Um, well, yes, I think so too. There are several spots I would have worded differently. Even so, I get what they were attempting to say (I think) and agree with it.

1) Glad you’re neutral on Israel-Palestine. So am I. Neutral is not, IMO, starting off a paragraph by saying “Israel has the right to exist.” Neutral, to me, is starting off by saying “Both Israel and Palestine have the right to exist as independent nations”, or something like that. It just seems to me that whenever I see a comment on Israel, Palestine is treated as an afterthought: “Oh, and Palestine, too.” Perhaps I was unfair to the authors.

2) I do understand that the authors are concerned about adhering to the Geneva Conventions. Never doubted it in my reading of the piece. It’s just that the whole article sounded so sanctimonious and contrived, even though the underlying thoughts were certainly valid. For example, I think most would agree that the statement “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” is forthright, clear and unlikely to confuse anyone with excess verbiage. I’m of the Howard Dean/Russ Feingold school of speech: when you have something to say make it clear and understandable; don’t bury it in unnecessary language. Therefore, my comment, why not just say “torture is wrong”? One can agree or disagree with that statement, but the point is clearly made. You would have written a much better piece, maha, than they did. You use a lot of words to express your thoughts, but you don’t drown in your own words. That’s my real complaint with the manifesto. Thanks for your thoughtful response.

Here

If the good professors really wanted to address this situation

But they didn’t want to address this situation. They wanted only to make a statement that American foreign policy should re-focus on enabling a just settlement between the Palestinians and the Israelis, instead of encouraging Israeli aggression as the Bushies have done. The nature of that settlement is left unstated and (obviously) is outside the scope of the document, WHICH IS ABOUT AMERICA, NOT ISRAEL.

Not everything in the world is about Israel and Palestine.

For the record, The Mahablog remains strictly neutral on the Israeli-Palestinian question, because frankly I think all parties have behaved badly, and the blame for Why It’s All Screwed Up should be liberally spread across both the Israelis and Palestinians.

After reading the crap at Crooked Timber, I assure you I will not allow this thread to devolve into that level of anality (definition: the quality of being anal). Further discussion of paragraph 4 will be deleted.

Sure, investigations are warranted, but if the Reps keep the strength to stop them from actually happening then the only purpose will be to score political points by engineering a confrontation that they hope will make the Reps look bad.

Many left/liberals underestimate how much of the Republican anti-’liberal’ rage is produced by Fear- they acctually believe “leftists” mean to put capitalists in camps etc. The “Stopping Nacy Pelosi is worth dying for” stuff is built on top that fear – fear they have spent decades inculcating in the minds of their listeners – and it only makes sense if you understand that many people are afraid of “radical leftists”.

I think the best way to assauge this fear would be to resolutely stand up to the president on any future issues like the Torture bill while attempting to pass legislation to help the lower and middle classes, but to refrain from aggressively partisan moves like “investigations” that (right or wrong) are bound to meet massive Rep resistance, further polarize this country (and ‘confirm’ the fears of the right), and accomplish nothing more than the “Marriage Ammendment” did for the republicans.

Having a plan makes “doing” a lot easier and with a higher chance of success.

Of course, the Dems aren’t going to be in much of a place to “do” anything (assuming Republicans retain enough seats to obstruct Dem legislation) but at least Bush will also be able to “do” a lot less in his quest to subordinate the country to the Executive.

What Bush may “do” is decide that no future gov’t will have the balls to start a war with Iran and give the order to bomb their nuclear facilities – which I think he rightly believes will start a tit-for-tat (another Hezbollah fiasco etc.) that draws us into a real War with Iran. For a sufficiently cycnical bastard it’s a smart move – you get the war you want and a hell of a house-warming gift to the next Dem president who will have to deal with the mess. I could be wrong – I hope I am.

These are the reasons some people feel that creation of Israel wasn’t such a great idea in the first place.

If the good professors really wanted to address this situation, then “we support Israel’s right to exist”, is a strange way to do it.

I went at it a while back, with the same complaint — that liberals talk about liberalism’s greatest hits rather than it’s underlying principles. The Wikipedia used to have it thus:

Liberalism is a political current embracing several historical and present-day ideologies that claim defense of individual liberty as the purpose of government. It typically favors the right to dissent from orthodox tenets or established authorities in political or religious matters. In this respect, it is sometimes held in contrast to conservatism. Since liberalism also focuses on the ability of individuals to structure their own society, it is almost always opposed to totalitarianism, and often to collectivist ideologies, particularly communism.

The word “liberal” derives from the Latin “liber” (“free”) and liberals of all stripes tend to view themselves as friends of freedom, particularly freedom from the shackles of tradition. The origins of liberalism in the Enlightenment era contrasted this philosophy to feudalism and mercantilism. Later, as more radical philosophies articulated their thoughts in the course of the French Revolution and through the nineteenth century, liberalism equally defined itself in contrast to socialism and communism, although some adherents of liberalism sympathize with some of the aims and methods of social democracy.

And for my money that’s the leaping off point to discuss liberalism.