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Scratch white America and beneath it is black - Times Online
"Any European student of Alexis de Tocqueville swiftly opens his eyes at the three races that defined the country in the classic text, Democracy in America. And that’s why it seems so odd that the election of the son of a white mother and a black father could be seen as a threat to American identity, when, in fact, Obama is the final iteration of the American identity. "
Obama’s new man calls time on US torture | Andrew Sullivan - Times Online
With him in place and with Obama in the White House, we now have something very, very precious back in the government of America. It’s called trust and lawfulness. As they say in some of the most beleaguered places on the planet: know hope.
Proportionality And Terror
Andrew Sullivan applies the just war theory to the Israeli assault on Gaza.
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In the history of the West, the laws of war are clear enough. You do not launch a just war if it leads to greater evils than the status quo
ante. There must be a reasonable proportion between means and ends. Both sides should be able to acknowledge common human values, even as they fight over territory or ideology. And yet Hamas has never done this; has no capacity for abiding by even minimal moral norms, believes it has a moral responsibility to eradicate the Jewish state, and certainly finds the universalist and liberal moral law embedded in Western and largely Christian culture meaningless outside Islamic hegemony. Israel, for its part, is on a different moral plane than Hamas. Its internal critics write op-eds; they are not taken out and shot. But, in the face of what is, essentially, a 60 year war against enemies on all sides and within, it has long since disappeared down the self-reflecting mirrors of survivalist logic and existential panic. It looks to me like a society in danger of losing its sense of restraint to the logic of violence. It is lashing out because it feels it can do no other and senses its long-term survival at stake. Even if violence does not solve the problem and may make it worse, war can seem a better option now than disappearing passively in the next couple of decades. The stunning near-unanimity of Israelis behind the Gaza attack is proof of this. In Israel, it seems, it is always America in 2002. -
If the goal is to persuade Gazans to
ditch Hamas, the war has so far been counter-productive, and has
certainly exposed the Sunni Arab dictatorships' de facto alliance with
Israel against Iran-backed Hamas. So far, the big winner - again! - is
Iran. - 1 more annotations...
Aliens
Sullivan says: The inability on both sides to see Jews and Arabs as equally and indistinguishably human before they are Jews and Arabs is at the heart of the problem. In a contest between Israel's flawed democracy and Hamas's theological murderousness, I see no moral equivalence. But Israelis and Arabs demand exactly the same respect as human beings, every single one, including the "worst of the worst". A refusal to grapple with the moral costs of this conflict, and a glib dismissal of the terrible human carnage now being inflicted by Israel (and paid for in part by Americans) is a sign of moral unseriousness. But it is the same mindset that can authorize the torture of human beings and see it as "coercive interrogation" only when Americans do it to Muslims.
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The inability on both sides to see Jews and Arabs as equally and indistinguishably human before they are Jews and Arabs is at the heart of the problem. In a contest between Israel's flawed democracy and Hamas's theological murderousness, I see no moral equivalence. But Israelis and Arabs demand exactly the same respect as human beings, every single one, including the "worst of the worst". A refusal to grapple with the moral costs of this conflict, and a glib dismissal of the terrible human carnage now being inflicted by Israel (and paid for in part by Americans) is a sign of moral unseriousness. But it is the same mindset that can authorize the torture of human beings and see it as "coercive interrogation" only when Americans do it to Muslims.
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (December 19, 2008) - Taking Yes For An Answer
If I cannot pray with Rick Warren, I realize, then I am not worthy of being called a Christian. And if I cannot engage him, then I am not worthy of being called a writer. And if we cannot work with Obama to bridge these divides, none of us will be worthy of the great moral cause that this civil rights movement truly is.
Obama: I am the chosen one - Times Online
In the coming week, if he is elected, we would be wise to resist euphoria or sentiment. But we would be wilfully blind not to sense the gravity and potential of the moment as well. We could have the first black president, with a congressional majority of a size not seen since Lyndon Johnson. We could see a landslide among the young. We could see an unprecedented African-American turnout – a moment when black Americans actively take ownership for the first time of the society in which they have always been such an integral part.
We simply do not know what new realities this moment could unleash. What we do know is that this is history – epic, deep, momentous history.
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (October 25, 2007) - Imaginationland
Bush, putty in Cheney's hands, never wanted torture, but was so cowardly and lazy he never asked the hard questions of what was actually being done. He knows, of course, somewhere in his crippled fundamentalist psyche. But this is a man with clinical - Christianist and dry-drunk - levels of reality-denial, whose interaction with Rumsfeldjimwatsonafpgetty reality can only operate on the crudest levels of Manichean analysis. All he needs to be told is that whatever it is they're doing, it isn't torture. He won't ask any more questions. They're evil; we're good; so we can't torture. Even when they were totally busted at Abu Ghraib, his incuriosity and denial held firm. After all, what if he were to find out something he didn't want to know? His world might collapse.
Dictator Bush’s great illusion is exposed | Andrew Sullivan - Times Online
executive power – as the third and fourth US presidents, Thoma
The Abolition of Torture
The very concept of Western liberty sprung in part from an understanding that, if the state has the power to reach that deep into a person's soul and can do that much damage to a human being's person, then the state has extinguished all oxygen necessary for freedom to survive.
That is why, in George Orwell's totalitarian nightmare, the final ordeal is, of course, torture. Any polity that endorses torture has incorporated into its own DNA a totalitarian mutation. If the point of the U.S. Constitution is the preservation of liberty, the formal incorporation into U.S. law of the state's right to torture--by legally codifying physical coercion, abuse, and even, in Krauthammer's case, full-fledged torture of detainees by the CIA--would effectively end the American experiment of a political society based on inalienable human freedom protected not by the good graces of the executive, but by the rule of law.
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