Lowering your personal carbon footprint and saying you’re reducing climate change is like fitting a burglar alarm and saying you’re talking crime. You’re not, you’re just opting out of the problem

Jacqui Smith’s down-to-earth nature and soft approach seemed a breath of fresh air in the early days of Gordon Brown’s government. Now she’s stepping down, her tenure appearing, to many, one of disappointing underachievement. The parallels with the government she served in are inescapable. 

Bet you a tenner I’ve got one of them almost word for word.

I’m surprised we haven’t heard more objections to this clause of the proposed European Union Definition of Antisemitism:

Examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel taking into account the overall context could include… Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Strikes me as problematic, to say the least.

I don’t have the time today to do a complete, detailed response to Philip Pullman’s silly piece in the Times a few weeks ago, which has just come to my attention. But let me just quickly tee up the most obvious objections. The piece invokes William Blake to argue that civil liberties are so under threat in today’s UK that democract is effectively a sham.

The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people. It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that nation still. It is a sweet dream.

You are not to be trusted with laws

So we shall put ourselves out of your reach

We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition

You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate them, or to send your representatives to vote against them

You do not need to hold us to account

You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?

Who do you think you are?

What sort of fools do you think we are?

This is a kind of ad hominem argument: that is to say, it doesn’t put forward an argument at all, but simply presents a widely admired author as being on one side of an issue and expects its readers to follow suit out of sheer admiration. It’s the trick every politician pulls when invoking Lincoln, Reagan or Churchill in their speeches: somebody you admire once believed something similar to what I believe in superficially similar circumstances, so you should agree with me. There’s not one sentence - in a 1100-word article - of actual argument against the slew of liberty-infringing laws the article rails against. The effect - the removal of the article’s rhetoric from the reality of the issues at stake - is deepened by the fact that the figure invoked is not even a politician, philosopher, or moralist. He’s a writer - a gifted one, certainly, and one whose writings touched on issues of morality and the role of the state. But not a true political thinker of any stature. There’s not a philosophy being invoked, to which many people nowadays subscribe, which this writer invented or embodied. This simply tells us that a great poet disliked tyranny. Should the fact that Blake diagnosed and condemned sham democracy give us pause today? Well, let’s see what else he advocated. A proto-socialist, he railed against the excesses of capitalism at least as surely as those of government. Do the Times readers enjoying this article subscribe to those aspects of his views, too?

Not that Pullman ought to be concerned with any of this: he is himself, after all, an author. An author, to be precise, of children’s books - highly enjoyable ones, admittedly, with some interesting, if jumbled, religious allusions. But children’s books nonetheless. For him to look to other writers for inspiration in constructing his view of the world, and of politics, is perfectly natural.

But for a serious national newspaper to print it is not. This is a complex issue, deserving of a detailed, nuanced analysis. The list of allegedly freedom-restricting statutes Pullman reels off at the end of the article is just that, a list, and each individual bill contains its own balance between the needs of security and those of liberty. You might well think the government has got that balance consistently wrong. Let’s have a look, citing examples, providing evidence. This is the debate that’s needed; this is the debate it’s a newspaper’s job to provide. Not to give a platform to an author delivering what amounts to a rallying cry for the converted - not intended to win over doubters, but to inspire true believers with the faith that a poet they like would be with them.

Assuming, of course, that Blake would be with them. For an argument could easily be constructed that to compare the democratic situation in Blake’s time with ours now is so callously unfair as to border on the offensive. How can the lines “You are not to be trusted with laws / So we shall put ourselves out of your reach” not mean something utterly different in an age of universal suffrage? No-one can know for sure how Blake would have responded to the threats - both to security and to liberty - that we face today. Even detailed, clear philosophies like those provided by Locke or Marx are hard to apply usefully a century or more on from their writing.

And if this article ignores the immense progress in freedom made in recent centuries, the modern liberty movement also takes a disastrously narrow view of freedom in the context of the present. What about the many positive steps in the last decade? The adoption of the Human Rights Act? The loosening of alcohol licensing is probably a more regular source of joy in the lives of many britons than the presence of CCTV is a worry. What about my freedom to marry my boyfriend? The freedom to travel easily across Europe? The freedom of women and men to work part-time? Blake’s vision of liberty was broad enough to econompass practical, as well as legal, freedom. Why isn’t Pullman’s?

For me to pull out the old caricature of latte-sipping Islington liberals as the only people worried about these things would be engage in an ad hominem argument of my own. But like most stereotypes, it containts a kernel of truth. Only those whose lives are free of discrimination and material want can afford to take  such a narrow view of freedom.

Imagine if, instead of criticising each other in op-eds, engaging in showpiece letter-page spats or sprawling, hard-to-follow blog arguments, the thinkers of our time actually discussed things directly with each other? Rebutting and responding to each other in real time? And they let us watch? Wouldn’t it be, just, the best thing?

Don’t let the ramshackle presentation and iffy video quality put you off. If it plays its cards right, and maybe smartens up a little, the rapidly-growing Bloggingheads might just be the most important thing ever to happen anywhere (at least, since the last thing I said that about).

A case in point: This exchange - between semi-repentant neocon David Frum and Amjad Atallah of the New America Foundation (American think tanks always have three-word names, and one word is always “America”) is the best broad-reaching analysis of the current Middle East situation I’ve seen coming out of the recent Gaza debate. It provides a great impression of what the practical road to a palestinian state might look like - and a fantastic insight, for those of us used to the European viewe of the issue - an incredibly useful view of the conservative take on the current state of play and how we got here. There’s an audio download and podcast subscription options also available.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ch.9

Substitute “George and Dick” and you’re pretty much there, no?

Fitzgerald, of course, also said “There are no second acts in American life.” A world nervously hopes that he’s proven right in this case.

Funny how political change is aided by acts of god. Would Tony Blair have become PM if John Smith hadn’t died? Surely not. And I wonder: if Hurricane Katrina hadn’t begun the total breakdown of Bush’s popularity, would Obama have become president?

I’ve been meaning for some time to write a short post paying a small tribute to the man I believe is one of the least-sung heroes of the Obama campaign: Governor Howard Dean. Today I sat down to do it and realised this is in fact the very day he hands over to successor Tim Kaine.

Look at this display of front pages covering Obama’s inauguration. What words were selected by more newspapers than any others to summarise the new president’s message to the nation? “Hope over fear.”

Sound familiar? It’s because you heard it throughout the spring of 2004. “Hope not fear” was the  primary slogan of Dean’s campaign. After a year of hearing Obama talk about hope, it’s easy to forget just how radical-sounding this was. In 2004, fear was everywhere in America. Citizens, prodded by regular government threat alerts, feared terrorist attacks. Families feared for their sons and daughters in Iraq, which was just beginning to look insoluble. And the Democractic party feared to attack the war, or President Bush, for fear of sounding weak and unpatriotic. But Dean attacked the war. Dean attacked Bush. And Dean talked unashamedly, unapologetically, about hope.

Dean’s campaign may have failed, and probably rightly. But it provided the first shot of adrenalin that re-started the beating heart of the Democratic party: the grass-roots organisers and volunteers whose energy, four years later, propelled Obama to the nomination and, ultimately, the White House. As the first real internet candidate, Dean laid the groundwork for Obama’s breathaking fundraising organisation. As the first major-party electoral candidate to run against the war in Iraq, he helped set in motion the tectonic shift in public opinion that doomed Clinton and made Obama the Democratic front-runner. And by daring to offer full-throated criticism of President Bush, at a time when the party leadership was too craven to do so, he began the process of breaking down the post-9/11 conspiracy of silence that allowed so many disastrous missteps - Iraq, torture, wiretapping - to happen unchecked.

That same party leadership fought hard to prevent Dean becoming DNC Chair. But, as the grassroots predicted, his leadership was a revelation, galvanising volunteers and transforming fundraising. The 2006 mid-term victories that began the tide that swept Obama to the Presidency? Down in no small part to the smarts and passion of Dean. And that “50-state” strategy that enabled Obama to redraw the electoral map and end, in a stroke, a thousand hand-wringing worries about “divided America”? The brainchild of Howard Dean.

As a presidential candidate, Dean was a failure. But in both that role and his role as DNC Chair, he helped re-inspire a party slouched in despondency - and in his unapologetic passion for progressive politics, he helped Obama re-inspire a nation.

Someone on CNN just got rounded on by his colleagues for saying that he thought Obama’s speech lacked a truly memorable line on a par with “ask not what your country can do for you” or the oft-misquoted “We have nothing The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” And I suspect he’s right: it was lacking a money shot, as it were. But I think that may be deliberate. For while the tasks facing Roosevelt and Kennedy in those speeches were straightforward, Obama’s was highly complex - too much so to be summed up in a single, memorable phrase.

Roosevelt’s task was to reassure a nation in the midst of crisis. That reassurance - a message of, to use the modern slogan, Hope - was all that people needed to take away from his inaugural. For Kennedy, the task was also simple: to stir a complacent nation into a greater level of engagement with the Cold War, the battle against poverty, and assorted other challenges, and in doing so add a sense of history to what was in fact a squeaked-through election victory.

By contrast, Obama’s speech had a double aim: not only to reassure the nation that it could weather the current crisis, but also to impress the seriousness of that crisis on the nation. Remember, when Obama first began selling his message of change to the nation, the financial crisis had barely begun. The problems of Iraq and Afghanistan, of failing schools and crumbling infrastructure, were those he promised to deliver America from. As the election continued, the crisis became central to Obama’s speeches and the number one issue for voters. But the true depth of the crisis has become clear only since the election. Just these last few days, the dire news from Bank of America and Citigroup show the bottom has not yet been reached.

Yet the true scale of the crisis, it seems, hasn’t truly hit home. Roosevelt addressed a people who had seen three long years of decline. They knew the extent of their woes, and were desperate to hear good news. While the period since Obama’s election may have seemed interminable, it was merely weeks, much of which has been spent on business-as-usual bickering about the Warren selection, the Burris farrago, Geithner’s tax returns and the like. In recent days Obama’s hopes to quickly secure his stimulus package have been stalled by increasing conservative concern about waste, partly a result of the supposed “failure” of last autumn’s bailout.

All of this is reasonable scrutiny. But none of it is commensurate with a sense of dire emergency. Plans on the scale of Obama’s require a sense of urgency of the kind which was seen after September 11. So the speech had a dual purpose: to provide the sense of hope which we associate with Obama, but also to lay out clearly to Americans, perhaps for the first time, the full scale of the challenge ahead.

Hence the blunt tone of the first few lines. Declaring himself “humbled by the task before us,” he spoke of taking the oath “amidst gathering clouds and raging storms”. The summing-up of the state of the union that followed was remarkably bleak:

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood.  Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.  Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.  Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered.  Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet. 

This from a man who was ridiculed last year as a happy-clappy peddler of loose promises! Even when the tone of the speech turned to the positive future, the tone was of gritty determination rather than high-flown dreams.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real.  They are serious and they are many.  They will not be met easily or in a short span of time.  But know this, America -  they will be met.

At times, the tone was almost chastening. Obama blamed the financial crisis on “our collective failure to make hard choices.” His main biblical reference was almost damning: “We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.” For an America that has been coddled with praise for years by a simplistically patriotic president, this is a remarkable change of tone.

The next siginificant passage reminded this “childish” America of the sacrifices that brought us to this point. 

It has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. 

This is the voice of a serious man with a deep sense of history. This is not feelgood stuff.

As the speech went on, Obama talked in more hopeful terms about his goals, and the shopping list is daunting:

We will act — not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise healthcare’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

But strikingly, the climax of the speech brought the tone back to one of marked uncertainty. More than once, he associated the current crisis with the question of the survival of the United States itself. First he recalled Thomas Paine’s words, read aloud to George Washington’s troops before one of the final battles of the War of Independence:

In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

“Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].”*

Then in his closing paragraph he openly, albeit briefly, raised the spectre of the end of the American experiment:

Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back, nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations. [My emphasis]

This rhetoric is not aspirational. If this is an example of the audacity of hope, it is a hope tempered with a profound sense of foreboding at the scale of the task ahead. If this is inspiration for the future, it’s also deeply aware of the journey that has led us here. And if this is a message of reassurance for the people, it’s also one of responsibility.

It’s a nuanced message. A mature message. Even a conservative one. It reinforces, once again, my suspicion that Obama may truly be what he appears to be: a uniquely serious, thoughtful and determined man, potentially a remarkable leader.

These times require no less.

Read the full text of Obama’s inaugural speech

*Paine’s original words were “to meet and repulse it.”

On the Today programme a few days ago, the Israeli ambassador to the UK expressed his hope that the crisis in Gaza would lead the people of the beseiged strip to reject the leadership of Hamas. Pro-Israeli commentators - especially in the US - have repeatedly said that it’s the Gazans’ responsibility to make peace possible by choosing a government that wants peace.

But leaving the moral validity of this argument aside, it’s clear that it’s a fantasy. One British journalist on Today recalled speaking to a long-time Fatah member who told him, “we are all Hamas now”. The Israelis, like the US in Iraq, are underestimating the power of nationalism. It doesn’t matter how terrible a government is - its people won’t reject it at the behest of any foreign power. Indeed, support for bad governments is usually strengthened by such pressure.

The furore over Obama’s selection of Rick Warren is emblematic of one of the wider stories of the 08 election: the death of the myth of the ’60s “rainbow coalition” of minorities. The idea that women’s rights, racial civil rights and gay rights were all in some way complementary was always, of course, the fantasy of liberal straight white males. Minority members knew it wasn’t so simple. The Civil Rights Movement was strained by sexism, leading black and white women alike to leave it for feminism. And obviously, gays and blacks have had their issues - the black community voted heavily for Prop 8.

In truth, the relationship between minority rights struggles has always been more competition than coalition. They all vote Democrat, but beyond that there’s little love lost, as the furious feminist response to Obama’s popularity among liberals shows. But liberals keep invoking civil rights as the central objection to the Warren choice. Of course, in the UK, we have legally equivalent civil unions, everyone uses terms like ‘husband’ and ‘wedding’, and everyone seems fairly happy. But even if you accept the gay-marriage movement’s contention that the symbolic effect of the word ‘marriage’ is vital to equality - a view recently endorsed by the California Supreme Court, prompting the Proposition 8 farrago - to compare that symbolic difference with the brutal treatment of blacks in the segregated south is so fatuous as to border on the offensive.

I don’t blame the gay community for being worried - Obama wouldn’t be the first president to talk a good game on civil rights and not live up to it in office. But I find the assertion that Obama, as a member of a “minority”, should have some special sympathy with the gay cause to be silly and hopelessly naive.

In one of his final actions in the White House, President Bush on Thursday declared Jan. 18 to be “National Sanctity of Human Life Day.” 

“All human life is a gift from our creator that is sacred, unique and worthy of protection. On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, our country recognizes that each person, including every person waiting to be born, has a special place and purpose in this world,” reads the presidential proclamation.

The Economist’s spoken word edition has no truck with any of this “bleeping” nonsense. (Skip to 1:30)

“He hasn’t called him a crook!”

We’re now supposed to believe that Obama is at best insufficiently appalled at Blagoyevich’s behaviour - which, let’s not forget, is still legally unproven - and at worst implicated in it, because he uses calm language. And talk-show guests talk openly about Obama’s camp “admitting whatever it’s done”, apparently without feeling the need to admit that so far there’s not a shred of evidence Obama’s camp were involved with Blagojevich in anything other than entirely standard ways.

I can’t think of a more perfect example of how the desperate need to fill 24 hours of news a day has maddened America’s political culture. Not exactly news, I know, but I’m still frequently shocked.

“This is nothing to do with Obama. But some people are going to try to make people think this has something to do with Obama. So this is bad news for Obama. What is the Obama camp going to do about this bad news?”

US Media FAIL.

Washington Supreme Court Judge Richard Sanders has admitted that he was the one who stood up and yelled “tyrant!” at U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey during a speech in which Mukasey later fainted. At a black-tie dinner on Nov. 20, the AG defended the Bush administration’s war on terror. Sanders, who said he felt compelled to voice his disagreement with those policies, said he had already left the event before Mukasey’s collapse, and did not learn of it until the next day. 

"US Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama points on his way to board his campaign plane in Columbia, Missouri, October 31, 2008"

Well, yes. He clearly is pointing. This superb photo series of Obama’s campaign is only slightly impaired by the ponderous captions.

I don’t remember many people singing “God Save the Queen” in May 1997.

Andrew Sullivan has a plethora of reaction from across the ’sphere, with a conservative leaning. These two really sum it up:

The analytical quote:

1. The modern conservative movement began with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race. The modern conservative movement ends with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. John McCain — who took Goldwater’s Senate seat upon his retirement — in the 2008 presidential race.

2. Modern liberalism began its implosion with riots in Chicago’s Grant Park at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Tonight, modern liberalism is reborn at Chicago’s Grant Park, where a black Chicago Democrat will celebrate winning the presidency.

- Rod Dreher

The personal quote:

Nothing in my life has actually changed in the 30 minutes since it was announced Obama will be our next president. I have the same bills, the same amount of money in the bank, my dishwasher is still broken, and my 5 month old beagle won’t stop peeing on my carpet. Everything in my life is exactly the same as it was 30 minutes ago; and yet I feel as though everything is different.

I feel so much hope.  I feel so much pride. I feel like my one vote was a single drop of water in a great Tsunami of change. I feel like I was one of a million voices screaming in the night, ” I love my country and I’m taking it back!” I’m so proud of the country that I love and have so much hope in my heart that we can together heal the wounds that have been such a source of pain and anger to us all.

I know Obama isn’t going to fix the economy overnight, I know he won’t be able to provide healthcare to all Americans by February ‘09. I know Obama isn’t a Messiah who four years from now will have turned this country into a fabled utopia. But I also know Obama will make moral decisions. I know Obama will try to unite where others try to divide. I know Obama will help to make America the beacon of hope it once was to others. I know that at 27 years of age, I witnessed one of the most important and hopefully glorious chapters in American history.

I know hope.

- Anonymous Daily Dish reader