Paul Krugman thinks we aren't worried enough about extremism in American:
Before he saw the polls, Tom DeLay declared that "one thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America." Now he and his party, shocked by the public's negative reaction to their meddling, want to move on. But we shouldn't let them. The Schiavo case is, indeed, a chance to highlight what's going on in America.
More Krugman and other pundits below, including:
- Arriana scolds Democrats on Schiavo
- Robert Scheer on Bush's nuclear con game
- E.J. Dionne on mutual misunderestimation
- Richard Falkenrath on our vulnerabilities to domestic chemical attack
- Noam Scheiber on how Democrats may capitalize on Bush's democratization policy
- The Daily Cartoon
Krugman says we are too tolerant of the intolerant:
Democratic societies have a hard time dealing with extremists in their midst. The desire to show respect for other people's beliefs all too easily turns into denial: nobody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself.
We can see this failing clearly in other countries. In the Netherlands, for example, a culture of tolerance led the nation to ignore the growing influence of Islamic extremists until they turned murderous.
But it's also true of the United States, where dangerous extremists belong to the majority religion and the majority ethnic group, and yield great political influence.
While we have to be careful about appearing intolerant of other views--even the far-right's own intolerance--Krugman is correct in calling us to shed our shyness about calling out the disproportionate influence of Republican extremists.
Democrats punted on Schiavo?
Arriana Huffington sounds a similar note, but scolds Democrats for taking a hands-off role and points the finger at the Big Dog:
This is not about Terri Schiavo. May she find peace. It is about Democrats and how, once again, they pathetically misread what moral values mean in a political context.
Party leaders have been sticking their fingers in the air to see which way the wind is blowing - and consistently getting it wrong. The Schiavo case is a perfect example. It turns out that Bill Clinton had a behind-the-scenes role in the party's decision to adopt a hands-off policy. This kind of calculation may have been all right in the mid-'90s, but not today, when the party needs decisive leadership.
So the Democrats punted. Then the polls started showing that the majority of Americans thought the GOP had wildly overreached. I understand why Democrats didn't want to be seen as fighting to end Schiavo's life. But giving in to the Republicans or dancing on Schiavo's grave were not the only two options. Democrats fail to grasp that when it comes to the party's core issues, they are on the same side as the majority of Americans.
Nuclear three-card monte
The LA Times' Robert Scheer goes after Bush's "con job" on nuclear proliferation:
We have thrown away thousands of Iraqi and American lives and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars after crying wolf on Iraq's long-defunct nuclear weapons program and now expect the world to believe similar scary stories about neighboring Iran.
We have cozied up to Pakistan for more than three years as it freely allowed the operation of the most extravagantly irresponsible nuclear arms bazaar the world has ever seen.
We sabotaged negotiations with North Korea by telling allies that Pyongyang had supplied nuclear material to Libya, even though the Bush administration knew that the country of origin of those shipments was our "ally," Pakistan.
Mutual misunderestimation?
E.J. Dionne sees a mutual misunderestimation between conservatives and liberals, and thinks we shouldn't really be surprised that the conservative coalition cracked on Schiavo and Social Security, a coalition that may not hold up without national security at the front of the national agenda:
It would be premature to predict that the rise of new issues in the first quarter of 2005 marks the beginning of a "conservative crack-up," a phrase invoked by conservative writer R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. to describe an earlier period of conservative malaise. The Bush
administration has been unusually successful in managing the nation's political agenda and has regularly succeeded in uniting its own camp and
dividing liberals by pushing the issues of terrorism and national security to the fore.
But even the most skilled politicians can be severely tested when their political task requires asking principled constituencies to preserve party unity by ignoring their most serious commitments. Political conservatism is
alive and interesting, and therefore difficult to manage. Bush made the conservative balancing act look easy during his first four years. That does not mean it will stay that way.
Homeland vulnerable to chemical attack
Richard A. Falkenrath, former Homeland Security Advisor to President Bush, writes in today's Washington Post that we are still harbor "catastrophic vulnerabilities", principally by the vast quantities of unprotected deadly chemicals:
The terrorist is an adaptive enemy. One central question in homeland security is whether terrorists will again locate a catastrophic civilian vulnerability before the government gets around to addressing it. [...]
Of the all the various remaining civilian vulnerabilities, one stands alone as uniquely deadly, pervasive and susceptible to terrorist attack: industrial chemicals that are toxic when inhaled, such as chlorine, ammonia, phosgene, methyl bromide, and hydrochloric and various other acids. These chemicals, several of which are identical to those used as weapons on the Western Front during World War I, are routinely shipped through and stored near population centers in vast quantities, in many cases with no security whatsoever.
This risk is allowed while we spend billions on a "faith-based" ICBM missile defense that no one wants or needs?
More partisan role-reversal?
Noam Scheiber, a senior editor at The New Republic writing for WaPo, notices like everyone the ideological role reversals Democrats and Republicans displayed over Terri Schiavo, but points out the bigger reversal playing out in foreign policy, one he doubts will persist through 2008:
Except for a small circle of neoconservative intellectuals, most conservatives are nationalists: they support an activist foreign policy when it serves a narrow definition of American interests and oppose it when it doesn't. "Traditional conservatives supported military action against Iraq because its totalitarian regime was a threat to America, and because the spread of freedom there might promote American interests in a strategically important part of the world," wrote Ramesh Ponnuru in The National Review a few months after the invasion began. "Their stance implies no support for a generalized program of global good works." [...]
This dynamic gives Democrats a potentially huge opening if democracy takes root in nations like Iraq in the next few years - and if Middle America embraces it. (Both big ifs, of course. But American voters aren't nearly as isolationist as the caricature suggests; upwards of 60 percent consistently support American participation in United Nations peacekeeping forces.)
By embracing a robust democratization agenda, the Democratic nominee in 2008 will be able to appeal to his base while also claiming the new, pro-democratization center. The Republican nominee, who has to win the nomination of a party at best indifferent to democratization, will enjoy no such luxury. Mr. Bush himself won the Republican nomination in 2000 by promising a far less activist foreign policy than the Clinton administration had advocated.
What Scheiber fails to address is the selective democratization behind Bush and the neoconservatives; see Nuclear three-card monte, above.
Today's cartoon, from the SF Chronicle's Tom Meyer: