Libertarian Librarian

I agree that Berger should have received a harsher punishment, but it also seems to be par for the course. That doesn't make it right, but it happens on both sides of the aisle and it rarely causes anyone any shock that someone with connections and/or power didn't get treated as roughly as your average Joe Six-Pack would.

I think that Berger's input on the PSA's advisory board, however, could be a good thing. He does have knowledge of what worked and failed in national security policy during his tenures with the Carter and Clinton administrations. Being able to draw upon that in order to generate security policy suggestions, without needing to put any past failures on the record, could quite possibly provide the type of policy suggestions we would all like to see more of: ones that are longer on real-world solutions and shorter on partisan rhetoric.

I also agree with you on Yglesias. He wrote that "[a]nyone familiar with liberal thinking on national-security policy will immediately recognize that [the issues which the PSA is focusing on] are precisely the questions Democrats think the country needs to answer." Six days later, on September 7th, the PSA issued a public statement on their website entitled "Addressing the Terrorist Threat." In it they note that:

- The enemies of the U.S. and our allies are the people, organizations, and institutions that harness extremist Islamist ideologies (as well as other extremist ideologies) to engage in and justify the killing of innocent civilians to achieve their objectives.
- Violent extremists must be neutralized and the ideologies that sustain them must be countered.
- Forceful measures are necessary to eliminate terrorist networks.
- The U.S. and our allies must wage a far more vigorous campaign of ideas in the Islamic world.
- The U.S. strategy must include helping to build democracies.
- The U.S. and our allies must never capitulate to terrorist demands.

Those all sound more like points in the "neocon imperialistic plan to subjugate the masses" than liberal thinking on national-security policy.

Now, to be fair, I only culled the above from some of the more right-wing of the points in the PSA's public statement. It also included more traditionally liberal items, such as establishing better mechanisms for addressing legitimate grievances, investing far more in energy efficiency and alternative energy technologies, and significantly reducing non-renewable energy use in vehicles. The policy suggestions made in "Addressing the Terrorist Threat" should show that the PSA is trying to pull the best from both sides of the political aisle, as opposed to the assertion that Yglesias initially made.

Yglesias also noted that "...the only attention paid to the project by the right after its launch was a dismissive cartoon by militant hawk Chris Muir...", yet a search of the websites for CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, and NBC found no results for "Partnership for a Secure America" (the ABC News and Fox News websites don't appear to have any stories about Partnership for a Secure America, but the searches on their websites did pull up off-site stories at other websites). It seems that unless you read blogs or out-of-the-mainstream media, no one on the right or left has paid any real attention to the PSA.

This is probably all much ado about nothing, though. My guess is that, in the long run, the PSA will end up being just another Beltway think-tank that is known only to those who closely follow policy and politics.
 

Just for the record, that above comment is from me. I must have left the name field blank when I posted it.
 

I guess since Rush isn't in jail, even though he admitted to forcing others to commit crimes to feed his addiction, the powers that be decided to throw a bone the other way in the world of bias and double standards.
 

UH I think Sandy Berger is the least of our problems. We have Felons leadings the White House, the Senate and the Congress...

Wait a minute.. how did I get here? I was just innocently looking for pictures of Rachel Wacholder.

Now there is an All American Hero.

Cant find a single fault.