Someone in an ivory tower can reason as correctly as someone in the trenches. I brought up my experiences only to say: hey, the ivory tower dudes and the in the trenches dude have come to the same conclusion through their reasoning. Thus charge that only ivory tower dudes would argue this way does not seem to be a cogent response to the argument.

Sorry J, that may be true in the abstract, but not for human beings in realtime. Can you claim truly understanding responsibility for 300 million? Can you reconcile the lack of emotion in the Ivory Tower with the fear and anger of anticipating another attack? We are not automatons, but human beings. I never said that the leadership in 2002 was coldly rational. Rather I can attempt to understand the emotionality of the time and how it influenced decisions that later seem unreasonable.

The idea of reality applies here as well: a universal condition. If justice is real, then it cannot be ignored by anyone.

Universal condition? The only universal conditions that immediately come to mind are death and taxes. Justice is relative as well. Is shooting someone always murder? No it is not. Is inflicting pain on another human being always torture? The spanked child may think so, while the parent would disagree.

Torture is simply wrong.

So what? So is cheating on one's spouse or the IRS, but people do it anyway. Rationalizations vary, and one of the most powerful is preservation of self and loved ones. In 2002, that rationalization seemed legitimate, in 2007 it doesn't. More importantly, the law and our behavior has changed to reflect that. Additionally, it wasn't Ivory Tower abstraction that brought it about, it was the experience of being a nation that waterboards and a nation that decided it wasn't just. Like trying to describe sex to the uninitiated, there is no substitute for experience.

GG wrote:

"Go read every single one of those "more-radical-than-thou" sermonizers -- the ones who endlessly preach that anyone trying to change things without advocating what they deem to be some sufficiently revolutionary "anti-System solution" is a starry-eyed, Democrat-loving, status quo tool.

Tell me if a single one of them ever does anything beyond petulantly voicing that criticism, let alone ever advocates anything specific for what they think should or could be done (beyond platitutes such as "The people need to tear down these institutions").

During the Vietnam War over 40 years ago, Mario Savio of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement suggested one of the recourses that ordinary citizens may take in the face of implacable institutional corruption and criminality:

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

What Savio was urging peace activists to do was not to take up arms in a violent attempt to seize control of industrial cogs in the war machine (such as the University of California of the time). He was pointing out that when legal protests fall on insufferably deaf ears, a person's moral convictions may demand nothing less than the end of passive complicity, regardless of the personal consequences.

What activists of the 60's knew was that peaceful demonstrations were not the cutting edges of opposition to the war, they were its safety net. The shock troops of the anti-war movement were those brave enough to risk real jail-time with acts of non-violent civil disobedience intended to disrupt industrial and political instruments of the war machine. They were prepared to make personal sacrifices unfamiliar to contempory Americans, few of whom have experienced any significant inconvenience, much less personal jeopardy, from the US military interventions their tax dollars support.

ondelette said, "Why have a handler for a job you can do better yourself?"

The handlers have their place. Certainly they are necessary for the nuts and bolts of campaigns at the tactical level. Many of them, like my own boss, are extremely smart and have an incredible amount of campaign experience that no candidate can begin to match.

But candidates like John Kerry have to ultimately be responsible for themselves. They have to overrule their handlers where necessary. On the most important matters, they have to set the goals and let the handlers do what they're good at, figure out the means.

On something like torture or whether or not you are going to give a moral cretin like George Bush a pass for lying about WMD and starting an illegal war of aggression, you shouldn't need handlers or polls to make your decision. Some values are too fundamental to be traded off. Do you hear that Hillary? Do you hear that Nancy? Harry?

Other questions are simple common sense and knowing how to stand up for yourself in a street fight. How in the world could John Kerry both not attack Bush for being AWOL during Vietnam while simultaneously not fighting back against the Swift Boat scumbags? How in the world could we decide to run a pacifist convention that failed to indict Bush only to watch the Republicans predictably attack us with impunity at their own convention? Remember that bastard Zell Miller?

One sad thing I have learned in a life in politics is that many of our political leaders just are not the greatest people in the world. Some are. Most are ok as people. But most are gladhanders to a significant extent -- many to a large extent. I did not enter the business with any naive notions about the depth of character of the average politician but I have to say that, as naturally cynical as I am, it turned out to be even worse than I expected. The selection mechanism in place simply is not designed to recruit the best people.

The truth is most of our political leaders simply are willing to be handled. One thing I have always found amazing is just how much they are willing to have words put in their mouths. The consultants design their message usually with only rudimentary contributions from the candidates themselves. The candidates might -- I emphasize might -- set a few parameters in terms of some issue positions, and they might exercise a veto over some suggestions, but as far as actually writing some of it themselves or deciding which issues they will emphasize and the words they will use to convey their message -- that is for the most part done by the handlers.

The consultants have altogether too much influence and the wrong incentives. The consultants' primary goal is to take maximum credit for victories and to not be held accountable for losses. This biases them toward safe, conventional wisdom campaigns. If a candidate, like a John Kerry, loses a conventional campaign, the consultants will never be held accountable. There will be a hundred other reasons why it was either inevitable or the candidate's fault, not the consultant's. On the othe hand, if the consultants were to recommend bucking the conventional wisdom and their candidate lost, they would be held accountable. It's not the worth the risk to them. They have literally millions of dollars of their own personal income riding on not being held accountable.

The candidates are also guilty of lacking the moral fiber to stand up for principle. All too often they are concerned exclusively with re-election -- the party and principle be damned. They are mostly a bunch of independent operators rather than a team. And the consultants have no incentives beyond the candidates' own individual incentives. In the end, most candidates are looking out for themselves and the consultants care only that their candidates not lose in a way that they can be blamed for. The interests of the party and principle are only a small part of the equation.

That is why a general strike that included people who work in the offices of these consultants could be so powerful. There are just a handful of consultants --probably no more than 10 -- who handle all the big campaigns, make the most important decisions, and who are responsible for setting the conventional wisdom. They exercise a huge and unaccountable cartel power over the party.

But most of them run small firms with 20-30 people working in them, including maybe 3 or 4 senior people who are worked to the point of exhaustion. If just 1 or 2 of their senior people and, say, a quarter of their junior staff were to threaten a General Strike in about July of 2008, they would be in an even worse position than GM facing a UAW strike because there is only one election day and only 16 weeks before it arrives. Their operations would be severely threatened. The campaign assembly line would be severely slowed down and there would not be enough time to hire and train scab labor. The consultants would be sweating the fact that they can't deliver to their campaigns and the candidates would be sweating the fact that they might lose as a result -- and that is something they actually care about.

Between losing tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of progressive voters, and their time and money, as well as losing some percentage of their campaign infrastructure, a General Strike among progressives would force the Democratic Establishment to listen.