Ezra Klein, whistling bravely past the graveyard, has a piece in the Daily Beast today in which he argues that the fight over public unions in Wisconsin is

the best thing to happen to the union movement in recent memory. Give the man some credit: In seven days, Walker did what unions have been trying and failing to do for decades. He united the famously fractious movement, reknit its emotional connection with allies ranging from students to national Democratic leaders, and brought the decline of organized labor to the forefront of the national agenda. The question is: Will it matter?

The answer, I’m confident, is no. As Klein points out, union membership as a percentage of the workforce has been declining steadily for decades (it peaked about 1953). As manufacturing jobs continue to decline, thanks to globalization, automation, and other forces more profound than the union movement ever was, it will continue to decline until it is essentially one with the Greenback Party and the Wobblies. And for the same reason: they were an answer to yesterday’s problems, not today’s.

Klein’s arguments are remarkably out-of-date, but then, of course, so is liberalism. Read More

Three years after J Street’s formation, it’s still politically toxic for members of Congress to support J Street’s policies, said Rep. Keith Ellison during a panel discussion at the liberal lobbying group’s conference.

Ellison, who co-chairs the House Progressive Caucus, said that fellow caucus members who took positions that aren’t traditionally pro-Israel “found themselves primaried from the right on the issue of Israel.”

“There are prices to pay,” he added. “These folks who have impeccable pro Israel credentials found themselves in pretty tough primary races, and not just in one part of the country.”

He also stressed that J Street needed to be more effective at protecting these members of Congress from attacks from groups like the Emergency Committee for Israel.

“J Street needs to continue to strengthen its muscles … so that a politician can take a position that is pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-Palestinian … and not have to worry about [election-cycle attacks],” said Ellison.

During the 2010 midterm elections, J Street’s critics argued that it’s become politically harmful for members of Congress to align themselves with the lobbying group. J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami seemed to reject this notion during a meeting with reporters today, saying that the group has made it much easier for politicians to take controversial positions on Israel. “The change in Congress is notable,” he said. “The sense of openness on Capitol Hill is greater than three years ago.”

But according to Ellison, the pressure to be pro-Israel is so intense that the House Progressive Caucus often avoids taking positions on Israel because its members are so concerned about being attacked by pro-Israel organizations. “We don’t take them on because we can’t come to a clear consensus on the question,” said the congressman.

J Street was formed as an alternative lobby to AIPAC. But three years later, it’s noteworthy that the group is still unable to influence many of the most progressive politicians on Capitol Hill.

According to a story in Sunday’s Washington Post, as President Obama and his advisers measured their response to the mass killing in Libya, they were mindful of the fact that diplomats in Tripoli had told them, in the words of one official, that “certain kinds of messaging from the American government could endanger the security of American citizens.”

“Overruling that kind of advice would be a very difficult and dangerous thing to do,” said Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. “That was the debate, and frankly we erred on the side of caution, for certain, and at the cost of some criticism,” he continued. “But when you’re sitting in government and you’re told that ignoring that advice could endanger American citizens, that’s a line you don’t feel very comfortable crossing.”

The Obama administration’s position assumes that Muammar Qaddafi needs a pretext to kill Americans. He actually doesn’t. He has done so in the past, and he could just as easily do so now, regardless of what kind of “messaging” emerges from our government.

Beyond that, as Christopher Hitchens points out, the leaders of nations far less powerful than the United States, many with large expatriate populations in Libya, took much more forceful (and much earlier) stances against Qaddafi than did Obama. The president was the last major Western leader to speak up on Libya.

On a more fundamental level, what the Obama administration did was create quite a dangerous precedent. It has now signaled to the most malevolent regimes in the world that the way to delay (or perhaps even avoid) American condemnation, let alone American action, is to threaten the lives of American citizens. The message sent to, and surely the message received by, despots around the world is this: If you want to neuter America, threaten to harm its citizens. Mr. Obama will bend like red-hot steel pulled from a furnace.

There were, of course, other options available to the president, including informing Mr. Qaddafi through the appropriate channels that a terrible fate would await him and his pack of jackals if a single American was harmed (see here). The president did very nearly the opposite. He showed weakness, irresolution, fear. I wonder if people have focused on just how troubling this action, and the mindset it manifests, really is.

Sidney Hook once said that those who make survival the supreme value are declaring that there is nothing they will not betray. Professor Hook’s statement could be amended and updated: American presidents who declare that they will bow to the demands of dictators who threaten American citizens are declaring that there is nothing they will not betray. For those who were disturbed by President Obama’s diffidence in the face of Qaddafi’s wickedness, it’s worse than you think. The ramifications of Mr. Obama’s actions will outlive whatever happens in Tripoli.

The UN Human Rights Council, which just voted to suspend Libya as a member due to the country’s bloody crackdown on protesters, apparently doesn’t find it contradictory to release a report praising the Qaddafi regime’s human-rights record. From UN Watch:

Despite having just voted to suspend Libya from its ranks (to be finalized by the UNGA tomorrow), the UN Human Rights Council, according to the agenda of its current session, is planning to “consider and adopt the final outcome of the review of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.” According to the council’s timetable, the lengthy report hailing Libya’s human rights record will be presented on March 18, and then adopted by the council at the end of the month. The report, which the UN has published on the council website, is the outcome of a recent session that was meant to review Libya’s human rights record.

“Protection of human rights was guaranteed in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya; this included not only political rights, but also economic, social and cultural rights,” reads the report. The countries lauding Libya’s human-rights record include Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia.

UN Watch has called on the UN Human Rights Council to rescind the report. “The report is a fraud, an insult to Libya’s victims, and should be withdrawn immediately,” said Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, in a statement on the group’s website.

After this, do we really need any more evidence of how useless the Human Rights Council is? It’s a wonder that the U.S. taxpayers are still forced to support this sort of nonsense.

Rick’s characterization of the Obama posture on the Middle East is regrettably apt. American news media are dutifully reporting on the UN sanctions against Qaddafi and Hillary Clinton’s trip to Geneva, which we now hear has produced a promise of EU sanctions as well. But sanctions have never yet dislodged a brutal dictator, and they are not particularly meaningful to the problem at hand in Libya. As long as Qaddafi remains in the country, he will continue killing civilians in whatever quantities necessary to restore his control. A disorderly transfer of power could be equally sanguinary.

The nations of the EU are starting to take action. France is reportedly dispatching a humanitarian airlift to bring medical and other aid to the opposition group in Benghazi. Britain’s David Cameron, speaking in the House of Commons on Monday, referred to the possibility of arming the Libyan opposition as well as enforcing a no-fly zone. Italy has suspended its friendship treaty with Libya, paving the way for supporting no-fly zone enforcement from Italian territory.

Perhaps we should read into these events the galvanizing effect of President Obama’s phone call with Angela Merkel on Saturday. Meanwhile, the news Monday morning is that the USS Enterprise is being moved from the Red Sea back into the Mediterranean in case it is needed to assist in a response to the Libyan crisis. About this, too, the administration is somewhere between cryptic and behindhand: the Defense Department spokesman explained that U.S. forces might provide humanitarian relief, but nothing has been decided yet, and the State Department “has not yet made a request to the military.” Read More

President Obama today said, “I don’t think it does anybody any good when public employees are denigrated or vilified or their rights are infringed upon.”

I wonder if the president, who loves to portray himself as the high-minded arbiter of what is and what is not appropriate in American political discourse, might say something — anything — about the denigration and vilification of the governor of Wisconsin, who has been compared to Mubarak, Mussolini, bin Laden, and Hitler. There is nothing comparable being said about public employees.

If Obama were genuine in his concern about putting an end to (in his words, on the night of his election) “the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for too long,” he would have spoken out long ago on the slandering of Governor Walker. But he has not.

With each passing week, the president provides more and more evidence of his hypocrisy and cynicism. One cannot help but wonder if he even realizes it or whether his ideology has blinded him to it all. Whatever the case, it isn’t a good thing for him or for the country.

Dennis Ross may have been the only notably mainstream pro-Israel speaker to attend the J Street conference, but the other attendees didn’t exactly seem grateful for his participation. At a conference panel about engaging Hamas, one speaker had some pointed criticisms about the group’s decision to appoint Dennis Ross as the keynote speaker. “It’s disappointing that you would still host someone like Dennis Ross after 20 years of peace failure,” said Marwan Bishara, a senior political analyst at Al Jazeera. His comment was met with an enthusiastic round of applause from the audience, suggesting that many conference-goers agreed with the sentiment.

In a meeting with reporters, I asked J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami about the criticism, and he made it clear that his organization wasn’t involved in the decision to invite Ross. “We asked the [Obama] administration for a speaker, and they chose Dennis Ross,” he said.

Asked about Bishara’s comments specifically, Ben-Ami called his complaint “ridiculous.”

“We host plenty of people we don’t agree with, and that’s sort of ludicrous,” said Ben-Ami, implying that J Street sees itself at odds with Ross on the issues.

But while Ben-Ami rejected Bishara’s criticism of Ross, he also suggested that he wasn’t pleased that Ross avoided addressing Israel issues in his speech.

But the fact is, Ross’s views on Israel are undeniably different from the views held by many of the conference attendees. If his fairly broad speech about Middle East policy sparked such hostility, it seems likely that an address that focused more on Israel would have drawn even more ire from the crowd.

Obama-administration officials may be asking themselves why they bothered sending a representative at all, considering the chilly reception Ross received.

In 1996, Necmettin Erbakan became modern Turkey’s first conservative Islamic prime minister and started a revolution that is still changing the face of modern Turkey. The founder of Turkey’s Islamic political movement died Sunday at the age of 84. Erbakan was also the mentor of the ruling AKP leadership, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul — both of whom have in the past been active members of Erbakan’s political parties, filling mayoral, ministerial, and parliamentary posts.

The Islamization of the Turkish society is now visible at all levels. In a television interview in 2007, for instance, Erbakan declared that the Jews are “bacteria” and “disease.” But a more mundane example can be found in the Islamists’ campaign against alcohol. A Turkish glass of wine is one of the most expensive in the world. And it’s not because of the special quality of the wines, but because Erdogan’s government since 2002 has increased the price of alcohol of 737 percent. Thousands of people recently took the streets of Turkey to protest Erdogan’s moral policy against alcohol. ”No to fascism,” protesters shouted as others clinked glasses made of lightbulbs — the symbol of the ruling Justice and Development Party. In the last draconian sting, the tax on alcoholic beverages was raised from 25.1 to 30 percent. Before the advent of Erdogan, the tax was steady at 18 percent. Read More

The Atlantic’s Max Fisher tracked down and interviewed Vogue senior editor Chris Knutsen, who unabashedly stood by the magazine’s fawning March cover story on Asma al-Assad, the wife of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad:

“We felt that a personal interview with Syria’s first lady would hold strong interest for our readers,” he said. “We thought we could open up that very closed world a very little bit.” When I asked why they chose to dedicate so much space to praising the Assads without at least noting his brutal practices, he explained, “The piece was not meant in any way to be a referendum on the al-Assad regime. It was a profile of the first lady.” He noted the country’s difficult media restrictions and touted the article’s passing reference to “shadow zones,” saying, “we strived within those limitations to provide a balanced view of the first lady and her self-defined role as Syria’s cultural ambassador.”

The article, which portrays the Syrian leader and his wife as enlightened liberal democrats, is in poor taste to begin with. That its publication coincided with al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters makes the piece appear even more tone-deaf and insulting.

But Vogue seems to be unfazed by the PR disaster. When Fisher asked Knutsen whether the magazine would print a profile of the wife of Kim Jong-Il, the editor even refused to dismiss the possibility. “That’s the kind of hypothetical that — we really do that on a case-by-case basis,” he said.

And while Knutsen did grudgingly admit that al-Assad was an autocrat, he did so only when pressed by Fisher. “Yeah. I would call him an autocrat,” he said. “[T]here’s no freedom there.”

Vogue clearly doesn’t grasp the problem. But at least we can take solace in the fact that the magazine doesn’t weigh in on issues of any substance.

Over the weekend, the United Nations Security Council sanctioned Libya. So did the European Union. There has been only one notable exception to the condemnation of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s mass murder. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan this weekend spoke out against any sanctioning of Qaddafi’s regime.

It says a lot about Turkey when even China takes a harder line on human-rights abuses. Then again, perhaps it pays well to be, like Erdoğan, a recipient of the Muammar Qaddafi Human Rights Award. Turkey has changed.

Dennis Ross spoke at the J Street conference for 30 minutes this morning, and he spent most of that time trying to avoid any mention of Israel (a smart move). The first 20 minutes of his speech were about Egypt and the recent uprisings in the Middle East; the last five minutes of his speech were devoted to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. And somewhere in between, he managed to squeeze in a few prosaic words about Israel.

The “status quo” in Israel is “unsustainable,” said Ross,

much applause from the audience. He continued, saying that the only method for securing peace between the Israelis and Palestinians is “negotiation — there is no other.” That statement elicited far less applause.

Ross then added that the claim by Arab autocrats that “there can be no reforms until there is peace” is simply an “excuse” — a comment that was met with conspicuous silence. Clearly, many in the audience still believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the reason for the oppression across the Muslim world.

Ross escaped immediately after his speech, leaving a panel made up of author Bernard Avishai, the New York Times’s Roger Cohen, and the New America Foundation’s Daniel Levy free to mock his address onstage.

“We need a little more Dr. Kissinger and a little less Dr. Phil,” said Avishai about Ross, to enthusiastic applause.

It’s now apparent why J Street called on President Obama to withhold its veto on the anti-Israel resolution at the UN Security Council — because, based on the sentiments of the audience, the majority of J Street’s supporters won’t accept anything less.

The media prides itself on keeping public officials honest but too seldom steps back to draw lessons from their own mistakes.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein, CNN’s chief news executive Eason Jordan penned a New York Times op-ed describing the self-censorship in which CNN engaged in order to maintain access to Iraq. Commentators wrung their hands and rightly castigated CNN, but the real scandal was that no one asked what else CNN and other major media outlets were censoring.

Libya, too, presents opportunities for media introspection. Consider this Washington Post profile of Saif Qaddafi. Will Washington Post editors and Africa Bureau chief Sudarsan Raghavan consider how they were spun by a man for whom reform was simply an outfit to wear when venturing out to meet Americans and Europeans? Did the Washington Post, like Eason Jordan’s CNN, simply self-censor and spin for access?

Perhaps it’s also time to dispense with the idea that European education gives the progeny of Arab autocrats — be they Saif Qaddafi or Bashar al-Assad — liberalism. Rather, it gives them Western style and skills necessary to better deceive Western audiences.

Critics castigated George W. Bush for his Manichaeism, especially after the Axis of Evil speech. The same progressives and realists who were silent while North Korea, Iran, Saddam’s Iraq, Turkey, and nearly every Arab state invoked crude rhetoric against the United States, blew a gasket when Bush called the three brutal dictatorships evil. Muammar Qaddafi’s mass murder should be a wake-up call.

In this YouTube clip, Saif Qaddafi, a partner for progressive and realist engagement throughout the Bush years, holds an AK-47 while telling the crowd: “Those who are facing you are nothing but kids. Today, at night, I want you [to finish them off.]” The mob chants in response: “Allah, Muammar and Libya,” “You despicable Aljazeera, we want no one other than Muammar,” “The people only want Muammar the Colonel.”

If President Obama learns any lessons from Qaddafi’s actions over the past few weeks, they should be these:

• Evil exists.
• There is nothing sophisticated about moral equivalence.
• Engagement does not change dictators; regime change does.
• Think twice before apologizing for America, because you look foolish when those you are apologizing to are guilty of far more than the university-club cocktail circuit can imagine.
• What Arab autocrats (and their sons) say behind closed doors is irrelevant; what they say to their own people is what we should judge them by.

A visual reminder that, while the United Nations Human Rights Council has finally gotten around to condemning former member state Libya, there was also a time when Iran sat on the UN Commission on the Status of Women. From that lofty perch, the Islamic Republic was entitled to — and did — rail against Israel’s behavior in the West Bank, because that’s the pressing women’s-rights issue in the Middle East.

I’m not sure if any part of this video includes the pregnant woman they stoned to death, but please observe an EXTREMELY STRONG CONTENT WARNING for graphic images.

I would have liked to have seen a little more about temporary marriages, which are institutionalized clearinghouses for prepubescent rape and sexual slavery, but that’s not strictly an apartheid issue as much as it is something that’s just deeply evil. Add to that 62,000 legal citations to improperly veiled women and restrictions on women’s cycling and women’s soccer, which do count as apartheid.

In any case, something to remember the next time mindless European multiculturalists not so subtly imply that the status of Iranian women is quite nuanced, actually.

The clearest example of the bizarrely naive quality of hermetic liberal provincialism was attributed to the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael almost 40 years ago, and has been discussed in right-wing circles ever since. It went something like this: “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” Several years ago, I went on an admittedly desultory search for the original quote and was unable to locate it.

On Friday, on the New Yorker’s website, the magazine’s film editor Richard Brody offers what may be the first accurate version of the quote I’ve ever seen (I’m assuming it’s accurate because it comes from the New Yorker itself): “Pauline Kael famously commented, after the 1972 Presidential election, ‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.’”

Obviously, the paraphrase is far juicier than the original, but actually, if you think about it, the version quoted by Brody is even worse, as it indicates that Kael was actually acknowledging her provincialism (“I live in a rather special world”) and from its perch expressing her distaste for the unwashed masses with whom she sometimes had to share a movie theater. What this indicates is that, even then, liberal provincialism was as proud of its provincialism as any Babbitt.

In one sense, Barack Obama is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Famous for his eloquence, he has nothing to say about world historical events, emerging after a week in the latest one to announce he instructed his administration to provide “options.”  Elected as a clarion for change, he issues a let-me-be-clear statement that the United States has had nothing to do with change sweeping the Middle East. A prior Democratic president wanted every nation to know we would bear any burden to assure the success of liberty in the world; the current president can hardly bear the burden of speaking up about it.

It is a portrait of a president who wants nothing to do with foreign affairs if he can help it. He will stay silent unless forced to say something and do only what the world agrees to do with “one voice.” He appeases adversaries (giving China a pass on human rights, Russia a reset, Iran an outstretched hand, and Syria an ambassador) in the hope the world will leave him alone while he concentrates on domestic affairs, where his real enthusiasms lie.

In this sense, Obama is not a mystery but the logical extension of George McGovern’s “Come home, America” theme in his 1972 presidential campaign and John Kerry’s “Let America Be America Again” one in 2004. They sought to throw off wars in Vietnam and Iraq to concentrate on domestic issues, asserting that using American power to advance freedom abroad was a mistake. Obama made withdrawal from Iraq the center of his own campaign, and emphasized in his West Point speech — finally accepting, after weeks of indecision, his general’s recommendation to send more soldiers to Afghanistan — that “the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”  Read More

During his 2008 campaign, President Obama indicated that, upon taking office, he would “immediately” investigate the legality of the war-on-terror tactics used by Bush administration officials. Nearly three years later, many of Bush’s strategies are still in place, and the Obama administration has even commenced a vigorous defense of one of the antiwar movement’s biggest bogeymen, John Ashcroft, in a Supreme Court case:

The Obama solicitor general’s office is representing Ashcroft, contending he’s immune from legal action that springs from his actions as attorney general.

“That immunity rests on important public policy considerations, including the concern that harassment by unfounded litigation would cause a deflection of the prosecutor’s energies from his public duties,” Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal argued in a legal brief.

The case involves a Muslim convert, Abdullah al-Kidd, who is disputing the legality of his detention as a material witness in a 2003 terror case. Leftists and antiwar activists have often cited al-Kidd’s case as evidence that the Bush administration exploited the material-witness law to detain civilians unjustly.

But in court documents, the Obama administration continues to assert what many Bush-administration officials have been saying for years — that these strategies are necessary for law-enforcement agencies to do their jobs.

“The fear of personal liability may dissuade prosecutors from obtaining such a warrant when they harbor any suspicion that the subject might be involved in criminal wrongdoing but do not yet have probable cause to bring criminal charges,” said Katyal.

The left has been largely silent on Obama’s continuation of Bush’s terror policies. Will it now start going after the president for his defense of Ashcroft? This high-profile Supreme Court case could create a schism in Obama’s left-wing base.

We know democracy promotion is in fashion because the press is hard at work composing the heroic narrative of Barack Obama, stealth freedom enthusiast. The president’s bonding sessions with Hosni Mubarak in Washington and Cairo, his indulging Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his courting the revanchist Kremlin were evidently all part of a top-secret undercover plan to liberate the Arab world.

In a Washington Post column this week, Fareed Zakaria praises Obama’s “quieter approach” to pushing liberty. Unlike George W. Bush, you see, Obama went about “supporting freedom but insisting that the United States did not intend to impose it on anyone.” In a peerless display of spin, Zakaria explained that this had “the effect of allowing the Arab revolts of 2011 to be wholly owned by Arabs.”

In truth, most Arabs are “wholly owned” by their governments and for two years Obama took the quiet approach to accepting that. The media’s efforts notwithstanding, most observers recognize reality. In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Bari Weiss interviews leading Egyptian democrat Saad Ibrahim, who has this to say about Obama’s low-decibel call for liberty:

The president “wasted two and a half years” cozying up to dictators and abandoning dissidents, he says. “Partly to distance himself from Bush, democracy promotion became a kind of bad phrase for him.” He also made the Israeli-Palestinian conflict his top priority, at the expense of pushing for freedom. “By putting the democracy file on hold, on the back burner, he did not accomplish peace nor did he serve democracy,” says Mr. Ibrahim.

People like Fareed Zakaria point to the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere as implicit evidence for the effectiveness of Obama’s approach. This is post-hoc analysis of the most shameless sort. Obama hoped to keep various dictatorships stable and, therefore, amenable to much-needed American diplomacy. To cite the very inverse of the president’s aim as justification of his means is to find oneself calling abandonment the gift of “ownership.”

Worst of all, the implosion of Obama’s stability agenda has left the administration with an empty toolbox. Zakaria knows this, of course. So in the very last sentence of his column, he notes off-handedly, “the Obama administration will have to step back and think about a new American strategy for a Middle East.”  It is not pretty when one doesn’t buy one’s own spin.

NGO Monitor has called for the resignation of Sarah Leah Whitson, the director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division, amid allegations that she whitewashed the atrocities committed by Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi for years. Despite the fact that a press conference Whitson called last winter in Libya was reportedly sabotaged and shouted down by government agents, she wrote a glowing depiction of the event and glossed over the disruptions.

“That only two government hacks delivered screaming denunciations puts our Tripoli session at the polite end of Middle East news conferences,” wrote Whitson in a dispatch. She also praised the human-rights “breakthroughs” in the country and noted “a shift in the Libyan winds.”

The HRW Middle East director had earlier extolled the “reforms” of the Libyan regime in a 2009 Foreign Policy column. “For the first time in memory, change is in the air in Libya,” she wrote. “The brittle atmosphere of repression has started to fracture, giving way to expanded space for discussion and debate, proposals for legislative reform, and even financial compensation for families of the hundreds of men killed in a prison riot a decade ago. Many Libyans say the changes were unavoidable in the face of the open satellite and Internet access of the past decade.”

But now that Muammar Qaddafi has turned Libya into a bloodbath, Whitson has appeared to back away from her past optimistic statements. In a February 24 column for the Los Angeles Times, she wrote that “most Libyans we spoke with never had much faith that Moammar Qaddafi would learn new tricks, or that the announced reforms were anything more than an endless loop of promises made and broken.” Read More