Philip Kennicott reviews the movie Traitor, starring the fine actor Don Cheadle:

Once again there are terrorists in our midst, and once again they are Muslims, hiding in sleeper cells, posing as ordinary Americans, waiting to cause mayhem. Heroic action is needed.

To save us from the terrorists?

More pressingly, to save us from films such as “Traitor,” a long-winded thriller starring Don Cheadle as a conflicted Muslim who is either an undercover U.S. operative or a ruthless killer, or maybe both.

Wait. It gets worse—or, rather, better [e.a.]:

The film’s moral reasoning is all parenthetical: There are bad guys out there (but they’re not all irredeemably bad), and while we must fight them, we shouldn’t sink to their level (except when we have to). This doesn’t add up to real nuance. It just encourages people to break the rules and feel bad about it. The film, which borrows a line from Samir as its subtitle (”The Truth Is Complicated”), would be stronger if it thought more simplistically: Terrorism is always wrong, as is breaking the laws of civilized behavior to fight it.

How hard is it for the makers of American popular entertainment to get this? Terrorism is always wrong, and so is the uncivilized behavior sometimes used to fight it.

I haven’t seen The Dark Knight, but from what I’ve read, that movie fails the morality test, too.

The Dark Knight does not provoke profound debate about our methods and purposes. It spectacularly affirms them. “We don’t get the hero we need,” Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon says, with Niebuhrian wistfulness, “we get the hero we deserve.”

Memo to Hollywood: one, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war. Get us rewrite!

TigerHawk notes that despite Americans’ rising confidence in winning the “war on terror” (per this Rasmussen Report), they are still deeply unhappy about President Bush (as they well should be, because he has been a dreadful, incompetent, moronic “leader” despite his having had one correct impulse: to respond forcefully to 9/11—and these are my thoughts, not TH’s; he seems to be a lot more generous toward GWB).

TH writes [e.a.]:

The place of the presidency of George W. Bush in history will almost certainly turn on the state of the Middle East in another generation. If the ruling class in the region remains a teeming hive of scum and villainy, then Bush will land in the lower ranks of American presidents (although not “the worst president ever,” insofar as it would be virtually impossible for Bush to sink below James Buchanan). If, however, the major governments in the region have become more representative, more transparent, less corrupt and less oppressive, history will remember that George W. Bush was the first world leader to declare that end as his aspiration.

Sadly, Bush will not live to see the result. It takes around half a century for history to judge an American presidency. People have to die, records have to be declassified, and, most importantly, the judgment must be rendered by historians who were not themselves caught up in the partisan politics of the day.

That’s an interesting observation, especially in light of George Packer’s comments the other day about LBJ and his persona non grata status in the Democratic Party:

For decades Johnson has been a pariah in the Democratic Party, because
of the disaster into which he led the country in Vietnam. And
today, because of our complex racial politics, even his successes, which partly redeem the sins of his war, can’t be attributed to Johnson. When Hillary Clinton, during the New Hampshire primary, made the historically unimpeachable point that there would have been no Civil Rights Act without a President Johnson to push the bill through, she was accused by everyone from the New York Times to the Obama campaign of somehow denigrating King. These charges were false, but they showed that there is something unmentionable about Johnson’s courage and his accomplishment.

Upshot: it probably takes a lot longer than 50 years for history to make its judgments—and even then they will not always be what we hope.

I’m not in the business of educating whippersnappers—at least not online. (I’ve got a life, you know, and it happens to have lots of young people in it.)

This commenter at Matthew Yglesias’s site, however, is very interested in taking the fight to the whippersnappers. He takes exception to Yglesias’s habit of staking out the proper “progressive” line and claiming (for it, and for himself) the moral high ground … without ever backing it up [e.a.]:

[Y]ou utterly void your argument of any intellectual content when you restort to logical fallacies — in this case, using ad hominem semantics to tar the opposing argument. When you say, “requires people to temper the natural human instinct toward moralistic posturing” you make two ad hominem attacks on your opponent, 1) arbitrarily labeling opposition to international bad actors as mere “posturing” without substantive value (you give no rational argument why this is should be so a priori or otherwise; 2) that your opponents must be resorting to these actions out of “intemperate instincts” rather than on rational grounds - again you give no argument (other than a vain implication of false consciousness). These tendentious characterizations of your opponent’s position give the impression that you have little interest or confidence in arguing the issue on the actual merits.

Your argument claims that your position is moral because the outcome is moral, but you specifically void your position of any morality or rationality when you insist that opposing wrongs is not moral but mere posturing. Perhaps opposition to a bad actor must be curtailed for realistic reasons, but this does not make your silence or the bad act thereby good, merely an unfortunate, unavoidable, but immoral reality.

You also make a generic implied assertion which is demonstrably false historically, that “maintaining a good relationship” will inexorably or even predominantly lead to cooperation and commerce and away from violent conflict. These kinds of things need to be decided case-by-case, on the merits, and can never be decided with certainty. Taking a stand, symbolically, diplomatically, or economically, is not always mutually exclusive with “maintaining a good relationship.” Depending upon its effects on opposing regimes, it may or may not be effective, while “maintaining a good relationship” may or may not turn out to incite conflict more directly. Likewise military intervention is sometimes the path to the least overall violence. It depends.

Since these outcomes cannot be known — either way — in advance, it is wise to be cautious. But your dogmatism on which choices are generally optimal regardless of context, made plain by your unwillingness to state your argument merely in rational terms, totally ignores the fact that there are also moral costs, and often long-term costs to “peace and commerce”, to saying and doing nothing (be it symbolic, diplomatic, economic, or even military).

At least try to state your argument in ways that appeal more directly to reason and less to tendentious semantics.

But Samantha Power reviewed Yglesias’s book, so he must be a very important thinker, right?

Maybe!

Not to get all Gawkerish and conspiratorial about it, but one hand washes the other inside the Beltway, too—even if one hand belongs to a mere blogger and the other to a Harvard professor and journalist. Ms. Power might merely have been acknowledging Yglesias’s defense of her after her “Hillary is a monster” remark was dutifully reported by The Scotsman.

Just sayin’!