News for April 29

Democrats’ Darlin’ Arlen

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter’s political party switch to the Democrats from the GOP set jaws dropping and tongues wagging about the senators motivations and what his change will mean for both parties. While many Democrats and liberals cheered his addition to the Senate majority party, some of them were leery and wondered whether he makes for a happy addition. Links include:

FiveThirtyEight |  ” If you’re a Democrat, would you really want Arlen Specter to be anything other than a soulless, unprincipled hack? If Specter were more concerned about self-consistency — and less about self-preservation — he’d probably still be a Republican right now. Moreover, Democrats had better hope that Specter is as nakedly power-hungry as possible, because his best move from the standpoint of self-preservation is probably not merely to become a Democrat but to become a reasonably liberal one, along the lines of Bob Casey Jr.”

Obsidian Wings “Today’s flip further vindicates Clinton’s decision to fight it out to the bitter end in last year’s primary.  Looking back, nothing but positives came out of that contest.  As I’ve explained before, the primary had an “anti-Tasmanian Devil” effect – rather than chaos, it left stronger party organization and big increases of registered voters in its wake. And it’s that structural shift that doomed Specter.  He couldn’t afford to lose hundreds of thousands of moderate PA Republicans.”

Global Comment | “This is a tremendous, symbolic move. While the Republicans are struggling to rebrand themselves, consolidating their “message” as one of opposition to taxes—any taxes—support for torture, and knee-jerk anti-Obama blathering, one more member of the party stood up and said “This isn’t me.” Yes, he did it out of self-interest, but he made a very big, very visible gesture showing that the center is now firmly the domain of the Democrats. This is good news for the party.”

The Daily Beast |  “Of course, this speaks to much larger problem in the GOP. We need to attract more centrist and progressive conservative voters at the primary level, so that level-headed candidates stand a chance. We need courageous Republicans more than ever. And this week, Sen. Specter turned his back.”

The Anonymous Liberal |  “From a political perspective, instead of facing serious pressure from the Right (because of Toomey’s primary challenge), he will now face serious pressure to move to the left on various issues. That’s because he’s now going to have to run in a Democratic primary, and though the party will do what it can to clear the field for him, he’ll still likely face some competition. And whoever he faces in the primary will play up his or her own Democratic bona fides while attacking Specter’s lack thereof. So Specter will have to do things to prove that he is a legitimate Democrat.”

Farewell to the American Century  |  Salon

In its classic formulation, the central theme of the American Century has been one of righteousness overcoming evil. The United States (above all the U.S. military) made that triumph possible. When, having been given a final nudge on Dec. 7, 1941, Americans finally accepted their duty to lead, they saved the world from successive diabolical totalitarianisms. In doing so, the U.S. not only preserved the possibility of human freedom but modeled what freedom ought to look like. So goes the preferred narrative of the American Century, as recounted by its celebrants. The problems with this account are twofold. First, it claims for the United States excessive credit. Second, it excludes, ignores or trivializes matters at odds with the triumphal story line.

Rights versus Rites  |  The American Prospect

On Feb. 6, 2007, two women, both of whom had been circumcised in Africa, met in the conference room of a small foundation on Fifth Avenue in New York City for a highly unusual debate. It was the fourth annual International Day of Zero Tolerance of Female Genital Mutilation, an occasion for events across the globe dedicated to abolishing the practice. The gathering drew about 30 women, half of them African immigrants from countries including Senegal, Sudan, and Kenya, where female circumcision is common. Several of them were shocked to realize that, despite the name of the event, this wasn’t so much a discussion about how female circumcision can be eradicated as about whether it should be.

One Waterboarding is a Tragedy; a Million is a Statistic  |  Julian Sanchez

Civilian life affords us the luxury of a good deal of deontology—better to let ten guilty men go free, and so on.  In wartime, there’s almost overwhelming pressure to shift to consequentialist thinking… and that’s if you’re lucky enough to have leaders who remember to factor the other side’s population into the calculus.  And so we might think of the horror at torture as serving a kind of second-order function, quite apart from its intrinsic badness relative to other acts of war. It’s the marker we drop to say that even now, when the end is self-preservation, not all means are permitted.  It’s the boundary we treat as uncrossable not because we’re certain it traces the faultline between right and wrong, but because it’s our own defining border; because if we survived by erasing it, whatever survived would be a stranger in the mirror. Which, in his own way, is what Shep Smith was getting at. Probably Khalid Sheik Mohammed deserves to be waterboarded and worse. We do not deserve to become the country that does it to him.

Signs the GOP is Rethinking Stance of Gay Marriage  |  The New York Times

The fact that a run of states have legalized gay marriage in recent months — either by court decision or by legislative action — with little backlash is only one indication of how public attitudes about this subject appear to be changing. More significant is evidence in polls of a widening divide on the issue by age, suggesting to many Republicans that the potency of the gay-marriage question is on the decline. It simply does not appear to have the resonance with younger voters that it does with older ones.