On Lincoln's birthday I am going to talk till I am blue in the face about politics, his political genius in assembling a diverse coalition that renewed the American belief that All men are created equal. The vital personal element of this achievement was Lincoln's passion of course, which was born of humility. He had led a hard life. He lost his mother as a child, he avoided his father's deathbed because he didn't want to have words with him, he had lost a son, and by 1850 he'd lost his great political career. Out of that humility, Lincoln was able to reach out to the common man and to the intellectuals, to the rugged west that he personified and to the chattering classes in New York who were stunned to observe his verbal powers in 1860. Lincoln spanned class and geography to bring together the people who hated slavery. He helped destroy the corrupt regime of Whig and Democrat, and bring a new party into being.
So this morning I want to talk about two principled Americans who are working across the same lines on our corrupt Middle East policy.
One of the most courageous political acts I've ever observed was in September 2005 when Walter Jones, a Republican congressman from North Carolina whose support for the Iraq war was so vehement that he got the nickname "French Fry" Jones for his effort to rename the pomme-de-terre the Liberty Fry, walked into a small Capitol Hill hearing room filled with leftleaning Democrats and condemned the Iraq war. Jones had changed because he had to write personal letters to the families of slain soldiers in his heavily-military district. He could not face those families and put his name to statements he knew to be lies.
Since that time, Jones has suffered at the hands of the Republican leadership, but it hasn't stopped him. Lately he has pushed the Pentagon to give the media access to the coffins coming home. There's got to be a "visual," he tells the New York Times. And yesterday this public servant gave a great speech on the House floor about the terrible psychological effects of service on young men and women. I caught a few minutes of his speech at lunch. He read a mother's lament of her Marine Corps son:
“He has had a very difficult time readjusting to life after conflict. He came home to a `Dear John' letter, had several friends injured and killed and has seen more destruction than most of us will see in a lifetime. And having no one to turn to for help because of the stigma and the fear of losing his career, he started drinking to self-medicate so that he would be able to sleep.
“Congressman, do you know what it is like to listen to your once-strong son cry like a baby at 3:30 in the morning three to four times a week because he can't handle what he has been through? Wanting to kill himself because he doesn't feel he is worthy to live because his brothers were shot down?.. All the while wondering and asking why the Corps he served so proudly and willingly has written him off as worthless and weak and offer no help to prevent him from faltering further?"
Wrenching.
Yesterday on this site I quoted an email from young Anna Baltzer, an Ivy League Jew who believes in service as passionately as Walter Jones, that also struck a populist note:
policy in the Middle East and increasingly sympathetic towards the
plight of the Palestinians. It's not just in the big liberal
cities–it's in the smallest Midwestern towns, it's on conservative
southern ranches–it' s everywhere. In every corner of the country,
there is a middle-aged couple who just came back from Bethlehem or a
soldier who just came back from Iraq who is outraged. We have reached
a critical mass.
Today there is growing overlap between the blue-state progressive movement that Baltzer and I represent and the red-state questioning that Jones represents. The most you will see of it in the mainstream is when Chris Matthews inveighs against the neoconservatives' agenda on his show (last night) but won't say what that agenda was. Those who love America's image in the world have got to bring these strands together if we are going to change American policy in the Middle East. Progressive Jews are essential, so are military families.
Anna Baltzer gives a very powerful presentation on apartheid conditions in the West Bank. Here's hoping that a church group in Walter Jones's district will invite Baltzer to speak, and invite Jones too. Together they can change our policy.
(Phil Weiss)
"There's got to be a visual."
Yes, here of both GIs brought back in a box, their funerals. And of Gaza Palestinian civilians under occupation. And of the Gaza massacre.
In the old USA days, a bugler was sent to each funeral. Now the dead GIs and his/her family get a small tape recording of the bugle song just for the burial service.
I know, I was there–and more than once.
Anna Baltzer is one of the people who posted Barbara Lubin's (aka Blood libel Barbie) false atrocity story, then refused to apologize for falsely accusing Jews of murdering children.
What kind of scum does that? I mean, if I falsely accused someone of stealing a quarter from a wishing well and then it turned out I was wrong, I would be apologizing over and over. With self-hating Jews like Anna, Barbara Lubin, and Phil, nope. No apologies for false accusations that Jews murder children.
More to the point is that she has no credibility. Someone who spreads false stories, then when caught refuses to apologize cannot be trusted.
In short, you can't trust anything that Anna Baltzer says.
The fact that you endorse an unapologetic spreader of anti-Semitic lies means that you can't be trusted either. But then I guess Kapos of a feather stick together.
Gripping stuff this, false accusations of Jews murdering children and no apology.
Gripping and dishonest.
There was apology. There was apology for ONE story that turned out to be inaccurate. "Jews murdering children"? When did you stop beating your girlfriend, Thom?
For Israelis murdering children and Palestinians murdering children there are whole archives full of data:
Good place to start is http://www.rememberthesechildren.com
Many people trust Anna Baltzer, she calls spade a spade and apologises when she gets info wrong. But you know that, didn't you?
FROM THOM, ABOVE: "Anna Baltzer is one of the people who posted Barbara Lubin's (aka Blood libel Barbie) false atrocity story, then refused to apologize for falsely accusing Jews of murdering children. What kind of scum does that? I mean, if I falsely accused someone of stealing a quarter from a wishing well and then it turned out I was wrong, I would be apologizing over and over."
FROM ME: So Thom is equating the murder of children with the theft of a quarter from a wishing well. Very revealing!
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." – from the Introduction of Darwin's 1871 book, "The Descent Of Man"
Yes, it certainly is revealing that Thom's moral stance extends as far as the accusation of the theft of a Quarter while your's does not even go so far as to apologize for falsely accusing someone for murder.
I'd say you've been weighed, measured and found short, Dicky.
'He had led a hard life. He lost his mother as a child, he avoided his father's deathbed because he didn't want to have words with him, he had lost a son, and by 1850 he'd lost his great political career. Out of that humility, Lincoln was able to reach out to the common man and to the intellectuals, to the rugged west that he personified and to the chattering classes in New York who were stunned to observe his verbal powers in 1860.'
That reflection reminded me of something I read yesterday in a wonderful essay by the wonderful Terry Castle, on a wonderful book – Don Quixote. Castle makes a similar point about Cervantes' reaction to an even harder life:
'One might expect such a man to be embittered—to despise other people. But everyone who met Cervantes seems to have been impressed by his kindness and humor. Cervantes, said the priest who ransomed him, "showed a very special grace in everything." This grace was evident even to the brutal Hassan Pasha. After leading several escape attempts, Cervantes refused, despite the threat of torture, to name any of his conspirators and instead chatted gallantly—and amusingly—with his tormentors. The hardships Cervantes faced seem, paradoxically, to have opened him to the world. (Or opened him further: his curiosity about life was apparently innate.) And it is this openness, finally, that makes him still so valuable now. No contemporary North American reader of Don Quixote can fail to be struck by its surprisingly sympathetic evocation of the world of Islam. The Muslim element is everywhere in Cervantes's novel—for reasons both obvious and profound…
Elsewhere in Don Quixote, Cervantes challenges the crude logic of Western xenophobia. In Part 2 Quixote and Sancho meet up with a band of German pilgrims, one of whom turns out to be Sancho's former friend and neighbor Ricote the Morisco. (The Moriscos were those Muslims left living in Spain after the Christian victory; they were forcibly expelled—on pain of death—by royal decree from 1609 to 1613.) Ricote, a humble shopkeeper, has disguised himself as a pilgrim in order to retrieve a small "treasure" he had to leave behind when he and his family were forced to flee. His wife and daughters are in Algiers; he hopes to settle them in Germany, far from the "terror and fear" they have endured in Spain. His story is a poignant one, the refugee's timeless lament, and Sancho listens sadly, sharing a wineskin with his old friend, until they "go their separate ways." Cervantes never belabors the point, or descends into sentimentality, but offers a moving affirmation of ordinary human ties flourishing in spite of fanaticism.
Finally, one wants both to laugh and to marvel at the purportedly Muslim origins of Don Quixote itself. One of Cervantes's most ingratiating (and postmodern) gambits is to pretend that he is not in fact the real author of the novel but, rather, has simply had it translated from the recovered manuscripts of a mysterious and noble Arab named Cide Hamete Benengeli (which translates roughly as Sir Ahmed Eggplant). Though he has never met Benengeli, or anyone who has, he pays the Arab the most exquisite and elaborate mock homage throughout, a gesture that at this point in history undoubtedly has new and startling pathos.
Cervantes had a faith in conversation, in paying attention to others, in bonding with strangers, in speaking, reading, and writing across all kinds of human barriers. The sharing of stories—stories of real life, not the fabrications of romance—had the power, he grasped, to assuage madness, loneliness, and pain… In the fantasy of shared authorship Cervantes would seem to allegorize a broader vision of human fellowship. Hearing another voice, taking in another's story, is the essential thing—the humanizing component in an otherwise bleak landscape. It saves us from our lunacy and pride, both personal and cultural.'
I have to try harder to put that admirable principle into practice, but I have to admit to finding it dreadfully difficult with some of the other people who comment here. I do wonder if real conversation is possible with them, and how a Cervantes or a Lincoln would approach it. Perhaps 'chatting gallantly and amusingly with his tormentors' is as close as we can get.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200401/castle
real conversation is not possible when so many attempt to transfer nazi type actions with Israeli motives. That's just disguised antisemitism and there is no reason to discuss anything with an antisemite.
That is why none of us actually engage in conversation with Philip,Rowan & Martin, Eva, LD, Joachim and several others who lap up the shit Philip dispences.
Most of us merely point out the insanity of their opinion as well as counter their invented 'facts'.
@Eva Smeghead
Anna Baltzer never apologized for falsely accusing IDF soldiers of murdering children. She said that her original statement was not true, but saying that your information was incorrect is not the same as apologizing for spreading lies in the first place.
If someone accused you of murdering five children, then weeks later said, "actually, Eva didn't murder those five children", would you consider that an apology for making the false accusation in the first place?
If you think she apologized, post a link to it.
@Dick3870
Wow, Dick finally had a thought of his own, and it died of loneliness.
For Dick, and the other mentally challenged readers I will break it down.
The more heinous the accusation, the more moral obligation there is to apologize if it turns out you made it falsely. I am moral enough that I would apologize for falsely accusing someone of even the tiniest crime. Phil Weiss, Barbara Lubin and Anna Baltzer are immoral enough that they did not apologize for falsely accusing someone of perhaps the most heinous crime known to man.
I applaud Thom and his moral stance. I shit on Eva and Dicky.
The Iraq war and associated lies certainly gave rise to a much more cynical view of US foreign policy by the civilian population. How those returning from combat view and react to this movement is hard to say, but I expect there to be many passionate advocates among them who adopt a simlair critical position.
spuxxx: you are right.
Eva you are honest, and all your comments over the past year have enriched and informed us.
Glen, thanks for sharing, very thoughtful.
chris berel, you are a dick, a circumcised one sans sensitivity, a piece of flaccid meat. But worst: you are stupid, ignorant, and eat your own shit. Certainly nobody else here does, except your habara buddies–like thom.
I wish on you what you wish on the world outside that you hate.