Sunday, December 2, in the New York Times, Frank Rich notes that things are changing – that Barack Obama is a far more terrifying candidate in a general election than Hillary Clinton and what some call “the old-guard Republican elite” really, really wants to run against her next year. But the problem is Obama has increasing support from the independent voters –
Despite the thuggish name-calling of a few right-wing die-hards (e.g., Rush Limbaugh mocking “Barack Hussein Odumbo”), the dirty secret of a number of conservatives is that they are disarmed by Mr. Obama even though they know his record is more liberal than Mrs. Clinton’s.
The drumbeat of approval has been remarkably steady. Last year Mark McKinnon, a top adviser to both the 2000 and 2004 Bush campaigns, admiringly called Mr. Obama “a walking, talking hope machine” who “may reshape American politics.” Andrew Ferguson devoted pages in The Weekly Standard to raving about “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama’s memoir, before dismissing its political sequel, “The Audacity of Hope.” Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, keeps trying to write anti-Obama articles but they’re so mild that they never really contradict his judgment of a year ago that the senator from Illinois “is the only presidential candidate from either party about whom there is a palpable excitement.” Even Tom Tancredo, the most virulent immigration demagogue of the G.O.P. presidential field, has spoken warmly of Mr. Obama.
Andrew Sullivan adds this –
The key is that the old red-blue, right-left boomer paradigm is fading; Obama offers exhausted Republicans a way out: a Democrat they can vote for. Many do not actually like the party they have become, and want to move forward into a less nasty, cramped and vicious direction. That’s why Huckabee is rising too.
What do they have in common? Huckabee is a conservative whose character appeals to liberals; Obama is a liberal whose temperament appeals to conservatives. Both represent a deep desire to get past the hideous, nasty polarization of the last few years. Obama doesn’t despise conservatives the way Clinton does. Huckabee doesn’t repel Democrats the way Giuliani and Romney do.
As for Rudy and with what is now known as the “Sex on the City” scandal, see Brendan Sexton, who chaired the New York City Procurement Policy Board in 2000, with this –
He didn’t want anybody to know what he was doing. That’s the truth. I don’t care about his personal life - it’s not shocking to me that he wanted to visit his girlfriend. The part that’s disturbing to me is that my organization or any government organization could be used to conceal from the public how their money was being spent… At first, I thought it was humorous. I just couldn’t believe anybody would do this. After that, I was sort of sick about it.
Well, that whole thing is somewhere between absurd and pathetic. Change is in the air.
Or it isn’t. See the Sunday item by David Leppard in the Times of London – US Says It Has Right to Kidnap British Citizens.
What? This is very odd. But it is so –
America has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.
A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.
The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities and could face criminal charges in America.
Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.
So our government has, for the first time, made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, anywhere, British or what have you, who is suspected of a crime by Washington. That’s just the way it is.
Of course this came up in relation to a specific case. Stanley Tollman, a former director of the Chelsea football club and a friend of the Iron Woman who had bigger balls than Ronald Reagan, Baroness Thatcher, and his wife Beatrice, wanted in America for bank fraud and tax evasion. They’ve been fighting extradition. We just told the Brits something like, “you know, we could just kidnap them, as we know we have the right to do that, and you meaningless people couldn’t do anything at all about it.”
I think we just told them they don’t have a real country… or something like that. Our president after we “liberated” Iraq on March 24, 2004, said Iraq had its sovereignty –
There are five steps in our plan to help Iraq achieve democracy and freedom. We will hand over authority to a sovereign Iraqi government, help establish security, continue rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure, encourage more international support, and move toward a national election that will bring forward new leaders empowered by the Iraqi people.
The first of these steps will occur next month, when our coalition will transfer full sovereignty to a government of Iraqi citizens who will prepare the way for national elections. On June 30th, the Coalition Provisional Authority will cease to exist, and will not be replaced. The occupation will end, and Iraqis will govern their own affairs. America’s ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, will present his credentials to the new president of Iraq. Our embassy in Baghdad will have the same purpose as any other American embassy, to assure good relations with a sovereign nation. America and other countries will continue to provide technical experts to help Iraq’s ministries of government, but these ministries will report to Iraq’s new prime minister.
The Brits should be so lucky. So you get this -
During a hearing last month Lord Justice Moses, one of the Court of Appeal judges, asked Alun Jones QC, representing the US government, about its treatment of Gavin, Tollman’s nephew. Gavin Tollman was the subject of an attempted abduction during a visit to Canada in 2005.
Jones replied that it was acceptable under American law to kidnap people if they were wanted for offences in America. “The United States does have a view about procuring people to its own shores which is not shared,” he said.
He said that if a person was kidnapped by the US authorities in another country and was brought back to face charges in America, no US court could rule that the abduction was illegal and free him: “If you kidnap a person outside the United States and you bring him there, the court has no jurisdiction to refuse - it goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s.”
Bounty hunting – an American tradition. There are all sorts of westerns about bounty hunters. It’s what we do.
It doesn’t please others –
Legal sources said that under traditional American justice, rendition meant capturing wanted people abroad and bringing them to the United States. The term “extraordinary rendition” was coined in the 1990s for the kidnapping of terror suspects from one foreign country to another for interrogation.
There was concern this weekend from Patrick Mercer, the Tory MP, who said: “The very idea of kidnapping is repugnant to us and we must handle these cases with extreme caution and a thorough understanding of the implications in American law.”
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty, said: “This law may date back to bounty hunting days, but they should sort it out if they claim to be a civilized nation.”
The Justice Department declined to comment. Like we care?
Over at Big Brass Blog see Are You Proud To Be An American?
Our government gives less than a flying fart about the sovereignty of other countries. The crew without a clue believes they have the right to kidnap anybody they want, anywhere they want, whenever they want. They don’t even have to ask permission first, because just like FISA, extradition just takes too long. Of course if the tables were turned, there would be screaming and hollering on a scale that would probably cause some of the never right wingers to just stroke out.
But who would do that to one of our citizens? No one would dare. Yeah, right.
See “Cernig” at Newshoggers with United States Of Kidnapping –
But the same administration has vigorously pursued immunity from prosecution for US citizens by other nations for crimes committed while in those nations. Such a double standard, fuelled by a view of American exceptionalism which draws its inspiration from past colonial powers (including, it must be admitted, Britain) gives a clear lie to administration supporters’ claims of there being no intention for hegemonic dominance. Only the most blinkered “my country, right or wrong” zealots could argue otherwise.
British law, however, says that kidnapping is a crime with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. The UK government should make it clear that charges will be brought against any US official authorising kidnapping under a purely American and outdated law - and that even if extradition is refused by the US then those charges will remain open indefinitely. It should also make it clear that should the accused travel to another nation where the UK has an extradition treaty, Britain will ask for remand of the suspect to a British court for trial. Other nations should follow suit.
Would they dare?
And that links the British conservative blogger and pundit Iain Dale who writes this –
The US has told Britain it can ‘kidnap’ British citizens if they are wanted on suspicion of committing a crime in the US. Apparently this is because the Supreme Court has “sanctioned it”.
What arrant nonsense. I wasn’t aware that the US Supreme Court had jurisdiction over the entire planet. Surely the law of extradition takes precedence over the US Supreme Court? Maybe a lawyer can enlighten us.
Perhaps so, but we would say that whatever that lawyer says hardly matters. And this commentator reminds us that this is hardly anything new –
I realize the first thing people think of with extraordinary rendition is terrorism, and getting terror suspects out of countries with unfriendly governments. But don’t forget, this is the same administration that’s snatching up the foreign executives of online gambling companies at airports, then trying and imprisoning them, despite the fact that online gambling is perfectly legal in the countries where they operate, and where they are citizens.
Oh well. Cactus at Angry Bear is just puzzled –
To any law, there is always a special case. I think most people would regard North Korea’s occasional kidnapping of Japanese citizens as the act of an uncivilized country, but that most people would applaud Israel’s capture of Eichmann in Argentina. But an actual US law that makes it permissible to kidnap anyone suspected of a crime raises seems to me raises an obvious question… what happens when a foreign country decides they have the right to kidnap American citizens in the US? And what does this to our moral authority in cases like those of North Korea kidnapping Japanese citizens? After all, it isn’t “illegal” according to the only law that matters in North Korea.
Yeah, it’s a problem. See Vox Popoli with this –
I’m just curious to see how much longer those who try to deny that the USA is a criminal and dictatorial empire will be able to hold out. Just what would it take for you to accept the concept? Now that kidnapping is “legal,” what’s next, disappearances?
Do you still wonder why the citizens of so many other Western nations scoff at the idea that America is a “free country?” They already can’t believe that Americans aren’t allowed to take their own money out of a bank or pay cash for a car without being reported to the Gestapo; this asserted right to kidnap takes it to a whole new level.
Actually, we already do those “disappearances” – that what the Black Sites are all about. That’s old news.
But how did we get to this point?
On October 17, 2004, a New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind quoted an unnamed aide to George Bush –
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
You could look it up (and everyone agrees now that the unnamed aide was Karl Rove). We make up the rules as we go along.
But that was the old way of doing things. Neither Obama nor Huckabee would be so foolish as to argue such things. The times are changing.
Why?
“Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.” – Jane Wagner
The hunch has changed, and “the old-guard Republican elite” is really, really worried. Either of those guys might revert to the old-fashioned idea that the UK is a sovereign nation, not just an overpriced theme park with bland and odd food.
We know better. And we are better, really. We just need to move some jerks into a pleasant retirement, and repair the damage.
