Tonight, Barack Obama betrays Michael Moore

It’s a sign of something, I suppose, that even when I agree with Michael Moore I still find him irritating. So it goes with his open letter to President Obama, urging the president to call off his proposed troop increase in Afghanistan and instead bring the soldiers home.

Choose carefully, President Obama. You of all people know that it doesn’t have to be this way. You still have a few hours to listen to your heart, and your own clear thinking. You know that nothing good can come from sending more troops halfway around the world to a place neither you nor they understand, to achieve an objective that neither you nor they understand, in a country that does not want us there. You can feel it in your bones.

I know you know that there are LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan! A hundred thousand troops trying to crush a hundred guys living in caves? Are you serious? Have you drunk Bush’s Kool-Aid? I refuse to believe it.

Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you’re doing it so you can “end the war”) will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you’ve said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone — and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout “tea bag!”

I agree: Continued war in Afghanistan is not worth the blood or (non-existent) treasure we’ll spend there. Still, you’ve got to ask Michael Moore a serious question: What did you expect?

It’s true that Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 against the Iraq War. But he also campaigned on fighting the Afghanistan War more effectively than President Bush. He was very explicit about this. Anti-war liberals should not be surprised, but they are — probably, I think, because they expected his “tough on Afghanistan” rhetoric was just a ploy to seem tough in case his GOP opponents decided to deploy the standard “surrender monkey” campaign against him.

We keep doing this to Obama. He told us in the campaign that he didn’t believe in marriage rights for gays and lesbians, yet there has been a constantly repeated hope — in referendums in California and Maine — that he might lend his voice in support of gay marriage campaigns. It never happens. And liberals end up surprised, again. There are other examples of this sort of thing.

During the campaign, Republicans warned us that we didn’t know the real Barack Obama — that he’d take office and reveal the radical-almost-Communist reality beneath the moderate mask. The heck of it is that liberals apparently suspected nearly the same thing. But everybody was wrong.

Barack Obama will surprise us on occasion by taking more moderate or more conservative stands than we expected. He will never, ever surprise us by doing something more liberal than we expected. He was never trying to win over the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic Party. And he still isn’t. We shouldn’t be surprised.

The difference between MSNBC and Fox News

Whereas Fox News’ bread-and-butter is criticizing President Obama, the liberals at MSNBC … criticize President Obama:

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues.

“I don’t think our audience is looking for unequivocal ‘rah-rah,’ ” said Ms. Maddow, who calls herself a liberal but not a Democrat.

Truth be told, I can barely watch Keith Olbermann. I find Maddow more palatable, but not enough to catch her show every night. But MSNBC isn’t just the leftward version of Fox News; it has conservative hosts on its air, and its liberals are more willing to go after one of their own.

I’m not going to boycott Whole Foods

For five years in high school and college, I worked at a tiny grocery store owned by a Mennonite Sunday school teacher named Ray Franz. Ray was — is — a good, gentle, man, with a deep bass voice and ready chuckle. Despite a passion for serving the small community where we lived, he also (I learned) had an aversion to politics: He had served on the city council a couple of decades before and found that making hard decisions had been bad for business. And that was that.

I thought of Ray this week after John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, angered his customers by writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed opposing Democrat’s health care reform proposals and offering market- and behavior-based alternatives instead. The result? Many of my fellow liberals now want to boycott Whole Foods.

I won’t be joining them. We don’t buy a ton of Whole Foods — Trader Joe’s is closer and cheaper — but we do buy some.

For one thing, I’m not inclined to punish somebody for thinking differently than I do, unless those thoughts are particularly odious. I won’t be eating a cheesesteak at Geno’s anytime soon, for example, but that’s the exception.

Second: For the last couple of weeks we’ve been screaming about the anti-health reform advocates who have been screaming at the town halls. So an opponent of reform comes along and offers a thoughtful-but-still-contrary opinion — and we’re going to punish him for that? If that’s what we’re going to do, why shouldn’t people like Mackey scream and throw tantrums? There’ll be no percentage for our opponents to engage the debate in a rational way.

So a boycott is kind of counterproductive.

That said, I don’t think Mackey was a terribly smart businessman in all of this.

I think it’s important to recognize that Whole Foods does more than sell food. It’s sells an idea of food — you too can be a foodie and environmentally sustainable — that is, frankly, more associated with the left than the right. To the extent that I’ve ever seen “Whole Foods” and “arugula” mentioned by the right, it’s usually been in disdainful tones reserved for the “latte-sipping liberals.”

John Mackey has every right to his opinion — but purely as a business matter what he did was bad brand management.

Liberal politicians communicate like communists; conservative politicians torture like communists. Which is worse?

Lots of talk in conservative circles about this Andrew Breitbart op-ed in today’s Washington Times, which suggests that dastardly liberals inundating conservative media with commentary and disinformation that crowds out the ability of conservatives to talk to each other or make their case more broadly.

You know: Just like the communists. Conservatives, meanwhile, are just too Christian to ever stoop to anything like that:

The right, for the most part, embraces basic Judeo-Christian ideals and would not promote nor defend the propaganda techniques that were perfected in godless communist and socialist regimes. The current political and media environment crafted by supposedly idealistic Mr. Obama resembles Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela more than John F. Kennedy’s America.

Trying. Not. To. Curse. Yeah, this makes me angry.

I’m not going to get into all the many ways Breitbart’s “conservatives are just too good to ever break from the rules of civil discourse” act is ridiculous on its face. Politics ain’t beanbag, the saying goes, and the truth is that both sides take the gloves off, all the time proclaiming their virtue. Whenever you hear such proclamations, understand that they are — as in the case of Breitbart’s op-ed — complete and utter bullcrap. You can count on it.

But even assuming that Breitbart is correct about the “communist propaganda techniques” of liberals, he’s insanely stupid to step out on that limb. You know why? Because the Bush Administration promoted and defended torture techniques that were perfected in communist and socialist regimes.

I’m not kidding: The “enhanced interrogation procedures” ordered by the Bush Administration were adapted from Communist Chinese methods of extracting false confessions from prisoners of war. So let me ask you: What’s worse? To use the communication techniques of the communists, or to use their torture methods?

I know my answer. And I’m pretty sure I know Andrew Breitbart’s.

And as long as we’re on the topic, let’s note Sunday’s Washington Post story indicating that — oops! — one of the main “successes” of the torture regime actually sent American anti-terror officials on tons of wild goose chases. Why? Because when you torture a human being, they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear. Torture: Morally wrong and ineffective. Actually, given the resources wasted chasing ghost leads, I’ll take it a step further: Torture is anti-effective. We can talk about this more at a later date.

I’m sure we’ll have those later opportunities. Why? Because the same Spanish court that went after Augusto Pinochet is now looking at indicting Bush Administration officials for war crimes. I don’t imagine those officials will ever see a day of prison time, but I don’t mind that they’ll have to be very careful about leaving the country forever after this. No more Davos trips for you.

Blind worship of Barack Obama

I don’t think I completely buy what Glenn Greenwald is selling today, but it’s an interesting point nonetheless.

Whenever I would speak at events over the last couple of years and criticize the Bush administration’s expansions of government power, extreme secrecy and other forms of corruption, one of the most frequent questions I would be asked was whether “the Left” — meaning liberals and progressives — would continue to embrace these principles with a Democrat in the White House, or whether they would instead replicate the behavior of the Right and uncritically support whatever the Democratic President decided.  Though I could only speculate, I always answered — because I believed — that the events of the last eight years had so powerfully demonstrated and ingrained the dangers of uncritical support for political leaders that most liberals would be critical of and oppositional to a Democratic President when that President undertook actions in tension with progressive views.

Two months into Obama’s presidency, one can clearly conclude that this is true.  Even though Obama unsurprisingly and understandably remains generally popular with Democrats and liberals alike, there is ample progressive criticism of Obama in a way that is quite healthy and that reflects a meaningful difference between the “conservative movement” and many progressives.

Greenwald goes on to make a number of caveats — yes, there were conservatives who dissented from the Bush regime, and yes there are Obama lickspittles — but his point is that generally speaking, folks on the left are more likely to challenge their own leadership than folks on the right. That’s comforting to those of us on the left, if true, but I’m not sure how you actually quantify it, and I’m skeptical to believe it. That just a little too convenient, and in any case, conservatives pretty forcefully pushed back against President Bush when they really, really disagreed with him. The problem is that they didn’t generally disagree with him in ways that liberals favored: For the most part, they really did support the invasion of Iraq, they really did support torture and they really did support creating massive deficits through tax cuts that disproportionately favored the rich.

That said, it’s certainly true that conservatives have been pretty delighted to see liberal criticism of the president. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I might disagree, even strenuously, with some of  President Obama’s decisions. But I still think we’re better off with him, instead of John McCain or any of the GOP’s 2008 contenders, as president.

Shelby Steele wants you to believe the rift between the GOP and minorities is an accident of history

Shelby Steele takes to the pages of the Wall Street Journal today to diagnose the causes of the rift between conservatives and minorities, and concludes that the problem is one of narrative and symbolism. Simply put, Democrats offered a better feel-good narrative about their attempts to help the country rise up from Jim Crow racism.

If you could at least seem to redeem America of its past sins, you could win enough moral authority to claim real political power. Lyndon Johnson devastated Barry Goldwater because — among other reasons — he seemed bent on redeeming America of its shameful racist past, while Goldwater’s puritanical libertarianism precluded his even supporting the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Johnson’s Great Society grandly advertised a new American racial innocence. If it utterly failed to “end poverty in our time,” it succeeded — through a great display of generosity toward minorities and the poor — in recovering enough moral authority to see the government through the inexorable challenges of the ’60s.

Democrats, Steele says, succeeded with African Americans not so much because they helped African Americans, but because they were seen as at least trying to do something. And there’s probably something to that. But Steele goes wrong when he looks at the other half of the equation. Conservatives, he suggests, have been undone by their noble devotion to the timeless principles of individual freedom. And that simply couldn’t compete with the showy activism of the left:

But conservatism sees moral authority more in a discipline of principles than in activism. It sees ideas of the good like “diversity” as mere pretext for the social engineering that always leads to unintended and oppressive consequences. Conservatism would enforce the principles that ensure individual freedom, and then allow “the good” to happen by “invisible hand.”

And here is conservatism’s great problem with minorities. In an era when even failed moral activism is redemptive — and thus a source of moral authority and power — conservatism stands flat-footed with only discipline to offer. It has only an invisible hand to compete with the activism of the left. So conservatism has no way to show itself redeemed of America’s bigoted past, no way like the Great Society to engineer a grand display of its innocence, and no way to show deference to minorities for the oppression they endured. Thus it seems to be in league with that oppression.

Well, there’s a reason for that.

Let’s take affirmative action as an example. Conservatives are correct that, all things being equal, no university or corporation should have to set aside positions for minorities — it unfairly works against the merit system. But all things aren‘t equal, though they’re much closer now than ever. Conservatives don’t seem to realize (or simply want to forget) that a sort of affirmative action existed for hundreds of years, giving wealth, jobs and education to white people — no matter how more qualified a black person might have been for those opportunities. When the civil rights movement swept away Jim Crow in the 1960s, conservatives suggested that affirmative action amounted to a kind of racism. But without programs aimed at rectifying the past by diversifying student ranks and corporate rosters, entire communities that started out left behind would’ve stayed behind. Perhaps conservatives didn’t intend for their opposition to affirmative action to be seen as an attempt to consolidate the gains of white people, but that’s how it was perceived. You can’t blame African Americans for thinking that that conservatism wasn’t allied with their interests.

Beyond that, though, Steele is greatly mistaken to suggest that liberals were active and that conservatives (by implication) were passive. During the civil rights era, it was liberals like LBJ and Martin Luther King Jr. who lead the way while leading conservative publications like National Review sneered and fretted about the breakdown in societal order. And conservatives were very active — in the 1970s, 80s and 90s — at using the racial grievances of whites to attract votes to the Republican Party. Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms were former segregationists who switched to the GOP in the years following the civil rights acts of the mid-1960s. And the GOP adopted a “Southern strategy” of appealing to racist whites — albeit in coded terms. How do we know? Because the GOP just apologized for that strategy a few years ago! Why apologize for something you haven’t done? Under the circumstances, even people who might’ve bought the “reverse racism” angle of conservatism’s opposition to affirmative action spent decades understanding it was entirely rational for African Americans to flee to the welcoming arms of the Democratic Party.

And you know what? Even as a liberal, I think that sucks. It sucks for the Republican Party, sure, which finds itself on the short end of the demographic stick in a diversifying nation. But it mostly sucks for African Americans, who by and large haven’t had access to a full political marketplace.

Steele is wrong, however. Conservatives were not fated to an existence largely free of minority support. They made their own destiny.

UPDATE: Because I have conservative friends, I want to make clear I don’t think that all or even most conservatives are racist. But the Republican Party — which is the main political/institutional expression of conservatism — has acted in ways that sought to capitalize on racism. Some conservatives — like Steele — are so in love with the sterling purity of conservative ideas that they don’t seem to realize that most people will be inclined to judge the acts and their results.

Conservatives hate Hollywood. Conservatives need Hollywood.

Andrew Breitbart, a Drudge-buddy, today launches Big Hollywood — a group blog designed to begin the conservative takeover of the entertainment business. Or something like that. Breitbart explains the aim of the site is to return Hollywood to its “patriotic roots”:

Big Hollywood’s modest objective: to change the entertainment industry. To make Hollywood something we can believe in – again. In order to give millions of Americans hope.

Until conservatives, libertarians and Republicans – who will be the lion’s share of Big Hollywood’s contributors – recognize that (pop) culture is the big prize and that politics is secondary, there will be no victory in this important battle.

And apparently Big Hollywood will help bend the industry to conservative wishes by utilizing the awesome powers of … Orson Bean. Yes, he’s a fine actor and, yes, he’s also Andrew Breitbart’s father-in-law, but I’m not sure that anybody — in or out of the entertainment industry — but he’s also … Orson Bean. And he’s 80. There’s nothing wrong with that, but he’s not really the audience Hollywood is chasing.

(To be fair, Breitbart’s stable also includes John Nolte, who was the guy behind Dirty Harry’s Place, a conservative blog focusing on film. It was pretty interesting, most of the time.)

If Breitbart wants Hollywood to start churning out John Wayne movies again, he’s probably not going to succeed. The movie business is pretty thoroughly globalized — it’s not just the American box office that counts anymore — which is why villains in blockbusters tend to have their nationalities neutered (Quick: Name the country that provided the enemy fighters in Top Gun) or simply made up (”Mr. President: We’ve got a situation in Kablooeystan”) or made the avatars of a faceless behind-the-scenes corporation that is the source of real villainy in the world, not those pesky nation-states. The intentional vagueness makes it possible for a movie to be popular — and sell tickets — everywhere. “America is No. 1,” though, is a message that might not sell tickets in Luxembourg. And movie execs want to make money in Luxembourg.

Yes, Hollywood is reflexively liberal. Yes, that means you get crappy anti-war movies now and again. (Though you also get great anti-war movies, too.) But if flag-waving sold movie tickets, we’d be getting more of those John Wayne movies. Hollywood is a business, not a political action committee. Attempts to politicize it — instead of letting it entertain us, while chuckling at the ham-handedness movies like Rendition — are doomed to failure.

Hello, Philadelphia

I'm voting for this guy.

Welcome to Philly Weekly’s new blog about national politics.

Who am I? Well, I’m Joel Mathis, the online editor at Philadelphia Weekly. Until a few months ago, I’d lived in Kansas all my life. (Cue Wizard of Oz jokes here.) Yet, somehow, I ended up liberal.

I came of age among Mennonites in Central Kansas, growing up among people whose German-speaking grandparents had emigrated from Russia in the late 1800s because they believed the compulsory military service didn’t square with serving a God of peace. Modern Mennonites remain very interested in peace and social justice issues, and they influenced me greatly.

That influence set me on the path to my current set of beliefs.

* I think wars of choice are a bad idea. And while I think some military action is needed in defense against terrorists, I think that jihadism is an idea — and that we need to give as much energy and effort to competing in the realm of ideas as we do to killing our enemies.

* I’m against torture — and waterboarding clearly qualifies. I think the “ticking time bomb” scenario used to justify torture almost never happens in real life.

* I think security and civil liberties can co-exist. Imperfectly, perhaps, but still.

* I think our economy, national security AND the environment can benefit from higher fuel standards for cars and trucks — and that’s just the beginning of what our efforts should be.

* I believe my gay and lesbian neighbors deserve the same rights and protections that my wife and I receive.

* I think that health care is a right — and that while the market (usually) does a lot of things right, it’s insane to let the forces of capitalism dictate my life span and/or quality.

And so on and so forth. I think that makes me fairly liberal; I resist, however, any tests of ideological purity.

But I don’t think people who disagree with me are necessarily evil. (I think I can make an exception or two.) I’m a lifelong Kansan; I couldn’t possibly have had civil relations with my neighbors if I thought so.

Still, let me declare my sympathies up front: I’ll be voting for Obama come November. And if — knock on wood — he becomes president, well, I plan on doing what I can to hold his feet to the fire.

Let’s get the conversation started. And feel free — I know you will — to tell me why I’m wrong.