politics

Another political contender is dipping is toes into the blogging world — this time it’s Gary Hart.

I don’t know as much about him (aside from numerous mid-80’s Bloom Country references), but it’s great to see another politician exploring blogging as a method of communication. And as a bonus, his site is using MovableType, complete with comment and trackback capability. Quite cool. Now let’s see what he has to say.

Noted independent journalist Robert Fisk got to see some unedited videotape shot by Al-Djazaira of Basra, which is supposedly captured and held by British forces.

It is also proof that Basra — reportedly “captured” and “secured” by British troops last week — is indeed under the control of Saddam Hussein’s forces. Despite claims by British officers that some form of uprising has broken out in Basra, cars and buses continue to move through the streets while Iraqis queue patiently for gas bottles as they are unloaded from a government truck. A remarkable part of the tape shows fireballs blooming over western Basra and the explosion of incoming — and presumably British — shells. The short sequence of the dead British soldiers for the public showing of which Tony Blair expressed such horror yesterday is little different from dozens of similar clips of dead Iraqi soldiers shown on British television over the past 12 years, pictures which never drew any expressions of condemnation from the British prime minister. The two Britons, still in uniform, are lying on a roadway, arms and legs apart, one of them apparently hit in the head, the other shot in the chest and abdomen.

The rest of the article is extremely disturbing, as he describes the scenes of warfare caputured on the tape — scenes that not only would definitely not be broadcast in the U.S., but would most likely not even be talked about either. But then, it’s also the reality of what is happening on the other side of the world. Not the video-game-on-tv shots of explosions mushrooming up from miles away, but the street-level violence of urban warfare that we now find ourselves in as our armies penetrate further into Iraq.

From Dave Winer:

Presidential candidate Howard Dean gave a talk at Harvard last night. He asked an interesting question. Next year, how will we feel when China invades Taiwan because they think they have weapons of mass destruction? Has the new Bush Doctrine, pre-emptive wars, unleashed a philosophy of world power that we may not be so comfortable with?

Not a happy thought, is it? My guess, if a situation like this were to happen while Bush was in power, would be that we would then start rattling our sabres at China for “invading a soverign nation”. You see, as we’ve amply demonstrated in the past few weeks, when anyone else in the world attacks another country, it’s invasion. When we do it, it’s liberation.

Of course, it’s been pointed out by many people that many of the same arguments used to justify the attack on Iraq could be applied to the U.S. We have a leader in power who was not elected by the popular vote. We have weapons of mass destruction that we’re not willing to destroy. We have chemical weapons (hell, we sold Iraq theirs). We are denying (some of) our citizens their constitutional rights (especially if they’re of middle eastern heritage). So why aren’t we facing U.N. sanctions or a coalition of countries using military force to liberate the American people?

Who knows — maybe we will at some point in the future. As Dean is pointing out, Bush has just made that an acceptable foreign policy for the nations of the world to take.

There’s a very interesting article in this week’s Seattle Weekly from Jonathan Raban, a british author who’s been living in Seattle since 1990. In a letter back to Britain that was originally published in The Guardian, he does a really good job of outlining where Seattle sits politically and economically, especially in contrast to how the U.S. in general is presented to the world. Then, towards the end, he mentions a certain up and coming political candidate that is rapidly gaining notice, and suggests that this might be the man to watch in the upcoming months…

There is also much anger with the Democrats for failing to provide any articulate leadership in the war on (not with) Iraq. To many of its traditional supporters, the party appears to have been gutlessly complaisant in its bipartisan stance. But something interesting happened on Feb. 21, when the present crop of presidential hopefuls paraded in front of the Democratic National Committee in what several reporters likened to a beauty pageant. Joe Lieberman made a speech so flat that his candidacy may well have died in that moment. Richard Gephardt boasted of making common cause with the Bush administration on Iraq, and was met with cries of “Shame!” but went on to outline his domestic policy and won a series of standing ovations. Then came Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont.

“I’m Howard Dean, and I’m here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party…. What I want to know is why in the world the Democratic Party leadership is supporting the president’s unilateral attack on Iraq.”

Dean’s opening remarks were enough to leave both Lieberman and Gephardt in the dust. The hall was in an uproar of approval and relief. At last a reasonably qualified and plausible presidential candidate was saying something that rank-and-file Democrats have been waiting to hear for many months. The immediate upshot of his speech (by no means limited to the war) was an orgy of text-messaging from state delegates to their party officials back home, saying that Gephardt had rescued himself after a bad start, Lieberman had flopped, and Howard Dean had carried the day gloriously, on the economy as much as on the invasion of Iraq. Dean is far from being a Gene McCarthy figure; he comes with a raft of policies, one of which happens to be about the war. In the last month, he has moved from being an utterly obscure figure to anyone not from Vermont to being a neck-and-neck front-runner in the Democratic nomination race. If this has come as a surprise to most national political commentators, it doesn’t seem at all surprising if you happen to live in Seattle.

(Via Rick Klau)