Thinking points from The Nation.

Whether you agree or disagree with the views or assumptions presented (and many readers of this blog will disagree), I found these tidbits from the August 16 issue of The Nation to be provocative and worthy of challenge. Worthy of reading first is the long review by Peter Canby of several books on wars in Colombia. Now to the tidbits...

• "My sense, for example, is that in almost every state delegation [at the Democratic Convention] a mini drama is being played out over the transfer of power to the next generation. In New York, if Attorney General Eliot Spitzer runs for governor, Mark Green, Andrew Cuomo and perhaps Robert Kennedy Jr., among others, are in line to run for attorney general. When I asked Mark about this and what sort of politicking one could do at the convention, all he said was, 'Look and you will see any number of us taking down names of people to talk to later. We're keeping lists like a prosecutor at a Mafia wedding'" (Victor Navasky, "The Real Story in Boston").
  
  
• "And finally, there was the convention outside the convention--in the streets and in various venues around town. At one of these events, I ran into the Reverend Jackson, and since I had just seen his picture on various front pages smiling alongside George W. Bush, I asked him what that was all about. He told me, 'I asked the President one question: Did he intend to enforce the law so that every vote counted? And he said he'd get back to me' " (ibid.).
  
  
• "But if the BSF [Boston Social Forum] bore little resemblance to the official Democratic gathering just five miles away, neither did it look much like Boston--a majority nonwhite city--or even UMass Boston, often the first step for working-class and immigrant students in search of a toehold in the middle class. There was little sign of the exciting new alliance between African-Americans and Latinos that is beginning to reshape local politics, and save for SEIU [yay!], which brought leaders as well as members, the only union presence belonged to the police, hundreds of whom were using the campus as a staging ground for the DNC" (Jennifer C. Berkshire, "A Social Occasion").
  
  
• "The strong and wrong position won out in the Democratic Party when its voters chose Kerry over Howard Dean in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. An antiwar party rallied around a prowar candidate. The result has been one of the most peculiar political atmospheres within a party in recent memory. The Democrats are united but have concealed the cause that unites them. The party champions free speech that it does not practice. As a Dennis Kucinich delegate at the convention said to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, 'Peace' is 'off-message' " (Jonathan Schell, "Letter from Ground Zero: Strong and Wrong").
  
  
• "It is a mistake to give the right a monopoly on values by agreeing with them in a half-baked, yes-but, wishy-washy way. Sure, abortion should be rare--but it should be rare thanks to birth control and support for women and children, not because women guilt-trip themselves into continuing crisis pregnancies. It's not a satisfying answer, either, to change the subject, as when Kerry said that 'good-paying jobs' is a Democratic value. People need to hear about those good jobs, but they also need to hear about a social vision that isn't just about their own immediate self-interest" (Katha Pollitt, "Let's Not Devalue Ourselves").
  
  
• "We liberals and progressives and leftists have our own noble principles, our own beautiful abstract words. We should take our stand on them. Fairness is a liberal value. Equality is a liberal value. Education is a liberal value. Honesty in government, public service for modest remuneration, safeguarding public resources and the land--these are all values we share. Liberty is a liberal value, trusting people to make their own decisions, letting people speak their minds even if their views are unpopular. So is social solidarity, the belief that we should share the nation's enormous wealth so that everyone can live decently. The truth is, most of the good things about this country have been fought for by liberals (indeed, by leftists and, dare one say it, Communists)--women's rights, civil liberties, the end of legal segregation, freedom of religion, the social safety net, unions, workers' rights, consumer protection, international cooperation, resistance to corporate domination--and resisted by conservatives. If conservatives had carried the day, blacks would still be in the back of the bus, women would be barefoot and pregnant, medical care would be on a cash-only basis, there'd be mouse feet in your breakfast cereal and workers would still be sleeping next to their machines" (ibid.).
  
  
• "For all the interminable thundering about the evils of George Bush, the man has done a very useful job of sabotaging the American Empire, which is probably why so many liberals hate him. They think he's a national embarrassment, hurling Imperial America over his handlebars, landing on its ass amid world derision. But as Gabriel Kolko remarks in his contribution to Dime's Worth of Difference, the new collection edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and myself (details on our CounterPunch website): 'The United States will be more prudent, and the world will be far safer, only if it is constrained by a lack of allies and isolated. And that is happening.... Inadvertently, the Bush Administration has begun to destroy an alliance system that for the world's peace should have been abolished long ago. The Democrats are far less likely to continue that process.... As dangerous as he is, Bush's reelection is much more likely to produce the continued destruction of the alliance system that is so crucial to American power in the long run' " (Alexander Cockburn, "He's the (Any)One").

And of course, the cover article is absolutely worth reading, at least as a jumping-point for the question of whether/whither electronic voting: Ronnie Dugger, "How They Could Steal the Election This Time."