Nominating Kerry has not made us safer

By Aziz P. -
sorry for the obligatory jab at Kerry, but Matthew Yglesias' piece revisiting Dean's then-infamous and now-prophetic statement that "capturing Saddam Hussein has not made America any safer" really brought up some serious feelings of loss here. Go read the piece in full, it deserves full attention rather than selective quotation.

However, in another way, the article does highlight just how disastrous in the political sense it was for Dean's most attractive quality, his plain-spoken bluntness, was as a liability. Dean would have been chewed to pieces by the Bush campaign by now in a way that Kerry has weathered remarkabbly well, and I grudgingly concede that Kerry's war record gravitas has been far more of an asset given teh instability in Iraq than I had previously thought.

All this leaves me wishing more for Dean to be active as Kerry's proxy, saying what can't be said by teh candidate proper, but still making the blunt statements of fact that get noticed. Dean probably hasn't been tapped by the Kerry campaign for fear of sclipsing the candidate, and that's a shame because Dean is raw ammunition just waiting to be used. I misshis presence on teh stage and I think his value as an asset is likely underestimated by Kerry. Especially now that they are allies rather than opponents.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A fair solution to Jerusalem

By Aziz P. -
I remember reading one of the books by Tom Clancy in which Jack Ryan was credited with coming up with a solution for Middle East peace which was pointedly never actually detailed in the novel. It was just a way to give his character some foreign policy cred, but ended up like that mysterious suitcase in Pulp Fiction. I couldn't help but be reminded of that, though, when I read former New York mayor Ed Koch's innovative solution to resolving the status of Jerusalem . Instead of putting the hot-button issue of Jerusalem last on the agenda, the issue should be addressed first. If the Jerusalem question is solved, everything else should fall into place more easily. I believe there is a way to keep Jerusalem unified. I am talking not only of the old walled city, which is a very small part of the city of Jerusalem, but the whole city, east, west, north and south. [...] My suggestion is to situate the new Palestinian capital in that part of East Jerusalem that is occupied overwhelming
Read more

Conservatism's shari'a, liberalism's ijtihad

By Aziz P. -
An interesting meta-debate by intellectual conservatives over conservatism's future is playing out. It started with David Frum's Waterloo essay, which led to his political excommunication. Julian Sanchez observed that this represented an epistemic closing of the conservative mind , a thesis that was validated by the retribution visited upon Jim Manzi for daring to suggest that conservatives will achieve more persuasion by using honest, strong arguments instead of weak, emotional ones. All of this has led John Quiggin at Crooked Timber to argue most wisely that as conservatism implodes, liberalism needs to find its own rationale that is more than just "not conservatism". Quiggin has a list of priorities for the liberal movement to address, and closes with the general plea, ...the left has to stand for something more than keeping the existing order afloat with incremental improvements. We need to offer the hope of a better world as an alternative to the angry tribali
Read more