Also, I’ll be on FNC’s The Live Desk w/ Martha MacCallum at 9:15 PM EST talking blogs and caucuses, as well as The Rick Moran Show at 9 PM CST.  So read, watch and listen!  We’re multi-medium today, baby!

Klein slips in a bogus word here: feels. Cohen doesn’t feel he is a liberal hawk; he believes he is. He has arguments to make, arguments that can be agreed with or disagreed with, but that have merits of their own that should be addressed regardless of the arrangement of political power at the time. This isn’t narcissism; it is the duty of any writer and thinker to state his own views as best he can without concern for how the world might greet them, who might use them unfairly, or who might expropriate them for insincere purposes. Without this independence, a writer is merely a hack. Or, worse for a writer, an activist.

Amen.

I wrote about the Cohen piece a couple of weeks ago, and found Klein’s argument equally puzzling. Aside from labeling all dissenters as enablers, it also seemed to imply that there should rarely ever be consensus on matters of foreign policy. I argued the following:

Consensus on foreign policy apparently strikes Ezra as enabling and unthinkable, even though Democrats and Republicans often agreed on matters of war and diplomacy throughout the last century. This is why Senator Johnson could mobilize his party to support a Republican president’s war effort. This is why Republicans and Democrats alike could support the same approach in dealing with the Soviet Empire. This is why two of the top-tier Democrats, both currently courting the anti-war vote, could authorize the invasion of Iraq in support of their president.

This behavior, or similarity in tone, surprises Ezra. Forget the very Liberal merits in staying in Iraq, those are irrelevant. To approve of such a thing would make you a neocon, thus dismissing you from the table. The appropriate behavior for any good Democrat would be to apologize for the invasion, and get out. Anything short of that enables the scary neocons, and PNAC and other bad stuff.

I didn’t touch upon the feelings argument, but yes, I find it to be the puffiest of straw men, as did (Andrew) Sullivan. I don’t think it’s a question of honesty, but rather a question of fairness.

It’s not fair to accuse someone you disagree with of narcissism. This should probably go without saying, but it’s unfair to warn someone on the impact of their words simply because you don’t like them.

Why? Because that can go both ways. If the words of Roger Cohen are enabling the administration, well who does Klein et al. enable?

Who might take comfort in hearing that American bloggers, journalists and politicians don’t support their president?

That’s a dangerous path to go down.

Others Blogging It:

Protein Wisdom
Brian Beutler
Ezra Klein

(Cross posted at RCP)

In the backlash against President Bush’s democracy agenda, conservatives are increasingly taking the lead. It is inherently difficult for liberals to argue against the expansion of social and political liberalism in oppressive parts of the world — though, in a fever of Bush hatred, they try their best. It is easier for traditional conservatives to be skeptical of this grand project, given their history of opposing all grand projects of radical change.

—

The unavoidable problem is this: Without moral absolutes, there is no way to determine which traditions are worth preserving and which should be overturned. Conservatism assumes and depends on an objective measure of right and wrong that skepticism cannot provide. Without a firm moral conviction that independence is superior to servitude, that freedom is superior to slavery, that the weak deserve special care and protection, the habit of conservatism is radically incomplete. In the absence of elevating ideals, it can become pessimistic and unambitious — a morally indifferent preference for the status quo.

History does teach that reform is easier to start than finish well. But history also teaches that some organic social arrangements are rotten and wormy; that it is not utopian to rescue a human life from oppression, it is justice; that events without reference to universal ideals of freedom and human rights can become a hell of permanent, unchallenged slavery. It is not a coincidence that the great movements of conscience have generally come not from skeptical traditionalists but from men and women of faith and conviction who taught that loving your neighbor is inconsistent with enslaving him; who rescued children from the nightmare factories of the Industrial Revolution; who asserted that the long tradition of racial segregation created 10,000 petty tyrants; and who believed that the Declaration of Independence is actually true, for us and for all.

Aside from unclear or codified international values, the other problem with a Burkean approach to the democracy agenda, especially in the Middle East, is the lack of feudal land owners that transcend dynasties and empires. Conservatives that argue for the "organic" development of society must also acknowledge that this region has never really had the underpinnings of a Middle Class, at least not in the way we know it.

Iraq resided under many flags, as have the Iranians. Whether it be the Qajaris, the Mongols or the Pahlavis, the head of state often divvied out rights to followers of their respective dynasty. Once these regimes were toppled, the land often changed over.

Even in modern day Iran, while much of the country’s industry is state run, it’s done so often by families and names loyal to the Revolutionary regime (see Rafsanjani and the copper industry). It’s true that you can’t make people care about a constitution simply by writing one, nor can you call it a democracy by simply having elections.

Certainly, this must flow up from the people, and there must be the desire to have a democratic, civil society. But we mustn’t assume, for example, that this current regime ruling over the Iranian people stemmed from something organic. Their claim to power in Iran is really no better than that of the regimes and dynasties before them, and mustn’t be granted more legitimacy and respect than it deserves.

Sadly, you see this happening on both ends of the spectrum. As we’ve seen in the past, the progressives and the Ron Pauls of the world are working to push us further away from the world. Who knows if their voices will be heard in the next administration, but it’s something we should all be concerned about.

Others Blogging It:

Eunomia
Brian Beutler
Publius Pundit

(Cross posted at RCP)

Hillary Clinton, you’ll remember, has staked out a nuanced position on the surge. In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in late August, Clinton declared of the surge, "It’s working." And now, O’Hanlon has been named as a foreign policy adviser to the Clinton campaign.

Clinton, of course, is no friend of the antiwar left, and at least one lefty blogger is calling on the Senator to "renounce O’Hanlon’s support." But, despite her grandstanding during the Petraeus hearings, it isn’t at all clear that the senator’s position on the war is all that different from the president’s. By putting O’Hanlon on her team, she’s let the netroots know that she doesn’t need their support, and more to the point, she doesn’t want their support. How can she afford to be so dismissive of this powerful constituency? Maybe because they aren’t as powerful as we’d thought.

Ouch. I mentioned the importance of foreign policy staffing yesterday, and this will no doubt be important for the next president. Our global standing is in question, and the next administration could set the tone for the War on Terrorism. Will it be Bush’s legacy, or America’s legacy?

On Clinton and the Netroots–I think Faughnan may be on to something. Hillary Clinton needs to account for all of the voices in her party, not just the loudest. Now is the time to distance herself a bit from them, as they would no doubt turn on her in a heartbeat were she to get elected. With their Republican muse gone, they’ll need something to charge the outrage-o-meter. If she panders to them now, she’ll only fuel such outrage upon being elected. It would be nearly impossible for any president to fully appease them, so why do it at all?

Belay their demands now, and she can maintain her independence in the general election, preventing the GOP from pigeonholing her as an extremist.

Kyle Moore disagrees:

O’Hanlon has been pimping the Iraq war with regularity, and even adopted the Orwellian overtones of the pro war movement when he not so subtly hoped the highly critical GAO report leaked before the Petraeus report would be "improved" before official release.

That Hillary would pick this man as a foreign policy advisor is highly disturbing, and just about eradicates any hope that she would even engage in a significant change of strategy in Iraq. In other words, should she be allowed to attain the Democratic nomination, we voters will be faced with a simple, though depressing, choice.

Vote for more war in Iraq or vote for more war in Iraq.

My only hope at this point is that she has played her hand too early, and is currently in the process of destroying her own prospects at nomination.

(Cross posted at RCP)

Just a program notice–stay tuned to RealClearBlogs all day today and tomorrow, where we’ll be frequently updating everyone on the Manhattan misadventures of that lovable little scamp Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

How does a Paul Krugman blog read? Well, a lot like a Paul Krugman Op-Ed:

Most people assume that this rise in inequality was the result of impersonal forces, like technological change and globalization. But the great reduction of inequality that created middle-class America between 1935 and 1945 was driven by political change; I believe that politics has also played an important role in rising inequality since the 1970s. It’s important to know that no other advanced economy has seen a comparable surge in inequality – even the rising inequality of Thatcherite Britain was a faint echo of trends here.

On the political side, you might have expected rising inequality to produce a populist backlash. Instead, however, the era of rising inequality has also been the era of "movement conservatism," the term both supporters and opponents use for the highly cohesive set of interlocking institutions that brought Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich to power, and reached its culmination, taking control of all three branches of the federal government, under George W. Bush. (Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy.)

Tom Maguire of JustOneMinute pokes a little fun at Krugman, noting that the good old days weren’t always that good (to paraphrase Billy Joel):

Well. Krugman wants to return us to a happy place we reached by way of war and depression, a place where minorities and women could not work, and where illegal immigrants toiled in the fields but nowhere else. And he wants to pretend that is not how we got there, and not where we were. Good luck.

(Cross Posted at RCBlogs)

Was that auditorium so huge that Kerry couldn’t grasp what was happening? I mean, you can see the edge of the stage in the video clip.

If Meyer was being annoyingly, undeterrably disruptive (which, given the scattered applause that erupts as he’s detained, he likely was), it’s understandable that the police would attempt to remove him. But when they start threatening to employ weaponry against him, and certainly when they do and the kid starts yowling in pain, that’s when it’s time to intervene. If those cops had been kicking the *beep!* out of him, I can’t imagine everyone would have stood idly by.

(Cross posted at RCBlogs)

Of course Barry’s statement is no different than conservatives calling liberals "soft on terror", defeatists, anti-Christian, or other such epithets.

As long as we believe that our political opponents are evil and only want bad things, we are never going to see real change and progress in this country. We are going to continue seeing insane political rhetoric and demagoguery.

Why did the Civil Rights Movement succeed? Because people like Martin Luther King Jr. believed that his political opponents deep down wanted justice just like he did – they just didn’t know what it looked like. MLK Jr. knew that his political opponents were made in the image of God and that they would eventually recognize injustice for what it is.

I am now utterly convinced that noted conservative David Horowitz is wrong in his book The Art of Political War. Political war is ultimately a self-defeating strategy that is demeaning and only sees the worst in humanity.

(Cross posted at RCBlogs)

So please, check it out, and give us your thoughts and suggestions.  Gracias!