Last night, Bill O’Reilly characterized the producer of NBC’s Law & Order crime drama, Dick Wolf, as a “far left guy” for approving a piece of dialogue that described O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh as a “cancer spreading ignorant and hate” that has convinced people that immigrants are the problem. O’Reilly called Wolf a “coward” and a “liar,” claiming that he has “consistently supported poor people who want a better life.” O’Reilly added:

Dick Wolf, the Executive Producer of Law & Order, is a despicable human being — despicable for distorting and exploiting this very complicated issue. Enough is enough with these network pinheads who shove propaganda down our throats under the guise of entertainment. No one on the Factor has been allowed to demonize any human being, and it’s partially because of this program that the border fence has finally been put up.

Watch it:

Ironically, O’Reilly attacks a fictional drama series with the same criticisms that many have reasonably brought against his news reporting. Not long ago, O’Reilly was proclaiming that immigration needs to be capped because the “far left” wants to “bring in millions of foreign nationals” to “break down the white, Christian, male power structure.” O’Reilly also got into a screaming match with fellow Fox News anchor Geraldo Rivera, who suggested he was purposely reporting a “drunk driving story” as an “illegal alien story” and “obscuring a tragedy to make a cheap political point” that flares anti-immigrant animosity.

Rivera isn’t the only person who thinks so. Former head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Joe Baca (D-CA), stated that O’Reilly’s language is “divisive and inflammatory, and often misleading” and “only creates fear, hatred and negative stereotyping of immigrants.” Media Matters has written that O’Reilly, along with Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck, serve a “steady diet of fear, anger, and resentment on the topic of illegal immigration.” O’Reilly is specifically described as frequently isolating crimes committed by undocumented immigrants and reporting them as if they were representative of the undocumented population as a whole and a “matter of national urgency.”

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund recently warned that “shrill anti-immigration reform commentaries” and the villification of immigrants in the public media has led to a rise in violent hate crimes against immigrants and those perceived as immigrants.

HT: Media Matters

The lead editorial from the Wall Street Journal today takes on President Obama’s vision of a “world without nuclear weapons,” claiming his disarmament agenda is out of touch with “the real nuclear world.” Despite being on the verge of signing a new START treaty with the Russians, the Journal claims that his disarmament agenda is not going “so well.”

The editorial that follows is amazingly contradictory. After spilling lots of ink fear mongering about Russia and arguing that a new START treaty (which no one has seen) will not put in place adequate verification and monitoring measures, the Journal changes its mind and concludes that these measures aren’t really important, since a new START agreement is just an “unnecessary arms control pact.” This last line reveals what the Journal is really arguing for: a world with lots and lots of nuclear weapons.

And they are right. This is the “real nuclear world.” We live in a world in which the United States and Russia – two countries no longer at war – continue to possess more than 20,000 nuclear weapons (96 % of the nukes in the world), representing an arsenal that can destroy the world hundreds of times over. This is the case despite the fact that these weapons, in the words of the late Robert McNamara, “serve no military purposes whatsoever” and are “totally useless — except only to deter one’s opponent from using them.” The Journal is right this is the “real nuclear world” and this world is insane.

The nuclear world of today is an unnecessarily dangerous place. The threat of nuclear war has greatly declined with the end of the Cold War, as Russia is no longer an enemy, yet as President Obama noted in Prague:

In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one. Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold.

While we are hurtling towards a proliferation cliff, the WSJ and those like Senator Kyl on the right are aggressively seeking to obstruct efforts to reduce these dangers, favoring to continue as if it’s still the Cold War and the current nuclear world can somehow be stabilized by building new nuclear weapons. Instead of working to move the nuclear world of today into the 21st century, they remain firmly rooted to the world of 50 years ago. Their outdated and dangerous extremism is only further exposed by the fact that stalwart Republican Cold Warriors, such as Henry Kissinger and George Shultz have called for the elimination of nuclear weapons and back Obama’s vision. In their famous oped in the same Wall Street Journal nearly three years ago, Schultz, Kissinger, Sam Nunn, and Bill Perry, conclude:

In some respects, the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons is like the top of a very tall mountain. From the vantage point of our troubled world today, we can’t even see the top of the mountain, and it is tempting and easy to say we can’t get there from here. But the risks from continuing to go down the mountain or standing pat are too real to ignore. We must chart a course to higher ground where the mountaintop becomes more visible.

In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize this week in Oslo, Norway, President Obama noted that “we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes,” but he also expressed “fundamental faith in human progress” that one day, humans will not have to resort to violence to resolve disputes:

OBAMA: But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached — their fundamental faith in human progress — that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.

For if we lose that faith — if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace — then we lose what’s best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.

Conservatives of all stripes praised Obama’s speech. Newt Gingrich called it “historic,” and Charles Krauthammer said it was “his best speech” he’s given on foreign soil. But there’s one right winger that refuses to sign on. Last night on Fox News, John Bolton explained why he thought it was a “pretty bad speech” that was “sort of at high school level”:

BOLTON: He says we have to acknowledge the hard truth we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. Well, no kidding. You know, homo sapiens are hard-wired for violent conflict, and we’re not going to eliminate violent conflict until homo sapiens ceases to exist as a separate species. And the whole notion you could even think about eliminating it not just in our lifetime but soon thereafter I think reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.

Watch it:

Of course, Bolton probably doesn’t have a moral compass to lose. His belief that humans will never eliminate violent conflict does nothing but provide it further justification and offers an insight into why the use of force is always his first instinct. In Bolton’s mind, that’s just “human nature.”

Two responses from prominent neoconservatives on President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech reveal something very positive about Obama’s reframing of U.S. national security.

Comparing passages from the Oslo speech and George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, Bill Kristol seems to think that it’s noteworthy that both Presidents Obama and Bush are in favor of using U.S. power to combat terrorism and extremism, the implication being that this in some way vindicates Bush’s neoconservative-inspired “global war on terror” approach to national security. (Adam Serwer dismantles this idea here.)

Neoconservative pundit Daniel Pipes, however, laments that “the war on terror” is precisely what was missing from the speech. Noting Obama’s statement that “I am the commander-in-chief of a nation in the midst of two wars,” Pipes replies:

And here I thought there were three wars. Obama’s two are Iraq and Afghanistan; missing is what George W. Bush termed the War on Terror and I call the “war on radical Islam.” Obama apparently reduces that third one to al-Qaeda and counts it as part of the Afghan war. His mistake has real consequences; long after American troops have left Iraq and Afghanistan, Islamists will be attacking and subverting us. If we don’t see their efforts as a war, we lose.

Say what you will about Daniel Pipes — and there’s quite a bit to say — he’s never really been interested sanding the edges off his views. See, for example, his admission that he would prefer that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad win Iran’s presidential elections, because, as Pipes put it, “I would prefer to have an enemy who is forthright and blatant and obvious.” In other words, Pipes may be a crank, but he’s an honest crank. Kristol, on the other hand, is a blatant propagandist with record of floating comically transparent bad-faith arguments aimed primarily at buttressing his own position of influence.

This is probably one of the few times that I’ll ever agree with Daniel Pipes: Yes, President Obama has rejected the war on “radical Islam,” broadly defined, that the neoconservatives briefly and disastrously sold to America, and chosen instead to disaggregate and more narrowly define America’s enemies. Unlike Pipes, however, I think this is altogether a good thing.

The president’s clearest rejection of neoconservatism, which Bush himself had largely rejected by the end of his presidency, came about half-way through the speech, when Obama defended engagement with repressive governments on the grounds that “The promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone.”

At times, it must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach — and condemnation without discussion — can carry forward a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door.

“The satisfying purity of indignation.” That’s a wonderfully succinct description of the simplistic and destructive ideology that drove George W. Bush’s foreign policy, and which Bill Kristol is still trying heartily to convince himself and others hasn’t been discredited. This isn’t to say that Obama hasn’t retained some troubling elements of Bush’s national security policy, which progressives will continue to challenge and debate. But I think it’s hugely important to recognize that the key foreign policy conceit of the Bush years, the idea that America is in an existential struggle with a monolithic, undifferentiated Islamofascist other, has been discarded. And America — and the world — is safer for that.