Increasingly, there's an air of rhetorical desperation to the fear-mongering. Call me a wild-eyed optimist, but I (sometimes, not always) actually take this as a good sign. They can no longer count on the unquestioning acquiescence of a passive audience, which is why they are now forced to crank up the volume.

Yeah, that's probably way too optimistic.

Well Lieberman spouting that does not surprise me one bit. Just last week Marshall Whittman had this little gem in his July 27th post about Joe Lieberman:

"Radical Jihadism poses an existential threat to liberal civilization."

Existential threat. Um, okay. I'll agree with physical threat, but "existential threat" is just way out there.

But here we are with Joe Lieberman essentially suggesting the same thing.

As they say, Joe has either "completely lost the plot or he's spinning a line".

Either way, the guy is an idiot. I hope he has a lot more quotes like this over the next couple months, to show CT his true beliefs.

Just call these people pisspants. Scared of the shadows. Not manly enough.

If they are so easily scared, they should be easily intimidated, too :-)

i believe what the good senator means is this: "i've grown accustomed to being patted on the head by a bunch of right-wing crazies, and these head pats are deeply important to my self-esteem and in particular to my self-perception that i am a towering figure of integrity and bipartisanship at a time when integrity and bipartisanship are in decline, and in order to keep getting these head pats i'm going to babble ever more silly drivel incessantly."

Just last week the Washington Post came forth with a poll showing that in answer to questions regarding which political party was best prepared to deal with Terrorism, the Democrats crossed the 50% threashold and were 8 points ahead of the Republicans on this opinion dimension.

Don't you all think that poll put the fear of the lord into the inner reaches of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the RNC, and their enablers such as Lieberman? It has been their rock bottom winning point for nearly five years now, and opinion is apparently shifting. I would imagine they have their own internal polls that track this -- so yea, they are reacting and trying to change the direction of opinion.

For nearly five years now they have profited from vague definations of the enemy -- evil, bad, maybe a few other loaded but essentially scriptual and moral terms. In fact, they have never clearly defined the enemy, because inside the circle, they disagree. So with that not working they move on to Fascist and Jihadist -- again not terms clear to many Americans, but freighted with foreignness and evilness.

Let's play real politics for a change -- we need a realistic defination of the "real enemy" -- and then we need to challenge them to show how policy, strategy and tactics actually address that enemy. Don't let them fake it with fancy terms.

Is he talking about Ned Lamont?

Have questions about the Cafe? Try here.

I think you're seriously correct there, DanF. If you listen to Joe Lieberman enough (spare me!), you're listening to someone who thinks the world revolves around him or ought to. He and Miss Piggy would make a great pair. Actually, they sorta look alike...

Amen! And while we're at it, can we demand that they make list of the actual contingencies (like say, bombing Chicago), together with the severity (number of casualties plus physical and economic damage) and the likelihood of each happening. That way, we can compare them with other risks, like another hurricane, a nuclear strike on Seoul by N. Korea, a nuclear strike on Israel by Iran, total closure of Nigeria's oil production, etc. You know, introduce some facts and fact-based discourse into the discourse...

Taylor, your point really touches on how the Neocon/(true)fascists have such bloody hands. This is how they work with and create the conditions that lead to actual and/or virtual attacks on civilians by crazies. It's not really a grand conspiracy of Neocons and the likes of Osama (the perpetual straw man used to knock down a lot of conspiracy theories), rather it's the enhancment of and the playing of the likes of the Evil O. Set up enough conditions, such as not really trying to do real security, inflate the standing of the crazies, maybe take a vacation or two, fire up a couple of "disastrous wars", do a couple of infuriating diplomatic moves and voila' you are bound to have something happen. Nothing can ever really lead back to Washington because there really isn't any real connection.

It doesn't help though if you've got a bunch of real security folks out there running these things down and doing actual, bona fide, security work though If these folks are within the U.S. government you can silence/ stop them pretty easily (as has been shown), but outside... that's not so easy. But you can always hype technical solutions, especially exotic high tech ones (multiple gains there)that are pretty useless but have plenty of flash and glitz.

It's really not that big a mystery.

I don't attach any particular danger to any particular holder of nukes. Wait a minute, what I mean is that I don't think it's more dangerous for Al Qaeda to have nukes than the US -- which has shown itself capable of putting, say, Cheney within reach of the red telephone. Or Israel (smarting from insult and indignation at present). I'd like to see nukes in no one's hands.

I don't want Al Qaeda to get mad and have weapons but I don't want any rapturists, of whatever "faith," to have them either.

Altogether, measured against lung disease caused by pollution, cancer caused by a thinning of the ozone layer, crashing a car that missed a recall notice, obesity's toll, life on the streets in NOLA, I'd say Al Qaeda is a relatively small risk for a relatively small number of people and one which can and should be contained by a competent intelligence agency with useful ties to other intelligence agencies, and an international police force. That could make things unpleasant for Pakistan and Saudi, which is one reason, I think, the Bush administration has pulled its punches on going after these guys. It could also mean no more playtime with the military, and no more bonanzas for a dozen or more corporations supporting Our Glorious Leaders. Much better to have enemies and "serious" alerts and everyone scared and afraid to ask questions.

Now that you mention it, Joe does sound a little like Kermit...

This was precisely the issue I brought up with Bush's "Islamic Fascist" description yesterday. I'm quite used to hearing this sort of thing from Bush and conservative Republicans, but to hear it from a nominal Democrat...I think it neatly summarizes a pet theory of mine that many people inalterably changed their view of the world after 9/11 and, in the process, abandonned a part of their brains that allows them think rationally.

Terrorism is not, and never has been, a greater threat to civilization that organized military states like Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Not even close. In fact, the type of fear (distant drumbeats vs. sudden panic) associated with each is entirely different, but our present war mongers want general fear to be a rallying cry for decisive and patriotic action. This was appropriate during the Second World War and perhaps went a bit overboard during the Cold War but this rallying effect sustained the United States during difficult periods and created, undoubtedly, the superpower we are today.

Nationalism, then, is intimately tied to fighting other nations. Forget about ideology. It doesn't matter if it's a right-wing or a left-wing totalitarian regime, what matters is that those regimes were nations opposed to our way of life in some general sense and we fought back and we won. The "war on terror," a misnomer from the get-go, has nothing to do with nationalism and everyhing to do with one of the most basic question of civilization: under what political regime shall we live? Plato asked "how ought it be?" and we're been debating it ever since. Machiavelli, Hobbes and others pushed the question aside. It's not how it ought to be, they argued, but rather this is how it is. Is this debate amongst political philosophers relevant to the war on terror? More so than you think.

When Sen. Lieberman says terrorism is an evil threat to our security and that there is only one appropriate response--his own--he is asserting not how things ought to be but rather that there is one remedy to the situation. Everyone else that criticizes the handling of post-9/11 foreign policy is asking, "is this how things ought to be?" And if Sen. Lieberman doesn't get that then yes, he is not qualified to be a US Senator.

I think the Moose and Lieberman both went off the deep end after 9/11. I think it's an emotional thing tied to their obsession with the safety of Israel. They conflate threats to Israel with threats to the US. They may do it quite unintentionally but they have absolutely lost all perspective, context, and proportion.

If you are Karl Rove, you do this to confuse the American people into an emotional, fear driven response so they'll vote for Republicans. That's entirely cynical. But the Liebermans are just plain hysterical. That's as good a reason as any for the defeat of Lieberman.

We have a huge need for people who can look at the terrorism issue rationally and without regard for short term political considerations. There are almost none of them around anywhere in either party.

We have a huge need for people who will fight back against the emotional desire to declare war on an entire civilization. I believe that this problem is so complex and culturally based that we probably aren't going to find a way out of it unless there are some rational future oriented Islamic leaders to lead the way. We aren't going to find them by bombing their villages.

If you needed any more proof that Joe Lieberman is now a default Republican, here it is. He's now one clearly visible Adam's apple away from being Ann Coulter.

Perhaps because he's Jewish, the most visible evil he can comprehend in his own mind and communicate is the Nazis. If that's the case, I would refer him to Dante's "Inferno", which introduced the idea of "levels of evil" some 800+ years ago.

OR, more than likely, he's padding his own ego by AGAIN calling everyone who disagrees with him an idiot in the most roundabout way possible. If this is the case, I would refer him to my extended middle finger.

The issue I keep hammering to my republican friends is exactly HOW do our wars fight terrorism. I am not aware of a single native Iraqi or Afgani committing a terrorist act outside their own country.

In the Spain train bombings it was local immigrants, the same with the London subway bombings. Did we invade England and Spain? This latest airplane plot was Pakistani in origin - Should we invade Pakistan? 9/11 was primarily Saudis' - yet we did nothing to our oil friends except have our President hold hands with them.

Islamic terrorism is a manageable problem to be solved with intelligence, police and special ops work. Invading countries like Iraq or Lebanon will not solve the terrorism problem only make it worse.

If Bush really believed the crap he spouts about war being the answer to terrorism, I want to see the US Navy moving up the River Thames tomorrow.

And did we ever get a reliable death toll from Katrina? If our government actually wanted to save lives it might even offer health care like a real first world country. All this fear is destroying our capacity to deal with other vital priorities.

I haven't seen it, at least not as clearly as I see Coulter's.

Exactly what interest of Al-Qaeda's would be advanced by detonating a nuke?

The history of those possessing nukes is caution, even when the control structures of the state are absent. During the Cuban Crisis, the Soviet commander with nuke codes did not pull the trigger. During exercises here, soldiers manning silos did not unanimously launch; (the number that balked is not public).

It is an assumption without any information to support it, that once AQ gets a nuke they will use it. We also have no foundation to assign probabilities to Soviet trigger-happiness. Our leaders assured us they were always looking for a chance to do so, and the record shows otherwise. The risk that truly concerned insiders was not policy but accident.

That said, no one I know is encouraging this situation, including me. Lock down those nukes and the "threat" drops to an annoyance to civilization. Mostly the threat is to those in power, that get accused of failing to protect citizens.

I have pointed this out before, but that won't stop me from doing it again:  possession of a nuclear warhead does not confer on one the ability to deliver that warhead to a target.  Perhaps some day the entity, if it even exists, called al Qaeda will find itself with a nuclear warhead in its possession.  The warhead will likely weigh over 100 pounds, and most likely a lot over 100 pounds.  So, what is "al Qaeda" going to do to get that nuclear warhead somewhere in this country where it can do some damage?  And, how will they be able to detonate it once it is here?

A state, having an airforce, or an artillery force can reasonably be considered a threat if it possesses a nuclear warhead.  But, a state is also a big target easily vaporized in retalliation, so that threat is minute.  But a rag-tag group of terrorists would have no idea about what to do with a nuclear warhead, and would probably try to sell or trade it for something much more manageable, such as a few bottles of peroxide and some nail polish.  </snark> 

Hoppy in Sacramento

Yeah, and after that army we're training in Iraq gets familiar with command and control and modern weaponry, it'll probably turn their knowledge against us. What are we really doing there, training Iraqi Democrats or turning Islamists into modern fascists? No wonder Bush is worried about Islamic fascists.

Let's see. Hitler wins, every Jew in the world is dead, and a totalitarian dictatorship spreads through all of Europe and North America. Stalin wins, and the Red Army sweeps through Europe, the Red Army occupies Washington, and a totalitarian dictatorship joins forces with the Asian dictatorship and rules the world. Jews do okay, sort of, in this one.

Osama bin Laden gets his caliphate, from Pakistan to Morocco, and there's a primitive Taliban-type rule; though it's more likely Iranian-type mullahs with some democratic elements. People live oppressive, medieval lives in this caliphate, and they probably put the oil price up whenever they're pissed at us.

It's bad news for Israel, I guess. But I think we'd still have enough force to protect them. But for the U.S. and Europe? Would they invade us and try to make the Infidels live according to sharia? Don't think so.

Not as bad a threat, in my mind. It's a pan-Arab, nationalistic force, for the most part. Hitler made a grab for North Africa. North Africa doesn't have any designs that I can see on Europe. What do other people think?

Time to unleash the War on Bathtubs? It's quite obviously in the interest of national security.

Great point about defeating terrorism. Bush and bin Laden are each other's best friends - if they didn't exist, they'd have to invent one another.

Note that the capture of the British 21 this week was a victory for criminal prosecution, not war. The Republicans like to make fun of Democrats for advocating criminal prosecution of terrorists rather than war. Maybe that's why the Brits, rather than the Republican-controlled US government, actually succeeded in stopping a possible terrorist attack. Criminal prosecution works. War just creates terrorist breeding grounds like Iraq.

You have now made me thing of Joe Lieberman in a miniskirt. The horror. The horror. Oh, the humanity!

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

This is one point that I've been giving a great deal of thought about. There is one thing that Republicans have used to manipulate the debate and shape the arguments - a common enemy.

This has always united the country and kept control of the dialog. When the wall and communism fell we lost our common enemy. Now Rove and the conservative media have managed to create another common enemy.

Brilliant!  

Thanks so much for pointing me to this.  I've bookmarked it and sent it to people on my mailing list.  Get over and read the whole thing, everyone.  It's all quotable and prescient.  Mueller could be talking about Lieberman when he says

A problem with getting coherent thinking on the risk of terrorism is that reporters and politicians find extreme and alarmist possibilities so much more appealing than discussions of broader context, much less of statistical reality. That is, although hysteria and alarmism rarely make much sense, politicians and the media are often naturally drawn to them.

What makes this even more powerful is the source.  The Cato Institute can hardly be called a Democratic Party Think Tank.  If an organization which describes itself as espousing "market liberalism" and claims that term "liberal" has been "corrupted by contemporary American liberals" espouses views like Mueller, the radical right can hardly accuse the left of being "soft on terrorism".  

aMike

or at least from Dan Gerstein or Lanny Davis. Imagine if a line like that were in the 238th comment in a thread on DailyKos? They'd be all over it.

We simply need to shrink our bathtubs down to the size where we can drown them with sheer government.

And Jews hardly did "okay" under Stalin. He would have matched Hitler if he hadn't died in 1953, just months after he'd launched the "struggle against cosmopolitanism." Read up on the so-called "Doctor's Plot."

But this is an assessment of what Bin Laden would LIKE to do. He has nowhere near the capability necessary to achieve this goal. I'd like to have a 100 million dollars. I'm not going to have it though.

This is the key point. The Nazi/Soviet scenarios were realistic based on the power and size arrayed behind the goals. Bin Laden is essentially a network of a couple thousand people who can't publicly operate and whose ideology is fringe-like even amongst Islamists.

So what does it mean about all you people calling him an idiot that if something had turned out the way you hoped it would, this idiot would be in the sixth year of his vice presidency?

The key point is that terrorism is the refuge of the weak. The strong don't need it because they have armies, tanks, bombers, submarines, and ICBMs.

Tens of thousands of Polish Jews owed their lives to Stalin because they were found to be "enemies of the people" and sent in 1940/41 to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Of course, "doing okey" is a relative term here.

All very interesting, and almost all. both Mr. Schmitt and the commenters right as rain. And maybe, just maybe, the American people are waking up to this.

Still, it would be nice to see one serious politician, as opposed to mere internet bloggers and blogreaders daring to make these points the centerpiece of their campaigns. After five long years of this bullshit, maybe it's time.

In other words, how about a new approach? Not "we are, too, serious about security", but "we are serious about security AND YOU'RE NOT. We want to use the appropriate tools of intelligence to track and apprehend the people trying to harm us. You just want to scare the hell out of the American people to keep yourself in power."

If our political leaders are afraid to say things like that, they're not doing us any good, they're not leaders. The War on Terror is a crock.

Wait... I don't get it... the terrorists are commies? Now I'm suddenly worried about the domino theory...

What nonsense.

Cold War's over. WWII was over long before. Shouldn't we move on?

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Funny how disenchantment with what Joe became and with how he is bent on trying to retain some power is being construed.

Yes some people who would have been tolerating him as VP are now calling him stupid but that is more an indication of what he has become than what he was or how much those people have changed.

Are Republicans as a whole happier with George now than they were when he took office? Joe got 48% of the Democratic vote in a liberal state. I wonder what George's numbers in Connecticut would be? The way Republicans make it sound you'd think Joe is wonderful. I think that was the impression most Republicans had in 2000 too.

Somehow I don't think Republicans need to look up disingenuous.

Joe's comments are absolute crap and he should go back to giving a damn about something real and speaking from his heart instead of this blathering dyspepsia.

A plague of god-fearing Ay-rabs is coming to rape the white women in their comfortable suburban homes.

"You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor." – George Wallace

Fear has a new face.

Now Rove and the conservative media have managed to create another common enemy.

You mean themselves?

;>
Sheila in CT

Re: Osama bin Laden gets his caliphate, from Pakistan to Morocco

Iran would be outside any revived Caliphate just as it was outside the last one (the Ottoman Empire). The Iranian are Shi'ites and they believe the legitimate Caliphate ended with the martyred Ali centuries ago. So a restored Sunni Caliphate would be at major enmity with Iran, much as the Soviets and China were in the Cold War.

Here and elsewhere around the internet, and now, out of the President of the United States himself, one reads the word Fascism over and over.  I have some problems with this, mainly because the more indiscriminately the term is applied the less the term actually means.  Language gets debased this way, and the more language is debased, the less sure anyone is that his/her partner in debate is talking about the same thing.

This is NOT to say that the term does not apply.  It IS to suggest that it would be useful for people to refresh their memories and make direct references to HOW the philosophy of Fascism applies in each instance.   

So, with out further ado, three versions of Mussolini and Gentile's 1932 essay, "What is Fascism?":

1. An Abridged Version.  Courtesy of the Modern History Source Book. This and the companion History Sourcebooks are exemplary of the way the Internet can be used to disseminate accurate primary materials.  Pall Hallsall and Fordham University deserve a vote of thanks.
2. The Whole Thing. Courtesy of World Future Fund.
3. A Version including the Decalogue of Fascism:  Courtesy of the History Guide Organization. 

So here's the intellectual puzzle:  What elements of classical Fascism can be applied to the contemporary situation:  to whom, and how?  Maybe one of the powers that be around here  might like to start a post on this topic.

aMike

An excellent description of what's wrong with the Republican approach to mobilization (based on fear).

But if the response to that is merely to reinforce the general feeling that something is wrong and these people are no longer to be trusted, believed then that is even worse.

What's needed is a positive program that mobilizes people on the basis of confidence in the future instead of either Republican fear or Democrat cynicism.

Thanks, Mark, for calling attention to Lieberman’s laughable use of hyperbole. You have focused attention on a very important question that Americans need to start pondering thoughtfully: just how evil are the Islamic “Terrorists” who are trying to kill Americans and Israelis?

It seems rather indisputable that Islamic militants are judged to be evil by Western observers because they have intentionally targeted innocent women and children in their attacks. Is this indictment sufficient cause for us to say without ambiguity that any group of combatants that targets innocent civilians is evil? You just might want to think about this question for a bit before answering…

Consider the fact that during WWII, American bomber crews were ordered to intentionally slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese women and children in firebombing raids. Back then it was called “terror bombing” by the British. The intent of this military strategy was to terrify the civilian population into no longer supporting their leaders' war-making efforts. Was it an immoral strategy? Was it evil? A war crime? The answer is yes. But is it really fair to conclude from these facts that the American people in general are truly evil and utterly devoid of any hint of virtue? No, it is not.

The overarching truth that Joe Lieberman and George Bush and Condi Rice do not want the American people to know is that it is entirely possible for a people to pursue a truly moral end through means that are morally repugnant. America was truly justified in waging war against the Japanese and the Germans during WWII. But that indisputable truth does not mean that every action we took in pursuit of victory was morally justified. Indeed, American soldiers and commanders committed many, many war crimes during WWII. In spite of the many acts of evil "we" were guilty of, it is nevertheless true that our cause was just.

Lieberman, Bush, and Rice do not want the American people to be aware of this important distinction because they want us to see the ‘Muslim Extremists’ as purely evil people because they intentionally kill innocent civilians. It would ruin everything they are trying to accomplish if the American people were to wake up to the fact that the cause the Islamic Terrorists are pursuing is 100% justified, even though they have used means to pursue it that are 100% immoral.

As our own history has shown us, when we discuss the relative ‘evilness’ of the people that our leaders have called our enemies, we need to make a distinction between the means these people use to pursue their ultimate ends, and the ends themselves. Are both immoral? Or could it actually be the case that their cause is just, even though they have used immoral means in order to pursue a moral outcome? If the latter is true, then it would be logical for us to give the Islamic militants credit for the cause they are pursuing while at the same time condemning their terror attacks on civilians as morally reprehensible.

Could we please bring the discussion around to these particulars? Sometimes things just aren’t as black and white as our incompetent leaders would have us believe.

Why Are People So Cruel?