My new Dollars and Sense cartoon is up!

D&S editor Amy Gluckman writes:

Women who came of age 20 or 30 years ago in the United States may be forgiven our surprise that the whole work-home-motherhood thing continues to be so fraught. Surely by now, many thought, women would not be sweating it—at least no more than men do. Wrong! The media can take some of the credit, for, among other things, continuing to play up the alleged mommy wars between “working” and “stay-at-home” moms. At a more basic level, many people (well, men) still seem to think homemaking and raising kids is basically a “Ten-Year Nap”—the (tongue-in-cheek, we hope) title of a current bestselling novel on the subject.

There’s also some interesting stuff about what happened to Japanese divorces when the laws about pension allocations to ex-spouses changed, but you’ll have to click through to read that. :-)

I don’t really know what people mean when they say “playing the race card.”  To me, 9 times out of 10 it’s really means “stop talking about race because I’m uncomfortable” or it means “don’t accuse me of racism.”  But you have to laugh at some of our white American politicians like Bill “My Office is in Harlem” Clinton.

Clinton is at it again complaining that the Obama camp “played the race card” on him.  It all started with an interview with a Philadelphia radio station where Clinton made the race card comment.  The next day when asked about the comment Clinton denied it. Check out the video and the text summary on this New York Time blog (Clinton has his finger up in the air, which is usually a sign that he’s lying or angry.).  Here is the text of the exchange where Clinton tells his lie:

Mr. Memoli: “Sir, what did you mean yesterday when you said that the Obama campaign was playing the race card on you?”

Mr. Clinton: “When did I say that, and to whom did I say that?”

Mr. Memoli: “On WHYY radio yesterday.”

Mr. Clinton: “No, no, no. That’s not what I said. You always follow me around and play these little games, and I’m not going to play your games today. This is a day about election day. Go back and see what the question was, and what my answer was. You have mischaracterized it to get another cheap story to divert the American people from the real urgent issues before us, and I choose not to play your game today. Have a nice day.”

Mr. Memoli: “Respectfully sir, though, you did say …”

Mr. Clinton: “Have a nice day. I said what I said, you can go and look at the interview. And if you’ll be real honest, you’ll also report what the question was and what the answer was.”

Then in a subsequent interview he followed up with this gem of a comment:

In the same interview, he offered a full-throated defense of his record with African-Americans, adding: “You gotta really go some to play the race card with me. My office is in Harlem, and Harlem voted for Hillary by the way.”

Nice variation of the some of my best friends are black line isn’t it?  I guess we should also note that there were several irregularities in the voting in NYC, so some have questioned Clinton’s “lock” on Harlem.  In spite of past black support for Clinton, Clinton has never been the pro-black politician people make him out to be.  His policies were not particularly helpful to African Americans, and he was more than willing to play on white fears of blacks when he went out of his way to attack a rapper in one of his campaigns. 

I get a chuckle out of people like Clinton and Ferraro making racist comments, and then attempting to use the condemn the condemners strategy to make themselves look like victims.  I think I need to file this under “whiny white people.” What I’d say to Clinton is–if you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen. 

“Previously on…” from the New York Times:

Ms. Rowling and Warner Brothers Entertainment […] are suing Mr. Vander Ark’s publisher, RDR Books, based in Michigan, to stop publication of the Harry Potter Lexicon. Ms. Rowling contends in the lawsuit that the lexicon copies large chunks of material from her own books while adding little new information and insight.

From the questioning of Vander Ark:

PLAINTIFF’S ATTORNEY: So isn’t it true that you’re not limiting sales of the Lexicon to people who read all seven Harry Potter books, right?

DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Your Honor, that’s a preposterous question.

THE COURT: Objection sustained.

Damn, I wish that questions could have been blocked due to being preposterous at the most recent Obama/Clinton debate.

(Links to trial transcripts here.)

* * *

That aside, the heart of the issue is gotten at in a pre-lawsuit letter sent by Rowling’s lawyers to the Lexicon folks:

The book purports to contain an alphabetical glossary of fictional facts from the Potter books, presumably with little or no independent analysis or commentary, e.g. hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries on Rowling’s characters, themes, settings, motifs, spells, positions, etc.

Although I’m a fan of the Potter books, I think Rowling should lose her lawsuit.

More people are becoming aware of the massive injustices increasingly faced by undocumented immigrants. But now it turns out that even legal immigrants are being deported based on next-to-nothing.

From Asian-Nation:

As the New York Times reports, many legal immigrants are being caught in a web of technicalities, bureaucracy, and injustice and in fact, end up fighting orders from the Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE, the successor to the INS) to be deported back to their sending country, even though they came to the U.S. legally […]

The article includes many examples of how the ICE has used various bureaucratic items to order legal immigrants to be deported: a discrepancy regarding marriage status from 25 years ago, a 10-year old misdemeanor conviction that was wiped from one’s record, green card holders mistakenly voting in state elections, failing to update one’s home address, falsely accusing someone of committing a felony, and not showing up to an ICE office to be fingerprinted even though the person was a quadriplegic. […]

Apparently, a person’s decades of positive actions and contributions to his/her community don’t matter in whether or not they should be considered an American.

What seems to be more important these days is whether they’ve completed a form properly or not.

There’s more.

As C.N. at Asian-Nation points out, this sort of thing is a natural byproduct of the climate created by the “war on terror.”

I hope everyone celebrating Pesach this week is enjoying it! (And for everyone else, I hope you’re enjoying eating your soft, moist, delicious bread! Mmmmn….)

The Angry Geologist has posted a review of Hereville, and — fortunately — doesn’t seem too angry about it.

First, I’ve been unable to nail down the time period and place this is supposed to be set in. We could be talking about an insular community in post-war Europe, or a 1950’s Levitton, or ten years from now. I mean I can nail it down a little bit- they didn’t have electric stoves or lightswitches in the 1400’s. Stuff like that absolutely fascinates me. And as far as we can tell from the kids’ point of view, magic more than exists in the world.

Second, the cast is entirely Orthodox Jewish (with the exception of the possible witch that Mirka and her brother meet, but you’ll have to read it to find out what’s up with that), and the creator Barry Deutsch really brings their family traditions to life. You don’t see too many of that particular faith in comics, and it’s a refreshing change of pace.

There’s more — you’ll have to go over to Angry Geologist’s place to read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, the blog Jewish Comics — which is exactly what it sounds like, a blog about Jewish comics (both Jewish creators and Jewish characters) — has very kindly linked to Hereville and posted a round-up of some other folks’ reviews. I had forgotten all about Mary Ellen Slayter’s Washington Post article from a few years back, and her pithy one-line description of “Hereville”:

What do you get when you cross “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and Isaac Bashevis Singer?

As a “Buffy” fan, I was very pleased with that. :-)

So please check out those links — and for anyone interested in the general topic of Jews in comics, you may enjoy browsing through the Jewish Comics archives.

This is an open thread; use it to say what you’d like and post the links you like. Self-linking is encouraged.

From the Dollars and Sense blog:

Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative sent us this link to a recent article in Slate magazine. The article cites the curious phenomenon that professional baseball players are much more likely to be born in August than July. The author theorizes that August babies aren’t naturally better at baseball — they’re just older than their peers, because Aug. 1 is the normal cut-off date for youth baseball leagues.

The author concludes that this structural benefit for the August-born is a “small advantage can have an impact that lasts a lifetime.”

Which reminds me of this old cartoon of mine:

Many of you know this already, but I thought I’d make an “official” announcement that the paper edition of “Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword” will be premiering at Stumptown Comics Fest, this Saturday and Sunday, in Portland, Oregon.

The print edition contains 57 full-color pages of comics, and sells for $12.95. I’ve now seen a copy, and frankly, it looks good — the art and color reproduced very well, and the paper is a decent stock as well.

I’ve attended Stumptown every year since it began — in fact, I helped start it — and it’s an exceptionally good comic book convention, with a strong focus on creators (rather than three bazillion tables of dealers with long boxes). So I highly recommend attending — it should be both cheap and fun.

And if you do go to Stumptown, please stop by my table and say “hi.” (I’ll be the one sitting under a huge banner that says “Hereville”).

And by the way, if you’re not going to be able to make it to Stumptown, you can always buy Hereville directly from the Hereville website, in both paper and electronic editions. Plus, I hope to soon have a Wowio edition available — I should have news to post about that sometime in May.

I trust the anti-colonialist and anti-racist reasons to oppose most US uses of military force against other countries are clear to most “Alas” readers. I haven’t been discussing that connection because it’s too clear to be missed, not because it’s not important.

In contrast, I am worried, perhaps needlessly, that some readers will read this series of posts as me saying that I’m voting based on foreign policy concerns, not concerns about sexism, misogyny and LGBTQ issues.

I don’t believe the distinction exists. I’ll use this post to discuss why the distinction between a hawkish versus a moderate foreign policy should matter to feminists of all sorts.

And make no mistake — Clinton is a hawk, not just posturing as one for the election. Quoting Stephen Zunes:

…When her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination Senator Barack Obama expressed his willingness to meet with Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro or other foreign leaders with whom the United States has differences, she denounced him for being “irresponsible and frankly naive.”

Senator Clinton appears to have a history of advocating the blunt instrument of military force to deal with complex international problems. For example, she was one of the chief advocates in her husband’s inner circle for the 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 to attempt to resolve the Kosovo crisis.

Though she had not indicated any support for the Kosovar Albanians’ nonviolent campaign against Serbian oppression which had been ongoing since she had first moved into the White House six years earlier, she was quite eager for the United States to go to war on behalf of the militant Kosovo Liberation Army which had just recently come to prominence. Gail Sheehy’s book Hillary’s Choice reveals how, when President Bill Clinton and others correctly expressed concerns that bombing Serbia would likely lead to a dramatic worsening of the human rights situation by provoking the Serbs into engaging in full-scale ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Hillary Clinton successfully pushed her husband to bomb that country anyway.

The most famous difference between Clinton and Obama is Clinton’s support of invading Iraq — an approach to foreign policy fully consistent with her history, and likely to continue in a future Clinton adminstration, judging from who she’s chosen to lead her foreign policy team so far. From a feminist perspective, it cannot be overemphasized that our decision to invade and occupy Iraq has been a nightmare. Here are just a few examples:

First, from an op-ed by Bonnie Erbe:

A new poll of leaders of Iraqi women’s-rights groups finds that women were treated better and their civil rights were more secure under deposed President Saddam Hussein than under the faltering and increasingly sectarian U.S.-installed government.

Roz Kaveny writes:

Most weeks, three or four people are hacked, stoned, burned or shot to death for being lesbian, gay, bi or trans. The highest Shia religious dignitary Sistani has again promulgated a fatwa calling for the execution of all non-repentant LGBT people - people talk of him as a liberal and in this degree he is - he allows people to repent on pain of death when most of his rivals would just kill. Contacted by the UN about this campaign of murder, the Iraqi government has refused to acknowledge that it is even a problem.

This is a direct consequence of the war - the Saddam regime, vile as it was, was secular in this respect, just as the Ba’athists in Syria still are. No-one does well in a totalitarian state, but LGBT folk were left alone, mostly.

Riverbend:

Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it’s not really the latest- it’s just the one that’s being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last.

Houzan Mahmoud, of The Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, writes: (link via Bitch PhD):

More widely, professional women have been deliberately targeted and killed - notably in the city of Mosul - and, recently, anti-women fundamentalists in Baghdad have taken to throwing acid in women’s faces and on to their uncovered legs.

So-called “honour killings” are rife, as is the kidnapping and rape of women. Beheadings have occurred and women have been sold into sexual servitude. […] This is a recipe for future gender enslavement, second-class citizenship and ignorance. Thousands of female university students have now given up their studies to protect themselves against Islamist threats.

Islamist hostility is contagious and echoed daily in high-level political debate. Currently there is a drive over the “right” of men to have four wives, to make divorce a male preserve and for custody of children to be given to men only. Even women on Iraq’s National Assembly - the country’s parliament - have been calling for resolutions to allow for the beating of women by their guardians (males relatives, such as husbands or fathers).

This is all the outcome of the occupation of Iraq.

Melissa at Shakesville writes:

This is madness. In one fell swoop, they have turned back literally decades of women’s rights in Iraq.

When all other rationales for this war were proved devoid of substance, the Right yammered about a humanitarian intervention…and so did the hawkish Left. The last time I checked, women were humans, too, and they ought not to be left with less freedom than they had before we got there.

Iraqi women’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed:

Even apart from this the streets are not women-friendly. Many professional women who drive to and from work get insulted by men travelling around in pick-up trucks holding machine guns and wearing black from head to foot. Going out in the streets is scary. Many females have stopped going to school.[…]

If you travel from the north down through Iraq to the south, it is like being in a time machine. You travel from the 21st century in Sulamaniya, through Kirkuk to Baghdad, where you see a city which is in ruins. There is dust everywhere, and people are wearing very old clothes. Then in the south you are in the Dark Ages. In the areas dominated by the Sunni Islamists, in Fallujah or in Mosul, women’s situation is even worse than in Basra. You have something there which is new to us in Iraq. It comes from Wahhabism, from al Qaeda, from Saudi Arabia.

Riverbend again:

For me, June marked the first month I don’t dare leave the house without a hijab, or headscarf. I don’t wear a hijab usually, but it’s no longer possible to drive around Baghdad without one. It’s just not a good idea. (Take note that when I say ‘drive’ I actually mean ‘sit in the back seat of the car’- I haven’t driven for the longest time.) Going around bare-headed in a car or in the street also puts the family members with you in danger. You risk hearing something you don’t want to hear and then the father or the brother or cousin or uncle can’t just sit by and let it happen. I haven’t driven for the longest time. If you’re a female, you risk being attacked.

I look at my older clothes- the jeans and t-shirts and colorful skirts- and it’s like I’m studying a wardrobe from another country, another lifetime. There was a time, a couple of years ago, when you could more or less wear what you wanted if you weren’t going to a public place. If you were going to a friends or relatives house, you could wear trousers and a shirt, or jeans, something you wouldn’t ordinarily wear. We don’t do that anymore because there’s always that risk of getting stopped in the car and checked by one militia or another.

There are no laws that say we have to wear a hijab (yet), but there are the men in head-to-toe black and the turbans, the extremists and fanatics who were liberated by the occupation, and at some point, you tire of the defiance.

I could go on with quotes like this for another fifty screens, easily. The scope of the disaster is almost impossible to comprehend.

What’s important for this election isn’t how bad Iraq is, however. Iraq has happened, and neither Clinton nor Obama can change that. What’s important is how a Clinton or Obama presidency will change what happens in the future.

If Obama’s approach to foreign policy, and his team of policy advisers, comes into power, that will not mean that progressives occupy the White House, and it will not mean that horrible abuses of American power will cease to happen. Obama is not perfect. Obama is not even progressive. He’s just significantly better than the alternatives.

An Obama White House mean that a group of people who are significantly less warlike, and more critical of the U.S.’s use of military power, will become much more important in Washington and in our national conversation than they have been (and will remain so for years after Obama leaves office). It means that questionable invasions and bombings, which Clinton has supported throughout her career, will probably happen less frequently.

If Clinton becomes President, that will be a big improvement over Bush, in that we’ll switch from having a Republican hawk to having a Democratic hawk. It will be a much saner and more intelligent hawkish administration; but it will still be a hawkish administration, and from a feminist perspective — especially a feminism perspective that recognizes that anti-racism, anti-colonialism and LGBTQ issues aren’t separate from feminism — that’s bad.

Clinton didn’t intend the enormous harms I discussed above, of course. (On the contrary, Clinton has a dedication to women’s rights internationally that goes back many years, and which I admire.) But the unintended consequences of hawkishness aren’t less dire because they’re unintentional. The unintended consequences of Clinton’s future hawkish policies could easily turn into thousands of deaths, thousands of rapes, thousands of women under virtual house arrest, thousands of LGBTQ people in prison or worse. For people on the margins, unintended consequences are deadly.

I am not saying that if you’re a feminist, you must vote against Clinton because she’s a hawk. Feminists can vote a variety of ways for a variety of legitimate reasons, and countless feminists I admire will be voting for Clinton, or already have.

But foreign policy isn’t separate from feminist issues. It makes no sense at all to say that you’re voting based on feminist concerns, not foreign policy concerns. Foreign policy is a feminist issue, and anyone voting as a feminist should take that into account as they weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each candidate.

While I think Barack Obama has done a good job walking the tightrope of racial politics in America, I get the feeling that he is heavily constrained by racism and racial stereotypes. This was one of my reactions to the now famous speech–it is always important to think about what is, and is NOT being said. For the record, I think the speech was good as a political speech, but as a speech about race in American it was so heavily constrained by the politics of racism that there were some important points that Obama omitted. Furthermore, the reactions to the speech steer discussion in some unfortunate directions, which is where most of my critique lies. Now before anybody gets upset at me for saying this, I don’t blame Obama for the subsequent discussion of his speech.  My critiques are not about the man as an individual, they are about racism and racial politics in America.

Let me start with some things I agreed with and liked about the speech. Obama (and the speech writers because I’m sure there were some) asserted that we don’t talk openly and honestly about race in America.  I think that is true–people either tend to deny the realities of racism and or they exaggerate, stereotype, or misrepresent when it comes to our differences.

I also agree that history has created a great deal of racial baggage that we carry around with us as people.  Moreover, there is an acknowledgement in the “speech on race” that these effects linger in the form of institutional racism.  Check out these few paragraphs (I referenced the text from Daily Kos.):

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point.  As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried.  In fact, it isn’t even past.”  We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country.  But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations.  That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened.  And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up.  They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted.  What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination.  That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future.  Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways.  For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years.  That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends.  But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table.  At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

With the exception of the comment about welfare policy, which echoes Ronald Regan, I think these are pretty bold statements for a politician to make.  Of course, they are not quite as bold when they are framed as products of past discrimination rather than products of both past and present discrimination, but given the conservative nature of political discourse, I can live with it.

A Few Critiques of the Speech and Reactions to It 

The comment about Obama’s white grandmother has been pulled apart and parsed by pundits, most of whom don’t have a clue about the dynamics of interracial families.  Later, in discussing this speech Obama described his grandmother as the “typical white person” and the same pundits went crazy. These pundits expect people to be racially consistent and they cringe at the idea of whiteness being discussed in any way that is not exceptional¹.  In the pundits’ minds, people can’t change their racial views over time, and they can’t hold contradictory views.  In reality, that’s exactly how people are when it comes to race.  I highly suspect that Obama’s grandmother is typical of most whites in her generation–they grew up with racial segregation both legalized and informal segregation as the norm and didn’t much question it.  Furthermore, intermarriage was illegal in many states during the much of his grandmother’s lifetime.  Although Obama has never spoken about his white grandparents reaction to his parents marriage and his birth, we know from surveys that during the early 1970s the vast majority of whites opposed interracial marriage and this opposition was still very strong even into the 1990s, when whites were asked about a family member intermarrying.  So it would be the least bit surprising if she had negative views of interracial relationships and black people.  It’s pretty clear that, like many white relatives of interracial couples and biracial people, Obama’s grandmother loved him and cared for him, and she held stereotypical views of black men.  That should not be hard to believe because it is the norm in many mixed race families, and in many people in general.

What bothered me about this part of the speech and the subsequent discussion of the racial dynamics of Obama’s family life is that I got the distinct impression that the underlying message Obama and some of his supporters were trying to convey was, “Hey, don’t forget; I’m/he’s white too” or “I’m/he’s not as black as you think I am/he is.”  To me that was a really sad revelation about the current state of racial politics in this country.

What made this worse was when it devolved into a common stereotype of mixed race people that I have discussed in the past (here and in papers I have presented at conferences).  The myth involves the belief that mixed race people are 1) signs of progress and 2) potential saviors who will somehow liberate us from racism because they understand “both worlds.”  On numerous occasions, people have treated Obama in this way.  They have viewed his mixed race heritage as something that bestows him with supernatural abilities, specifically the ability to transcend race and heal old racial wounds.  Having a mixed race family doesn’t not necessarily give an individual a special understanding of race, and being monoracial doesn’t preclude someone from being able to united diverse groups and develop an understanding of what it is like to be from “another race.”

I don’t totally blame Obama for reminding people that his mother is white–that is politics.  Obviously, his campaign thinks it will help him, and they are probably right about that.  I just don’t like the handful of narratives that we have developed about interracial families and mixed race people.  While the old narratives about tragic mulattos, the one drop rule, and sexually adventurous interracial couples are misguided, some of our new narratives–”the best of both worlds” and “the supernatural biracial uniter” are also misguided.

In the next post on the Obama speech, I’ll address two other problems I had with the speech and the reactions to it.  The 2 critiques/points are related to the following points 1) Are white “resentments” and black “anger” really equivalents?  Does the two way street anaology really work?  2) Why does “Working Class” mean white in our political discourse?  And what does it say that we single out white working class resentment (racism)?

1. Do you think they would have been mad if he described her as the “exceptional white person” rather than the “typical white person”? (back)

Previously, I argued that the differences between Obama and Clinton even on desperately important domestic issues, such as LGBTQ rights or health care, are unlikely to make a real difference in policy outcomes. This is because the differences between the candidates — both centrist Democrats — on these policies are small, and the enormous effects of political constraints and legislative give-and-take will matter so much that the small differences between Clinton’s and Obama’s policies will be a wash.

But Presidents have much more control over foreign policy, especially matters of war and peace. This is an area where even small differences can potentially matter a lot. Specifically, a President’s beliefs about the use of military power, versus diplomatic approaches, is essential. There are areas of foreign policy in which the President will be forced to compromise with Congress, for better or worse: trade policy, for example, and immigration law. But there is no area where the President has more freedom to choose than military and diplomatic policy.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to determine what the differences between Clinton and Obama on foreign policy are. Listening to what they say is of limited use, because currently they’re both primarily concerned with persuading swing voters and superdelegates to support them, and everything they say is tailored to that end.¹

What matters more is who each candidate has chosen to be their foreign policy advisers. The press and public don’t pay much attention to these advisers, except when one gaffes² ; furthermore, the candidates are probably planning to be stuck with most of these advisers for years to come. So the foreign policy teams Clinton and Obama pick probably reflect their real policy preferences — or at least, reflect their real preferences more than calculated candidate statements to the public do.

Furthermore, it’s important to realize that the advisers a president “brings with” will stick around for years. Some of them will have the President’s ear while the President is in office, which is important. Many of them will be elevated into positions of greater importance within foreign policy circles, which is an effect that can last long after the President who elevated them leaves office. (Many of President Nixon’s foreign policy people remain important foreign policy people today.)

This is one of the most important effects a President can have. In the months before we invaded Iraq, the greatest advantage that the Bush/Cheney pro-war group had is that the bounds of “serious” foreign policy views were being set almost entirely by people who were in favor of invading Iraq; those who were not in favor of preemptive war were not considered serious, and so had a limited impact on the national debate.

The invasion of Iraq has been a disaster, and that disaster will probably continue for many years to come. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who would otherwise be alive are now dead, because of our invasion. Even more Iraqis have not been killed, but have been hurt in other ways; they’ve been horribly injured, their lives have been constrained, their infrastructure (even more) destroyed, their children’s and grandchildren’s prospects for the future dimmed.³ In addition, thousands of Americans have been killed and tens of thousands grievously wounded or traumatized. After that come the less important, but still substantial costs: Costs in money, costs in missed opportunities, and costs to the US’s international standing and effectiveness.

Over the next thirty years, there will be many times when the tenor of the “expert class” of foreign policy thinkers will again set the bounds of what is “serious” and what is not. As we’ve seen in Iraq, when the “serious” opinion excludes all people who oppose wars of choice, the costs to the world are hideous. The foreign policy experts riding on Clinton’s and Obama’s coattails are therefore important to consider.

And it’s here that we find a real difference between the candidates. Stephen Zunes, writing in Foreign Policy in Focus, reports:

Obama advisors like Joseph Cirincione have emphasized a policy toward Iraq based on containment and engagement and have downplayed the supposed threat from Iran. Clinton advisor Holbrooke, meanwhile, insists that “the Iranians are an enormous threat to the United States,” the country is “the most pressing problem nation,” and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is like Hitler.

…it may be significant that Senator Clinton’s foreign policy advisors, many of whom are veterans of her husband’s administration, were virtually all strong supporters of President George W. Bush’s call for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. By contrast, almost every one of Senator Obama’s foreign policy team was opposed to a U.S. invasion. […]

Hillary Clinton has a few advisors who did oppose the war, like Wesley Clark, but taken together, the kinds of key people she’s surrounded herself with supports the likelihood that her administration, like Bush’s, would be more likely to embrace exaggerated and alarmist reports regarding potential national security threats, to ignore international law and the advice of allies, and to launch offensive wars.

By contrast, as The Nation magazine noted, a Barack Obama administration would be more likely to examine the actual evidence of potential threats before reacting, to work more closely with America’s allies to maintain peace and security, to respect the country’s international legal obligations, and to use military force only as a last resort.

In terms of Iran, for instance, [Obama advisor] Cirincione has downplayed the supposed threat, while Clinton advisor Holbrooke insists that “the Iranians are an enormous threat to the United States,” the country is “the most pressing problem nation,” and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is like Hitler. This is consistent with Clinton’s vote for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment that opened the door to a potential Bush attack on Iran, and with Obama’s opposition to it.

Which experts do you want influencing the boundaries of acceptable foreign policy thought for the next three decades: The ones who supported invading Iraq, or the ones who opposed it?

Matt Yglesias writes:

Obama people are more likely to value international law, strategic restraint, and a narrow focus on al-Qaeda whereas Clinton people are more likely to take a pragmatic/instrumental view of international institutions, worry that nothing will happen without American leadership, and to have more sympathy for the Bushian idea that you need broad confrontation with rogue regimes.

Which expert do you want whispering in the President’s ear for the next four to eight years, when the next important foreign policy decisions come — Susan Rice, who has been arguing for the last six years that humanitarian intervention in Darfur should be among the US’s most pressing foreign policy goals, or Richard Holbrooke, who has been a cheerleader for invading Iraq from the start? (Holbrooke is a leading contender for Secretary of State if Clinton is elected.)

And at the most basic level, which President do you want: The one whose foreign policy team consists almost elusively of people who got the single most important foreign policy question of the last decade wrong, or the one who hires people who didn’t get it wrong?

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Note: The original draft of this post included a section arguing that foreign policy is a feminist issue. The section got to be so long that I decided to make it a separate post, which I will post later today.

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PLEASE DON’T POST COMMENTS ARGUING THAT INVADING IRAQ WAS A GOOD IDEA, or arguing that supporting hawks is a good idea. If you want to do that, use this post instead.

This thread is intended to be an argument for progressives who agree with core progressive ideas, and in particular progressive ideas about war.

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1. Although I hasten to add that what they say is not entirely meaningless. First of all, the political pressures limiting what Clinton and Obama say now, will still operate (although less powerfully) once either of them takes office. And secondly, on the rare occasion that Obama and Clinton’s public statements on foreign policy do diverge, that may indicate a real difference in their approaches to foreign policy. (back)
2. ”Monster.” — S. Powers, 2008. (back)
3. Obligatory Saddam-Was-A-Monster statement: None of this is to say that Saddam Hussain wasn’t a monster. But our invasion has made things much worse. (back)

This thread is the home of arguments about whether or not invading Iraq was a good idea, whether or not the US should attack Iran, whether or not hawkish foreign policies are wrong, etc.

The first seven or so comments were originally in response to this post, but I’ve moved them.

Less than a week ago I was complaining that no one ever reviewed Hereville… Sometimes it’s nice to be proven wrong. Two more reviews of “Hereville” have appeared.

Sam at the ZenKatzen Times writes:

It’s glorious, deep, clever, and intelligent; finally, a take on the hero’s tale which doesn’t look like it was cribbed straight outta G.I. Joseph Campbell. Mirka won me over from the start.

If you’re comic cognosenci, you know about it already. I just have to go on record and say how much I like this work. It’s nifty.

Alas for me, I’m pretty sure Sam’s comment about the “cognosenci” isn’t true — hardly anyone reads “Hereville” yet. But I’m really optimistic about the growth in readership (I now get around 500 visitors a day — a month ago I was lucky to get 100), and reviews like Sam’s can only help.

And at Comic Book Thoughts, Ragtime writes:

The comic is called “How Mirka Got Her Sword,” and is about a young Orthodox Jewish girl who sets out to slay dragons, which has all the elements that my little Raggirls will love, and looks to be the first comic book to crack our Bedtime Story Ritual since The Courageous Princess.

Ragtime also picks out page 11 as her or his favorite page of Hereville so far. I often don’t like my own work, but that page is one I’m fond of. My favorite part of it is probably the teeny, tiny Mirka and Dragon figures falling to the ground in the last panel — they give me the giggles.

Joss Whedon’s new show, “Dollhouse,” released (or perhaps had leaked) this pre-casting description of one of the recurring characters:

November
20’s, any ethnicity, beautiful and heavy. Another Doll, a hopeful child in the house and everyone else you need her to be outside. A comforting, radiant presence, who tends to get fewer of the criminal gigs and more of the personal ones. Recurring.

(Empahsis added). I remember reading that and thinking “cool.”

Now the casting choice for November, Miracle Laurie, has been announced. That’s a picture of Ms. Laurie to the right. Not exactly “heavy,” is she?

I’m annoyed, but not surprised.

To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with casting a thin actress in a part originally written as fat. I’ve done a little theater, and I know that often minds change once actors read for parts. No doubt Miracle Laurie hit just the right notes for November, better than anyone else who auditioned, and that’s why she got the part.

But. Four points.

1) This sort of casting choice is a one-way street. By which I mean, producers will decide that a thin actor is right for a character who was originally concieved of as fat, and so rethink the character. But it will virtually never be the case that a fat actor is seen as right for a character originally concieved of as thin.

2) If a thin actor has the right “look,” then producers will make allowences for them being less than perfect in other ways. So, for instance, David Boreanaz — who wasn’t much of an actor on the first season of Buffy – was cast for his looks and his potential. And he grew in the role, and became a lot better as an actor. Fat actors are rarely given that chance to develop.

3) Because of who gets a chance to develop, I suspect that frequently thin actors are, objectively, better actors. This is because they get bigger parts early on and become seasoned actors, and seasoned actors are better actors, all else held equal.

4) I wonder how frequently “any ethnicity” on a casting call turns out to be “white” once they’ve actually cast the actor?

(I suspect that points 1-3, above, apply as much to actors of color as they do to fat actors. When the musical Miss Saigon originally opened on Broadway, they cast a white actor in an important Asian role, because the role required a star and there weren’t any Asian actors with that stature. Casting decisions like that become self-fulfilling prophesies.)

The newest Make/Shift has a great interview with Mia Mingus, a “twenty-seven year old queer, disabled, Korean transracial adoptee” who is the co-director of Reproductive Justice Now!. Mingus’ interview is excellent and covers a lot of ground.

The whole interview isn’t available online, but Aaminah Hernández quotes a passage:

… I was taught to claim my body as a girl, female, woman, but not as a disabled person. When it came to my disability, my parents looked to doctors, health-care providers, medical experts, and brace makers. I was not the expert on my body; they were. No one ever connected that my experiences with teh medical industrial complex as a disabled child would ultimately discourage me from seeking medical services (reproductive or not) in the future. Or that standing in my underwear in front of male doctors as they studied me was no different from standing in my underwear in front of any old men as they studied me.

For years I wore a brace on my right leg. I had some that went from my foot to my knee and some that went all the way up to my hip. My braces were made of plastic and/or fiberglass. In the Virgin Islands Caribbean weather, they itched, pinched my skin, and gave me painful blisters. When I wore them, I could hear horrible brace makers’ voices in my head: ‘that’s an ugly walk,’ ‘walk down the hallway again - and this time, try to make it prettier,’ ‘don’t worry, you’ll be able to hide the brace under your clothes - boys won’t even know it’s there.’

The invasion of my body at such a young age by people who never engaged with me about what I felt being told that my body was ‘wrong’ and ’something to fix’ over and over again…The ownership and entitlement of the medical industrial complex of my disabled body is, in my mind, no worse than the ownership and entitlement of the system of white supremacy of my body of color, or the ownership of the system of male supremacy of my female body. In fact, they are so connected and mutually interdependent that they are impossible to separate…

… The way in which I was receiving care was not about actually caring for who I was, but about making me fit into the mythical idea of ‘normal’ - and of course it was assumed that being ‘normal’ is what I wanted. I think one of the key issues for me around receiving medical care is that it is already working from a paradigm of ableism that pathologizes bodies. It’s not to say that all medicine is bad, but more that the particular way that I got treated as a disabled woman of color was about ‘fixing’ my body, as measured against an ableist (racist, sexist, heterosexist, etcetera) standard of what was ‘right.’”

The interviewer was Irina Contreras.