Reply #77: "YES or NO!" This is yet another attempt to stifle debate on DU [View All]

We all know that presidents have awesome responsibilities and must make decisions which effect the lives of millions of people, and that some of those decisions can actually bring about mass death.

However, the term 'war criminal' is legalistic and suggests a judgment made through a judicial process. That goes beyond any judgment anyone here can make, except as a rhetorical gesture.

But we can, and we should, make our own best judgments about whether a course followed by a president whom we've supported, and wish to mainly think well of, was really the right course to take -- and we shouldn't let that discussion be distorted and ultimately stifled by resorts to flaming rhetoric.

I myself believe that the Kosovo and other military actions taken by President Clinton were justified, but I'm willing to listen to informed arguments to the contrary. On the sanctions against Iraq, I believe that Clinton's actions were wrong.

President Clinton's legacy is a subject that Democrats certainly SHOULD be talking about, because it has tremendous significance for the future. The impact of some of the actions taken by Clinton is still unfolding and will be for some time, when it comes to both foreigh policy issues and domestic issues.

But, typically, what we find being pitched on this forum by its administrators, moderators and the rightwingers who dominate it, are attempts to undermine discussion of such issues by changing the subject to luridly-framed questions of LOYALTY to individual leaders ("So is President Clinton a WAR CRIMINAL or not? HUH? HUH? YES or NO! If you criticize the Kosovo campaign or the Iraq sanctions, you're saying he's a WAR CRIMINAL! And YOU call yourself a DEMOCRAT!" etc).

Look. If we have loyalty to the Democratic Party at all, unless we conceive of it as out hometown or high school 'team,' that loyalty is to the principles and policies which the party is thought to represent, and isn't at all about fealty to individual leaders or the organization itself, no matter what directions that leadership takes the organization in.

By the same logic peddled here, that demands uncritical support of the Democratic party and its leaders, persons who relate strongly to issues of racial justice in the US should be loyal to today's Republican Party, because at its origin, that party's focus was the abolition of slavery. Lots of water under the bridge since then, right?

I, along with the majority of Democratic Party members (and oddly, unlike many frequent contributors to DU), want our party to remain the party that supports the interests of middle-class America, as it has traditionally been throughout our lives, and our parents' and grandparents' lives. The question of whether the party's current direction is taking us elsewhere is too vital for discussion of it to be stifled in the name of an empty fealty to the institution and its contemporary leaders.