Nicholas Kristof’s editorial in today’s New York Times tackles, with intelligence and nuance, the issue of American double standards regarding Israel.  

Kristof asks: “This week’s hearings at the International Court of Justice on Israel’s ’security fence‘ raise again one of the most sensitive questions for America: are we engaging in double standards in the Middle East?”

I agree with Kristof’s reply to his own question: The answer is a resounding yes.  

As Kristof notes, there is more to the issue than a facile acknowledgement that America has one set of standards for its friends and one for its foes — such an observation is more a statement of fact than an astute critique of U.S. foreign policy. Israel, a country that violates U.N. resolutions, can rely on American support and bucket loads of money. Iraq, another country that defied U.N. resolutions, was invaded by American forces.  

Kristof rightly insists, however, that we must examine the type and nature of the violations that these countries commit. Kristof argues that America is clearly guilty of double standards regarding Israel, just as the nations that criticize America as a bullying pro-Zionist machine have their own sets of double standards. Ultimately, mutual hypocrisy proves and accomplishes nothing, and Kristof believes that America must more forcefully condemn the wall that Israel is currently constructing on Palestinian land.    

I want to add additional emphasis to Kristof’s article and posit that it is imperative that the U.S. speak out now against the Israeli wall in order to restore some of its credibility in the international community and Islamic world. America is currently an occupying force in Iraq, and America must not underestimate the incredible resentment this occupation has inspired. Nations in the Middle East have a long and bitter memory of unjust and illegitimate rulers, and this list includes not only the likes of Saddam Hussein but also the colonialist occupying forces. America may be seen as the unwelcome successor to the previous French and British forces that occupied the region. Just as the Israeli wall is further problematizing the politics of the region, the American silence on the issue further delegitimizes the United States in the eyes of the world.  

Mimi Hanaoka

In a splendid tidbit that highlights the disparate Islams that exist throughout the world, today’s installation of the BBC Online’s photojournalism series illustrates the quotidian life of Sulayman Ag-Mohamed, a Tuareg nomad in northern Mali. This piece is visually stunning and highlights the diversity of Islamic life and practice that exists within the Islamic world.

Tuareg men wear indigo clothing, and against the backdrop of their desert environment, their blue robes are striking, as is the fact that Tuareg men also wear, from about the age of twenty, a blue turban that covers the face. Women and girls are proudly and culturally appropriately unveiled. In another inversion of popularly accepted norms, Sulayman Ag-Mohamed’s wife was selected by his brother.  

In addition to being an educational and beautiful morsel — the piece consists of a mere seven photos and short pieces of commentary — this item is timely. In an era when the Bush administration can rightly be accused of treating political Islam as the monolithic and evil heir to international communism, bringing attention to this diversity in the Islamic world should disabuse the world of such a feeble understanding of Islam. Contrary to what some policy makers may imagine, Tehran is not the only, or even dominant, type of Muslim society. The shocking blue robes of the Tuareg men are a fascinating counterpoint to the black robes of the mullahs in Iran.  

This informative piece of photojournalism should chip away at the myth of a monolithic Islam and instead underscore the richness of the disparate Islams that exist throughout the world.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Oil and the staggering greed it inspires has led to war profiteering in Iraq by the likes of Halliburton, and oil has now added a less sinister but certainly interesting new dimension to the events in the Middle East: Japan has signed a deal with Iran to develop the oil field in Azadegan.

As a tiny but energy-hungry island nation, Japan relies heavily on imports; oil — eighty-eight percent of which it imports from the Middle East — supplies half of the nation’s energy. After three years of negotiations, Japan has won access to the estimated twenty-six billion barrels of oil in Azadegan.  

Richard Boucher, spokesman for the U.S. State Department, stated that he was “disappointed,” by the deal that Japan has brokered with Iran.

Boucher may be rightfully suspicious of Iran, particularly in light of Iran’s recent admission that it purchased nuclear equipment from black market dealers. Iran insists it is using such devices for peaceful purposes, which may or may not be true. Only last year, Iran admitted that it had been concealing its nuclear activities for years. However, a deal of this magnitude certainly adds an intriguing new facet to the world-wide scramble for oil. America, distrustful of Tehran and thirsty for oil, must confront the fact that a newly militarized Japan is now an important and very visible player in the region.  

Mimi Hanaoka

While it seems silly that the media loves to focus on whether prospective First Ladies are liabilities or assets to their husbands campaigns, what should we make of all of the hoopla over Mary Cheney’s participation in her father’s re-election campaign? Openly gay, Mary Cheney has stood by her Vice President father and actively participated in the promotion of the Bush/Cheney ticket. Given that the Bush administration has vocalized its support of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages, members of the queer community can hardly begin to fathom how Cheney’s daughter is able to reconcile her sexual orientation with her ardent promotion of the Radical Right’s agenda.

In fact, just recently, some concerned citizens launched www.DearMary.com, a site dedicated to urging Mary Cheney to convince her father to oppose the amendment and to focus her loyalties on the interests of the queer community.

Mary’s predicament is not one that most of us would want to find ourselves in for one reason or another, but it does raise some important questions: Does one’s first loyalty belong to his or her family or to the demands of identity politics? Is it even possible to make such a simple delineation, particularly when one’s family and upbringing constitutes part of one’s identity? And is it possible that neither Cheney’s family nor the queer community which wants to claim her as its spokesperson can actually lay claim to Mary’s identity since both oppose aspects of her identity and thus potentially preclude genuine self-actualization?

Laura Nathan-Garner

Call me crazy, but I really don’t understand the media’s obsession with the spouses of presidential candidates. (Maybe I should just say the ”wives“ of presidential candidates. After all, the husbands of presidential candidates don’t make it into the spotlight since female candidates rarely remain on the ballot past February).

Prior to Dean’s withdrawal from the Democratic race, we heard all about how his wife was a liability since she wasn’t on the campaign trail with him. Today, The New York Times features an article which questions whether John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, is an asset or a liability to his run for the White House.

Sure, I suppose every intimate detail of a candidate’s life, ranging from Botox to extramarital affairs to the quality of his wife’s chocolate chip cookie recipe, is subject to scrutiny in determining whether he is fit to run the country. At the risk of being incredibly blunt and dismissive, who really cares? Or rather, why does the media try to make voters base their decisions on relatively trivial, personal issues?

I suppose that these types of stories keep The National Enquirer in business and give people something to talk about. But beyond that, such superficial details have little to no impact on one’s ability to lead a country.

On a related note, I wonder if the media’s portrayal of the wives of presidential candidates as caretakers, homemakers, party planners, entertainers — everything but policymakers —  reinforces the idea that women are expected to be wives first and foremost. I guess that by definition, that is what the title ”First Lady“ means.

But I wonder whether this tendency to focus on a presidential candidate’s spouse and children (remember those painful Saturday Night Live skits about Chelsea Clinton during the early 1990s?) reinforces the notion of the ”trophy wife,“ thereby making it that much more difficult for us to imagine a woman in the White House — as president. Maybe it’s time to start questioning the media’s tendency to question whether presidential candidates and their wives are indeed ”model Americans“ and worry a little more about what they will do for the country — and whether they can create a sense of belonging both in the White House and throughout the nation for a larger spectrum of people. Just some food for thought …  kind of like the chocolate chip cookie contest that dominated the 1992 presidential election.

Laura Nathan-Garner

Have you ever considered the composition of the self-selected group of people who visit and/or write for a given blog on a regular basis? The audience of various blogs on AlterNet.org, for instance, is probably quite different from the writers and readers of a blog featured on, say, the National Review website.

Undoubtedly, the similarities between the readers and writers of each of these blogs — as well as the differences between the audiences and writers of these two blogs as collective groups — become the basis for ”citizenship“ in their respective virtual communities. And in the process certain groups, perspectives, and identities get excluded or marginalized in the discussions that the blog features and facilitates.

Not surprisingly, such exclusion and marginalization produce a fair number of ”isms“ (yes, even members of the PULSE team and our readers are guilty of a case of the ”isms,“ even if it is primarily anti-Bushism). As Brooklyn writer John Lee recently divulged in ”Blogging While (Anti) Black,“ blogs such as Gawker and Wonkette seek to sustain an aura of hipness by joking about non-whites being second-class citizens. He writes:

Gawker is run by a New York Observer contributor named Choire Sicha … In an article covering the New Yorker Magazine Festival, Sicha reports that, ”around me the audience is white,“ although he also says that he sees people like ZZ Packer and Edwidge Danticat (of whom he says ”Edwidge is also adorable — you want to drive around with her in a giant Haitian-mobile and smoke a little weed“). Both of these women writers appear, at least to casual inspection, not to be white. In truth, there were several people at the three-day event who aren’t white, despite his claims, and whom he characterizes suspiciously by ethnicity. Sicha’s descriptions of non-whites seem to fall into the usual pattern of one part paternalism and two parts Maplethorpeian admiration.

Ana Marie Cox, a.k.a. Wonkette, is Sicha’s DC counterpart. Her mission: to plumb the DC gossip scene for any signs of life in a town where getting invited to a Beltway power party is harder than getting a reservation at Nobu during a Mad Cow Disease scare. For a city that arguably controls the fate of the known world, DC has a social scene that is only slightly more interesting than life on an Alaskan oil field — this city’s idea of a velvet rope is ten secret service guys standing in a row. Cox’s current main source of stories seems to be blog-refusnik Matt Drudge (oddly, she’s simultaneously constantly plugging rumors that Drudge is gay) …

Like Sicha, Cox injects ethnicity into even the most mundane occurrences. After a VH-1 Pop Quiz given to Democratic candidates about various music, sports and film icons, she declares ”Wes Clark: The whitest candidate in a very, very white field.“ Evidently, not knowing who starred in Total Recall or who wrote the Harry Potter books makes you white. Both sites seem obsessed with the eugenics of not just people, but ideas. But you don’t have to take my word for it, let’s examine some actual entries from the websites:

Proof Of Strife

Gawker: Jan 19: Media Bubble: Something Going On In Iowa?

Evidently there’s some sort of national holiday today? Also some election thing is going on in Nebraska or Iowa or some flat state. I didn’t really catch it.

There are many things one can say about Martin Luther King, and it’s fair game (though kind of poor taste) to poke fun at his alleged infidelity, but denying the holiday even exists is worse than marginalizing the event. He gave his life for what he believed in and there are still states and cities that refuse to recognize this federal holiday to make a direct statement about their politics. Gawker cast down its gauntlet in questionable company …

Wonkette: Feb 06:

Russell Simmons: Bothering the White Folks Again #

Lloyd Grove reports on Wednesday night’s Victory Campaign 2004: A bunch of liberal celebrities got together to bash Bush and showed PowerPoint presentations. Is there anything more politically inspiring? Way to excite the base, guys. Then hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons harshed everyone’s mellow, saying ”The shit y’all doing is corny“ and ”We are not included!“ That’s no way to get invited to the after-party, Russell. Can someone give him some ”bling-bling“ or whatever those people call it and tell him to be quiet?

Laughing at Russell Simmons is easy — he’s got that lisp, and a trophy wife who by our estimates costs him about $50,000 a day. However, there is a huge chasm between humor that’s good-humored and the wink-nudge barb that seems hip, but in fact serves to divide.

Gawker: Feb 6.

Too Black, Too Strong

Hey! It’s Black History Month! And it’s leap year, too, so we get a special extra day of blackness in the media. Here’s an in-depth report that I like to call ”Black History Month: What’s Up With Black People These Days?“ ….

… Well, looks like those are all the black people in the news today — one presentation of a marketing scheme in the paper of record and one gossip item painting an incredibly successful (if highly annoying) businessman as a buffoon. Okay, we’ll look for more black people tomorrow! Maybe Nicole Richie will slice someone up at fashion week.

Ummm, yeah. So next time someone tries to convince you that the internet is increasing our interconnectedness, think again. The internet may just be contributing to the maintenance of the barriers and stereotypes that keep us apart — though those barriers may now be more easily accessible to a larger number of people.

Laura Nathan-Garner

Sj at the blog, polis-Chicago, reflected yesterday about Howard Dean’s legacy. He concluded that the Vermont governor’s lasting impact on the Democratic Party will not be his use of the Internet, but rather the way his campaign showed disenfranchised Democrats, earthfirsters, and finicky academics that it is okay to step into the political ring. It has been said that the unintended results of history are often greater than the expected outcomes. I think Dean’s candidacy will prove to be a case in point.          

Most of the commentaries about Howard Dean’s lasting role in the future of Democratic politics has centered on his web-fundraising, but I think that his campaign did something much larger to the architecture of the party. Certainly it has been noted that the Dean campaign excited previously non-political groups (i.e., young people), but I don’t think enough has been made of the potential long-term benefits his efforts have germinated. His campaign has redefined the political for a large section of voters who were either apathetic or unattractive to the process, and this may have huge implications for future election cycles.

Yes, he was there at the right time: Bush’s domestic and foreign policies easily enraged even the mildest of liberals, and Dean was there to voice their anger by standing up to Bush when no other candidates would. But beyond just being a conduit for the left, Dean also taught far left liberals what it meant to be political. Yes, he would continue to lash out at Bush and the me-too Democrats, but he would also lay out a rather centrist fiscal and social agenda to make his campaign more than just a platform for minority views. And the amazing thing is that the far left ate this up: from the earthfirsters to the academics, his supporters learned to compromise their own agendas enough to get into the political ring and take a stand.

Being in academics, I know what an accomplishment this is. I’ve been frustrated for a long time with so many of my colleagues, who, despite their intelligence in the world of academia, refused to sully themselves in the world of politics. One of the brightest students in my department summarized his participation in the 2000 elections as voting for Nader “just to record his protest vote” (and not because he had any affinity with Nader’s message). What a waste of a mind, and that’s just one. Imagine if he took his smarts and applied them to the realm of politics, even just a little. And then multiply that by thousands of other bright people who don’t want to dirty their intellect with electoral politics.

Greens and Naderites often counter back that the Democratic Party doesn’t represent them, so why should they support the party’s candidates? Even beyond the fact that a third party vote is a vote for Bush, I think third party strategies are completely wrongheaded. If everyone who felt his or her voice wasn’t represented in the Democratic Party participated in the party, then accordingly, the party would shift its agenda, however so slightly. But the real problem is that this hasn’t been good enough for the far left. They haven’t been willing to get their hands dirty in the realm of politics, which requires that they concede that their position is not the only one on the table. Such political purity has produced an aloof left that has effectively neutered itself politically. And as they stand and watch, the Democratic Party has crept to the center more and more.

It’s obviously too early to tell at this point, but Dean’s campaign may have shaken that constituency out of its dogmatic slumber. Now the left is a potent force (both in terms of numbers and campaign dollars), and with Dean’s speech today, he is planning to employ them through to the general election. The results could be decisive. Hopefully, that effect can be one element of Dean’s legacy.

Benjamin Helphand

It’s a shift in city policy that could affect thousands of people and transform San Francisco’s image – and it doesn’t involve marriage licenses.

A new plan to combat homelessness was going to be the most ambitious undertaking by San Francisco’s city government before Mayor Gavin Newsom decided last week to dive head-first into the debate over gay marriages.

Newsom had a hand in crafting the homelessness policy. While a member of the city’s board of supervisors, he championed a voter initiative to cut welfare payments from up to $410 a month to $59 for 2,400 homeless people in San Francisco. The proposition, called Care Not Cash, was passed overwhelmingly by voters in 2002 but was ruled unenforceable by court order.

The idea was to funnel the money that would have gone to welfare checks toward housing, support services and drug rehabilitation programs for San Francisco’s most entrenched homeless people. The plan doesn’t address thousands of other street people who aren’t receiving money from San Francisco’s County Adult Assistance Programs.

Care Not Cash was seen by many as a political move by Newsom to scapegoat the homeless and use the issue to catapult him into the mayor’s office. It worked. He narrowly defeated a late, spirited campaign by Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez to succeed Willie Brown as mayor in November.

The biggest criticism of Care Not Cash was that it did not guarantee housing, only a bed in an emergency shelter, for people who would have had their welfare payments slashed. Opponents sued, and a judge halted implementation, ruling that only the board of supervisors can set welfare policy.

The board of supervisors passed a revised proposal last year offered by Supervisor Chris Daly. The new measure still cuts welfare checks but only when the recipient receives permanent housing or a spot in a drug rehab program. The city is coming up with plans to implement the new policy in April.

Anyone who’s been to San Francisco recently can’t help but notice how many people are living on the streets. Panhandlers ply their trade throughout the tourist districts, much to the chagrin of hotels and other businesses dependent on tourism. It can be a jarring sight for visitors used to a more suburban lifestyle.

Former Mayor Brown basically gave up on trying to solve the homeless problem during his administration. It will be interesting to see if this new approach can really make life better for some of San Francisco’s homeless people.

chinoloco

In perhaps the largest protest yet of President Bush’s support for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, thousands of queer couples from across the country flocked to San Francisco’s City Hall over the weekend to seek marriage licenses. On Friday, San Francisco Mayor Gavin C. Newsom instructed city and county officials to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, thereby giving thousands of couples an additional reason to celebrate Valentine’s Day.

Thanks to hundreds of city officials and police officers working throughout the holiday weekend without pay, over 2,400 same-sex couples have legally entered marriages with their partners since Newsom’s decree. However, despite the jovial mood on the streets of San Francisco, there is concern that San Francisco city officials are violating the terms of California state law that restricts marriage to a union between a woman and a man. City officials acknowledge that they may be forced to cease marrying same-sex couples at any moment when the state steps in, but until then, they are marrying as many couples as possible in the name of love and equal rights.

Although Robert Tyler, a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund said that San Francisco was making ”a mockery“ of what he called ”democracy,“ the significant number of people who have participated in San Francisco’s defiance of this law suggests that the problem might not be city officials and same-sex couples but rather democracy’s failure to practice what it preaches.

Protest of this magnitude proves that Bush & co. won’t have an easy time outlawing same-sex marriages as queer communities grow more determined to hold democracy accountable to all of its citizens. Given that these communities pay taxes and even register for the draft in accordance with the law, the ”because the law says so“ rationale for denying them the right to marry is laughable. The law of the land, after all, isn’t supposed to create two classes of citizens, but as of now, that is what the law seems to do. If California officials have any sense, they’ll recognize this — along with the marriages of thousands of same-sex couples.

Laura Nathan-Garner

Under the erroneously simplistic impression that national service will bridge racial divisions, Malaysia is now implementing a system of mandatory national service. The system is not a draft, since those who are called up will not engage in military training or be deployed overseas. Rather, the system is more like a bizarre marriage of boot camp and an Outward Bound course; this year, 85,000 eighteen-year-olds will undergo three months of training, which will include physical exercise, community service, and what the BBC ominously calls “lessons in nation-building.”
  
The official national service website eerily juxtaposes an image of uniformed and bereted young men engaging in physical training next to a photo of a young woman happily feeding tea and cakes to the elderly. This, apparently, is the face of tomorrow’s happily racially integrated Malaysia.

An article in today’s The Star, a Malaysian newspaper, was cautiously and diplomatically optimistic about the program.

The BBC, however, offers a more insightful analysis of the situation. The BBC notes that there are serious rifts that fall along racial lines between the nation’s Malay, Chinese, Indian and tribal communities, and that these racial and ethnic divisions are reinforced by race-based economic policies. The new system of national service will do nothing to speak to these race-based policies and the resultant atmosphere of tension and racial inequality.  

While it may be the case that the droves of teenagers corralled together during their national service will foster friendships that cross racial divides, the fact will remain that race-based economic policies still will be firmly in place when these teenagers return from their three-month hiatus from quotidian life. National service may foster personal relationships that are blind to race and ethnicity, but the government will continue to operate with an eye to racial differences.

Mimi Hanaoka

With the Justice Department demanding that at least six hospitals hand over the medical records of hundreds of abortions performed there, the debate over partial-birth abortions appears to be heating up again. Although Bush signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 2003 into law in November, federal judges in Nebraska, New York and California issued temporary injunctions immediately thereafter, protecting physicians who perform this procedure until the courts hear both sides’ full arguments. Because they can be punished later for abortions performed during the injunction if the law is upheld, however, doctors are exercising precaution.

It is difficult to surmise whether such precaution is all for naught. Since the Supreme Court overturned a Nebraska partial-birth abortion law that failed to provide a medical exemption in Stenberg v. Carhart, and all twenty-one legal challenges to such laws at the state and federal level have succeeded, the law is likely to be overturned. But if one or two justices retire before the Court hears the case, the President’s judicial nominees could sway the vote.

What is at stake when the Court hears this case? More than the term ”partial-birth abortion“ might lead one to believe. By making the procedure seem wholly unnecessary, the ban appeared to be a negligible restriction on reproductive rights.  But it is telling that the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), which represents 90% of U.S. board-certified obstetrician/gynecologists, maintain that partial-birth abortion is not a medical term. Nevertheless, the ACOG assumes this legal term of art crafted by Congress refers to ”intact dilatation and extraction  .  .  .,  a rare variant of a more common midterm abortion procedure known as dilatation and evacuation“ which ”may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.“ Significantly, the law never employs these medical terms, leaving it open to the discretion of the courts to interpret.

Insisting that the partial-birth abortion ban ”is not required to contain a ‘health’ exemption, because . . . a partial-birth abortion is never necessary to preserve the health of a woman, poses serious risks to a woman’s health, and lies outside the standard of medical care,“ the legislation restricts this procedure across the board. While the law includes a nominal medical exemption if a woman’s life is at stake, its failure to do so for her health belies previous partial-birth abortion rulings. Moreover, since permissibility of exemptions must be determined by State Medical Boards, whose members are typically appointed by the governor, doctors in more conservative states may never obtain medical exemptions, threatening a right that many women and their doctors have taken for granted for more than thirty years.

Laura Nathan-Garner

The morning Op/Ed page is democracy at work — a forum for exchanging ideas and a reflection of our values. But it can just as well reveal the naughty bits of our particular capitalist democracy, with its tendency toward partisan bluster and mindless cant.

If you read The Boston Globe Op/Ed page every day, you might assume that there are only two possible political perspectives: liberal and conservative. But you might start to wonder what, exactly, these terms mean. If “conservatism” means fiscal responsibility and “getting government off our backs,” you have to wonder whether, for example, President Bush’s policies really meet that definition.

Whatever accepted definitions the “conservative” and “liberal” labels once had are breaking down. Young people, especially, are shedding traditional party and “camp” affiliations. Ask a college student whether she’s a republican or a democrat, and you’re not likely to get a straight answer — half of college students describe themselves as “unaffiliated,” and less than a third describe their views as “moderate.”  

If young people are less inclined to stay inside these two particularly constrictive boxes, our political language is sadly trending in the opposite direction (maybe that helps explain declining student engagement in politics). While our marketplace of ideas slides into dogmatic, partisan silliness, opinions that can’t fit neatly on a bumper sticker become irrelevant.

Let the inane, breathless ranting typical of Sean Hannity or Michael Moore trickle down to us ordinary citizens, and our ability to reason through complex issues — like gay marriage or the Iraq War — trickles down with it. When you see your political landscape as being dominated by two fundamentally opposed, warring camps, it is easier to rally support for your side by appealing to emotion than by appealing to reason. If you’ve already taken sides, it makes no sense to ask why you’re fighting. You just put your head down and fight.

Seeing the world in this profoundly uncivilized way allows Republican Party spokesmodel Ann Coulter, for example, to write:

[T]he left’s anti—Americanism is intrinsic to their entire worldview. Liberals promote the rights of Islamic fanatics for the same reason they promote the rights of adulterers, pornographers, abortionists, criminals, and Communists. They instinctively root for anarchy and against civilization.

From Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (Crown Forum,  2003).

  
To a sympathetic reader, Coulter gives emotional rant the appearance of logic by defining “America” as everything that is good and agreeable to me and “the left,” “liberals” or “democrats” (she uses the terms interchangeably) as everything that is bad and disagreeable to me.  When her terms are so defined, the above statement is perfectly logical. Coulter’s aim, though, is not to lead the reader toward knowledge or understanding or reason, but into a comfy tautological cul-de-sac, where, by definition, she is always right.

It’s this kind of intentional definitional confusion that allows Globe reader Bruce Cantwell to write, in a letter to the editor:

Liberalism has nothing to do with freedom. If I own a piece of land and want to build on it, who blocks my effort? If I want to own a gun, who stops me? If I want to smoke in a bar, who stops me? Who opposes freedom in all areas of trade and commerce? (The Boston Globe, Feb. 9, 2004).

  
In case it’s not clear, Mr. Cantwell means to suggest that “liberals” are the enemies of freedom. But in response, one might ask, as Globe  reader Dan Feinberg did the next day:

What if I own a home and I want to freely enjoy my neighborhood without commercial encroachment? What if I want to freely walk down the street without being threatened by a “sporting” handgun? What if I want to work or play in a bar free from toxic smoke? What if I want to eat fish free from the mercury taint that even a conservative-led FDA and EPA admit is dangerous and comes mostly from polluting coal “commerce?” (The Boston Globe, Feb. 10, 2004).

Are “conservatives” and “liberals” both enemies of freedom? Provided they can agree on a bar, maybe Bruce and Dan will get together and resolve the apparent paradox over a beer. If they do, they might ask a more productive question: Why talk about “liberals” and “conservatives” and their relation to “freedom” if we won’t even define our terms?

When we banish these labels to the proverbial dustbin, it gets harder to point out one side’s hypocrisies and the other’s ironies. Without the ability to level the opponent to one common denominator or another, Op/Ed sophistry becomes almost impossible. Just try answering Bruce or Dan’s questions without them. And when we refuse to use misleading generalizations, we might have to get down to the patriotic work of a well-functioning democratic citizenry: earnest, candid dialogue — on the issues.

henrypb