Today's speech from President Obama was kind of like his presidency so far: at least 75% impressive, heartening, and inspiring to watch...and about 25% really disturbing. He has been rightly applauded for decisively rejecting the ludicrous fear-mongering around the transferring of Gitmo detainees to American prisons. He also made some great statements about transparency (information should be released unless there's a compelling reason not to), about presidential power (decisions on detainees shouldn't rest with one person), and about why Gitmo makes us less safe.

But he also, for I believe the first time, explicitly made the case for a system of indefinite detention for certain detainees - a truly radical proposal, made even more insidious by its couching in soaring rhetoric about the Constitution. And he pledged that no one who could be dangerous to the U.S. will be released - something he can't personally guarantee unless he retains the power to be the sole arbiter of certain detainees' fates. So here are some questions I hope someone will ask the President and/or his representatives as soon as possible:

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-About military commissions, you say:

They allow for the protection of sensitive sources and methods of intelligence-gathering; they allow for the safety and security of participants; and for the presentation of evidence gathered from the battlefield that cannot always be effectively presented in federal courts.

Could you describe exactly what sources and methods could not be adequately protected in a federal court in, for instance, an in camera hearing with a judge? How would participants not be safe and secure in a federal court? And could you describe exactly the kind of evidence that cannot be effectively presented in federal court and why not? And how does all this jibe with your assertion that the nation's courts are quite capable of trying terrorists and have done so in the past?

-Could you please describe in detail what legal framework you envision that could make indefinite detention of people of your choosing Constitutionally and legally permissible?

-You pledged in your speech that any system of indefinite detention would be subject to judicial and congressional review. What exactly would be the system of judicial review?

-Do you intend to continue to assert the state secrets privilege during this review process, and if so, how can we be assured that the judge(s) will have adequate evidence to evaluate the case?

-You say there will be Congressional oversight. What form will this take? Under the Bush administration, Congressional "oversight" meant informing 4 senior members of Congress of a decision, who were then not allowed to discuss the information with anyone, not even their staffs. Will you devise a system of Congressional oversight that allows members of Congress to make informed judgments about your proposals and have some recourse by which to protest those proposals?

-You've pledged that no one who is a danger to America will be released. If judicial or Congressional review finds you don't have the grounds to hold a detainee you believe to be dangerous, will you disregard those findings?

-You spoke of our deepest values in your speech. Isn't habeas corpus, with us since the Magna Carta, the fundamental basis of a free society? And in order to keep your pledge not to release anyone you deem dangerous, won't you have to dispense with habeas corpus?

-Your point about the need for the government to keep certain information and evidence secret is well-taken. But in the case, for instance, of the photos of detainee abuse the release of which you are now opposing, aren't you essentially asking the American people just to trust your assertions that these are photos of isolated incidents for which people have already been held accountable? Why should we, when we've been repeatedly lied to about such issues in the past?

-If your answer is that you are fashioning a way for Congress and the courts to review your decisions on these matters, can you give details on what that oversight mechanism will be?

-You said in your speech that your administration is nearing completion of a thorough review of use of the state secrets privilege, which you say you want to be limited. If so, why have you sought actively to have several lawsuits dismissed under that privilege, instead of asking for a continuance while you finish your review - a continuance the plaintiffs were happy to give you?

-If one of your concerns about looking into the actions of the previous administration is that inevitable partisan rancor will obstruct your legislative goals, why do you want the inquiries of Congressional committees - all run by Democrats - to continue, instead of supporting an independent commission that would take the investigations out of the hands of partisan political players?
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One final thought on these matters. I think it's a little crazy that, in a speech in which he so eloquently laid out why Guantanamo is bad for our national security precisely because it undermines our values, President Obama called out those of us who advocate for full disclosure and transparency as absolutists who would put transparency over national security. We advocate for getting all the information out because we believe that knowing what our government is doing - or in the cases where we can't know everything, ensuring that there is oversight of the actions of the executive - is precisely what keeps us safe.

When Obama makes his argument that, for instance, the detainee abuse photos shouldn't be released because they'll inflame sentiment abroad, one of the reasons this doesn't scan is that people abroad already know what we do. Thousands of people from all over the Middle East (mostly Iraq and Afghanistan) have gone through our detention system, from Abu Ghraib to Bagram to Guantanamo to the CIA black sites. The only people who don't know what's going on in our detention system are Americans. And we can't advocate for our government to stop doing things that hurt our national security (by, for instance, cycling thousands of people through our detention sites) if we don't know about them.

The most disturbing revelations to date about torture under the Bush administration are contained in the Senate Armed Services Committee report released last night:

It's not that the Bush administration adopted torture tactics without any serious examination of their origins, usefulness, or past use.  That sounds like pretty much every other project of the Bush administration: undertaken with lots of ideology, little factual basis, and arrogance.  Iraq, anyone?

Nor is it that the torture techniques were planned and readied, perhaps even used, before the Justice Department memos declared them legal.  The memos were so obviously an attempt to legalize certain techniques, not an independent assessment, that one assumed those particular techniques were already in use, or at the very least on deck.

Rather, it's the evidence referenced in the WaPo article linked above:

By late 2001, counterterrorism officials were becoming frustrated by the paucity of useful leads coming from interrogations -- a meager showing that was linked, according to one Army major, to interrogators' insistence on "establishing a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq," the report said.

Mark Benjamin at Salon fleshes that out:

In September, the Army dispatched a team of psychiatrists and psychologists to Fort Bragg, N.C., to learn how to reverse-engineer the so-called SERE tactics for interrogations on real detainees at Guantánamo. One member of the team sent to Fort Bragg described a specific reason for the pressure from above to get tough on detainees at Guantánamo: Iraq.

"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Army psychiatrist Maj. Paul Burney is quoted in the Senate report as saying about Guantánamo. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

I have to say that this allegation is darker than any that had crossed even my suspicious mind.  No justification for torture coming out of the Bush administration was acceptable...but there's something particularly horrifying about the idea that they may have pushed harsh tactics specifically to make their fanciful link between Iraq and al-Qaeda and thereby push the case for war with Iraq.  They needn't have believed these would be false confessions - perhaps they had all genuinely convinced themselves that there was a link and these detainees must know about it.

But this also calls into question in my mind one of the most prevalent defenses of the Bush administration's actions.  In the words of the Times,

Whether the same information could have been acquired using the traditional, noncoercive methods that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military have long used is impossible to say, and former Bush administration officials say they did not have the luxury of time to develop a more patient approach, given that they had intelligence warnings of further attacks.

The defense ("We were being barraged with terror warnings!  We didn't have the luxury of following the rules!") is invalid on its face - the rules are for precisely such times.  But the evidence about looking for an Iraq-Qaeda link suggests that a) fear of an attack might not have been the only, or even primary, reason for engaging in the tactics, and b)some of that fear may have in fact have been generated by the information garnered by the torture itself.

Consider this from a piece by Daily News Washington reporter James Gordon Meek:

Another retired counterterrorism official who read reports when they arrived in Washington detailing the confessions of [Khalid Shaik] Mohammed, known as "KSM," said most of the information he coughed up during the waterboarding sessions involved things he thought his CIA-contract interrogators already knew, or were just his ideas for mayhem.

"Most of the (cables) were reports of actions that KSM was only remotely thinking of undertaking - they didn't even reach the planning stage," the retired counterterrorism official said. "So it's a bit of a stretch for Bush administration officials to say these were attacks they had disrupted."
...
A third senior former counterterrorism official who worked at the CIA and read the reports of KSM's grilling said there was "a lot of speculation" at Langley about possible plots, based on what the Al Qaeda "military commander" said during the waterboarding sessions.

"Just after he was caught, I remember the warning that came out about flights to and from the Pacific rim," the former operative recalled.

One wonders if we're looking at something of a self-perpetuating feedback loop: we torture people to get information about al Qaeda and Iraq, they cough up all kinds of dubious stuff under torture - plots they'd vaguely hatched in their own heads, say - which makes its way back to Washington, upping the fear of more terror attacks, and then more torture is ordered.  This would seem to be yet another argument against using torture: it's not just that information given under duress is often false - but that information then has repercussions when officials treat it as a genuine threat.

In any case, this all suggests that the timeline we got from the Armed Services report on interrogation ought to be compared to a timeline of threats and responses to those threats in late 2001/early 2002.  How much of the "intelligence" that formed the justification for so many drastic Bush administration actions, and fueled the culture of fearthat allowed those actions, was the result of torture?

Justice Department officials authorize waterboarding.

Waterboarding used 266 times on just 2 detainees.

Attorney General says waterboarding is torture.

Torture is illegal.

But White House chief of staff rules out prosecution of any kind for the people who authorized the torture?

As the AIG fiasco continues to fuel conversations about greed, wealth, and the intersection of public good and private business, this NYT piece today is worth noting, on the push from some New York state lawmakers to address the economic crisis in part by raising taxes on the wealthy:

It is perhaps the most potent argument offered by those who oppose increasing the income tax on wealthy New Yorkers: If you raise it, they will flee.

That case has been made repeatedly by Gov. David A. Paterson, who says that higher taxes should be a last resort. It has been featured in a campaign by Taxpayers for an Affordable New York, a coalition of real estate and business interests. And it has been on the mind of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg , New York City's richest person, who said in a radio interview, "You can't tax too much those that can move."

Yet there is surprisingly little evidence to support the proposition that rich New Yorkers would bolt if forced to pay higher income taxes. Though tracking the movement of wealthy taxpayers from state to state is difficult, experts on public finance and migration say they have yet to document a substantial "rich drain" in states that have raised income taxes in recent years.

"Surprisingly little evidence"? I, for one, am not surprised. I've thought this argument was bull from the start. In fact, I find it a surprisingly weird, warped perception on the part of some of our state and city leaders of why people like to live in New York and New York City. It ain't because it's cheap.

In fact, it's already cheaper to live just about anywhere else in the country, if not the world. You want cheap, you move to Buffalo and get the house you've always wanted. You want one of the most extensive mass transit systems in the world (so you never have to own a car); the greatest and densest concentration of art, music, film, museums, and great and exotic food in the world; the inspiring architecture (some of it); the truly impressive public park system; a cab whenever you want one (though admittedly never when you need one); 311; the brooklyn bridge, the statue of liberty; the diversity, the energy, the crush of humanity outside your door...you want all that? Yeah, you gotta pay for it.

New York Republican leaders have complained that any tax increase would force New Yorkers to pay the highest income tax rates in the country. That may be true (though there are many many poor New Yorkers who pay no income tax at all), and my reply is, "Why wouldn't we?" I live in the greatest city in the world - I would expect each of us to pay for it according to our means.

Of course I want to have as much of my money as possible - but then again, it's not all really my money. I earn money at work, but in order to get to work, I utilize mass transit. Or sometimes I ride my bike, which is made much easier by roads that are kept up and bike lanes that allow me passage. If my bike gets stolen, I have recourse to our city's police force and court system. If I get run down on my bike, there are many publicly-funded hospitals nearby that will treat me. And though I'm fortunate to have employer-provided health insurance, I would gladly instead pay more in taxes to be covered by national health insurance of some kind. The city housing department recently inspected my building and got my landlord to make it safer, and my neighborhood is kept vibrant and diverse by lots of subsidized housing, and dotted with small city-supported community gardens that make the area greener and more social. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Bridge doesn't fall down, the tap water and restaurant food don't kill me, my neighborhood is safe, and this summer I look forward to public art projects and music and cultural events filling the city's innumerable parks. I suppose I could pay for each of those things individually somehow, but it seems easier to have it taken out of my paycheck every couple weeks, doesn't it?

Of course, I'm nowhere near the tax brackets that would be seeing these proposed tax increases. But like any American, I harbor dreams of being there someday. And if I do get there, it will be partly because of the employment and advancement opportunities available to me in New York, and I will gladly plow some more of my money back into the city I love.

I agree with Joe Biden - if you love your city, your state, your country, then love the public services they provide and which rely on your support via taxes. Absolutely fight for your money to be better spent, via the ballot box and via activism. But all I can say is, if you make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, but New York City isn't worth a little more tax money to you...you don't deserve this city.

And it's the first good news in a while. Obama of course signed those pretty decisive and heartening executive orders his first day in office - ordering the closure of Guantanamo, the suspension of kangaroo trials there, and the shutting down of CIA black sites around the world. But since then his Justice Department has taken some shockingly Cheney-ite positions on terror, detention and civil liberties issues: invoking the state secrets privilege, as the previous administration did, to try to shut down a lawsuit from former detainees; upholding the Bush position that detainees at Bagram in Afghanistan have no right to challenge their detentions; and working to shield Bush's NSA warrantless wiretapping program from judicial review.

Civil liberties advocates, many of whom expected that Obama would not fulfill their every wish, have sounded nonetheless genuinely taken aback by the whole-hog adoption of Bush legal positions - especially because, in both the state secrets and the Bagram cases, the government's position was nothing more than a couple of sentences submitted to a court affirming support for the previous administration's position. The administration has not offered any deeper explanations for its stances.

But there's good news today. Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, the last "enemy combatant" detained without charges within the United States - and the subject of a great Jane Mayer piece in this week's New Yorker - will face terrorism charges in a civilian court:

...the decision is a demonstration that Obama administration officials believe the nation's civilian courts are capable of handling some terrorism cases.

Such a belief ought to elicit a collective "Duh!" from everyone - as civilian courts have always handled terrorism cases. But note the word "some." In what we're now coming to recognize is a classic Obama move, the decision leaves the door open on the thorniest question:

The decision also would allow the Obama administration to avoid taking a position for the time being on whether a president may detain legal residents indefinitely without trial.

Still, this is really great news. The Obama administration may not be saying that legal residents can't be detained indefinitely without trial...but at least it's saying this detainee won't be. One hopes the latter is a step toward the former.

Now, there's no question this case is a tough one, but it bears emphasizing that the problems the government may face in prosecuting Marri do not demonstrate the inherent problems of prosecuting suspected terrorists in civilian courts, but rather the obstacles to such prosecution introduced into the equation by the Bush administration. According to Mayer, government lawyers who were preparing to prosecute al-Marri felt they had a pretty "solid" case...but then the Bush administration stepped in days before arguments were to begin in June 2003 and transferred Marri to the Navy brig in South Carolina.

Before agreeing to transfer Marri to the brig, however, the presiding judge in the case ruled that the White House would be barred from charging Marri again with the same crimes. In legal jargon, the original charges were "dismissed with prejudice," to protect Marri's right not to be placed in "double jeopardy." As a result, if the Obama Administration decides to charge him in the criminal system now, it has to bring a different set of charges, unless Marri's lawyers offer a deal. [James] Benjamin, the former [federal] prosecutor, insists that "there is a whole bag of tools for dealing with truly bad guys--there are many other statutes that the government could explore, including material support of terrorism, conspiracy charges, and mail- and wire-fraud charges." But, he suggests, by taking Marri outside the regular criminal system "there's no doubt they made all kinds of problems for themselves."

This is a point that's usually lost in debates over Bush terror policies. The argument against indefinite detentions and torture isn't that they degrade our moral standing and poison our national principles even if they keep us safer. It's that they degrade our moral standing and poison our national principles AND they make us LESS safe. But it's clear that part of the Bush administration's rationale for breaking free of the criminal justice system was precisely to insure that the possibility of a traditional trial would never be an option. Writes Mayer,

Andrew McCarthy, a former federal terrorism prosecutor who writes for National Review, defends Marri's transfer to the brig. "Sure, the criminal-justice system, by permitting Marri's pretrial detention, neutralized him, at least for a time," he says. "But there's always the chance the court will release a defendant on bail." Moreover, he argues that open criminal trials run many risks, including the accidental, or oblique, disclosure of classified information. It's also unclear how to handle witnesses who may themselves be terrorists: they may demand immunity before they will talk. Or it may be that their testimony was obtained by unsavory means, which could scuttle a conviction.

Certainly it's no surprise that there are many prosecutors who feel that defendants' rights ought to be curtailed. But logic like McCarthy's is cruelly twisted: evidence obtained by torture is inadmissable, but rather than not torture people, we'd better just forgo trials altogether and lock up all the suspects forever.

More broadly, the argument from McCarthy and all those who insist civilian courts can't handle terrorism suspects is, at its root: We can't try them because there's a chance we'll lose. But this is an argument that can be made about any trial. It's a short hop skip and a jump from making this argument about terrorism prosecutions to making it about all cases involving crimes we find particularly reprehensible. After all, we could try a case against a suspected child molester, but wouldn't our children be safer if we just locked the suspect up - you know, just to be safe?

If the lawyers and politicians and pundits and former Bush officials want to make the argument to the American people that the criminal justice system needs to be modified so that in some cases, the government can substitute its own judgment for a fair trial, they should make that argument. How anyone can possibly have faith that the government "knows" that some of its detainees are "bad guys" - given how much else the government has "known" over the last eight years - is beyond me. But hey, let's have the debate.

But let's not pretend that terrorism cases are inherently harder to prosecute in civilian courts than other cases. I don't like the idea of trying and releasing someone who may be guilty or dangerous any more than the next guy. But if that happens, let's not make the mistake of blaming Obama for giving them trials. If police misconduct in a murder case taints the evidence, prosecutors don't get just to keep the suspect locked up for fear of losing their case. If we have to let dangerous men go free, it will be because of the poor judgment, bad decisions, and extralegal shenanigans of the Bush administration.

Back in 2005, a then-little-known Harvard professor and bankruptcy law expert named Elizabeth Warren was feverishly doing all the media she could, telling everyone who would listen (and not many people were) that the "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act" being considered in Congress would be a disaster for middle- and working-class Americans. The bill made it harder to file for bankruptcy, on the premise that banks and credit card companies were being massively scammed by profligate Americans who overspent their means and then declared bankruptcy to escape their ill-accrued debts.

I distinctly remember the distressed tone of Warren's voice; the bill was headed inexorably toward passage, and she had years of data and research demonstrating that its premise was false. In fact, the vast majority of bankruptcies are caused by medical catastrophe, job loss and other phenomena outside the control of those who file for it...and the bill made it harder for those people to escape crushing debt as well, not just the handful of scofflaws.

But Warren (who fortunately for all of us now chairs the Congressional oversight panel for the financial bailout fund, or TARP) and her evidence were up against one of the most surefire political platforms we have in this country: keeping rewards out of the hands of the undeserving. Wrote Warren after the bill was passed:

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has said that millions of Americans are bankrupt or near-bankrupt because "they run up huge bills and then expect society to pay for them." He is joined by the federal judge Edith Jones--long rumored to be a potential Bush appointee to the Supreme Court--who has written (with the law professor Todd J. Zywicki) that "bankruptcy is increasingly seen as a big 'game,' with the losers being those who live within their means, while the bankrupts pursue more interesting and carefree lives."

This notion - that most people in financial trouble have brought it on themselves - is resurfacing to some extent in the current discussion over the Obama administration's foreclosure relief and prevention plan. The public radio program Marketplace last week was among many outlets to note the outburst from CNBC's Rick Santelli while reporting from the Chicago Board of Trade. After complaining that Obama's plan rewards people who took out mortgages they knew they couldn't afford, Santelli shouted to the traders:

How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise their hand!

A big chorus of "No!" was the reply.

 
Marketplace also quoted a Chicago homeowner named Mare Runge, who can't sell or refinance her home in the current climate and isn't eligible for government help:

Those of us who did buy within our budget and bought something we could afford, we're the ones who are getting screwed now.

"Screwed" strikes me as a bit of a stretch. I mean, if I was always prudent with my food budget, and now because of the sinking economy I can't eat all the kinds of food I want, I hardly think the government is "screwing" me by giving food stamps to people with no food, regardless of why they're hungry. But I digress.

Many of us, perhaps especially in this country, seem hard-wired to hate the idea of society helping those who don't "deserve" it. Ronald Reagan's welfare queen still looms large in our national consciousness. And behavioral economics experiments bear this out - the New Yorker's finance columnist James Surowiecki describes the principle of "strong reciprocity":

Apparently, people would rather throw away money than let someone else walk away with too much. ... Essentially, people are willing to pay to punish those they think are free-riding or acting unfairly, even when doing so brings them no material benefits.

Even though it has been noted time and again that foreclosures will affect everyone in their neighborhood and, by extension, everyone in the nation (President Obama has repeatedly invoked the analogy of the fire at your neighbor's house - you help put it out even if they started it by smoking in bed or being careless with the stove, because the fire could spread), many are made profoundly uncomfortable by the idea that the government may help people who caused their own misfortune.

Indeed, some people clearly feel so strongly about this that, whether it be welfare under Reagan or foreclosure help under Obama, they appear ready to deny help to everyone, rather than risk that anyone might exploit the system or be unfairly rewarded. They don't articulate it this way, because it sounds heartless, but that's the only airtight way to prevent all unfair help. It's like refusing to grant any sick days to employees, because some of them might call in sick when in fact they're at the beach. One of the philosophical differences in approaching the needy - a difference that doesn't always fall neatly along party lines, as evidenced by the overwhelmingly bipartisan approval of the bankruptcy bill - is between "Better that some people who genuinely need help are denied in order to be sure the unworthy aren't rewarded" versus "Better that some unworthy people are rewarded so that all the genuinely needy have easy access to aid."

Marketplace followed up the segment above with a refreshing conversation with Randy Cohen, author of the New York Times Magazine's Ethicist column, who had the following to say about the outrage at perceived unfairness in government help:

It's an understandable feeling, but it's a poor guide to public policy. Once you start conjuring up this Victorian notion of the undeserving poor. Look, we help people who make mistakes all the time. When someone goes to the emergency room, the doctors don't question their moral worth, they make a medical decision. We send the fire department to someone's house without asking why did their house catch fire? What it is to live in a community is to shoulder the burden of responding to the needs of those around you, without making moral judgments.

One of the glaring contradictions of the conservative political and moral environment that's held sway in this country over the last three decades or so is that for all the talk on the right about the importance of "community" (especially "small towns") to the heart of America, the "culture of personal responsibility" or "ownership society" pushed by the Republican Party is at odds with the idea of community. Just look at the language from Hatch and Jones and Santelli and Runge: is there any question that the insistence that each of us alone is responsible for our own successes and failures in fact breeds suspicion, mistrust and bitterness amongst neighbors? As Randy Cohen articulates, you can't have a strong community if each person disavows any debt to his neighbors for his success and any obligation to them in their failures.

And community is hard work - it requires sacrifice and, as Cohen puts it, the will to push aside our lesser selves:

If I've played by the rules, if I've led a frugal life, it's hard not to resent the people who have [not] done so and are now people helped, at my expense, in part. We should recognize that those feelings are also not that which is best about us. We should look to the better angels of our nature.

Who better to get us to do that than Mr. Better Angels himself, President Obama? His "house fire" analogy for the foreclosure crisis is a good start - it gets us to consider the well-being of ourselves as a larger community.

But to circle back in conclusion to Elizabeth Warren and her data, the truth is that while over-consumption - i.e., living beyond one's means - is an issue, it is hardly the root of our woes:

The over-consumption story dominates every discussion of the financial condition of America's families, but when all the changes in family spending over the past generation are added up, a very different picture emerges. Families are spending less on luxuries and more on the basics of being middle-class. Even with two people in the work force, today's families trail those of a generation ago in the struggle to make ends meet--to pay for their homes, health insurance, transportation, and child care.

But the new family budget is notable for another reason: it is far more deeply leveraged. A generation ago, the one-income family committed about 54 percent of its pay to the basics--housing, health insurance, transportation, and taxes. That is, the one-income family spent about half its income to make the "nut"--the basic expenses that must be paid even if someone gets sick or loses a job. Today, these basic expenses, including child care so that both parents can work, consume 75 percent of the family's combined income. With 75 percent of income earmarked for fixed expenses, today's family has no margin for error. There is no way to cut back if one person's working hours are cut or if the other gets laid off. There is no room in the budget if someone needs to take a few months off to care for Grandma, or if someone hurts his back and can't work. The modern American family is walking on a high wire without a net; they pray there won't be any wind.

And Warren has a fascinating suggestion for one reason the over-consumption myth persists:

Politics and ideology help to sell the over-consumption myth, but perhaps it also survives because it is comforting. The families who fall into financial ruin are ordinary. Their circumstances are ordinary: job loss, medical problems, and family breakups are cited in nearly 90 percent of bankruptcies. Perhaps the over-consumption myth is a prayer. It nourishes the idea that families who have lost their financial footing are different from us. If we can believe that those in serious trouble are morally suspect, it is easier to glance away from the dangers of everyday life. Those of us who clip grocery coupons, who would never buy $200 sneakers, and who always buy in bulk are surely protected from the sudden jolt that sends people reeling out of the middle class. Thus we avoid that terrifying moment of connection with a person caught in a financial disaster, that frightening realization: there but for the grace of God go I.

This is the very heart of why we have communities, why we have a social safety net, why so many societies have decided to participate in a welfare state to a greater (Scandinavia) or lesser (the U.S.) extent: we accept our inherent vulnerability to the vicissitudes of life. It's counterintuitive, but the hope and the strength we need to weather America's current troubles may in fact come from embracing that vulnerability. For too many years, our nation has pursued a philosophy that we were better off not needing other nations...but we've been less noticeably adhering to a philosophy that each of us is better off when we don't need other people.

But if we want the things President Obama has promised us - peace, safety, health care, green energy - we're going to have to not just grudgingly accept that some of our hard-earned money will be going to other people and places and projects, but to celebrate and be liberated by that use of our money. Keeping every penny of our own money from those we suspect might be undeserving isn't going to save us in these tough times. But if we all put our pennies together, we can build a net to catch any and all of us - deserving or not - when we get blown off that high wire.

...but that hasn't stopped most media outlets from referring to this episode as anything from a blow to a catastrophe for the Obama administration. Call me a political naif, but I don't see it. This makes Gregg look like an idiot, but otherwise it looks like once again Obama has extended the hand of bipartisanship and had it slapped away.

A couple caveats: I have no idea why Obama wanted Gregg in the first place. No one seemed able to explain why the guy who a few years ago voted to abolish the Commerce Department was the best pick to lead it. Also, Gregg's withdrawal is clearly bad news in the sense that the department is still without a leader, and it shows that Obama may have once again misjudged the magnanimity of a potential GOP partner.

But honestly - what was Gregg thinking? You take a job in the President's cabinet, and you get to argue your positions vigorously...but in the end, you carry out the President's directives.

It strikes me that Republicans have decided that bipartisanship means "The President has no principles." Inviting Republicans to the negotiating table on the stimulus, offering them tons of concessions (even when the American people have given Democrats overwhelming control of the entire government) - that's not bipartisanship. Bipartisanship is letting the Republicans write half the bill - or perhaps more. Inviting Republicans into his cabinet isn't bipartisanship. Bipartisanship is letting Republicans run their cabinet agencies according to their own ideology.

Personally, I see this Gregg episode as reflecting well on Obama. If Gregg thought he'd be able to do whatever he wanted at Commerce, then he thought he'd be able to run roughshod over a weak president, whose desire for bipartisanship trumps his principles. Obama balked, stood strong, and Gregg had to withdraw. I'm not by any means suggesting this is what Obama regularly does. I'm among those who thinks the concessions to the GOP have been overmuch at times, in terms of what's best for the country.

But in this case, it seems that's what Obama did. And I think it's great, not just because I prefer his views to Judd Gregg's, but because hopefully it signals that Obama is starting to recognize that bipartisanship - while still a great long-term goal which I hope he continues to work on - is not as important right now as delivering on the policy goals which the American people elected him to achieve.

A few days ago, a TPM reader noted that the Collins-Nelson proposals for spending cuts in the stimulus bill were incoherent: "They're not offering a comprehensive or coherent approach to stimulus spending. They haven't established a fixed standard, against which they're measuring each item."

Just watched Ben Nelson on Rachel's show, and she pressed him on just this issue...and was confronted with incoherence. There'll be a transcript up tomorrow, but here's the short version:

RACHEL: Why did you cut billions in state and education funding from the package?

NELSON: We wanted to make sure this was the most stimulative package possible.

RACHEL: But surely cutting aid to states, which will cause them to lay people off, is anti-stimulative - as is cutting aid to build schools.

NELSON: We're giving them lots of money - way more than they would have gotten otherwise.

RACHEL: Right, but because of your intervention, the bill has less money for states and education.

NELSON: Ah, well you see, we needed to get some Republican votes.

RACHEL: Ok, but you agree it's less stimulative than it was before.

NELSON: No, no, it's very stimulative.

If you can make sense of that, you're a better analyst than I. Keep in mind that Nelson himself said he would vote against the bill without some cuts...but the only concrete reason he can give for that is that he needed some Republican votes. Is he saying he would have voted against the bill simply because no Republicans would vote with him? Now, that's commitment to bipartisanship.

Just a quick thought. I've heard some pundits on the TV talking about how quickly and eagerly Republicans have adapted to their opposition role. And they are doing a damn good job of it. But this should be no surprise. Even when they were in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, the GOP operated as an opposition party. Right up to the end, they were selling themselves as the party that would liberate America from the tax-and-spend, morally bankrupt liberal elite. Remember Mitt Romney's surreal RNC speech just this past September?

Last week, the Democratic convention talked about change. But what do you think? Is Washington now, liberal or conservative? Let me ask you some questions.

Is a Supreme Court decision liberal or conservative that awards Guantanamo terrorists with constitutional rights? It's liberal.

Is a government liberal or conservative that puts the interests of the teachers union ahead of the needs of our children? It's liberal.

Is a Congress liberal or conservative that stops nuclear power plants and off-shore drilling, making us more and more dependent on Middle Eastern tyrants? It's liberal.

Is government spending, putting aside inflation, liberal or conservative if it doubles since 1980? It's liberal.

We need change all right: change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.

(APPLAUSE)

We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington: Throw out the big government liberals and elect John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Now, finally, the Republicans are in a place they're comfortable: they don't actually have to govern (which is good, because they don't believe in government), and they can attack the big spending liberals who hold the power...and they don't even have to play make-believe to do it!

It's only week three of the Obama administration, so I find it kind of amusing when news anchors say things like, "Has the Obama administration lost control of [insert agenda item]?"

That said...it's hard to deny that the Obama administration appears to have lost control of the conversation on the stimulus bill...if indeed it ever had such control.

I work in a newsroom, and we have a bank of televisions tuned to several news channels. And every night, all night, they carry discussions of what's wrong with the Obama/Democratic stimulus bill. Sometimes there's a Democrat there, more often a Democratic pundit, who says the economy is in crisis and something needs to be done.

But here's the thing: I'm a pretty informed guy. I consume news voraciously. I know something needs to be done. I don't know why this particular stimulus package deserves my support. Frankly, I don't even know exactly what's in it. I know what Republicans want to be in the bill. I know what Republicans don't like about the bill. But I have yet to see or hear a Democratic member of Congress out on the news shows explaining what exactly is in the bill and why these specific things will be good for us Americans.

I understand that Obama wants to remain open to changes advocated by Republicans. But you've got to sell your version first.

Working in a newsroom, I understand this isn't all Democrats' fault. Media will go for controversy by default. When a plan comes out, the first thing a producer asks is, "Ok, who opposes this plan?" And the Republicans are more than happy to oblige.

And, let me add that I think I understand Obama's behind-the-scenes strategy and it has potential. By wining and dining Republicans at the White House, he is trying to change the tone, make Republican moderates feel comfortable working with him. This could yield some results, as personal relationships in Washington count for a lot. Did you see Susan Collins beaming on her way out of a WH meeting today? She told reporters she and Obama had a substantive discussion, and she went on to name a couple of perfectly reasonable things about which she had concerns (e.g., State Department upgrades - sure, could create a couple jobs, but shouldn't it go through the normal appropriations process?).

Changing the tone, and the benefits it could bring, are going to take a long time after so many years of partisan hatred. But unilateral disarmament is one thing when it comes to White House cocktail parties - quite another when it comes to shaping public opinion. If this stimulus is full of things on which Obama campaigned, we need to know about it, so we can embrace it. The perception of this bill when it's passed may well have an impact on how well it's perceived to work down the road. I don't want to feel like we as a country are grudgingly accepting this bill. If it doesn't work as well as expected, people may start remembering all those Republicans they saw on the TV warning them about it (and the fact that their warnings were intellectually dishonest won't matter by then).

A few odds and ends that are on my mind today:

I'm wondering if Obama has a better chance of getting some Republican support on other, future legislation than he does on the stimulus bill. After all, there are some Republicans who are not neo-cons and may be up for trying some new approaches in foreign policy, even some Republicans who may get on board with healthcare reform if they can be convinced it's not socialism. But if there's one thing every single elected Republican agrees on - indeed, the only principle the Republican party has left - it's that government is bad, tax cuts are good. So essentially, right out of the box, Obama is asking them to compromise on a bill that, at its core, goes against their one bedrock principle.

It's as if Democrats were asked to...to... I've been thinking about this all day, and you know what? I couldn't think of a damn thing Democrats wouldn't be willing to compromise on. In Glenn's words,

It's very hard to find any virtuous attribute of the contemporary Republican Party, but one thing that can be said for them is that -- unlike Democrats, whose overarching desire in life is to please the needy harmony fetishists by adopting as many GOP views as possible -- Republicans are willing to incur criticisms by opposing what they oppose and supporting what they support.

Ok - I've got one: Social Security. When Bush tried to privatize it right after the 2004 election, the Democrats blocked him. Any others? Seriously, let me know.

Ok, so the Dems have extended the hand of compromise and its been bitten. Can we get on with the people's business now? To quote Glenn once more,

This is what happens every single time: the Democrats do everything possible to "accommodate" the Republican position and then get attacked anyway (they voted in large numbers for the Iraq War in and then got attacked for being soft on Terror in 2002; they voted for virtually every Bush "Terrorism" policy and the same thing happened, etc.). Here, they did everything possible to change their bill to please Republicans and nothing is happening except full-scale GOP opposition accompanied by a constant barrage of GOP attacks against them as big-spending, reckless, wealth-transferring liberals.

The Dems still have a chance, now that it's been proven for the umpteenth time that the current GOP is not interested in compromise, to make this stimulus into the best bill it can be, rather than a watered-down version designed to attract nonexistent GOP support. I've said it before, I'll say it again: post-partisan does not necessarily mean bi-partisan. Obama has repeatedly said he'll take good ideas no matter where they come from, a welcome change from the last eight years. He has not said, I will take ideas equally from both sides of the aisle, no matter what they are, mush them up into a bill, and call it centrism. That's how most mainstream media, egged on by Republicans, have interpreted what Obama said, but I really really hope that's not what he meant.

The key phrase is "good ideas." The current Washington GOP has yet to show that they have any. Obama sitting down repeatedly with GOP leaders and listening thoughtfully to their ideas is post-partisan even if he decides they're not good ideas.

***

A friend writes me, in re the family planning funding that was removed from the stimulus after Republican objections,

Were family planning advocates played? ... Is it a good thing that the lesson was learned this early? Might they rise to the challenge of real politics and establish political clout?

I think family planning advocates may sort of been played. There has been some suggestion that the family planning money was a rope-a-dope tactic - i.e., Dems knew it would catch Republicans' eye and then they could show bipartisan good faith by scrapping it. If true, I think the problem with this is two-fold. One, as I detailed above, Republicans don't respond to good faith bipartisan gestures; they're not going to "appreciate" the Dems' willingness to cave...they'll just see it as weakness.

Two, if the intended audience of the move was not Congressional Republicans but the wider public - to demonstrate bipartisanship in hopes of painting Republicans as partisan obstructionists - then I think Democrats have once again mis-judged public perception. Canceling the family planning money just makes them look 1)weak, and 2)once again, ashamed of their support for family planning.

So I hope family planning advocates will get in there and help the newly-powerful Dems articulate a strong defense of their family planning goals, so they can stop guiltily slipping funding into other bills and looking morally ambivalent.

***

Finally, since we're on the subject today of how Reps and Dems approach politics differently...remember how when Bush would sign some horrific bill into law and all the people on the right would cheer and hail the President for his action?

Yeah, we have a problem with that on the left. Acknowledging that we are all deeply traumatized from decades of Democratic betrayals, that it is our job as liberal advocates to hold Obama's feet to the fire, that it does no one any good to relax into triumphalism...acknowledging all that, reading all the liberal blogs and news sites that I do, I find myself on a regular basis nearly as depressed as I was when Bush was still president. Here's TPM's big headline today:

Obama Signs Ledbetter Act - But What About Broader Pay Equity Bill?

I mean, I'm in favor of more pay equity bills as much as the next guy. But even as the ink of Obama's signature is drying on this bill we've been fighting for for the last year or more, we're already on to another, better bill that's languishing. And look - I think it's good. We can't let our energy flag even for a moment at this pivotal transition.

It's just...I spoke to a friend last night who doesn't follow the news or blogs as obsessively as I do, and she's still totally high on Obama's win and all the great things he's signing and pushing Congress on. I envy that, I really do. I'm exhausted already.

Josh says just what I've been thinking this past week:

I hear a lot of talk about whether Obama's governing approach can be 'bipartisan' if a good number of Republicans don't vote for his Stimulus Bill. But that dubious point seems to be obscuring a more obvious and telling reality: the Republican leadership in both houses has decided that it's in their political interest to oppose the Stimulus Bill no matter what.

In the most cynical of evaluations, it's not clear to me that they're incorrect. If the stimulus is judged a success, their political gain from adding more votes to what will be seen as Obama's bill will not be that great. So they're figuring that only failure will work for them politically; and they judge that they want Obama to own it entirely.

One can pick apart the political ethics of their stand, but the reality of it is clear. They want to criticize as many provisions of the bill as possible, push for as many non-stimulus inducing tax cuts as possible at the expense of spending on infrastructure, and then vote against the final bill en masse. I think it's possible Obama will get a smattering of moderate Republicans in the senate. But that is the Boehner/McConnell approach -- and the one few if any reporters seem to have the wherewithal to say out loud.

Thank you. The Republicans have no idea how to get us out of this economic mess, so they have only one political gambit left: make Americans believe that government intervention is even worse than the current shitstorm. Tagging along on a stimulus bill that works might be an ok consolation prize, might help some of them get re-elected. But if you're a Republican, right now this is what you're thinking: "If giant government spending and regulation fixes this problem, my entire political ideology and reason for being is undermined." Of course they don't want this to work.

If Obama and his team think that Republicans aren't that craven, they haven't been paying attention the last eight years. And I know they have been paying attention. So I'm not sure exactly what the strategy is here.

Greg Sargent wonders too:

One quick question about the politics here: Do Obama aides actually believe such gestures will win over Republicans? Perhaps, but it's also possible that such measures are all about laying the groundwork in advance to blame GOPers and paint them as partisan obstructionists if and when most of them vote against the stim package, which they appear likely to do, no matter how many concessions Obama grants.

Well good god, I hope it's the latter, because the former would be naive and foolish. But even if it is the latter, I would ask David Sirota's question: How much should taxpayers have to pay for political aesthetics?

Hey, you know what would be great? If Obama and his team realized the Republicans weren't going to vote for this anyway and then took back the sweeteners they put in it for them. Let's go with the Paul Krugman/House progressive caucus version of the stimulus bill - restore the mass transit funding, the contraception funding, and make it even more ambitious.

During the 2004 campaign, I distinctly remember a colleague of mine tossing aside a New York Times Magazine with John Kerry on the cover and sighing, "It always amazes me that people don't want to think for themselves." He was referring to an article by Matt Bai, which contained this anecdote, among others:

A row of Evian water bottles had been thoughtfully placed on a nearby table. Kerry frowned.''Can we get any of my water?'' he asked Stephanie Cutter, his communications director, who dutifully scurried from the room. I asked Kerry, out of sheer curiosity, what he didn't like about Evian.
''I hate that stuff,'' Kerry explained to me. ''They pack it full of minerals.''
''What kind of water do you drink?'' I asked, trying to make conversation.
''Plain old American water,'' he said.
''You mean tap water?''
''No,'' Kerry replied deliberately. He seemed now to sense some kind of trap. I was left to imagine what was going through his head. If I admit that I drink bottled water, then he might say I'm out of touch with ordinary voters. But doesn't demanding my own brand of water seem even more aristocratic? Then again, Evian is French -- important to stay away from anything even remotely French.

This was the media/GOP narrative at the time: Kerry was a waffler, with no firm principles, shifting with what he thought voters wanted to hear, constantly battling his own ingrained elitism. What my colleague meant about people not thinking for themselves was that, if Bai had not absorbed this media narrative and decided to see Kerry through that frame, he would not have interpreted this water bottle moment - or any other number of moments - that way.

(Quick digression: I think Bai's article on Obama, 4 years and 5 days after the above, was actually quite good.)

I find unthinking adherence to a rather bland pre-set narrative much more cloying and damaging than factless partisan screeds. Not only is it maddeningly difficult to get out of a media narrative rut, but it makes it all but impossible for anyone on either side of the notebook/microphone/camera to talk about anything else.

Case in point. Throughout the campaign, the grownup thing to say about Barack Obama was: All this rhetoric is great for campaigning, but if he becomes President, he'll actually have to govern. And [wistful smile and headshake from Clinton/McCain/David Gergen] he's going to find out that's a little more difficult than he makes it sound.

So, now that Obama is in office, there is only one choice for the media as far as a narrative: Now that he's President, he's finding out that governing is a lot more difficult than his rhetoric made it sound. Here's Sheryl Gay Stolberg's take from this Saturday's New York Times (again, an author I sometimes quite like):

Great Limits Come With Great Power, Ex-Candidate Finds

WASHINGTON -- President Obama showed up for his first full day at work on Wednesday determined, as he later told the nation, to make "a clean break from business as usual." But it did not take long for the new president to discover that there were limits to his power to turn his campaign rhetoric into reality.

Perhaps I was the only one...but I did a double- or triple-take when I read this. This analysis is so at odds with the week I think most Americans experienced. In fact, I think we nearly had whiplash from the amount of change suddenly taking place in the White house, and from how many campaign promises Obama managed to follow through on in the space of 3.5 days: Guantanamo, torture, secrecy and transparency, global gag rule, emissaries to the Middle East and Afghanistan/Pakistan. And since then, he's moved to re-regulate the financial system and implement stricter emissions standards, and given his first sit down interview to Al-Arabiya (an amazing interview, I'm watching it now).

But the media narrative does not move at that speed. Everyone expected Obama to run smack into the cold hard face of reality...and so, in media analyses, that's what he did.

When Mr. Obama wandered into the White House briefing room Thursday afternoon hoping to make small talk with reporters, he was instantly confronted by an unwelcome question: Why was he waiving his tough restrictions on lobbying for a Pentagon nominee? The president brushed it off, saying he would not return "if I'm going to get grilled every time I come."

The photo of this moment is captioned (not Stolberg's doing, presumably), "President Obama got a grilling, not the hoped-for small talk, on a surprise visit to the press room." I've seen the video, and it was not a grilling. One unpleasant question that he "brushed off" does not a grilling make. But even if it did, I'm not sure what this is supposed to demonstrate. Now that he's President, he'll get tough questions?

His plan to build bipartisan consensus around an economic package ran smack into discontented House Republicans. When he ordered the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to be shut down, Mr. Obama put off the tough decision of what to do with the terrorism suspects there, a delay that his senior adviser, David Axelrod, attributed to the complexity of the issue -- the same argument Mr. Bush used to keep the prison open.

If, while listening to Barack Obama during the campaign, you thought he was promising that everyone from both parties would instantly flock to him once he became President, you weren't paying attention. And comparing Obama's thoughtful approach to examining what to do with Gitmo detainees to Bush's stalling tactics because he didn't really want to close it at all feels like a stretch, doesn't it? You can palpably feel these examples straining under the pressure of being fit into a pre-set narrative, can't you?

Finally we get this wrap-up:

But in the coming weeks, Mr. Obama will have to do more than create an image; he will in fact have to make something happen...

Hey! Sound familiar? How many times over the past year or more have you heard a pundit of some stripe say, "If Obama wants to ____, he's going to have to do more than just ____"?

It's going to take a long time for the media to catch up with how mature the relationship between Obama and the American people actually is. Obama has spoken to us like adults, and recent polls have shown that most of us support his attempts to revive the country after eight years of Bush, and that we're willing to be patient. But much mainstream continues to show that, at some level, they think Obama tricked us. He got us all hopeful with his pie-in-the-sky optimism, made us believe he was magic, and now we're all going to see that he's fallible and governing is really hard. Unlike ordinary Americans, of course, Washington reporters know how hard governing is, because they see it every day.

I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of Obama supporters who do fit that description, nor am I accusing all Washington reporters of being condescending. But I think many if not most of us voted for a serious person to take on the country's problems, were willing to give him a good amount of slack to tackle those problems, and have frankly been amazed at the speed with which he has worked so far to implement changes. We remain vigilant (if Obama decides after consideration to hold some Guantanamo detainees without trial, just elsewhere, we'll be horrified), but to see the story of Obama's first week as the story of an idealist brought to ground by reality...well, you'd have to really be looking for that story to see it there.

Now that we're living in a "postpartisan" world, there have been many calls to end the current era of polarization. Older generations recall that there was a time when the country wasn't so defined and divided by political party. On inauguration day, I heard Tom Brokaw describe a version of old Washington I've heard time and again: Democrats and Republicans were rivals by day, friends by night - sparring in political gamesmanship on the floor of Congress, coming together to get things done whenever they could, throwing back whiskeys together afterwards. People often sigh wistfully at this description, hoping we can recapture that spirit.

Not me. At least, not until we re-establish some ground rules.

For starters, the clubbiness of Washington has long been decried as one of its great faults: there's so much back-slapping and quid pro quo and friendly rivalry that eventually our representatives can't tell whom they're representing anymore. So you know things must be bad when we find ourselves wishing that our representatives - who are after all there to protect our interests - would be more friendly and accomodating to their policy opponents.

But let's put that aside for now. What is it that's brought us as a nation - not just elected officials but ordinary citizens - to be so polarized along political party lines? I've heard countless people of the baby-boom generation say that when they were younger, they didn't even know or care what party their friends voted for...but in the last eight years many have had irrevocable fallings out with old friends over the Bush administration. Fewer young people I think have had such fights - but that's largely because they've already self-selected into politically homogenous groups.

The mainstream, moderate, respectable pundit answer to why we're so polarized is that the most radical elements of both parties have gained the loudest voices, for instance through talk radio and the Internet, maximizing differences at the expense of common ground. Indeed, over at Daily Kos, Hunter points to an instance of this common wisdom in yesterday's column from the WaPo's voice of reason David Ignatius:

Obama's speech showed us, once again, that the new president really means it when he says that he wants to create a new kind of politics for a "postpartisan" America. This has been difficult for some of his supporters to accept, in their rage against the Bush presidency and their understandable desire to settle scores with those who took the country into a dark and painful time. But Obama wants none of it. "On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics." Did that cause a moment of self-reflection at Rush Limbaugh's offices, or at the Daily Kos? I doubt it, but one can always hope.

Hunter's affecting response, asking what exactly he and the rest of Daily Kos did that equates with Rush, deserves reading in full. Here's a bit:

Which were [the petty grievances]? Was it speaking too loudly of the devolution of the United States into unapologetic torture? Was it complaining of the lives lost in Iraq, or making petty noises that even the president should follow the Constitution when it came to spying upon certain Americans, or making the case for their internment?
... When Rush Limbaugh was playing "[Barack] the Magic Negro", all in good fun, of course, what abominable slight was it precisely that makes David Ignatius think of him and me as cut from the same cloth?
What were the worn out dogmas, the ones I should avoid? The insistence that energy policy be rational, or scientific fact be given plain acknowledgement regardless of ideological convenience?...The staggering assertion that competence should be not only be expected of government, but that it could and should be judged?...Is it my fury at the plainness with which powerful men can avoid the law, was that the bridge too far...?

It is ludicrous to suggest an equivalence between Rush Limbaugh and Daily Kos, as anyone who reads Daily Kos regularly - or at all - knows (there is probably an equivalency to be made between the more virulent spectators who post comments on Daily Kos, which is an open community, and the more virulent callers to Limbaugh's show...but this is a distinction lost on nearly all press commentators). But Hunter's comments serve as an important reminder of something far deeper: there is no radical left in this country.

I do not, of course, mean that there are no people in this country who hold radical left-wing views. We are a diverse nation, and if you want to find Marxists, anarchists, pacifists, people who believe that farming is eco-rape, or that one guy who's on a life-long legal quest to get the word "God" removed from the pledge of allegiance and our currency, you can certainly find them - and conservative media has found them in abundance.

But there is no organized radical left that has any kind of political currency in America in the 21st century - and it certainly has no pull on the Democratic Party, which by any objective measure has operated in Washington over the last eight years as a center-right party. Perhaps Ignatius and all the other commentators and politicians who talk of "extremists" on both sides are still thinking of the Left of the Vietnam era, which certainly was full of Marxists, anarchists and pacifists who marched on Washington by the hundreds of thousands, and who derided returning American troops as war criminals.

There is, however, a radical right - and it has taken over the Republican party. Here are just three tenets of the modern Republican party:

1) It is permissable, even necessary, for the American government to kidnap and torture people.
2) The President is above the law.
3) Preventive war - the invasion and occupation of a country that may at some future point pose a threat - is justifiable.

Those things are so radical, so repugnant, so un-American, and so non-negotiable that yes, I am polarized in opposition to those stances. I do not find these things to be policy differences over which we can politely disagree, then go have a drink together. If you support these tenets, and especially if you play a part in enacting them, I think you are complicit in the loss of innocent lives; in the justification of one of the most despicable crimes against humanity, torture; and in the moral undermining and degradation of the ideals and principles of the United States. I emphatically do not seek compromise with you, because there can be no compromise on these things.

This is not the case for the vast majority of policy that is debated and enacted in Washington. Liberals and Conservatives of all shades of the ideological spectrum can have genuine, strenuous disagreements amongst each other about the right economic policy to get us out of the current mess, about the best way to fix the health care system, about how best to engage diplomatically with Israel and the Palestinians, or with Pakistan. We can all go have a beer together afterwards because though we disagree, we all are trying to do what's best for the country. But there are some things we must find polarizing or we've lost our way entirely.

I know that placing blame is supposed to be counter-productive in our new postpartisan age. I know we're supposed to admit that we all got carried away and it's time to come together again. But like Hunter, I'm just not clear what it is I'm supposed to be apologizing for. We must remember that a nonpartisan analysis of what went wrong doesn't necessarily lead to a bipartisan diagnosis, in which we're all equally at fault. There's simply no extreme left wing of the Democratic party that's been advocating a socialist government, or unilaterally laying down our arms and letting terrorists roam free, or bringing all American troops up on war crimes charges, or making our President get approval from the U.N. for his actions.

Rather, even the most liberal wing of the Democrats has been holding the reasonable middle ground on almost every issue: a market economy, but properly regulated; stopping terrorism and hunting down terrorists with all the tools at our disposal, not just military, and within the law; honoring and supporting our troops by making sure they have the best benefits and keeping them from serving endless tours; insisting that the President of the United States be bound by the Consitution. Have we, in our anxiety, advocated these things vociferously, angrily, stridently, employing humor and satire and sometimes name-calling? Absolutely.

But make no mistake: it was the radicalism of the Republican Party that polarized the country. We didn't all just let policy differences get personal. Torture is not a policy difference. The Constitution is not a policy difference. The Republicans have been messing with the fundamentals of American law and decency. Someday, if we get back to genuine policy differences, I stand ready to buy a Republican a beer and toast the great American tradition of disagreement and debate. But as long as the opposition party continues to propagate its current radical vision, I plan on staying polarized.