It is now the fashion to claim that the government should stay completely out of people’s lives and that we should manage on own own. What many of the people who make such claims do not seem to realize is that they are the direct beneficiaries of many government programs.

Steve Benen points out a chart shows the enormous number of people who say they have not used a government social program who have in fact benefited in some way or other.

This kind of cluelessness is only possible because, unlike the private sector, the government rarely broadcasts the fact that they are giving you a benefit. The public works signs that say “Your tax dollars at work” may be the only exceptions.

The most obtuse of such people may be the actor Craig T. Nelson who in a TV interview with Glenn Beck condemned government aid to the poor as coddling, giving himself as an example of someone who heroically struggled through difficult times entirely on his own. “They’re not going to bail me out,” Nelson said. “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No. No.”

… from Paul Krugman:

[T]he surest way to get branded as not Serious is to figure things out too soon. To be considered credible on politics you have to have considered Bush a great leader, and not realized until Katrina that he was a disaster; to be considered credible on national security you have to have supported the Iraq War, and not realized until 2005 that it was a terrible mistake; to be credible on economics you have to have regarded Greenspan as a great mind, and not become disillusioned until 2007 or maybe 2008.

It should not be a surprise that those who need a job sometimes have to say and do things that they may not agree with. We can understand such behavior when it is done by people occupying lowly positions and who have few options. What is more surprising is when people who have perfectly good and secure careers are willing to betray the principles they stood for simply to be close to power.

Harold Koh, former Dean of the Yale law school and now adviser to the State Department, who used to be a strong voice for the rule of law and opposition to the imperial presidency, provides a sad but perfect case study of this phenomenon. He has become this administration’s John Yoo, an academic who is willing to provide the rationale for whatever his boss wants to do. In Yoo’s case the issue was torture. In Koh’s it is the absurd claim by Obama that the US is not engaged in hostilities in Libya as envisaged by the War Powers Act. Like Yoo, Koh could have easily afforded to stand on principle and even enhanced his career and reputation by doing so. But instead he sold his soul.

As Gene Healy says, “It’s the kind of story you hear again and again in D.C. — on the right and the left — of principles sold out for the dubious rewards of “access” and “relevance.” This town is “Hollywood for the Ugly” in more ways than one.”

Glenn Greenwald sums it up:

[I]t’s easy to see how Koh has risen from token liberal placed in an inconsequential “advisory” position at State to the face of the Obama administration and prime Presidential spokesman. As Barack Obama himself has repeatedly shown, and as his underling Koh has dutifully learned, one does not advance in Washington power circles by adherence to any sort of principle or actual conviction. One accumulates power by saying anything and everything necessary to acquire and hold onto it: one key reason I now all but disregard what Obama says, and watch only what he does.

As far back as in 1946, George Orwell described in his classic essay Politics and the English Language how politicians deliberately corrupt language so that certain political terms no longer have any core meaning but become infinitely malleable, designed to fit whatever need the politician has in mind.

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
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Henry Siegman makes in more detail the point that I made recently, that the US and Israel are pursuing policies that will lead to disaster in the Middle East.

Lawrence Davidson says that the rising numbers of Israeli Jews who are leaving or planning to leave that country permanently is a sign that they too are concerned about the future. The ones who remain are amongst the most fanatically religious and ideological. He adds, “This is what happens when any group gives itself over to a doctrine, be it racial, religious or political, which destroys all notions of common humanity. That is what the prevailing ideology of Israel has done.”