bush hasn't been impeached]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This interesting piece is largely asking the wrong questions, in my opinion.
The people who seem most uninterested in impeachment as even a topic of discussion are the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate and the media. Occasionally, pieces like Kamiya's will appear, which in one way or another talk about the politics of impeachment. But actually suggesting that impeachment is justfied has all-but-officially been declared to be a fringe position. Major polling organizations have been loath to even ask about it.
Given this state of affairs, what's amazing isn't that the American people are not clamoring for impeachment, but rather how many of us are.
Indeed, I can't think of any time in American history in which there was more public interest in impeachment given such an utter lack of interest in it from the press and leading members of Congress.
So rather than engage in social-psychological speculation about the American people, perhaps we should instead ask why the supposed opposition party and the media seem so utterly uninterested in even discussing the merits of impeachment? It is their attitudes to the Bush administration's threats to our constitutional order that need to be questioned.
And those of us who favor impeachment need to come up with strategies that do not, in the first instance, require our leaders to actually lead.
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What IngSoc Said
[Read the article: After everything we did for them]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The last thing we should do now is put aside the question of imperialism. In fact, considering that question is the necessary first step to understanding, and recovering from, the Iraq misadventure.
The failure (even of a lot of Americans opposed to this war) to grapple with the issue of imperialism helps explain, e.g., why there is so little outrage over the bipartisan insistence that Iraq pass a hydrocarbon law designed to put most of Iraq's mineral wealth under the control of big energy corporations with close ties to the Bush administration.