Repeal of DADT
Filed Under In the News, Porchy | Comments Off
Not letting gays in the military was always a stupid choice on the part of a military leadership hoping against hope that young Americans would line themselves up to get killed for political decisions that, at 18, they hardly understood. Beggars can’t be choosers.
Kicking gays out of the military was doubly stupid since, prior to their outing, those soldiers were serving as admirably and nobly as all of their straight and non-outed peers. It was willful stupidity in the face of observable fact.
The championing of the cause of gays in the military by Clinton early in his first term was stupid because he was fighting for a right that most gays at the time could not have cared less about. They were more concerned, if I remember right, with employment law and hospital visitation rights. And, because the military was so opposed to it and since the military had spent the previous 12 years having its ego stroked by the Reagan/Bush dynamic duo of small wars, they felt entitled to make demands of their commander in chief, forcing Clinton into yet another early and embarrassing compromise, DADT.
I may have been politically naive in the early 90s but I knew DADT was stupid then, and nothing over the last 17 years (or so) has convinced me of anything else. In fact, the firing of the a handful (or more) of gay, Arabic translators (a position the Army annoyingly and misleadingly calls “linguists”) has done more to convince me I was right then.
I don’t know how many people supported gays in the military when DADT was hashed out and signed into law. But now 80% of the country is behind its repeal. So it seems we’re in agreement: stupid then, stupid now. We’re better off without the obstacle to military service especially now that we are fighting two wars and seem intent still on gearing up for something in Iran.
But, no matter how stupid we might think it is, I think this guy, commenting at TPM is more, way more, optimistic than I am of how smooth the repeal will go, on Army bases and in the popular media.
As far as discipline on military bases goes we now have stories like this one, indicating that it’s getting more difficult to enforce. I don’t know why. Lower recruitment standards doesn’t seem to be the issue. Lack of disciplinary freedom doesn’t seem to be an issue. I would venture to guess it has more to do with basic human difficulties dealing with a more culturally diverse military. But I’m observing from very far away.
That’s the on the base problem that I think leads directly to the TPM commenter being more optimistic than me.
For the rest of us who sit at home and get our facts about the way the world works by watching the evening news, we have a different problem.
People don’t seem to understand that rape is not about sex. It’s kind of violent dominance. It’s about control and creating a physical reality that represents a logical pecking order in the mind of the assailant.
Homosexuality is about sex. Rape is not. For many people this simple concept isn’t so simple. So, when the already existent problem of male/male sexual assault on military bases hits the evening news after the repeal of DADT, I bet good money right now, that it will be reported as the repeal unleashing rampant homosexuality–rather than what it is–which is a failure on the part of the military establishment to protect their soldiers from creating what is essentially a vigilante hierarchy of peers.
The military has been pretty good about keeping most of their assault reports out of the mainstream media. But they have largely been working with the press in this regard. The MSM doesn’t want to spend a lot of time reporting on soldiers (read: “heroes”) as criminals. After the repeal, a lot of reporters, or at least certain news agencies, are going to be invested in making sure that one group of soldiers are criminalized. Unfortunately it will be done by confusing male/male rape with an act of homosexuality which is just going to confuse an already confusing issue.
The problem of integrating blacks was difficult, but it was also pretty straightforward. What we have here is something that has at least one complicating factor. We have the reality of homophobia. And we have the reality of sexual assault which looks like homosexuality but isn’t.
Am I a Liberaltarian? Are you?
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A long, long time ago in blog years (18 years for the first year of the blog and approximately 4.5 years for every year thereafter, making Porch Dog something like 31 years old or so) SB7 added me to his blogroll and by way of introduction said he had gauged me as something of a “liberaltarian.” I liked the term and casually nodded in assent. Since then, I have seen the word repeatedly but had never really looked into whether I thought the term was fully accurate.
But, thanks to Rand Paul the word is everywhere now and as somebody who has already skirted a few uncomfortable discussions because of my willingness to concede that, at the very least, Paul’s philosophical unease with Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act at least deserves a fair hearing before deciding to burn him alive, I felt I should take a closer look at the term and my relationship to it.
So I started here, in what I assume was one of the earliest uses of the term that also tried to flesh out what such a term might mean. At least it seems to me this must be a pretty early use because the author, Brink Lindsey, doesn’t come to any firm conclusions of what a liberal/libertarian fusion might mean, and because he also acknowledges that the liberal-progressive reforms of the 20th century displayed strong libertarian leanings prior to the formulation of a proper libertarian ideological platform. Although he did not mention Prohibition which was a reform by the American Left that was most definitely not at all libertarian.) This latter point could be used to claim I am not a liberaltarian but some sort of post-21st Amendment classic liberal.
As I read through the article I could not find any strong disagreements with Lindsey’s rough sketch although I can already percevie some discordance with tax policy and social welfare. Political coalitions are broad and within a group there are always a core members who strongly identify with the central platform, and there are peripheral members who agree enough with the core principles that they are more that group than they are any other defined group. From my initial foray into the literature it seems I might be in the liberaltarian camp but definitely not at its center.
We’ll see as I read more on the subject…not that finding a semantic bag to put myself into amounts to much of a victory, but at least if someone asks, I should be able to articulate my feelings on those groups I might manifest an ideological alliance with.
And for the record, I think Title II was necessary and philosophically sound.
One more Thing about Primaries
Filed Under Domestic Politics, Politics, Porchy | 2 Comments
There’s a lot of ink spilled and pixels burned with sentences like one I just wrote in the previous post “Sestak has a better chance of defeating the Republican candidate in November than Specter did.”
This is almost always true. It is so true it is almost a waste to say. But let me lay it down for you anyway.
Now, most people don’t vote at all. And the amount of people that do vote is substantially decreased during primaries. So what a primary does it gives you us a peek at what motivated voters, who are often more informed voters, think regarding who should represent their party in the general election. If you can’t win against a fellow partisan, there’s almost no chance you will be able to persuade anybody else.
Democrats vote “Democrat,” and Republican vote “Republican.” Don’t believe the myth of the independent voter. For a Democrat to win a general election he has to persuade Democrats to leave their houses on a chilly, November morning and push the button next to his name. That’s it. Democrats who lose primaries demonstrate that they are the weaker of two candidates in this one primary political skill: winning elections.
Now, there are exceptions. Sometimes, like in NY-23 or in Connecticut you get a primary loss brought about by a highly motivated minority of partisan voters. The candidate from those primaries is often in a weaker position than the ousted candidate. Primaries weed out candidates that can’t win. That’s their purpose, and more often than not, that’s what they do.
The trick in political reporting is to be able to determine why a certain Democrat (or Republican) lost (or won) in a primary.
A Bad Year for Democrats
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This year’s midterm elections are going to be bad for Democrats. The only question that remains is “how bad?” The real political nerds reading this site have already come up with what the most recent round of primaries and special elections will mean vis a vis the swamis’ predictions for November.
By any measure, Dems came out ahead. Losing Arlen Specter, formerly a Republican, can hardly be considered a large blow, especially considering that his primary opponent, Joe Sestak, will have an easier time than Specter would have come November. Which is not to say, of course, that Sestak will have a cake walk, or that he’ll even win, but if either of those two guys could win, it would be Sestak. There’s been a lot of hay thrown (made?) about the Arkansas run-off, but c’mon! let’s let the run-off determine how Arkansas went. And besides, were Dems going to keep Arkansas anyway?
And Ygelsias had this to say on his blog about Critz’s victory in Murtha’s old district:
The end of the Bush backlash and the rise of anti-Obama sentiment, combined with the reality of the legislation coming out of the Pelosi-era House is supposed to get Republicans back to baseline at least. To see a Democrat win an open seat in a district that went for John McCain will be a welcome sign to a large number of House Democrat incumbents from red districts.
So, yeah, that sounds good.
On the other hand, as I said during the run-up to November 2008, primaries and specials mean jack-all. Nothing. At all. These kinds of elections are so boring, small, and under-advertised they only appeal to a specialized subsection of voters overall. Sure, one could say the same thing about non-presidential general elections like what we’ll get this November, but primaries and specials are even smaller than that. Moreover, they are fought locally over local issues. They can really only tell us what, for example, Pennsylvania voters thought of Specter. Hell! Maybe they voted against him because after years of voting for “The Guy Who Isn’t Arlen Specter” they just got trigger happy. Voting is a muscle memory sport.
So there you have it. I’m still going to go with my prediction that Dems will lose horribly in November, but that “horrible” will be a consistently historic horrible, ~25 House seats and ~5 Senate seats. Dems will maintain control of both chambers and Republicans will tell us that performing within historically predictable results will be a mandate for Obama to privatize Medicare, Divert 100% of tax revenues to the military, and banish all Teh Gayz to Guantanamo.
John Kerry is President of Craft Beer
Filed Under Beer, Economics, Porchy | Comments Off
I twittered this yesterday from my beer account, but I thought I would bring it to the attention of Porch Dog readers. John Kerry has proposed legislation that would reduce the federal excise tax on beer made by small brewers (that is, small quantity, not LP brewers).
Anyway, maybe later I’ll write a post about how a tax-and-spend liberal who is a little divided on the excise tax in general can rationalize a reduction in the small brewer’s share of the burden.
Story here.
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