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June 28, 2004
Welcome
For right now, consider this site a temporary expedient, as I'm having trouble getting the old one fixed. I may make a permanent move over to this service, however, so who knows. Right now I don't have time to try and configure the look to my satisfaction since I'm supposed to be doing some actual work. More political commentary soon.
Misreading Canada
The New Republic wonders if we're about to witness the dawn of Bush-style conservatism in Canada. This seems to me to be founded on a mistake. The Conservative Party is not very popular -- latest polls have them in the low-thirties. The Liberals' problem is that they're also in the low thirties since scandals and so forth are boosting the NDP and Bloc Québécois margins. This is bad for the Liberal Party and does create the very real chance that we'll see a Conservative Prime Minister, but we're certainly not going to see a Conservative majority that could implement a bold rightwing agenda. A Conservative government would be awkwardly dependent on BQ support and probably collapse pretty quickly without doing a great deal.
Ill-served
Obligatory haven't-seen-the-movie-yet-going-tommorrow-night disclaimer. That said, I think my friend Richard Just flies a bit off the handle with this assertion:
There seems to be a growing sentiment among liberals that Moore is a bad guy, but dammit, he's our bad guy. I disagree. Liberalism is as badly served by liberal intellectual dishonesty as it is by conservative intellectual dishonesty.I'm not sure I'd want to be a forthright defender of intellectual dishonesty, but liberalism can't possibly be as badly served by liberal intellectual dishonesty as it is by conservative intellectual dishonesty. At least it can't be if we're talking about effective intellectually dishonest material. And Moore's film seems to be effective -- it's doing just what a sermon aimed at the choir is supposed to do: firing people up and motivating them to get involved in the process.
I should say more broadly, though, that the folks complaining about the film really sort of seem to be complaining about the fact that it's a film. I take it for granted that Moore's argument doesn't really make sense, but that's because it's a movie. When you're writing, you can lay out an argument where you clearly say what you're trying to say and then you mount some evidence. A movie, by its very nature, is appealing to people on a sub-rational level by using images and sounds to try and manipulate your emotions. As a result, it's not very well-suited to high-toned discourse about the leading issues of the day. But that's just the nature of the beast. Film does have certain political uses, namely as a motivating tool. It's one thing to hear about what the president did after being told of the second plane, and it's another thing to see it. Images, sound, film hit you in the gut in a way that text doesn't. Text, on the other hand, lends itself to making real, credible arguments in a way that film doesn't.
Now last time I saw text by Moore, Dude, Where's My Country? it was pretty unimpressive compared to other Bush-bashing books, but that's why Moore's really a film-maker.
And Another Thing
Of course, the other thing to be said about Canada is that no matter how rightwing Stephen Harper may be, no one would be crazy enough to bestow upon their country the American health care system. His ideas may or may not constitute an improvement over the Canadian status quo (haven't examined the question) but they'd still certainly produce a better outcome than America's "worst of both worlds" approach to health care.
John Rawls: Self-Promoting Hack?
Chris Bertram put up what I think is a rather churlish post about this thing I wrote that's produced some interesting discussion in the comments section.
Fafblog Veepstakes
Funny stuff, but one ought to speak no ill of John Edwards as long as the specter of Gephardtism is still stalking the land. The latter gentleman's candidacy is being considered very seriously, and it is incumbent on all decent people to help squash it.
Blogads
Having some trouble with the blogads.
June 29, 2004
Hawks After Hawkery
Via Laura Rozen who's got some thoughts on this, a good Fox News piece on the Iranian threat. I suspect that the hawks' efforts to push the panic button here are considerably more justified than their similar efforts vis-à-vis Iraq. The trouble is that they've already burned all the resources -- troops, prepositioned munitions, international and domestic political credibility, sheer will -- that they need in the Iraq venture.
It's especially noteworthy that a large number of people who always (and, I would say in retrospect, correctly) believed that Iran was the greater strategic threat in the region managed to go along with the Iraq War either just for the hell of it, in order to maintain their general credibility as "hawks," or else out of a misguided sense that invading Iraq would wind up weaken Iran. In fact, the reverse seems to have happened, as the war strengthened the hand of hardliners at home, weakened the US military threat, and created a new playpen for possible Iranian influence.
The upshot may be that there's not really a great deal to be done. We've seen this tragicomedy play out in North Korea already, and if Iran is next, we'll be spending the next several decades paying the price for our little misadventure in the Gulf.
Oh Canada!
Instead of shifting right as many were predicting yesterday, Canadian politics seems to have taken a left turn, at least functionally. The Liberals have a rather large plurality compared to the Conservatives (Ontario voters seem to have panicked at the last minute) but will need to rely on the votes of the left-wing New Democratic Party and the hopes of picking up a few social democratic Bloc Québécois members to get anything done.
The Gas
Juan Cole makes an important point about the odd theory that the "real" motive for the Afghan War was a desire to build a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan: A pipeline to convey natural gas from Turkmenistan would be an excellent thing to have. Natural gas is something about which it's hard to say too many good things, it's a hell of a lot cleaner than coal or oil, it's relatively cheap, it can be processed into electricity by very flexible generators, you can make hydrogen fuel out of it, and it has a lot of promise to serve as a "transitional fuel" as we start transitioning away from the oil/coal economy to a non-hydrocarbon one. The good people of Turkmenistan could use more money, as could the Afghans, and the nations of South and East Asia need more energy supplies.
The main trouble with this pipeline is that it hasn't actually been built, and in light of continuing instability it doesn't look like we'll be seeing it very soon.
Now the trouble with natural gas is that transporting it requires liquification to create the oddly named "liquified natural gas" (LNG) and the facilities where you can dock LNG ships, regassify the LNG, and then put it onto pipelines are expensive, ugly, and need to be on the coast, where property values are high and people don't like to see big fuel-processing facilities get constructed. Right now our regas capacity isn't very high, so it's hard to import much LNG and natural gas production in the USA has already peaked even though it would be nice to use more. The current thinking is that we can build the facilities in Mexico and pipe it up from there.
Summer in the Cities
Black man's got a lot of problemsOr so said Joe Strummer. Mark Schmitt thinks he may have forgotten, with the result that elites are no longer frightened into caring about urban poverty issues. Peter Levine in a related post calls me out as one of several prominent bloggers who ignores such topics. I'll admit that I mostly let my topic selection simply be determined by the news cycle, so things that are off the national radar screen tend to drop off mine. I do post now and again on the topic of crime prevention, which I think bears some important relationships to the urban poverty issue. I also have a nagging, Atrios-esque sense that there's something inherently futile in trying to have serious policy debates while George W. Bush is in the White House and the Republican Party is essentially devoid (outside of education, about which I promise to say more later) of people who are interested in substantive domestic policy debates.
But he knows how to throw a brick.
More to the point, this is an issue area about which I have very little actual knowledge, but an extraordinarily large quantity of anecdote-based pseudo knowledge acquired from living for the past nine months in very close proximity to a lot of poor blacks and Latinos. This makes me very hesitant to opine on these topics because ont he one urban issue where I do have some knowledge (crime control) I know that anecdotes have wreaked horrible damage on public policy.
All Those Prisoners
I tried to read the detainee case decisions, but really the only one I could understand was Scalia's dissent in Hamdi. That made a lot of sense to me. What I found most unsettling about the government's position in these cases is that everything seemed mighty ad hoc like they didn't have real reasons for treating Prisoner X like so and Prisoner Y like so. No real rules governed anything, and everyone was being shipped about in an arbitrary manner. The rulings don't really seem to have altered that very much, since they were scattered, there was often no majority, and in a lot of instances the Court chose to duck the big issues. Now we've got more confusion than ever.
It's nice to see, though, that they rejected the government's far-too-cute position on the legal status of the Guantanamo Bay facility.
Weak
Andrew Sullivan's ham-handed attack on William Raspberry's defense of Fahrenheit 9-11 really makes Raspberry's column (and, by extension, the film) seem a lot better than I felt like it was when I first saw it. We're seeing here the confluence of both the very severe inherent flaws of the "fisking" genre and, apparently, a rightwing driven absolutely batty by the prospect of seeing their president get hit below the belt. Meanwhile the right threatens to establish a dictatorship if "responsible" voices on the left on the left don't restrain Moore. Well now.
The Economy Is Stupid, Stupid
Today's column -- enjoy.
More Honesty Please
Andrew Sullivan and Gene Healy both denounce Hillary Clinton's insidious plan to "take things away from you [a group of wealth people] on behalf of the common good." And I'm glad they did it. If I may plug my column again this is a debate that liberals will win every day of the week. And it's the debate we should be having -- this is the real ideological divide in the country.
June 30, 2004
Run Amok
Lots of mockery among civil libertarians of this Eugene Volokh argument in re: the Gitmo detainees case, but I have a serious question. Doesn't the constitution specifically contemplate that circumstances might arise under which the government can suspend the writ of habeas corpus as an emergency measure? If so, isn't the right thing to say that if this sort of unlikely scenario were to emerge that congress could cross that bridge when we come to it through a suspension? It's very hard to see how under the actually obtaining circumstances, or anything remotely resembling them, that the Court's ruling will create a serious burden. That seems more than good enough to me.
UPDATE: See also Kieran Healy.
Debate Debate
In comments to this post Will Wilkinson notes that by "winning the debate" I mean "winning elections while having a debate about this" rather than "winning the debate on the merits." I don't know that the debate on the merits really can be won. It seems to me, it has always seemed to me, and it will always seem to me that the strong claims of ideological libertarianism (as opposed to the empirical observation that this or that government program might not be a good idea) are just patently and obviously absurd, though I know perfectly well that this view is held by many intelligent, though grossly immoral individuals. It strikes me as a tautology to say that coercion in the pursuit of the common good is justified, and, indeed, necessary, though as I say people disagree and I don't know how one could possibly resolve such a disagreement. Hence we clash on the field of politics where the pro-coercion side deploys coercion (we're pro-coercion, after all) and the anti-coercion side deploys dishonesty (since most people want what's best for most people).
I recall a really good blank stare moments from back when I was in a seminar taught by Robert Nozick my junior year in college. Do you really believe that?
UPDATE II: Ah, I see Volokh has a reply on this point. I find it pretty unconvincing. Basically he says the outlandish hypothetical he outlines wouldn't fall under the conditions laid out by the suspension clause. It seems to me, though, that if we're going to bend the rules anywhere, it would be better to bend them here than to do the bending Volokh is contemplating. More broadly, absent "rebellion or invasion" or the threat of an imminent invasion it just doesn't seem that you have the sort of compelling threat to the country that would warrant a setting aside of the normal rules of procedural justice. The constitution is not a suicide pack, but losing operational control over Falluja for a limited period of time isn't suicide.
Transition Costs!
They must not teach math very well at Hillsdale College ("educating for liberty since 1844") since 2003 graduate Keith Miller seems to think that 1 minus 1 equals 3. The fact that I've seen this precise op-ed published about 1 billion times makes me seriously question what's going on in America's conservative think tanks. It's obvious -- obvious! -- that whatever merits Social Security privatization may have, the one thing it really won't do is allow us to maintain the current benefit structure for oldish people past 2018 without raising taxes. Indeed, it would do the reverse.
The honest case here -- obviously, again -- is to say that in exchange for a one-time expenditure of tax revenues to float the system during the transitional period you could more-or-less permanently solve the problem. On the other hand, it's really not clear that there even is a problem here, as the Social Security trustees are using what seems to be an improbably low projection of future productivity growth in their models. But if a problem does arise, it would be easy enough to cut the rate of benefit growth down to something less than the rate of wage growth but still higher than the rate of consumer price growth, or do any of half a dozen other things.
Unmasking
Julian Sanchez writes:
I'm always a little puzzled by a rhetorical strategy I occasionally encounter in friendly political arguments. I'll often, unsurprisingly enough, end up taking a libertarian position, and midway through the back-and-forth, my interlocutor will respond with something like: "Well, you're a libertarian, so of course you think that, but..." as if to suggest that an ideology is some kind of suspect ulterior motive, along the lines of "Well, you work for ADM, so of course you're for ethanol subsidies." But of course, that's sort of backwards: I don't believe in low taxes, strong property rights, free trade, and robust civil liberties because I'm a libertarian. Rather, I'm a libertarian because I believe all those things for other independent reasons. (And the "because" here is constitutive, not causal--being a libertarian, in other words, just means believing those other things.) It's as though once you can slap a label on a view, you've banished it, in the way we used to think knowing the true magical names of evil spirits gave us power over them.I think the best way to rationalize the use of this rhetorical device is to understand it as a means of located at what level of abstraction the debate is proceeding. You might have been assuming that you and your interlocutor had some shared premise, and you simply didn't understand how he could fail to see that your conclusion followed from the premise in question. But then you realize that you're disagreeing because he's a libertarian and doesn't agree with your background premise. You may then think that the dispute about the background premise isn't really worth having and say, "well, you're a libertarian, so of course that's what you think" secure in the knowledge that you're not missing some key step in the argument. Since any given casual conversation is probably not a good moment to decide that your entire ideology is wrong and you should be a libertarian, there's really nothing more to say, and you walk away sure that you're right.
The same kind of dynamic in reverse is why an article called "The Liberal Case Against The Minimum Wage" or "The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage" or "The Libertarian Case for Universal Health Care" would be more interesting interesting than the converse ones. "The Libertarian Case Against The Minimum Wage" and "The Liberal Case for Universal Health Care" are both pretty banal, and probably cover well-ploughed territory. People who aren't libertarians (in the first case) or liberals (in the second case) are going to feel that the author can just be ignored. He's a liberal so of course he thinks there should be universal health care, but I'm not a liberal so why should I care what he thinks about this.
The difference here is that Julian seems to think that he's come to various libertarian conclusions each on independent grounds and that it's just a kind of coincidence that when you add all these conclusions up what you get is libertarianism. I think a more realistic picture of people's political ideas (people who think a lot about political ideas, that is, other people probably have a very different belief structure) is that a small number of background beliefs about matters moral and empirical are driving their conclusions on various subjects. Correctly identifying those beliefs can be crucial in helping to understand what's going on.
Belton's Dilemma
Patrick thinks he's holding to the "pessimistic response," but I find that what really gets people in those circumstances down is considering the possibility that they're just kind of girly.
Hewitt and Armitage
Check out Hugh Hewitt's interview with Deputy Secretary of State Dick Armitage . . . in an interesting way, Armitage seems to be pretty consistently taking less pro-administration stances than Hugh is.
My Life
Right, then. I'd been meaning to say something about this book. I think it's best to really think of it as two books rolled into one. The first one, about Clinton's days as a rising politico in Arkansas are quite good. The main limitation here is that it's a book about Arkansas politics in the 1970s and 1980s which is not the most inherently fascinating topic in the world. Still, I'm interested in the question of where politicians who aren't just leaping into the family business come from and how they get ahead, so I found this interesting. You get a lot of good memoirish stuff here about Clinton's relationship with his sometimes allies, sometimes adversaries within Arkansas progressive politics -- William Fulbright, Dale Bumpers, Dave Pryor, Jim Guy Tucker, etc. -- along with things about his adversaries on the other side, and the friends and allies he made in other states.
The second book, about his presidency, is rather more disappointing. The Starr stuff is fine, as far as it goes, but if you want to read about this you should really read The Hunting of the President and if you've read Hunting you really don't need to hear what Clinton has to say about it. The parts that deal with substantive policy and politics, on the other hand, are really quite disappointing. The trouble is that nothing gets explained, instead you just kind of have this blow-by-blow account of federal government related stuff that happened in the nineties. If you don't know what stuff happened, you might learn a thing or two. Or else you might just get confused, I couldn't really say. But if you're looking to really learn anything about what Clinton thought -- hoping to get an inside look at the process -- which would seem to be the merits of a Clinton-authored memoir, you don't get it. It's just sort of "John said X, Jane said Y, so I did (X or Y) because (John or Jane) was right." There's no real account of what happened, arguments aren't really put forward, etc. The fundamental flaw here is that whenever Clinton is talking about people who are still influential in left-of-center politics he wants to be uniformly nice about them.
One assumes that this is motivated by a desire to consolidate his position as an "elder statesman" in the Democratic Party and to avoid harming his wife's political career. Those are both reasonable priorities, but the right way to deal with them would have been by not writing the memoir until such time as he felt ready to really tell us what he thinks. Instead everyone is his "close friend and frequent golfing partner" no on turns out to have been an idiot, an asshole, or just really brilliant at X but totally lacking understanding of Y. There's no bitching and no moaning, which means that there's no real praise of anyone either, because no one can stand out in the sea of banal niceties.
I would imagine that most presidential memoirs are like this, though I haven't read any, but it makes for pretty disappointing reading. So far, then, Joe Klein's The Natural is the best book about the Clinton years of which I'm aware, which is unfortunate, because I think a better, longer, more thorough book is needed. Maybe someday....
July 1, 2004
Grand Schisms
Andrew Sullivan's got a post predicting a grand schism within the GOP after the election no matter who wins. I'd like to believe it, but I've got my doubts. John McCain is the obvious leader of a dissident faction within conservatism, but despite the best efforts of many Bush-doubters on the right he's consistently declined to take the steps that would turn him into a real factional leader. I don't say he needs to leave the party or anything, but he didn't need to agree to go speak at the convention, either. Or, at least, he could have held out for some favors -- a White House denunciation of Denny Hastert's "you don't know the meaning of sacrifice" bit or something substantive on the Paygo issue or anything, really.
Most mildly, if he wanted to, he could organize a sub-caucus for GOP moderates or a series of meetings between moderate congressional staffers and their potential allies in the think tank and intellectual worlds or just do something -- anything -- beyond making the occassional critical statement on television. But I've been watching for years and hoping that McCain, Hagel, Lugar, Snowe, Collins, Chaffee, and maybe some others would really do something to dissociate themselves from the administration and give sign of a determined effort to build a more responsible GOP and I simply haven't seen any sign that it's going to happen. Maybe -- maybe -- a big Kerry win will produce a crisis of confidence that leads to some changes, but if Bush gets re-elected, everyone will swallow their reservations and get back with the program.
Their Morals and Ours
Never miss an opportunity to steal a headline from Leon Trotsky, that's what I say. Mark Schmitt, meanwhile, has wise words on the subject that he attributes to Hendrik Hertzberg:
[T]he idea that stuck with me, and that has seemed hugely relevant through all the Clinton melodrama and into the Bush era, is that there is a symbiotic relationship between the weakening of the boundaries of private life, and the denigrating of the public sphere. The more we made the private public, the more we would erode the idea of the public sphere as a separate one with its own moral obligations. The more the boundary is smudged, the more private virtues substitute for public duties, and private vices are allowed to distort and twist the public debate about health care or taxation, the more illegitimate and merely a matter of individual preference will the larger moral choices we make as a society seem.I've been thinking about this topic lately and I think you'll see a proper essay on it from me in the not-too-distant future, but one point I've been thinking about is this. There's a very real sense in which the ideals of private morality -- of being a good husband, father, and friend, say -- is strictly incompatible with the demands that public morality places on our high officials. It's always treated as a joke when people say they're leaving the government in order to "spend more time with my family" but there's really nothing funny about it. The senior staff in the White House, in the cabinet departments, and in the congress really don't get to spend much time with their families, at least not if they're doing their jobs right. And unlike very busy people in the private sector, working hard doesn't even serve the goal of enriching the family. When it's done right, it's a person's conscious decision to sacrifice his private obligations to family in pursuit of the public interest.This is obviously a helpful insight into Bill Clinton, especially coming at the moment when he seems to have almost given up, and allowed so many of his television interviews to be devoted more to his private shame than his public record, rather than holding firm as he did in 1998. But it is also key to the understanding of George W. Bush's bizarre glorification of private morality. "I will restore honor and integrity to the White House" meant absolutely nothing more than that he would refrain from screwing the interns, for which we are expected to give thanks.
This probably means that people with high political ambitions aren't great marriage candidates. But it also means that people whose highest aspiration is to properly discharge their private duties isn't a very good candidate for high office. Bill Clinton often claims that the hardest, most important, job he ever had was that of father. This is a nice "feel good" line -- it makes us feel like Clinton is in touch with the values of common decency that most of us hold dear. But in his case it's also patently false. A big part of what made him a better President of the United States than George W. Bush is that he thought being President of the United States was the hardest, most important job he ever had. That's the sort of person you want to have as president. You almost certainly wouldn't want to be his wife or his daughter. It seems that in a sense he had so many "friends" that he must not have had any real friends. And yet he really and truly wanted to -- and did -- focus on trying his best to do a good job discharging his office. He wasn't 100% successful at this, any more than anyone is 100% successful at discharging their private obligations, but he was pretty clearly trying in a way that the current occupant of the White House is not.
Spelling With ABC, Reading With K-Lo
The great one writes:
Kevin Cherry notices this item on The Note today: "Yesterday morning, top political aides to at least several candidates who are thought to be leading contenders were contacted by a member of Jim Johnson's vice presidential search team and asked to provide detailed contact information for their principles, as well as their schedules over the next 10 days."Silly Democrats.Democrats need contact information for their principles? I guess they do.
But how about this possibility. The Note meant to write "top political aids . . . were contacted . . . and asked to provide detailed contact information for their principals," meaning their bosses. As in the Principals' Committee of the National Security Council where the top folks from each agency meet, as opposed to the Deputies' Committee where the number two people meet.
Spare Me
Drezner, Levy, and Levy again, two of the dwindling band of decent people who have not yet joined the ranks of shrill Bush-haters are wondering if the Bush administration really failed to strike at Abu Zarqawi for crass political reasons. Both say that if this story turns out to be true, they will be very disturbed. Both are desperately casting about for contrary information. The best Levy can come up with is a couple of quasi-denials. Both feel the press ought to investigate more resources into looking into this. I'm happy to say folks should look into it, but let's step back here. Is there any reason to think this might possibly be false?
Why wouldn't the administration have just quickly and clearly denounced the story if it were false? Are there any examples -- any, any at all -- of the administration failing to denounce inaccurate anti-Bush stories that have appeared on major television networks? More generally, has this administration distinguished itself as an honest and forthright one? Has this administration distinguished itself as one committed to doing the right thing above political advantage? Has this administration been known to engage in questionable behavior in order to build public support for invading Iraq? What planet are we living on here?
UPDATE: I really should have read this post by Jacob Levy where he semi-endorses Kerry before writing this. We've got also got one more reason not to pick Gephardt.
Is Teheran Running America's Iraq Policy?
Why have a blog, especially an unofficial non-magazine-sponsored blog, if not to engage in a little semi-formed speculating? Thus, what's going on with Iranian efforts to influence the course of events in Iraq? Some data points:
Continue reading "Is Teheran Running America's Iraq Policy?" »
Levy's Dreams
Rereading Jacob Levy's case against Bush I'm a bit puzzled by his political ideals:
I dislike Kerry. I've disliked him for fifteen years; in New Hampshire we had plenty enough exposure to him to leave me sick of him a long time ago. And, man oh man would I prefer to be supporting a pro-Social Security privatization, pro-voucher, pro-tax cut incumbent president who was serious about fighting the war on terrorism and democratizing the Middle East and who might appoint Supreme Court justices who would enforce a strict reading of the Commerce Clause. Even support for the Federal Marriage Amendment wouldn't outweigh all of that, since the President doesn't play a direct role in amending the Constitution and anyway I feel sure that the FMA will never pass.Now as Levy recognizes, current federal revenues fall short of current expenditures by a significant margin. Levy expresses concern about this fact elsewhere in his post. None of these Levy-favored initiatives would seem to imply cuts in federal expenditures. Indeed, it seems that getting "serious about fighting the war on terrorism and democratizing the Middle East" would require increased expenditures. Social Security privatization, too, would increase federal expenditures in the short-term until our current retirees are dead. Vouchers would not, strictly speaking, entail a spending increase, but federal leverage over education policy derives entirely from the exercise of the spending power, so for the federal government to push the country toward vouchers in a substantial way would, again, require it to spend more money. So how, in the context of all this new spending, are we supposed to get a president who's also pro-tax cut? Agricultural subsidies play almost as large a role in my personal demonology as they do in Levy's, but they simply aren't a huge portion of federal expenditures. One could, I suppose, achieve the Levy agenda by simply eliminating (not privatizing, eliminating) Medicare altogether, but that doesn't seem pragmatically achievable, and if one really thinks old people should just die when they get sick, one ought to say so clearly.
July 2, 2004
No, No, No!
Brad DeLong warns Tyler Cowen against getting too outraged by George W. Bush absurd Cuba policy:
I should, however, point out that there is fine print: this kind of absurd, punitive, counterproductive, and stupid policy toward Cuba is not the exclusive province of this particular administration or this particular congress, but is the reflection of the structural strength of the anti-Castro lobby. Don't hope for things to become less stupid for a while, no matter who wins elections.Six months ago that would have been right, but after a brief feint toward trying to out-absurd Bush on Cuba policy, John Kerry has seen the light. Listening to pollsters who tell him that younger generations of Cuban-Americans (see, e.g., me) do not favor absurd, punitive, counterproductive, and stupid policy toward Cuba, Kerry has come out against these latest moves, thus making his Cuba policy marginally less absurd, punitive, counterproductive, and stupid. From a short-term perspective, the Cuba policy implications of this election are probably not enormous, but there's a big "but" here. This is to say that if Kerry's strategy works, and he managed to become the first candidate since 1960 to win the state of Florida by advocating a less bad Cuba policy than his opponent, then the political power of the hideous CANF may be broken and the prospects for a rational policy will rise significantly.
Quasi Exculpation Suggestion
As the search for an explanation of why the administration didn't hint Zarqawi before the war continues, I should offer one possible exculpation of sorts. When I first wrote about the Zarqawi camp and the role it played in the administration's case for war, I took our failure to strike the camp as prima facie evidence that the administration didn't really think he, or Ansar al-Islam, was a serious risk to American security. It was just something like the mythical aerial drones that they'd seized on in an effort to scare people. After the NBC story came out, I shifted toward a presumption that NBC had the story right, but maybe I was right the first time. That would explain why we don't get a proper official denial here -- they're not going to say, "we didn't strike the camp because we didn't really think it was a threat, that was just something we made up to scare people, but then it turns out that it really was a threat and now we look like idiots."
It would be particularly neat if that turned out to be the case, however, because then we would have a real-world application of the Gettier problem. Indeed, it occurs to me that if the JMM-derided Financial Times story about Niger turns out to be accurate, that might be a Gettier case as well. Perhaps one ought to think of the entire Bush administration as an attempt to bring greater public attention to the fine points of epistemology.
The Clinton Legacy
Max Sawicky and Anne Lewis debate over at TAP Online. My own take, abstracting away from nitty-gritty policy details is this:
Fahrenheit 9-11: Not Reliable Sources
Inspired by Brad Delong what I would have said if the booker hadn't canceled on me:
- It is very strange that the media is more concerned with Michael Moore's invalid argumentative techniques than with the extremely similar techniques employed by the president of the United States.
- It is very strange that the media is more concerned with the fact that Michael Moore is a polemicist rather than a journalist presenting a balanced view of events than with the fact that the Fox News network and a small army of conservative radio hosts are doing the same thing.
- It is a very strange thing indeed that the media does not provide outlets for stridently liberal commentary in lieu of the fact that Fahrenheit 9-11 clearly demonstrates that there is a large audience for such things.
- What liberal media?
Reason to Hope for a GOP Win?
Kevin Drum highlights Grover's thinly-veiled threats to the MPAA. Now the MPAA's lobbying agenda is not what I would call an instance of pure evil, per se, but it is quite pernicious. It seems likely to me that the GOP will still control congress in 2005, but I've been hoping that doesn't happen. Now, perhaps, we have a reason to hope it does. No more international agreements on the free exchange of goods held hostage to draconian intellectual property agreements! No more efforts to destory any technological progress that might lead someone, somewhere to download a film off the internet! Is it really possible that Grover Norquist could accomlish something good for the world? I have my doubts, but maybe -- just maybe.
Meanwhile, Dan Glickman?
The Czar's Big Mistake
Tacitus has some sound advice for his Nader-sponsoring fellow-travelers on the right:
I don't think any of us on the GOP side actually want a thriving nutball movement led by the likes of Saint Ralph (to say nothing of the detestable Greens) and his assorted fringe fellow-travelers. We foster them on the assumption that they will remain forever on that fringe, or at least affect the policy debate so little as to not cause worry to those of us who like America more or less as it is. This is a dangerous and foolish assumption. History goes its own way, and it is replete with examples of manipulated forces that broke loose of the manipulators to the latter's eternal grief: perhaps it's a hyperbolic metaphor, but seeing the GOP sponsor Nader to beat the Dems calls to mind the Israelis sponsoring Hamas to beat the PLO. Sometimes you have to stop and think: Where is this going? What happens if my sponsorship, well, succeeds?Indeed. The Czar in Russia, or at least his minions on the Okhrana, once got the bright idea that they really ought to give covert support to these nutty Bolsheviks. That gang of wreckers made more trouble for the other socialists (to say nothing of the constitutional liberals!) than they did for the regime itself. Besides which, their crazy antics would help convince the various aristocratic and business elites that the entire anti-regime movement was dangerous and insane. Last but by no means least, there was simply no way that gang of nutjobs was every going to take over the country. The real enemies, as everyone knew, were the Kadets and the Mensheviks, that was a threat to the regime. The Bolsheviks were just a threat to the other revolutionaries.
Needless to say, it didn't work out so well in the end, though in a sense the real blame lies with the Kaiser for whose (admittedly, rather clever) war strategy of shipping Lenin and a big box of gold from Switzerland into Russia hundreds of millions of people paid a heavy price over the years.
Now there's no moral equivalence between the Green Party and the Bolsheviks (or Hamas, for that matter) but the general point holds -- encouraging the extremists on the other side as a way of weakening your main enemy is a very shortsighted political strategy.
An Israeli Strike?
Even the liberal New Republic is wondering what's going on in Iran:
So it's easy to understand why Iran wants to send a message to its neighbors. But the Islamic government's efforts to gain respect in the Middle East could carry the seeds of its own destruction. Israelis (correctly) view their country's bombing of Saddam's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 as an unqualified stroke of wisdom. If Israel sees Iran's nuclear ambitions turn into a tangible threat to its existence, there is a possibility that Israel would act again, this time in Iran. In the Middle East, playing for power is a perilous game.Diplomatic worries aside, there are some feasibility issues here. The Osirak raid was not easy to pull off, and the greater distance between Iraq and Israel would only complicate the logistics. What's more, my understanding is that during the 1982-1990 program Iraq was very successful in reconstituting its nuclear program in such a way as to be immune to that sort of narrow strike. Not that the diplomatic issues should be ignored. Though it was widely condemned at the time, Israel pulled off Osirak without suffering any real adverse consequences. That was then, however, and this is now -- the regional situation is much more tense.
July 3, 2004
Biden for State?
Take a look at Part I (he sure knows how to stretch his content out) of Josh Marshall's interview with Joe Biden. Readers will know that I'm a big Biden fan. It seems to me that among practical politicians -- i.e., people who actually run for office -- his understanding of America's foreign policy challenges is unparalelled. As such, it's no surprise that he's one of the leading contenders for the Secretary of State job in a hypothetical Kerry administration. It doesn't strike me as the best idea, though. When a president is using his appointment power, one thing he wants to do is make sure he has a group of good advisors running with him. Another thing he wants to do, though, is make sure he's making efficient use of the people at his disposal. The other main contenders, Dick Holbrooke and Sandy Berger, aren't really going to be of much use to the country or the administration unless they get cabinet jobs. Biden, on the other hand, could do good right where he is as Ranking Member (or, hopefully, Chairman) of the Foreign Relations Committee.
That's a sort of shitty reason to not give a person a job he'd like to have, but it seems like the right balance of considerations to me. I also wonder why we're hearing so much more speculation about the State job than the Defense one among Democratic national security people. One possibility is that they're trying to dangle the option in front of John McCain so he'll keep being nice about Kerry. There's a decent case for actually appointing McCain, especially seeing as governor Napolitano would replace him with a Democratic Senator (likewise, there's a strong case for trying to get one of the essentially unbeatable Maine Senators to take a cabinet job) but I would hesitate to reinforce the impression that Democrats can't handle the "hard" aspects of national security policy, especially seeing as Holbrooke and Berger can't both run Foggy Bottom.
Get Rid of All The Discretionary Spending
Brian Doss tries to defend Jacob Levy's odd math. Let's recap the state of play. Jacob wants to close the gap between expenditures and revenues, currently running at around $500 billion. He also wants to privatize social security, which will cost $1 trilliion over a period of several years. He also wants to "get serious" about the war on terrorism and Middle East democracy promotion: Right now, the Iraq War is costing about $100 billion off-budget per year. Jim Turner proposed democratization initiative has an $11 billion per year price tag, which probably isn't enough, but we'll stick with that. And Jacob also wants to see taxes cut further. I contend that this could only be achieved by dismembering Medicare.
Brian's thought is that this is wrong, and we could achieve our savings through the 33% of the budget dedicated to domestic discretionary spending. This, as Steve Verdon writes is around $424 billion per year. So if we just eliminated that, we would still be left with a $76 billion deficit, before Levy's new spending initiatives and new tax cuts. Let's also note that eliminating domestic discretionary spending is not exactly consistent with getting serious about terrorism, since that figure includes all of our homeland security spending. It also includes the money to do such minor things as keep the electricity on in the White House and other government buildings. FBI? Gone. Indeed, all federal law enforcement agencies would be gone, along with all federal prosecutors and all federal judges. All federal regulations whatsoever would be unenforceable without money to pay the salaries of the regulators. I don't know about you, but I'm kind of wedded to the idea that someone is watching our nuclear waste and making sure the plants don't melt down. Eliminating national parks strikes me as a good idea, but a good libertarian would favor turning those into private fee-for-service enterprises, so I won't complain. Much federal highway spending is wasteful, but not spending anything on our highways doesn't seem like a very good idea, either. I could go on.
The point is that even if you did this, you would not close the budget deficit, much less make room for new spending on SS privatization or military and foreign affairs (indeed, you would have to close all the embassies, since Steve includes the foreign operations budget in his "other" category) much less tax cuts. Eliminating federal education spending, moreover, would, as I indicated in the original post, make federal vouchers policy a bit superfluous. It can't be done like this. If you want even less revenue than we have now and you want a balanced budget, you need to cut defense spending and Medicare -- pretty drastically -- both of which are projected to grow a great deal according to current estimates of our national needs.
Things I Learned Last Night
From a reliable source:
- The president really is a compassionate guy.
- Whatever explains the unwillingness of the White House press corps (Dana Millbank excepted) to call a spade a spade, it's not a failure to recognize that the spade is, in fact, a spade. Seek out structural explanations.
What Course?
The president, or so he tells me, is committed to staying the course in Iraq. But what course are we on? According to the DOD's "weekly" status report (it appears to actually be biweekly) this is the schedule:
- July 04: National Conference convenes and selects Interim National Council. [This is going to be an unelected mock legislature to accompany the unelected mock cabinet currently governing the country; as I understand it the unelected cabinet need not maintain the confidence of the unelected legislature to govern, so I don't totally see the point here. Nevertheless....]
- January 31, 05: Elections for the National Assembly complete. [This will be done, much to the chagrin of Michael Rubin, via a party list system, which ensures that SCIRI and al-Dawa will together get most of the seats unless al-Sadr really succeeds in building a political party with the dynamic duo of PKK and PUK picking up Kurdish votes and unknown persons winning in the Sunni areas]
- Early 05: Iraqi Transitional Government takes power. [straightforward enough]
- 15 August 05: National Assembly completes draft of permanent constitution.
- 15 October 05: Referendum for permanent constitution.
- 15 December 05: Elections for permanent government.
- 31 December 05: Elected government assumes office.
Known Unknowns
A post about some of my known unknowns. It used to be the case that the Republicans were the party of high tarrifs and the Democrats were the party of free trade -- when did that change? And why did it change? The proximate cause is pretty clear, the GOP has always been the party of business, so business changed from wanting protection to wanting to import cheap supplies and move production offshore, but when/why did that happen? Back in the day, the pro-trade argument was a pro-consumer one -- lower tarrifs means cheaper stuff. Nowadays, no one says this in public, instead the official argument is an export-promoting one -- more trade means more exports means more (or better) jobs. When and why did that shift occur? Relatedly, pro-trade policies have shiften from unilateral lowering of barriers (a straightforwardly pro-consumer measure) to multilateral trade agreements which lend export-promotion arguments their viability. Again, when and why?
The Real Problem
I'm thinking more about this business with Jack Ryan and the sex clubs, and now there's some push to get John Kerry to release his divorce papers as well. Others are pushing back, standing up for Kerry's and Ryan's right to "privacy." I think this is a mistaken view of what's going on. A right to privacy is never going to stand up in this sort of case. After all, rights can be waived, and an innocent man has nothing to hide, right? Plus, simply hassling someone about their sex life will force them to say something about it, and once they've said something, the case becomes about their all-important credibility. The real culprit here, I'm afraid, is not an over-intrusive press, but an extraordinarily silly electorate and reading public which seems to feel that a candidate for office's sex life is an important consideration in decided whether or not to vote for him (or her).
Near as I can tell, there's no reason whatsoever to think that a candidate who's cheated on his wife (or pressured her to visit sex clubs or whatever else) will do any worse than a candidate who likes vanilla sex in the context of marriage. I mean, honestly, what kind of difference could it possibly make? I'm totally stumped. But people really seem interested in this stuff, and as long as they are the press will cover and politicians will lie about it and then the press will say they're raising questions about the person's honesty (as if there are any adult people who've never told a lie about anything and we live in a George-and-the-cherry-tree fairy tale) and there will be more pressure to disclose etc., etc., etc., etc.
It's The Little Ones
Speaking of lies, it's really the little lies of politics that piss me off. Take this story in which ABC News "reveals" that John Kerry's campaign has -- gasp! -- conducted polls about different VP possibilities:
When told about the polling, Republicans said it indicated Kerry was inconsistent in what he says he's looking for in a running mate.For one thing, Wyoming has three electoral votes. For another thing -- cut the crap. Is anyone really supposed to believe that there was zero political calculation behind the Cheney pick? Is this attack on John Kerry supposed to move any votes? Is there any reason at all to grant the source of this inanity anonymous status? No, no, and no. "No" number three is especially important. If the reporter had said, "look, you can't go off the record for no reason" then the guy would presumably have been disinclined to say something astoundingly stupid in hopes of gaining some miniscule propaganda advantage."If true, this is glaring example of Kerry being for and against picking the best person for the job," said one Bush adviser.
The adviser went on to contrast Kerry's selection process with Bush's decision to choose Dick Cheney as his running mate for the 2000 election. "President Bush picked the best man for the job with zero political calculation or polling," he said.
"Remember, Wyoming was not exactly a battleground state and had a whopping two electoral votes."
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