Author: jameswagner

Do we really think anything involving force will make us feel safe? We have more of that stuff than anyone in the world, even the Israelis.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Air National Guard fighter jets were scrambled into the air too late from nearby Andrews Air Force Base on Wednesday night to protect the White House from a small plane that wandered into restricted airspace over Washington, U.S. officials said on Thursday.
….
“This illustrates just how hard it is to do this kind of thing, especially in a busy air traffic area,” said one of the officials.

Maybe it would make more sense to think about how we can dissuade people from wanting to blow us up in the first place. Duh.

Why is U.S. foreign policy so fundamentally irreconcilable with that of our European friends? Our differences are still being ignored or minimized by just about all parties, but real differences there are.

…the fact is Europeans and Americans no longer share a common view of the world. On the all-important question of power — the utility of power, the morality of power — they have parted ways. Europeans believe they are moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. Europe itself has entered a post-historical paradise, the realization of Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international rules are unreliable and where security and the promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.

I’ve admired Richard Goldstein for years, largely through his pieces in the Village Voice. This week his essay in The Nation really did it for me.
I’m linking it here because Goldstein has done an excellent job of describing my own social and political posture and my position as a member of a pariah community.

The queer community is the spawn of a marriage between socialism and bohemianism more than a century ago. This heady union, which begat gay liberation, has been all but ignored by the culture.

Some of my friends and relatives will be surprised to know that I am not a “retreating liberal” and I am not a “good gay.” I blame over sixty years of a certain amount of dissembling in order to survive in a frightened and frightening world for any appearances which may have encouraged that misunderstanding. I am grateful however to chance, and for the good graces of friends and strangers, that I have become more and more radical over the years. I intend to keep heading in that direction.
What I am now is a leftist and a queer, and for me the two are inseparable.

We now have a window into what President Bush and America’s senators think of the world’s women: Not much.
An international women’s treaty banning discrimination has been ratified by 169 countries so far (without emasculating men in any of them!), yet it has languished in the United States Senate ever since President Carter sent it there for ratification in 1980. This month the Senate Foreign Relations Committee got around to holding hearings on it, but the Bush administration, after shyly supporting it at first, now is finding its courage faltering.

Nicholas Kristof is just a bit off base when he assumes the success of the rights movement for women in the U.S., saying that the treaty “. . . has almost nothing to do with American women, who already enjoy the rights the treaty supports,” but he is absolutely correct when he describes the Bushie adminstration’s attitude toward the treaty.

Critics have complained that the treaty, in the words of Jesse Helms, was “negotiated by radical feminists with the intent of enshrining their radical anti-family agenda into international law” and is “a vehicle for imposing abortion on countries that still protect the rights of the unborn.”
That’s absurd. Twenty years of experience with the treaty in the great majority of countries shows that it simply helps third-world women gain their barest human rights. In Pakistan, for example, women who become pregnant after being raped are often prosecuted for adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. But this treaty has helped them escape execution.
How can we be against that? Do we really want to side with the Taliban mullahs, who, like Mr. Ashcroft, fretted that the treaty imposes sexual equality? Or do we dare side with third-world girls who die because of their gender, more than 2,000 of them today alone?

Now can we start the revolution?
Look at Bloggy if you want to know what tomorrow will bring for all of us, and take full note of the Washington Post‘s take on the emperor and his clothes.
This is really scary.