Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes Errors and Lies:
Surprise! It turns out that there’s something to be said for having the brother of a failed president make his own run for the White House. Thanks to Jeb Bush, we may finally have the frank discussion of the Iraq invasion we should have had a decade ago.
But many influential people—not just Mr. Bush—would prefer that we not have that discussion. There’s a palpable sense right now of the political and media elite trying to draw a line under the subject. Yes, the narrative goes, we now know that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake, and it’s about time that everyone admits it. Now let’s move on.
Well, let’s not—because that’s a false narrative, and everyone who was involved in the debate over the war knows that it’s false. The Iraq war wasn’t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war. The public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that. We were, in a fundamental sense, lied into war.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post writes
Jeb Bush’s brotherly bind:
Am I am the only person outside the Bush family who has a smidgen of empathy for Jeb Bush’s roller-coaster ride in trying to answer a straightforward question: Was going to war in Iraq the right thing to do?
It’s hard to go much beyond “smidgen” because it remains astonishing that Bush hadn’t worked out long in advance how he’d grapple with an inevitable query about the invasion his brother launched. Still, there are more important issues here than family. Bush’s agony isn’t over because Iraq raises profound questions not only for him but also for all of his GOP opponents. If Bush’s initial answer about the war was wrong and his most recent answer was right, this means that opponents of the war were also right. They included a young Illinois state senator, Barack Obama, who predicted in 2002 that “even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”
Many of the war’s staunchest supporters understand that they can never concede that Obama was right because doing so would undermine their ongoing defense of a hyperinterventionist foreign policy. That’s why some of them remain unrepentant. “I believed in it then,” former vice president Dick Cheney said of the war to Politico’s Mike Allen last July. “I look back on it now, it was absolutely the right thing to do.”
More pundits rounded-up below the orange corral.
Dana Milbank at The Washington Post writes Jeb Bush’s alarming caution:
Jeb Bush promised he would be his “own man,” and this week he proved it — alas for him.
The former Florida governor, often regarded as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, managed over an extraordinary 72 hours to demonstrate that he is not anything like his older brother, the former president. He showed himself to be indecisive, uncertain where he stands, afraid of his shadow and nakedly calculating.
Steven W. Thrasher at
The Guardian writes
To put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill would be an insult to her legacy:
To African Americans, Harriet Tubman was our Moses, guiding the enslaved to freedom by faith and the light of the North Star. Why cheapen her by putting her on the face on the 20 dollar bill—the very symbol of the racialized capitalism she was fleeing? [...]
I don’t want to see Tubman commodified with a price, as she once was as a slave. I don’t need to see hers as the face of the US treasury, being passed in transactions to underpaid retail workers and appearing in print ads for transnational banks.
It’s not that I object to genocidist Andrew Jackson getting sidelined from daily sight. But there’s something frank and honest about him occupying the 20 dollar bill. I mean, who better to represent what the US treasury has bought, and for whom it has amassed its tremendous wealth, than Andrew “trail of tears” Jackson? Maybe only the Founding Pappy on our dollar bill, slaveowner and “slave catcher” George Washington? Or Jefferson (on our $2 bill) who built his wealth at Monticello with the 175 slaves he owned? [...]
The roots of capitalist American slavery are not just found in long shuttered tobacco and cotton plantations, but in the entire business structure of the modern US economy. As historian Greg Grandin recently wrote: “Banks capitalized the slave trade and insurance companies underwrote it.” And while a still existing company like Aetna insurance was built on insuring slaves’ bodies, it has apologized but won’t pay reparations.
Sylvie Kauffmann, a former editor in chief at
Le Monde, writes at
The New York Times about
Surveillance Without Borders. Four months after Islamicist fanatics slew 17 in the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the French parliament has passed a new surveillance law. It is likely to pass the senate as well and be law, say its supporters, by the end of July. This despite how the French swore they would not succumb to fear as so many of them felt we Americans have done:
The irony of the new French mind-set has not been lost on some U.S. liberals, while hawks have seized on the French bill to try to bolster their case for continued mass surveillance. But when American right-wing commentators praise the French, we know something’s fishy.
So, is France having its Big Brother moment? Not so fast. There are major differences between the broad legislation rushed through Congress after 9/11 and this text. This is not a legislature declaring a global war on terror, or allowing for the indefinite detention of aliens believed to be potential terrorists. It is not voting on an anti-terrorism bill, but on a long overdue legal framework for the activities of the intelligence services. Strangely enough, as a parliamentary report noted in 2014, France is “the only Western democracy without a legal framework for its intelligence services, exposing its agents to a legal vacuum, and posing potential threats to the fundamental liberties of its citizens.”
Doyle McManus at the
Los Angeles Times writes
Can the government reduce poverty while also slashing the budget?
To Obama, the problem is that Republicans will talk about poverty, but they won't spend money to back up their words.
Brooks and other reform conservatives say they're willing to spend more money on poverty alleviation — for example, wage subsidies to encourage employers to hire more minimum-wage workers — but they still want federal spending to shrink overall.
“If you talk to any of my Republican friends, they will say … they care about the poor — and I believe them,” Obama said. “But when it comes to actually establishing budgets, making choices, prioritizing, that's when it starts breaking down.”
Brooks answered in kind. “Let's have a rumble over how much money we're spending on public goods for poor people, for sure,” he said. “But we can't even get to that when politicians on the left and the right are conspiring to not touch middle-class entitlements.” (He meant Social Security and Medicare, mainly.)
David Sirota at
In These Times explains
Why Legal Weed Is the Future:
Vendors and potential financiers at last month’s Marijuana Investor Summit here in the Mile High City say the current market for legal cannabis is more than $3 billion in the 23 states that have already legalized the drug for medicinal or recreational use. Expanding that market, they say, will require not just drug reform legislation, but also a consistent infusion of capital at a time when the marijuana economy still exists in a legal gray area – one where the drug is permitted in some states, but still outlawed at the federal level.
“It’s going to take time, but it’s a great opportunity,” said Chris Rentner of Akouba Credit, a Chicago small business lender exploring the possibility of working with marijuana businesses. “For people that think everyone is a stoner lying on the sidewalk passed out, it’s going to take time for them to get comfortable with it. But there’s too much money in it. We just need to figure out the risk associated with it, but if we can find a way where it makes sense legally, then why wouldn’t we try to be in this market?”
Carrie Rickey at
Truth Dig write
In ‘Ex Machina,’ a Robo Babe Raises Powerful Questions:
In the spirit of cautionary prophesies such as “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Demon Seed,” “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” and “Her,” Garland’s provocative film raises questions of gender, ethics and existentialism.
Gender: Why in movies like “Ex Machina” and “Demon Seed” are scientists male and their creations embodiments of fetishized females? Ethics: Why in movies (think “A.I.”) do humans create machines with human capacities and retreat from them when they exhibit human needs? Existentialism: Does artificial intelligence (think Samantha, the operating system in “Her”) surpass the human kind? Are these AI creations (think HAL in “2001” and Proteus in “Demon Seed”) a threat to humans, out to subjugate their creators via manipulation, murder and rape?
Such questions haunt “Ex Machina.”
Kaye Whitlock at
Critical Mass Progress writes
Torture, Lies and Denial:
Torture.
It’s not somebody else’s problem. It’s an American problem. It’s our problem. We bear some measure of responsibility for it because it goes forward in our names, by public and private actors and institutions who comprise much of the mainstream of civic life.
Torture isn’t perpetrated by rogue actors and “bad apples.” It is foundational to American policing, prisons, and military action.
Many people seek to justify torture, or the euphemisms that try to disguise its nature: “enhanced interrogation” and “special methods of questioning.” Others – most people – simply deny its existence or, if made uncomfortably aware of it, make frantic efforts to explain it away and cover up complicity in its authorization, administration, and human, ethical, and spiritual impact.
Politicians won’t make it stop. Professional advocates won’t make it stop. Religious leaders won’t make it stop. It can’t be arrested and jailed away; that’s part of the same mentality that produced it. Torture will only stop if we make it stop, through visionary as well as practical forms of movement building and community organizing that build unstoppable momentum, linking growing numbers of people across myriad constituencies and issues.
Allison Pugh at
The New Republic writes
Class Matters—What job insecurity does to our kids:
Inequality extends to how parents respond to the new economy. In the new ways of organizing work, people expect job insecurity. But the impact of the new precariousness is radically different for the top and the bottom of our economy. Workers with more education are less likely to lose their jobs than those with less education, and when they do lose their jobs, they are less likely to endure a pay cut when they get a new one. Insecurity feels more like flexibility among advantaged workers, and more like abandonment among low-income or marginalized workers.
These differences find their way into what we might consider today’s “insecurity parenting.” Both groups say they want their children to be flexible, but not all flexibility is the same. Affluent parents want their children to be able to take advantage of all the opportunities that may come their way. “We wanted for them to grow up with the flexibility of being able to go somewhere, take a look around and say, ‘This is what I need to do to fit in here’,” said Anita, a white mother of three. “I just wanted them to be able to have the opportunity to do what you wanted to do, [so they know] you can go anywhere you want, do anything you want.”