"It's time for Democrats to grow a backbone and stand up for what we believe"

Jonathan Capehart thinks there's a national mood of "meh" when it comes to politics and the midterm elections. For all I know, he may be right.

But I also know something else. Leaders don't simply sit back and comment on "meh." They challenge us to get up off our asses and do something. That's exactly what Gov. Deval Patrick did at the 2012 Democratic Convention. His words are as relevant today as they were back them (maybe even more so). Take a listen - especially from minute 3:00 to 8:00.

If we want to earn the privilege to lead, its time for Democrats to grow a backbone and stand up for what we believe. Quit waiting for pundits, or polls or superpacs to tell us who the next president or senator or congressman is going to be. We're Americans. We shape our own future. And lets all start by standing up for President Barack Obama...The list of accomplishments is long, impressive, and barely told...With a record like that and a vision that hopeful and powerful, I, for one, will not stand by and let him be bullied out of office. And neither should you.

That's a leader my friends. I don't know about you, but I'm going to listen.

I'm sick and tired of all the nonsense. Its clear that President Obama and the Democrats are prepared to lead and Republicans simply want to divide us with their political games. If we can grow a backbone and get into the long game of change, we can do this! Barack Obama isn't on the ballot this time...we are!

What is war?

I see that Sec. of State John Kerry is getting all kinds of push-back for suggesting the U.S. is not at war with ISIS. The truth is, that word has been bastardized for decades now. I'd suggest that it all started when we embraced the idea of a "Cold War" with the USSR. That gave us the cover for everything from "police actions" in Vietnam to covert military actions all over South and Central America. We pretty commonly refer to our excursion in Southeast Asia as the "Vietnam War." But we don't talk much about the war in Chile, or Guatemala, or El Salvador, etc. The concept of war was further bastardized when the Bush administration launched war on a tactic - the Global War on Terror. But of course, the precedent was laid with war on a commodity - our War on Drugs.

The term "war" carries a lot of weight legally. When Nixon secretly bombed Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution, which has been the subject of a lot of controversy.  But beyond that, there are international laws that govern the conduct of war that don't apply otherwise (i.e., detention of combatants).

I point all this out because in today's world it seems unlikely that we will ever be engaged in war as it was envisioned during global conflicts like World War II. That is a good thing. Referring to the international changes that occurred following the last great war, President Obama said this during his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

In many ways, these efforts succeeded. Yes, terrible wars have been fought, and atrocities committed. But there has been no Third World War...The ideals of liberty and self-determination, equality and the rule of law have haltingly advanced. We are the heirs of the fortitude and foresight of generations past, and it is a legacy for which my own country is rightfully proud.

And yet, a decade into a new century, this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats. The world may no longer shudder at the prospect of war between two nuclear superpowers, but proliferation may increase the risk of catastrophe. Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale.

Moreover, wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations. The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states -- all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos. In today's wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, children scarred.

That is the face of "war" as we see it today. Most of the legal processes meant to govern the conduct of war - both national and international - are still mired in the past. Since the advent of the Cold War, that has given U.S. presidents a lot of leeway that has often been abused.

I believe that President Obama's speech on counterterrorism back in May 2013 was a call for us to examine much of that. As he said, "We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us." My concern is that we are running out of time for that to happen under the guidance of this president. And I'm not sure I'll trust the next one to take up the effort.

This is precisely why I've been so disappointed in liberals who continue to argue about many of these issues as if it was all about civil liberties. Its not and never has been. Its about war. A failure to recognize that has meant that a lot of liberals have abandoned this debate in favor of the non-interventionist libertarians. And so we see the possibility of a Clinton/Paul presidential contest with Rand Paul to the "left" of Hillary Clinton on foreign policy. That's just idiotic!

If we are going to have a debate about the meaning of war and if/when/where military actions are necessary, liberals need to engage that conversation on the basis of threats and conflicts as they exist today. What would an effective counterterrorism strategy look like? President Obama has suggested that it includes "targeted action against terrorists, effective partnerships, diplomatic engagement and assistance." Are "targeted actions against terrorists" necessary? Are they the equivalent of war? What national and international rules need to be applied to these kinds of actions?

These are all questions we avoided as long as the Bush administration declared a ridiculous "global war on terror" and lied us into invading Iraq. But in hindsight, what would have been the appropriate response to 9/11? And what should we do to prevent it from happening again?

Rand Paul and the libertarians don't have a satisfactory answer to these questions. If we want to challenge the remaining neocons (Republican or Democrat), we need one.

"We have to make decisions based not on fear, but on hard-earned wisdom"

Up at the top of this blog you'll see a tab titled Ending the Indefinite War. For almost three years now I have been advocating that its time to start talking about ending what George Bush called "the global war on terror" and what President Obama refocused as the "war on al Qaeda." The explosion of ISIS on the scene in Iraq and Syria means that is unlikely to happen anytime soon. And so I'm dealing with my disappointment in having to let that go. But my disappointment is not directed at President Obama. It is focused where it belongs...on ISIS.

Back in May of 2013, President Obama gave a speech that indicated perhaps we could finally start talking about ending the indefinite war. I was ecstatic at the possibility. In my elation, I didn't focus as much on the reality that his speech was really an outline of how we move forward with a rational counterterrorism strategy. And so today I went back and re-read the speech. Its interesting to listen to what the President said about all this more than a year before he announced his plan for military intervention against ISIS. Take a look at some highlights.

Now, make no mistake, our nation is still threatened by terrorists. From Benghazi to Boston, we have been tragically reminded of that truth. But we have to recognize that the threat has shifted and evolved from the one that came to our shores on 9/11. With a decade of experience now to draw from, this is the moment to ask ourselves hard questions -- about the nature of today’s threats and how we should confront them...

So America is at a crossroads. We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us. We have to be mindful of James Madison’s warning that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror. We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings, nor stamp out every danger to our open society. But what we can do -- what we must do -- is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger to us, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all the while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend. And to define that strategy, we have to make decisions based not on fear, but on hard-earned wisdom. 

The President went on to propose a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy. He gave a lot of details, but summed it up here:

Targeted action against terrorists, effective partnerships, diplomatic engagement and assistance -- through such a comprehensive strategy we can significantly reduce the chances of large-scale attacks on the homeland and mitigate threats to Americans overseas.

That has been President Obama's strategy all along. In that speech he invited us to ask the hard questions. Unfortunately, that has not happened. Instead we have had ongoing prescriptions from left libertarians who pretend like we can just ignore the problem and neocons who think every problem can be solved by simply invading yet another country. I believe that last night's speech from the President was an attempt to tamp down the fear so that perhaps we could get in touch with some of that hard-earned wisdom.

To be honest, I don't know if the President has chosen the right strategy for dealing with ISIS. I long for a discussion about what our options are that is based on seeing the situation as clearly as he laid it out over a year ago. Anyone who tells you that Obama's plan is either guaranteed to be a success or doomed to failure don't know what they're talking about. They are simply mouthing the surety of the ideologue.

What I do know is that by the time President Obama has made a tough decision like this, he's weighed all of his options and calculated the possible unintended consequences of each one. As he did when he made the decision to go after Osama bin Laden, he knows that at times like this, the risks of failure are very real and the consequences of that failure could be devastating. But until I see critiques apply the same process to their alternatives, I'll go with the guy who has demonstrated a pretty solid grasp of hard-earned wisdom.

Dear Pundits: President Obama just cleaned up the mess you made

When you hear that the President of the United States is going to give a 15 minute speech in prime time, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that it will not contain the kind of detail he included in his speech on counterterrorism back in May of 2013. Its obvious he had something else in mind.

President Obama's goal tonight was to clean up the mess the pundits have made in this whole situation with ISIS. And so he let us know that:

• Contrary to the pundit's endless obsession with misunderstanding what he said about "we don't have a strategy," yes...we have a strategy,
• No, ISIS does not threaten the U.S. right now,
• No, ISIS does not represent Islam,
• Yes, ISIS is a current threat to our allies in the Middle East and is a potential threat to the U.S.,
• We will conduct air strikes against ISIS,
• We have built an international coalition to fight ISIS,
• We will not send ground troops to Iraq to fight ISIS,
• This is NOT an Iraq War III,
• President Obama is providing leadership to get the job done.

To those of us who have actually been listening to the President all along, this is nothing new. But his message has been so distorted by a ranting media and GOP lies that he needed to calm the fears that were building with more casual observers. If folks will just chill and recognize what he was trying to accomplish, you'd see that he did a damn fine job.

"If nothing is true, then anything is possible"

When I started reading this article by Peter Pomerantsev,  I thought it would be an interesting explanation of how Putin uses propaganda in Russia. But as I continued to read, I could feel my blood pressure rising as way too much of it began to hit home in terms of our own media. Here are the sections that started to make my hair stand on end.

The new Russia...reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action...

In the philosophy of these political technologists, information precedes essence. “I remember creating the idea of the ‘Putin majority’ and hey, presto, it appeared in real life,” Gleb Pavlovsky, a political technologist who worked on Putin's election campaigns but has since left the Kremlin, told me recently. “Or the idea that ‘there is no alternative to Putin.’ We invented that. And suddenly there really was no alternative.”...

The Kremlin tells its stories well, having mastered the mixture of authoritarianism and entertainment culture. The notion of ‘journalism,’ in the sense of reporting ‘facts’ or ‘truth,’ has been wiped out...

The point of this new propaganda is not to persuade anyone, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted...to leave them confused, paranoid, and passive—living in a Kremlin-controlled virtual reality that can no longer be mediated or debated by any appeal to ‘truth.’

‘‘Huge parts of our population live in a separate reality created by Russian media,” says Raul Rebane, an expert on propaganda in Estonia, where a quarter of the population is ethnic Russian. “This makes consensual politics impossible.”...

“Is there more interest in conspiracy theories because far-right parties are growing, or are far-right parties growing because more conspiracy thinking is being pumped into the information space?” asks Gleb Pavlovsky, a little wickedly.

Long before Pomerantsev mentioned it in this piece, I thought of what Karl Rove (we all know it was him, right?) said to Ron Suskind back in 2004.

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

But of course, its not just the former Bush administration that bears some resemblance to this kind of propaganda. It is spewed every day by Fox News as well as right wing radio and web sites. A short trip to Media Matters or Right Wing Watch will disabuse anyone's doubts about that. What's interesting is that just before I read this article, I saw that someone on my Facebook page had linked to this unbelievable nonsense. It reminds me that there are significant numbers of people who are buying the bullshit!

But then Pomerantsev has the wisdom to recognize that its not just right wing ideologues who peddle propaganda in this country.

In a Prospect magazine review of Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide, for instance, George Packer writes, “Greenwald has no use for the norms of journalism. He rejects objectivity, as a reality and an ideal.” (Similarly, RT’s managing director once told me that “there is no such thing as objective reporting.”)...The ties that bind Greenwald and the Kremlin consist of more than a shared desire to ensure Edward Snowden’s safety. In some dark, ideological wood, Putin the authoritarian gay-basher and Greenwald the gay, leftist-libertarian meet and agree. And as the consensus for reality-based politics fractures, that space becomes ripe for exploitation.

With all the noise that exists in our media environment today, it can be difficult to find much objectivity and truth. But we've got to keep at it because...

Not a good move from the Clinton camp

If you actually read the transcript of Jeffrey Goldberg's interview with Hillary Clinton, you'll see that she went to great lengths to make it seem like she was not directly criticizing President Obama. But with the title chosen by The Atlantic for the piece and the howls from the media, all that was blown up.

I'm going to suggest that the recent drop in Clinton's poll numbers is a direct result of all that.

Hillary Clinton’s favorability ratings continue to tumble as she renters [sic] the political fray, with 43% of respondents now saying they view her positively, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, down from a high of 60% in 2009.

Its not just that some of President Obama's supporters were angered by the idea that she was criticizing a sitting Democratic president. The whole thing reminded people of how ugly the political fray can get.

That's why I think the Clinton camp blew it when they decided to directly come out swinging at President Obama.

As Obama seeks to make the case for military action against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in a prime-time address on Wednesday, Clinton supporters are saying that she would have approached the battle with ISIS in a completely different way if she were commander in chief.

“You never want to be a Monday morning quarterback on these issues because who knows how things would ultimately turn out, but Obama has been passive on these issues,” one former aide to Clinton said. “She would have taken a more aggressive approach.”

Another former Clinton aide took it a step further: “It’s the very notion of decisiveness,” the former aide said. “She’s not gnashing her teeth the way we’re seeing time and time again with Obama.”

Having those words come out of the mouth of an aide is probably supposed to give Clinton herself some distance from them. But please don't be fooled. This hit that incorporates all the Republican talking points about the President was planted in the media for a reason. They think its good politics.

What it tells me is not just that Clinton would be more quick on the trigger when it comes to dealing with foreign policy crises, it tells me that she still hasn't learned to play the long game.

The media is in a tizzy right now over ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Today Greg Sargent dug into the depths of some of the polling on this issue and demonstrates that it is very likely they are getting ahead of public opinion when it comes to beating the war drums. President Obama has a speech to deliver tonight and then two years to demonstrate whether or not his strategy with ISIS will be as successful as his approach to al Qaeda. The chances of Clinton being made to look the fool over the long term in this critique are obviously pretty high.

And so once again I am reminded of Michelle Obama's words about her husband.

Here's the thing about my husband: even in the toughest moments, when it seems like all is lost, Barack Obama never loses sight of the end goal. He never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise, even if it comes from some of his best supporters. He just keeps moving forward.

And in those moments when we're all sweating it, when we're worried that the bill won't pass or the negotiation will fall through, Barack always reminds me that we're playing a long game here. He reminds me that change is slow — it doesn't happen overnight.

Hillary would do well to take heed.

Why do so many Americans favor President Obama's policies but not President Obama?

For quite a while now, polling has presented us with a dilemma: why do Americans support President Obama's policies but don't show the same support for him? The most obvious example of this has come in polls showing that support for the Affordable Care Act always comes in higher than support for Obamacare. Now, when much of the polling that is being reported is about ISIS, it should be no surprise to anyone that this same dynamic continues.

Consider this paradox: Americans overwhelmingly support President Obama's actions against the Islamic State so far—airstrikes and humanitarian assistance without ground troops—and yet they disapprove of Obama's handling of the ISIS crisis. Why the split mind?

Of course we can trust our intrepid media to spend a lot of ink explaining to us why that is. This is usually where we see the emphasis on President Obama's lack of PR skills. The assumption being that he's not good at selling policies the American people already agree with (huh?). And of course, it provides people like Ron Fournier with the opportunity to say that its all about the President's lack of leadership.

But, like any political question or analysis of social behavior, it is absurd to think that the answer to this dilemma is simple. Fournier's suggestion that the President is being led rather than leading contains a grain of truth if you think about Obama's rejection of dominance as his leadership style and embrace of partnership.

There's also some truth in Jeffrey Goldberg's statement about why President Obama doesn't get the credit he deserves for taking down terrorists.

He gets no acclaim as a terrorist hunter for two reasons. First, Republicans will not credit him with any achievements in this endeavor because they won’t credit him with any achievement ever, for anything...Second, the left-leaning Democratic Party base is hesitant to tout his record in the terrorist-killing department because it is uncomfortable with the idea of their president as a drone-deploying killer. No love from the right or left means that attacks such as the one that eliminated the head of Somalia’s terrifying al-Shabab militant group received relatively little notice.

And then, of course, there is the way our media covers presidents in the post-Watergate era. Their approach reminds me of something Lily Tomlin says in the play The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe:

No matter how cynical I get, I'm afraid its never enough to keep up.

Journalists these days earn their chops by demonstrating how high up the chain of cynicism they can go. That makes it hard for any president to be credited with actual policies/achievements.

I'm sure you could point to many other things that contribute to this dilemma. But how can we legitimately talk about this with respect to our first black president and not even mention racism? The fact that so many pundits who've written about it haven't even introduced it as a factor speaks to the level of white privilege contained in the analysis.

From day one there have been Americans all over this country who have questioned the validity of Obama's presidency. That takes the form of everything from questions about his place of birth to those who are simply more amenable to suggestions that he just isn't up to the job - wink, wink...nod, nod. From there, motivated reasoning takes over to confirm the lies embedded in white supremacy. That is the fertile ground in which obstructionist Republicans plant stories about how the President is weak or incompetent or tyrannical or simply "not American." Racism also finds fertile ground when those on the left suggest that President Obama is naive, or lucky, or weak.

And so, any explanation for why this President's favorability is lower than support for his policies that does not include racism as a factor is simply incomplete. It might not be the only factor, but to not mention it at all is absurd.