What do liberals and conservatives believe.

OK, I'm still psyched about Osama getting murderized, but back to more substantive concerns.

I want to take a step back and just try to focus on what liberals and conservatives believe, and why.

First, Democrats generally stand for the following proposition: The United States as a nation has a duty of providing a level of social security to all its citizens, regardless of whether they are rich or poor. This means that the government is involved in education (public schools), guaranteed retirement (social security), health insurance (Medicare/Medicaid/ObamaCare).  The converse to that, of course, is that rich people get better education, are able to retire, and get much better health care, while poor people don't.

And we're not doing this just to be nice - we're doing it because we are stronger as a nation when people don't have to work until they're on their deathbeds, when we invest in future generations, and when people don't have to go bankrupt when they get sick.  This is security - and in that security is freedom. If a person knows that he'll have a guaranteed pension when he retires, he can take more risks in life and feel more confident starting his own business.  So, although those sloganeering Republicans decry all of this as "socialism," it's really strengthening capitalism. That's why the middle class didn't come to be in this country until these social safety nets were put in place.

Obviously, I am a proud Democrat.

Republicans, generally believe in "small government." That means the less the government does, the better, as the free market is a better allocator of resources than the government. This means more private schools - possibly purely private schools. Privatization of social security. Vouchers instead of guaranteed health care when you're old. And of course, lower taxes. So the calculus here is people are "freer" because they'll pay less in taxes. Of course, a person making $50K a year who can't afford a good health care plan would probably argue that they're not really as "free" as someone making $500K when they get cancer and have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospital fees...but sure, that's what they believe, and that's fine, I guess. It's just pretty simplistic - if taxes are lower, you are freer. It's a simple slogan (and powerful!).

A lot of times conservatives characterize liberals as just setting up these safety nets because they're bleeding heart hippies. They're not. Most liberals I know hate hippies! Free love can screw itself. We believe in these policies because they make the middle class stronger, and because it is wrong for poor people to have less opportunities to succeed than the rich.

Did torture help us catch Osama?

OK, enough cheerleading for the day, on to some substance.

Some Republicans/conservatives are already saying that this whole thing validates Guantanamo Bay and the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," a.k.a. actions that are torture under the laws of the international community, the U.S. government, the U.S. Code of Military Conduct, and history. This is dumb, for about threereasons. [I picked that number randomly - let's see if I can think up that many.]

1. This is the most important: just because torture worked in getting information here doesn't mean that non-torturous methods, the ones that the military or law enforcement traditionally have used, would not have been equally or more effective.  In other words, even if torture yielded good information on this one occasion, there is no evidence that it yielded the information faster than other techniques.  Every study of whether torture is effective shows that it yields mostly just lots of BAD information - if someone says "tell me what you know!" before ripping out your fingernail, I'm pretty sure you'll say something, whether it's true or false. That's the technical problem with torture.

2. Morality matters. We shouldn't go around pretending to drown people. We're America. And even if we can make an exception for that dumb hypothetical of "there's a nuke in a major American city that is about to explode omg we must immediately torture this random computer analyst to get information," that wasn't the case here. Either we are a country who tortures or we are not.

3.  The ones using this as a political wedge, saying that Obama should now learn that torture and Gitmo are good - remember that it was GWB who ended "enhanced interrogation" and called for closing Gitmo.  This wasn't Obama's choice alone, he had the endorsement of his predecessor.

4. Just because we got the information from a Gitmo detainee does not mean that Gitmo is now validated. No one is saying that we should not detain and interrogate true prisoners of war. The argument is that we don't detain them forever with no trial or due process. We can still detain and interrogate these bastards as long as we don't discard our rules of law in the process. Because, you know, that's actually exactly what they want us to do.

I win. Four reasons. I dare you to have good arguments against any of them. This is a really dumb debate and it always has been.  AMERICA SHOULD NOT TORTURE PEOPLE. C'mon.

Quiz Question

Who said this:


“Thank God for President Obama . . . If he had not been there, who knows what would have happened?President Obama has continued the Bush policies of keeping a military presence in the Middle East. He did not scrub the mission to get Bin Laden. In fact, it may be that President Obama single-handedly came up with the technique in order to pull this off. You see, the military wanted to go in there and bomb as they always do. They wanted to drop missiles and drop bombs and a number of totally destructive techniques here. But President Obama, perhaps the only qualified member in the room to deal with this, insisted on the Special Forces. No one else thought of that. President Obama. Not a single intelligence adviser, not a single national security adviser, not a single military adviser came up with the idea of using SEAL Team 6 or any Special Forces.”


Click here for answer.  

More cool background on catching Osama

I'm not sure if this more reflects the strength of Obama's methodological, calm and structured approach to pretty much every issue, or just the benefit of having new eyes look at a problem. Steve Coll writes about changes Obama made to finding Osama when he took office.

"After President Obama took office, he and the new Central Intelligence Agency director, Leon Panetta, reorganized the team of analysts devoted to finding Osama bin Laden. The team worked out of ground-floor offices at the Langley headquarters. There were at least two-dozen of them. Some were older analysts who had been part of the C.I.A.’s various bin Laden-hunting efforts going back to the late nineteen-nineties. Others were newer recruits, too young to have been professionally active when bin Laden was first indicted as a fugitive from American justice.

As they reset their work, the analysts studied other long international fugitive hunts that had ended successfully, such as the operations that led to the death of Medellín Cartel leader Pablo Escobar, in 1993. The analysts asked, Where did the breakthroughs in these other hunts come from? What were the clues that made the difference and how were the clues discovered? They tried to identify “signatures” of Osama bin Laden’s lifestyle that might lead to such a clue: prescription medications that he might purchase, hobbies or other habits of shopping or movement that might give him away."

This is just really heartening. It's how our government should work: look at how we've done things in the past and replicate those techniques.  Very heartening.

Baller

This one is even better but it won't embed - click through please.

[thanks DJ JD and dermablogue for the images]

Presidents are busy

This is Obama's official schedule from the last National Security Meeting before he gave the kill order on Osama.  Man, being President must be hard. This day he 1) had a briefing on national security and the economy 2) meeting on war in Libya 3) meeting with your formal chief rival about SOMETHING 4) announcement of new national security team. etc. etc. Somewhere in there he had a meeting on killing Osama. And this is just the official schedule, who knows what else crept in there. Oh and meet another head of state. I have no idea how Presidents can manage all these different balls in the air.

9:30AM Pool Call Time

10:15AM THE PRESIDENT receives the Presidential Daily Briefing
Oval Office
Closed Press

10:50AM THE PRESIDENT holds a meeting on Libya
Situation Room
Closed Press

11:30AM THE PRESIDENT meets with Secretary of State Clinton
Oval Office
Closed Press

2:05PM THE PRESIDENT meets with a group of influential Hispanics from across the country on the importance of fixing our nation's broken immigration system to meet our 21st century economic and national security needs so that America can win the future
Roosevelt Room
Closed Press

3:10PM THE PRESIDENT makes a personnel announcement
Rose Garden
Open Press

3:45PM THE PRESIDENT meets with Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli
Oval Office
Closed Press

4:20PM THE PRESIDENT and Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli will deliver statements to the press
Oval Office
Pooled Press (Gather Time 4:05PM - Brady Press Briefing Room)

Useful things to keep in mind

From the always-interesting Jeff Goldberg: 


"SPIN: Segmented, polycentric, ideologically-networked. This is how we have to think of al Qaeda today. Bin Laden's death is of tremendous symbolic and moral importance, but it does not change the fact that the organization he founded -- and, more to the point, the ideas he propagated -- will live on in mutated form for years to come. We should not be surprised by the next al Qaeda attack."


True. This still feels awesome though.

Journalists must enjoy writing sentences like this:

"Bin Laden resisted the assault force, and was shot in the face during a firefight."

Presidents are badasses

People think of the president as being fairly removed from military tactics. That really isn't the case. Here's a little breakdown of the decision-making process for killing Osama that highlights how engaged the president is (from politico):

"The original plan for the raid was to bomb the house, but President Obama ultimately decided against that. “The helicopter raid was riskier. It was more daring,” an official said. “But he wanted proof. He didn’t want to just leave a pile of rubble.” Officials also knew there were 22 people living there, and Obama wanted to be sure not to kill all the civilians. So he ordered officials to come up with an air-assault plan. The forces held rehearsals of the raid on April 7 and April 13, with officials monitoring the action from Washington."

And, from paleoconservative Peter King: "I give the president full credit for this, it took a lot of guts,” said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-N.Y.), whose district was home to dozens of New York City firefighters and cops killed in the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept 11th 2001. “He’s the commander-in-chief, he was the guy who put it on the line. There was no guarantee –none - that this would work. We could have had our helicopters shot down… It was a really delicate operation.”