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Great Salt Lake, Utah.
In a post titled "The creepy tyranny of Canada's hate-speech laws," Salon commentator Glenn Greenwald loses it over a heads-up sent to Ann Coulter by the provost of the University of Ottawa, where Coulter was to speak, informing Coulter that:
You will realize that Canadian law puts reasonable limits on the freedom of expression. For example, promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges. Outside of the criminal realm, Canadian defamation laws also limit freedom of expression and may differ somewhat from those to which you are accustomed. I therefore ask you, while you are a guest on our campus, to weigh your words with respect and civility in mind. . . . [Greenwald's emphasis.]
Greenwald, drunk on Voltaire, defends to the death our right to consider such thoughtful warnings as a threat to free speech:
Who would ever want to empower officious technocrats to issue warnings along the lines of: be forewarned: if you express certain political views, you may be committing a crime; guide and restrict yourself accordingly? I obviously devote a substantial amount of my time and energy to critiquing the actions of the U.S. Government, but the robust free speech protection guaranteed by the First Amendment and largely protected by American courts continues to be one of the best features of American political culture. [Greenwald's emphasis.]
I would think it self-evident from the letter sent to Coulter by Provost Francois Houle, the officious technocrat in question, that Houle is neither "threatening someone with criminal prosecution for the political views they might express," nor "anointing oneself the arbiter of what is and is not sufficiently 'civilized discussion' to the point of using the force of criminal law to enforce it."
The administration of criminal justice in Canada is handled by folks professionally trained in that line of work, and not by university provosts. Having taken the trouble to familarize himself with Coulter's utterances, Houle kindly told her she could be led away in handcuffs for that kind of thing up here in the Great White North. I don't think he was proposing to do such a thing himself. He was doing the Coultergeist a favor.
Canada, like Britain, does indeed have stricter laws about what constitutes "hate speech." The principal effect of which is to force orators (and writers) to exercise their imagination in the denigration of others.
"Being attacked by Joe Clark is like being savaged by a dead sheep," Bob Rae once said, making his (memorable) point without fear of being hauled off to jail. Ann Coulter has said "The government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East...”
Greenwald himself identifies Coulter as a "far-right hate-monger." And what a blessing it is in the U.S. that such people can say the most repulsive things that come into their shrunken heads. That they can yell creative expressions of dissent like "faggot" and the N-word at members of Congress, as we saw last weekend. Indeed, that a member of Congress himself this week could accost a fellow congressman as a "baby killer!" on the floor of the House of Representatives over the issue of federal financing of abortion procedures. That another honourable member of that chamber could shout "You lie!" at the president of the United States during his speech to a joint session of Congress. Now there's role-modeling for you.
Mom turns to her kid and, as moms will do, asks: "Where did you get that word?!" Answer: Fox News or, heaven help us, C-SPAN.
I'm not sure this is the ideal moment to be defending America's anything-goes discourse. In the aftermath of the passage of the healthcare reform bill, members of Congress have been getting voice-mail messages from fellow Americans wishing their elected officials a premature death. "What you've just done, you faggot bastard asshole, you're going to DIE. Fucker!" was a sample contribution this week to the in-box of Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), the pro-life congressman who held out for a guarantee of no federal funding of abortions before voting for the healthcare bill last Sunday. There was more where that came from, played on NPR this morning.
The vile speech, vigilantism and threats of violence coursing through the American body politic just now are in no measure healthy for the Republic. Inciting people to hatred is not a good thing. And no, I will not defend to the death your right to call a South Asian or Central European a refugee from the sewers on the basis of his ethnicity alone.
If you don't think this accumulation of bile has consequences, perhaps you have your own explanation for Nov. 22, 1963; the assassination of Martin Luther King; and the government-hating terrorist Timothy McVeigh's mass murder in Oklahoma City.
And for what comes next. Here's a short list of disturbing reports this week alone:
"You want a War on Terror? It starts at home," says Daily Kos, not without reason.
There's a bright line in Canada when it comes to hate speech and hate crimes, and 99.999% of us have no difficulty discerning it, and making forceful points without crossing it. We are, it's true, a tad more "politically correct" than our American friends (even if they're the ones who invented the term and the well-intentioned concept).
Above all things, Canadians value civility. So do many Americans.
The pentulitmate line from Brian Williams' "thank you" note to Canada in wrapping up NBC's coverage of the Winter Olympic games in Vancouver was: "For reminding some of us we used to be a more civil society."
I turn to NPR's "On Point," a daily morning current affairs show, for some sanity on U.S. politics. I was disappointed this morning when guests David Gergen, former advisor to presidents Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Carter, and Jack Beatty, author and columnist, expressed at length their surprise at how Obama gave Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu an insulting reception at the WH.
None of the show's four participants put the episode in context, namely the humiliation to the U.S. earlier this month when Netanyahu's government chose the very moment of Vice President Joe Biden's state visit to Israel to announce a settlement expansion of 1,600 housing units in East Jerusalem, a piece of land Israel took in the Six Day War and has never been recognized by the U.S. or other nations as Israeli territory. The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as their hoped-for future capital in the "two-state solution" sought by the U.S.
After pressing one of the hottest of the countless hot buttons in the Middle East, and after a disengenuous assertion by Netanyahu that he wasn't in the loop on every urban-planning decision in East Jerusalem, "Bibi" got an admittedly cool reception in his own state visit earlier this week in Washington. While in D.C., a defiant Netanyahu made the obligatory speech to AIPAC, the hugely influential Israel lobby, saying Jews have been building in East Jerusalem for centuries and they build there today.
Netanyahu might as well have endorsed Texas Governor Rick Perry's flirtation with Lone Star secession, that's the magnitude of the insult dealt in Israel to the U.S., and the hash made by Netanyahu of U.S. foreign policy. When Netanyahu's brother-in-law, Hagai Ben-Artzi, asserted on Israeli radio that Obama is an "anti-Semite," I thought Ben-Artzi was the idiot relation. Now I wonder if Ben-Artzi's brother-in-law is the idiot.
I guess this is why I'm not cut out for diplomacy. I would have called Biden back to the U.S. immediately, and cancelled Netanyahu's scheduled visit to the U.S. But "No Drama" Obama, while greenlighting statements by Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (to AIPAC, no less) that America disagrees with the East Jerusalem settlement decision, did not engage in retaliatory embarrassment of Israel.
Obama may yet say no to Israel's next hand-out request of its sole significant patron, $3 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars it wants in order to replace its ageing fleet of F-16 fighter jets. But don't bet on it. As New Yorker editor David Remnick explains in a must-read essay on the current soured relations between Israel and the best friend it recently humilitated on the world stage, Obama has pro-Jewish and pro-Israel credentials the likes of which very few of his predecessors can claim. There is a divergence here, to be sure. But it's between America's long-standing pursuit of a two-state solution (or what Tony Blair touted as a "Middle East roadmap for peace," a device for distracting attention from a looming 2003 Iraq invasion), and Bibi's Likud-led coalition of hard-right parties, with whom any sort of productive discussion seems impossible.
The Christian Science Monitor canvassed the stateside anger with the Biden-Bibi incident in an article insisting that, just the same, prospects of fruitful discussions had not been closed off. But soon after publication, talks were aborted.
It might have occurred to Netanyahu that Israel's sole protector has its plate full with domestic distress just now, and that this wasn't the ideal time for Israel to put itself and the U.S. in a needlessly awkward position. Bibi will now have to walk back the EJ settlement decision, and risk the implosion of his shaky coalition, or persist in alienating Israel's best friend. Obama, for his part, can't be seen to be meddling in Israeli politics even if most of his desired options would have the effect of further weakening Bibi's shaky hold on power.
Polling in Israel consistently shows a public convinced that Obama is ignoring Israel. Maybe he is, and maybe that's best. Israel has long commanded far too much of America's foreign-policy attention. One might almost say American has a foreign policy and a policy regarding Israel, that's how much time and money America invests in this nation the size of Norway. Recall that the neo-cons who came up with the Iraq invasion had in mind the toppling of Saddam, followed by the fall of the Iranian theocracy, and the region would magically become pro-Israel and pro-America. It's all laid out in the founding statement of William Kristol and Robert Kagan's Project for a New American Century, circa 1997, signatories to which included future Bush administration officials Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby and Robert Zoellick.
Jane Mayer, in reviewing yet another self-apologia from a Bush administration veteran (this one defending Bush's torture practices), is among many who pine for a "Truth and Reconciliation" effort to get origins of the Iraq war and the Bush-era torture practices. She's in good company with U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who was itching to hold such an inquiry, with subpoena powers, to haul the likes of Rummy, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle and so on before the kleig lights.
One of the biggest favors Obama has done for Israel has been to dissuade his Hill colleagues from just such an inquiry. He hasn't done it overtly. He's just repeatedly stated he has no interest in rehashing the past. There were rather a lot of ardent Zionists involved in that project, and the less said of it the better the sake of U.S-Israel relations.
Going forward, as they say, the issue is how to resolve the issue of Israel's security. Here the current Israeli government needs the some quiet time, absent discussions with the U.S., to rethink the hard line it has taken and the patience of the American people, which is not infinite.
Remnick puts it well:
Without the creation of a viable contiguous Palestinian state, comprised of a land area equivalent to all of the West Bank and Gaza (allowing for land swaps), and with East Jerusalem as its capital, it is impossible to imagine a Jewish and democratic future for Israel. There is nothing the Israeli leadership could do to make the current fantasy of an indifferent American leadership become a reality faster than to get lost in the stubborn fantasy of sustaining the status quo.
NYT's first-class economics analyst and reporter David Leonhardt on the HCR's dramatic social-policy impact:
For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform, at least one thing seems clear: The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.
Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor.
Nearly every major aspect of the health bill pushes in the other direction. This fact helps explain why Mr. Obama was willing to spend so much political capital on the issue, even though it did not appear to be his top priority as a presidential candidate. Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan.
Leonhardt has probably spent more time with Obama on economic issues than any journalist. I recall from last year a lengthy talk between them on AFO, with Obama fading after a whirlwind trip but sounding Clintonesque (Bill, that is) about the "core" American problem of the widening gap between rich and poor over the past three decades. Leonhardt's account of this remarkable exchange, which tipped us to Obama's genuine progressive instinct, was in a NYT Mag feature late last year.
Obama gets zero media or other credit for this, but the man has signed into law two huge income-tax cuts in the short time since coming to office. One was in the stimulus package, a tax cut for 95% of working families. The other was on Tuesday, the biggest healthcare-related tax cut in U.S. history.
Both cuts are geared to the working poor and the middle class. Both are skewed away from the wealthy - people such as Obama, as the president often says of himself. Barack and Michelle Obama were poor as church mice until the windfall of royalties from The Audacity of Hope, bestselling book of its type in history, and renewed interest in his earlier Dreams From My Father yielded about $4 million, enabling the couple finally to pay off their student loans. Which hasn't stopped Obama from thinking like the first social worker raised for a time on food stamps to become U.S. president.
"You mean, spread it around a little," Candidate Obama said, gesturing with his hands, as if smoothing the waters, when he met "Joe the Fraud Plumber" on the campaign trail, and Joe expressed faux dismay about the sad lot of the poor. And that's what started the theme of Obama as socialist.
Well, yes, Obama does want to spread the wealth. He wants to rescue a U.S. middle class that has been the backbone of American superpower status since the end of the Second World War. The same middle class that magazine cover stories in publications ranging from Time to Bloomberg Business Week have been correctly fretting about the demise of for the past two or three years.
The G.O.P. voted against the Obama stimulus that already has saved or created 2 million jobs. Not one Republican supported healthcare reform that will actually cut premiums in contrast to the 39% premium hike imposed a few weeks ago by Wellpoint/Anthem on policyholders in foreclosure-ridden California. Now the G.O.P. is poised to overtly oppose Main Street interests yet again in siding with the avaricious Wall Street tycoons in opposing needed reforms that Obama will soon propose.
There's a bit of a revolution going on here. Of course, if it looked like one, Obama wouldn't be able to pull it off. It's very useful to Obama to have progressives like Robert Reich and occasionally Paul Krugman labelling him as a conservative in disguise. The G.O.P. knows better. But it's trapped in Reaganomics. And with each passing day it's looking more like the doomed Romanovs.
WaPo"s estimable Ezra Klein on Rudy and others' walking back their vow just 24 hours ago to try to repeal the healthcare reforms, now saying there are some elements they would repeal, others they've "always" liked.
In about 12 hours, the GOP's position has gone from "repeal this socialist monstrosity that will destroy our final freedoms" to "there are some things we don't like about this legislation and would like to repeal, and there are some things we support and would like to keep."
"We always said there are things that we can all agree on in the bill," said Rep. Brett Guthrie.
At this rate, they'll be running on expanding the bill come November.
And here's why the G.O.P. is wimping out: As I've repeatedly said, HCR will be popular once it's been passed and Americans can see it. Well, now that it's passed, they're already liking it. Remember, as recently as yesterday - yesterday, a day after passage - Republicans were still insisting Americans hate this bill and that's why the noble G.O.P. was trying to kill it.
Mr. Klein again:
Voters like success, the media covers winners more positively than losers, and people take their cues from outcomes. The first poll taken entirely after the House vote bears that out: 50% were enthusiastic or pleased while 42% were angry or disappointed. Similarly, 49% thought this a good thing for the country while 40% thought it bad.
This is one reason you don't govern by polls. They're too volatile. What a difference a weekend makes, HCR goes from plurality disliked to plurality favored. Mind you, as I earlier posted, every poll I looked at showed that in response to specific questions about elements of the bill, Americans continued to strongly support the major aspects of the proposed legislation. But the "headline" number - the only one widely reported from each poll - of overall like or dislike of the bill, slipped into negative territory as Palin and the Tea Partiers began spreading their lies last August. And the WH and the Dem Congressional leadership didn't fight back. Yet even then, at the nadir of public support, there continued to be majority support for the bill's specific provisions - even for a public health option (a.k.a. "government takeover of healthcare.")
Polls are useful. They tell if your message is getting through. And you adjust the message or the delivery of it, or both, accordingly. What you don't do is change the principle of what you're trying to achieve - in this case, as Obama stated from the beginning, quality affordable healthcare as a right, not a privilege, of citizenship.
Republicans aren't going to take the Dems' healthcare triumph lying down. Oh no. On the Hill, G.O.P. senators will fight next week the package of amendments to the Senate bill passed Sunday by the House and signed into law by the President today.
President Obama signing the historic healthcare reform bill at the White House on Tuesday.
At the state level, elected state attorneys general in 13 states say they'll contest the healthcare-reform bill in the Supreme Court. They may not have taught constitutional law for 11 years or edited the Harvard Law Review, as Obama has, but they just know the bill is unconstitutional. And when it comes to the G.O.P.-appointed Roberts Court, who knows?
Then there's repeal, the one-word rallying cry of Weakly Standard founding editor William Kristol and other neo-cons and Tea Partiers.
But this bill isn't going to repealed. Nor is it likely to heard by the Supremes, much less struck down as unconstitutional. David Frum, former Dubya speechwriter, explains why: The healthcare bill's provisions are simply too popular, as we'll see as they take hold over the next few months.
And this from the virulently anti-Obama WSJ's lead editorial on the same topic:
Many Republicans are already calling for "repeal" of ObamaCare, and that's fine with us, though they should also be honest with voters about the prospects. The GOP can't repeal anything as long as Mr. Obama is President, even if they take back Congress in November. That will take two large electoral victories in a row.
You really don't want to be the state A-G running for re-election on a platform of being the insurance industry's best friend - of putting Wellpoint/Anthem/Blue Cross ahead of the people.
As for repeal, in the unlikely event the Dems lost both houses of Congress in November, Obama would refuse to sign a G.O.P. bill repealing his healthcare reforms. If Obama is defeated in 2012, or chooses not to run, by that time the reforms will be deeply entrenched - so integral a part of everyday American life that no new president will dare repeal them, any more than any president has tried or succeeded with substantively altering Social Security. (Dubya tried; his own G.O.P. senators refused to consider it.) There's a reason why altering Social Security or Medicare are regarded as "the third rail" in U.S. politics. There's only political downside in trying. Once given an entitlement, Americans won't allow it to be taken from them. That's why the G.O.P. had to stop healthcare reform in the first place, as they did with Hillarycare. This time they failed. It will be an enduring failure. Deal with it.
Here's the context for the brave faces of Republicans at this moment, as they spew defiance even as the will of the people, as expressed Nov. 4, 2008, has just been done. The G.O.P. has now suffered three consecutive devastating defeats. Losing both houses of Congress in 2006. Losing the presidency two years later, along with further losses on the Hill. And now this, the biggest social-welfare reform in 45 years, and, like Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, something Dems can proudly claim to have authored in making America a healthier place.
So some venting is in order for a hapless G.O.P. The G.O.P. brand headed south starting with Katrina, and hasn't hit bottom even five years later.
The Dems have been in this bad place. Just as the Dems gradually shed their self-enslavement to special interests - unions, gay-rights advocates, eco-zealots and so on (good causes, but in total a bit too much for centrist Americans - the G.O.P. now must reinvent itself
There is absolutely no sign, apart from the lonely Frum, that the G.O.P. has the leadership or grass-roots sentiment to do this. Until it does, the fate of the Whigs and Know-Nothings is very much in prospect for a party of sharply declining relevance to everyday Americans.
As long as the Dems stay focused as champions of the middle class - a franchise the G.O.P. took from them beginning in the late Sixties - they will control the game.
Things will get worse for the G.O.P. before they get better. The next fight is financial-markets reform. And the G.O.P. has already indicated it will oppose needed reform, and head into the midterms not only as enemies of a healthier America but as defenders of Wall Street greed and incompetence. Good luck with that.
Today's G.O.P. is the one alluded to by Cole Porter:
"You're the top;
"I'm the bottom, I'm the G.O.P., or 'gop'..."
David Olive is a business and current affairs columnist at the Star, which he joined in 2001 after stints at the Globe and Mail, National Post and Financial Post.
"If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."
- George Bernard Shaw
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