My former mention of "limp Nation-style liberalism" here generated a bit of controversy. And I say again that the Nation often acts as a useful progressive outlet--except when it comes to the Democratic Party near election time, when it acts more like a painted harlot catcalling from a dark alley.
Case in point: in the recent YouTube/CNN debate, Barack Obama said that he was willing to meet with the leaders of US-designated rogue states around the world--notably including the democratically-elected president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez--and Hillary Clinton tried to score a point on him for being so naive as to think that negotiations ever solved anything, responding thusly: "Certainly, we're not going to just have our president meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and you know, the president of North Korea, Iran and Syria, until we know better what the way forward would be."
Always eager to minutely dissect whatever vapid excuse for debate is currently going on between the Democratic presidential hopefuls, various Nation authors staked out their positions on this foofaraw:
- David Corn opined that Obama had indeed committed a gaffe, saying that unlike Hillary, Obama isn't "steeped in the nuances, language, and minefields of foreign policy" and he "has to avoid such mistakes as promising to open the doors of the White House without conditions to Kim Jong Il and others of that ilk"
- Ari Berman replied to Corn that while that it may be true that Hillary has more experience, Obama can use her Iraq war vote to respond to the carping about his naivete, adding that "Hillary's evolution on the war appears to some as more motivated by calculation than conviction"
- Finally, Katrina van den Heuvel judged that Berman had the more convincing argument and that Obama "got it right." She went on to criticize Hillary's approach, saying that as a result of Bill Clinton following that same policy, "The respective regimes of Castro in Cuba and Chavez in Venezuela have only grown stronger, and more influential in Latin America."
(Zzzzzzzz...huh?...oh, right. Sorry, I nodded off for a second there.)
QED. That round of analysis is so flaccid that I can't even bring myself to spend the mental effort to make fun of it. In reading through the respective articles, I don't see a word that would be out of place in the Washington Post or the New York Times--and that's a sad statement for a magazine that touts itself as a premier source of progressive commentary.
Note in particular that not a single one of them made any differentiation between Venezuela and the other countries in the list. And as you can see, Corn and van den Heuvel actually went so far as to adopt the mainstream propaganda frame with regard to Venezuela--directly conflating the Chavez government (oops, sorry, "regime") with the other governments (oops, sorry, "others of that ilk"), and blithely ignoring its repeatedly-established democratic credentials, its uncontested popularity with the Venezuelan people, and its progressive policies. After all, the Democrats say that Chavez is a Bad Man, so the Nation's writers are more than happy to go along with that.
Berman touched on the Chavez issue only glancingly, when he referred to "dictators (the kind bemoaned by Clinton and embraced by Obama in last night's YouTube debate)"--implicitly if a bit obliquely lumping Chavez in with the others. But even setting that aside, he established his Nation qualifications when he said that Hillary's "evolution" on the Iraq war "appears to some" to be calculating rather than principled. I'd say that's a good candidate for understatement of the year, and it's just the kind of wet-noodle pundificating that's the source of my Nation aversion.
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