The atmosphere in New York City

Less than an hour ago, walking from my office in the West Village to the Q train in Union Square, I heard constant shouts, cheers, and chants; passed a young woman singing the Star-Spangled Banner; and saw more smiling faces than I’ve ever seen on a New York street — or any street, for that matter. My wait for the train was accompanied by still more screams and yelps of joy, as each new group of people descended the stairs into the station, giddy and enthusiastic.

I stepped onto a Brooklyn-bound Q train not long after 1am. There was a short, five-second awkward silence. Then a young woman screamed “Obama!” and the entire train car erupted into raucous applause.

What Henley said

Verbatim Bill Kristol:

The way you puncture euphoria is reality, or to be more blunt, fear. I recommend to Senator Clinton the politics of fear.

Jim Henley:

[T]he thing to note here is that Kristol identifies fear and violence (he goes on to tie the fear theme to attacking Iran) with “reality.” Fear is reality in his equation. The national greatness conservatives spent the 1990s arguing that national life without a higher purpose lacked meaning. They’ve spent the Naughts settling for a low one.

Obama gets it

An endorsement from David Rees, the man behind the satirical comic Get Your War On:

Cluster bombs and landmines are particularly terrifying weapons that wreak havoc on communities trying to recover from war. They are fatal impediments to reconstruction and rehabilitation of agricultural land; they destroy valuable livestock; they disable otherwise productive members of society; they maim or kill children trying to salvage them for scrap metal.

Over 150 nations have signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. It pains me that our great nation has not. But in the autumn of 2006, there was a chance to take a step in the right direction: Senate Amendment No. 4882, an amendment to a Pentagon appropriations bill that would have banned the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas.

Senator Obama of Illinois voted IN FAVOR of the ban.

[...] As is so often the case, there was no political cost to doing the wrong thing. And there was no political reward for doing the right thing. But Senator Obama did the right thing.

Read the whole thing.

Don’t worry your pretty little head

Once upon a time, we fought a war over taxation without representation. The idea that a faraway king could just take our money, and not let us have a voice in how that money was spent, made a lot of people angry.

Today, we still have taxation without representation. If you’re 14, 15, 16, or 17 years old, you are legally allowed to work, but you’re not allowed to vote. You may earn money, and if so you will pay taxes, but you cannot vote for the representatives who will decide how that money is spent.

There is no good reason for this. Young people are no more likely to make dumb decisions than adults. (Yes, their brains are still maturing, but our brains are changing all the time. Does anyone seriously propose that we should bar people with traumatic brain injury, or mental illness, or Alzheimer’s from voting?)

No, the usual arguments are that young people’s political interests can be represented by their parents, that they aren’t responsible enough, that not very many of them will bother to vote, that they don’t understand how government works, that they will be swayed by politicians’ promises.

These are insulting and paternalistic arguments, ones that have been used in the past against women and racial minorities. They are no more (and no less) true of teenagers than of their parents. If a politician promises a special benefit to teens, is that different from a benefit for the AARP?

At some future day, people will look back on the voting age of 18 as flatly discriminatory, even quaintly incomprehensible. But to get to that day, a lot of us will have to stand up and say what should be clear: Everyone who contributes to a society should have a say in how that society is run.

(Inspired by this rather lame op-ed.)

These guys are crazy

I only caught the last half-hour of the most recent Republican debate, and boy was it terrifying: Eight of the ten candidates came out in strong favor of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” formerly known as torture. Mitt Romney wants to double the size of Guantanamo Bay. Only Rep. Ron Paul and Sen. John McCain argued that torturing people was perhaps not the best way to defend our values.

Rep. Paul pointed out that calling torture enhanced interrogation techniques was akin to Newspeak. Sen. McCain, the only candidate who has experienced the horrific reality of torture, gave an impassioned argument:

It’s not about the terrorists, it’s about us. It’s about what kind of country we are. And a fact: The more physical pain you inflict on someone, the more they’re going to tell you what they think you want to know.

It’s about us as a nation. We have procedures for interrogation in the Army Field Manual. Those, I think, would be adequate in 999,999 of cases, and I think that if we agree to torture people, we will do ourselves great harm in the world.

The rest of the candidates appear to be morally bankrupt. They seem to think our moral yardstick is Al Qaeda, and as long as we’re not as barbaric as they are we’re doing okay. They’re wrong. Our moral compass should be based upon our nation’s founding principles, not the actions of murderous thugs.

Also frightening were the frequent allusions to 24. Rep. Tancredo said that in the (entirely contrived and 24-esque) ticking time-bomb scenario he was “looking for Jack Bauer.”^[1] I was reminded of a scathing and rather apropos article from the American Conservative magazine. The entire piece is worth a read, but its thrust is summed up in its closing paragraph:

The devotion to 24 and its protagonist demonstrates what few may care to admit: in the war on terror, the conservative movement has become willing to sacrifice principle to passion and difficult moral reasoning to utility. As escapism, 24 is riveting; as a parable for our time, it is revolting.

Rep. Tancredo said that America is Western civilization’s last hope and tried to justify the use of torture as a means of defending Western civilization. That’s like burning down your home to defend against a prowler on the roof. When we start torturing fellow human beings, even under the assumption they have committed heinous crimes, when we “sacrifice principle to passion,” we destroy the very values we purport to defend.

1. Complete transcript online via the New York Times here. If you don’t have an nytimes.com account, try BugMeNot.com ↩