i made this point several times during the election season- liberals have become the new reactionaries, conservatives the progressives. it's the right in america that wants to change things and the left that is digging in it's heals. EDIT: the war in iarq is a case in point. the left would like to roll back the clock to that dreamy time of "stability" pre 9/11. the right recognizes that vision of "stability as a chimera (well, except for pat buchanan), and seeks radical transformation in the ME and in our foreign relations generally. you may agree or disagree w/ the policy generally, but it's hard to argue who the real progressives are in this case.
The right definitely wants to change things in America. They want to change things back to the way they were in the 1950s. It's called regression.
The change the right wants to make is bombing the Middle East back into the stone age, rather than changing the causes of terror. And you call that "progressive".
You'd think that the strategy of overthrowing dictators and encouraging democracy as a way of defeating terrorism would draw support from the left, since it's consistent with the "root causes" talk we heard right after 9/11. But you'd be wrong, and for one simple reason: Bush is doing it.
Not quite, basso. You're about as accurate as Rush on a Hillbilly Heroin bender. You'd be wrong for this one simple reason: That's not the way Bush sold it to the American people. By the way....where are those weapons of mass destruction?
Then why stop at saddam? Why isn't he doing anything in Sudan,N. Korea,Iran and Yemen? They need democracy too. You're correct on one thing. Bush did help topple a dictator and he is encouraging democracy in the ME. But you can't seriously believe that after decades and decades of conflict in that region, that shrub is the one who is going to bring peace there? Take off your pollyanna glasses. Shrub is loved only by his minions here in the states. In the ME he's more loathed than probably any president....Ever! And just to let you know,the left isn't behind shrub because his heart isn't in the right place but more like his brain.
As RMT that is not why Bush said we went to war. That only came about later. Secondly enouraging democracy is great. Forcing it down people's throats at the end of a gun barrel is horrible. I agree that we should be fixing the root causes and not supporting dictators. Tell me has Bush cracked down dictatorship in Suadi Arabia, Kuwait, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, etc? Those places were far more dangerous in terms of terrorism than Iraq was. If there was a sincere effort to encourage democracy it would be great. So far we haven't seen one.
As others have mentioned, that not why we went to war. Your selective memory is consistently... conveniant. And it is not consistent with "root causes". Bombing people into oblivian is not my idea of "correcting" US foreign policy. Hell, that's maintaing the status quo! I'd be against this war regardless of which muttonhead ordered it.
I won’t disagree with you about the left, in the US or Canada for that matter. They have indeed become reactionary, but there is nothing progressive about the right, in either country. Don’t confuse action with progressive action. As others have pointed out, this administration seems to have failed to learn any lessons from the last half century of world history. As I have said and explained in detail before, a first year project management student could have done a much better job of planning this war, or better yet, of identifying the prohibitive risks of this course of action and the minute chance of success and worked to devise a genuinely progressive course of action, and there are a number of such options that are fairly obvious. Instead this administration seems blinded by a very dated ideology and a desire to protect their vested interests.
TIRED CONSERVATIVES....Matt Yglesias is upset with the Economist's increasing right wing hackery. In particular, he's annoyed with their insistence that liberals don't have any new ideas. Here's an example that's not actually from the Economist itself, but is written by two Economist editors and matches the tone of what the magazine itself often says: Indeed, the left has reached the same level of fury that the right reached in the 1960s — but with none of the intellectual inventiveness. On everything from Social Security to foreign policy to economic policy, it is reduced merely to opposing conservative ideas. Actually, I wouldn't mind stuff like this so much if the writers would acknowledge that this lack of innovation is actually far more true of conservatives than liberals today. I mean, what's the conservative agenda these days? Lower taxes, gay baiting, gun rights, school vouchers, business friendly tort reform, kicking ass overseas, opposition to entitlement programs, hatred of collective bargaining, etc. etc. etc. In other words, the exact same stuff they've been pushing at least since Ronald Reagan took office, and in some cases since the day the party was born. There's nothing very new there. It's a little remarked fact of modern American life that beneath all the sound and fury our political battles are mostly being fought at the margins. Liberals have built up institutions over the past 70 years that are enormously popular and therefore basically invulnerable to serious alteration. Conservatives might be able to change this if they truly had any new ideas to offer, but they don't — and their old ideas aren't any more popular than they've ever been. Because of this, conservatives these days have been mostly reduced to little more than nibbling away at liberal programs. Big new ideas or significant changes to liberal institutions are pretty scarce. Now, I'm guessing that many of my readers don't believe this, so let's roll the tape. What has the Bush administration accomplished in the past four years? There was No Child Left Behind, a bill that was cosponsored by a legendary liberal in the Senate and has increased federal education spending by $10 billion. Bush's stem cell decision was a weasely compromise, and even at that is likely to be expanded by Congress soon. Sarbanes-Oxley was opposed by the Republican business base but Bush was forced to sign it anyway. Campaign finance reform has likewise been opposed for years by conservatives, but Bush signed that too. The Department of Homeland Security was originally proposed by a Democrat and later co-opted under pressure by Bush — though he did manage to get a bit of union busting thrown in. The prescription drug bill was an expansion of a traditionally liberal entitlement program. How about the conservative side of things? The PATRIOT Act is a bad bill, but let's face it: compared to previous American responses to acts of war, it's a marshmallow. The recent bankruptcy and tort reform bills were bad, but in the great scheme of things qualify as little more than nibbling. Social Security privatization is dead in the water. The war in Iraq, after a mere two years, is already going sour. That pretty much leaves tax cuts and judges as the only unqualified conservative triumphs of the Bush administration, and those have been part of Republican orthodoxy for a quarter of a century. That's a lot of nibbling and not much in the way of innovative new thinking. It would be nice if the Economist — and the rest of the media — could take a few minutes away from their lazy liberal stereotyping to acknowledge this. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_06/006558.php
I’m sure it would draw support, even from the left, but this is a moot point because no one can claim with a shred of credibility that this is what Bush is doing. In fact it’s become quite obvious that just the opposite was happening: “For every one I kill, three take his place,” Col. Fred Wellman. So Bush is clearly adding to the root causes. He is not only needlessly killing young American soldiers and innocent Iraqis, he is killing Americans in the future by increasing the number of terrorist in the world. This was easy to predict and in fact we did predict it here on this board before the war even started, with a full explanation of why this was going to happen. This is what makes all this needless bloodshed and the crime that this is war is so much more repugnant.
You understand that the language is called English and not American, right? So, whose spelling is more correct?
do you even read the economist? i've been a subscriber for perhaps the last 15 years and they've grown pregressively more critical of bush as his term has gone along. they are vociferous critics of guantanamo and have called for rumsfeld's head over abu ghraib. it'd be helpful fo yglesias, or you yourself, didn't confuse a single article by some editors for the economist that appeared in another newspaper for the editorial tone of the magazine itself. further more, the article wasn't necessarily complementary of conservative goals, just mentioned they had more cause for optimism than might otherwise appear. sheesh- read first, then criticize.
