Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

My Conservation of Craziness principle looks especially good when you consider how deeply we have fallen down the rabbit hole in such a short span of time. Our topmost leaders don’t mind cribbing interrogation policy from not one but both bugbears of the twentieth century. No GOP challenger can win today without supporting explicit torture of American captives with no binding limitations regarding who, when or how. At the most recent GOP debate the torture-stoked GOP audience only quieted down when John McCain suggested that torturing prisoners is wrong. To put it frankly, an entire class of America did not spontaneously go insane some time in the last six or seven years. The sick mentality exposed by this torture debate has percolated beneath the surface for as long as any country has existed. America was a great nation not because we lacked howling torture boosters but because people like that felt ashamed to express themselves in public.

-- TIM F.

The moral question is subjective, of course. It is closely related to another question: What standard of civilized behavior should the United States exemplify, in a fight to preserve civilization against barbarism?

My own view is that the cool, carefully considered, methodical, prolonged, and repeated subjection of captives to physical torment, and the accompanying psychological terror, is immoral. I offer no opinion as to whether such conduct is a federal crime; merely that it is immoral. My moral standards are entitled to no special regard. My argument is not that others should adopt my morality. It is that the responsible policy officials should explicitly, thoughtfully, employ moral reasoning of their own. And, further, my argument is that the substitution of detailed legal formulations for detailed moral ones is a deflection of responsibility. Such deflections, often unconscious, are too common in our modern age.

-- PHILIP ZELIKOW

The president says so many stupid things about Iraq that it's sort of hard to know which ones to focus on. But in purely political terms if no others I would think the president's critics would want to focus in on what the White House said about how long the president thinks US troops should stay in Iraq.

By saying that Korea is the model for the US military presence in Iraq, the president is saying that he envisions the US military presence in Iraq continuing for many decades into the future.

Or let's put that in more stark terms, for most of you reading this post, the president envisions US troops remaining in Iraq long after you're dead.

Talking about drawdowns in late 2007 or by the end of 2008 is basically a joke, in other words. Countries can really only think on forty or fifty year horizons. So what this means is that the US military presence in Iraq is permanent.

-- JOSH MARSHALL

I have only one question for Vice President Cheney:

If you haven’t done anything deeply unethical or flatly illegal, why on earth do you need to destroy documents, that you’re (seemingly erroneously) claiming are not property of the American people, which include lists of visitors to your official residence? Seems to me, it shouldn’t make a difference if we know who visited you, if there was nothing nefarious going on.

Oh, and—by the way—since you seem to have forgotten, I’d like to remind you that you work for us. Thanks.

-- MELISSA McEWAN

Just weeks after Pope Benedict denounced government-endorsed contraception during a visit to Brazil, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva unveiled a program . . . to provide inexpensive birth-control pills at 10,000 private drugstores across the country.

Silva said the plan will give poor Brazilians "the same right that the wealthy have to plan the number of children they want."

-- STAN LEHMAN

What unites the wing-nuts; left-wing Democrats, right-wing Republicans, and shrill Internet pundits from the Huffington Post to Michelle Malkin? The idea that the US is the centre of the universe. That everything that happens is somehow because of U.S. engagement, lack of setting values, overt interference or rampant consumerism.

Get over it. The U.S. isn’t that important.

-- WHYTHAWK

It's awkward to criticize an old friend, which I still consider the [Los Angeles] Times to be, but I think the question of how mainstream journalists deal with the working class is important and deserves debate. There may be no better setting in which to examine the issue: The Los Angeles region is defined by gaping income disparities and an enormous pool of low-wage immigrant workers, many of whom are pulled north by lousy, unstable jobs. It's also home to one of the most active and creative labor federations in the country.

But you wouldn't know any of that from reading a typical issue of the L.A. Times, in print or online. Increasingly anti-union in its editorial policy, and celebrity -- and crime-focused in its news coverage, it ignores the economic discontent that is clearly reflected in ethnic publications such as La Opinion.

-- NANCY CLEELAND

Over the last few years, Lou Dobbs has transformed himself into arguably this country’s foremost populist. It’s an odd role, given that he spent the 1980s and ’90s buttering up chief executives on CNN, but he’s now playing it very successfully. He has become a voice for the real economic anxiety felt by many Americans.

The audience for his program has grown 72 percent since 2003 . . . Many elites, as Mr. Dobbs likes to call them, despise him, but others see him as a hero. His latest book, "War on the Middle Class," was a best seller and received a sympathetic review in this newspaper. Mario Cuomo has said Mr. Dobbs is "addicted to economic truth."

Mr. Dobbs argues that the middle class has many enemies: corporate lobbyists, greedy executives, wimpy journalists, corrupt politicians. But none play a bigger role than illegal immigrants. As he sees it, they are stealing our jobs, depressing our wages and even endangering our lives.

-- DAVID LEONHARDT

In the movie, "The Forgotten" starring Julianne Moore, the memories the living have of people who have died start to mysteriously disappear. And not only memories, but all artifacts and physical traces that they ever existed. Only a few people are left with any recollection of what has been lost.

Outside the walls of theaters and home entertainment centers, however, there is a real group of people who could also rightly claim to the title "the Forgotten." These are the displaced people of still suffering at the hands of an uncaring, do nothing Bush administration. Indeed, many former New Orleans residents are still not allowed by their government to return to their homes New Orleans, because to acknowledge their presence would be "inconvenient" to the powers that be. Indeed, the federal government is proceeding with plans to demolish undamaged public housing units in order to keep poor, predominantly African American residents of New Orleans from returning to repopulate the city.

-- STEVE D.