[Peace-discuss] "Liberal" media

[Chas. 'Mark' Bee]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu>
To: "Morton K. Brussel" <brussel4 at insightbb.com>
Cc: <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2005 11:48 AM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] "Liberal" media


> Tendency, not purity, is the issue, Mort.  A reasonable
> description of the usage of “liberal” in contemporary American
> politics involves a position on the war like that of Clinton's
> man, Sidney Blumenthal, on Democracy Now last week -– a view
> that Norman Solomon accurately called pro-war (= roughly, US
> troops should stay until some stability emerges).
>
> That is also the position of the Woolsey Concurrent
> Resolution, about which MoveOn did an internal poll recently
> -– and which represents the most advanced position MoveOn has
> advocated (although their website still doesn't say that even
> that is the position of the organization).  Their website
> lists eight campaigns, only one even peripherally associated
> with the war: support for Rep. Conyers' petition “demanding
> that Bush address the evidence in the Downing Street Memo"!
> (Address the evidence?)
>
> That resolution by House liberals merely asserts that it is
> “the sense of Congress that the President should develop and
> implement a plan to begin the immediate withdrawal of United
> States Armed Forces from Iraq.” Develop a plan to begin?
> Hardly a ringing demand for Out Now.  And a hat-in-hand
> sense-of-Congress resolution, while nice to have, hardly
> inhibits the administration from what we know was their plan
> from early on.  Remember that during Vietnam the Supreme Court
> held that Congress authorized the war by continuing to fund it.
>
> MoveOn has been a Democratic party front group since its
> founding by a couple of guys from Silicon Valley who wanted to
> support the Democratic agenda despite Clinton's impeachment
> (hence the name).  Their campaigns are basically faction
> fights within the business party.
>
> If I've “misstated their position,” as you charge, I'd like to
> see “their emails [that] call for an end to the occupation
> now,” to which you refer.  Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org’s executive
> director, has in fact said he's never supported immediate
> withdrawal.
>
> And take a look at “MoveOn conducts a push poll on Iraq and
> cons its supporters”:
> <http://simplyappalling.blogspot.com/2005/06/moveon-conducts-push-poll-on-iraq-and.html>,
> and “MoveOn.org: Making Peace With the War in Iraq”
> <http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0310-35.htm>. --CGE


   We hear constantly that those of us who support moving out slowly to avoid massive civilian casualties are 'pro-war', 
'supporting the occupation', have 'strange or corrupted reasons', etc.

   My reasoning is based entirely on number of Iraqis killed per day.  How a desire to keep that number down is 'strange 
or corrupted' is beyond me.  Now that the religious elements over there have begun to turn to bombing each other, it 
becomes clearer than ever that our new job as honorable compassionate people, post-invasion, is to get out, but to clean 
up Bush's mess before we leave.  Unless, of course, we want to personally enable casualty numbers to move on up into 
holocaust territory.

  Arguments that such reasoning cannot also be anti-war, when we are talking about defusing the potential for *more* 
war, are simply exercises in feely-good redefinition.  And labels of 'pro-war' - when applied to this idea - are simply 
lies.  -cmb