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More Hagel
Poor Dick Cheney can hardly restrain himself:
Viewed from afar, the stuff inside Hagel looks like the stuff that makes Republican presidential candidates. He is a third-generation party member who grew up idolizing Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. He says he was the only student in his Roman Catholic high school to support Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election—and when he cast his first vote, an absentee ballot from Vietnam, it was for Nixon's winning ticket in 1968. His conservative credentials are impeccable: according to Congressional Quarterly, he voted with the White House more times in 2006 than any other senator. He is manly, Middle American—and when he talks about military matters, he exudes the cool confidence of a warrior-statesman who knows that war is hell.
But Hagel, who as of late last week was in the final stages of weighing a presidential run, is never mentioned in the top tier of Republican candidates for one, simple reason: since the initial buildup to the war in Iraq, he has assailed the Bush administration's policy—in sharp words, in constant refrain and, most unforgivably, in public. His outburst last week was the culmination of a four-year campaign to raise public outrage about a war he's always considered disastrous. His stance has earned him the enmity of the White House. Asked about Hagel last week in an interview with NEWSWEEK, Vice President Dick Cheney said: "I believe firmly in Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment: THOU SHALT NOT SPEAK ILL OF A FELLOW REPUBLICAN. But it's very hard sometimes to adhere to that where Chuck Hagel is involved."
Incidentally, I've always wondered did even Ronald Reagan adhere to this principle? What was happening during the '76 primary? Isaac Chotiner raises the relevant point about Cheney: There doesn't seem to be anyone in the White House powerful enough to prevent him from mouthing off in weird ways.
Damaged Goods?
I was considering linking to this article about Hillary Clinton's retrospective take on her Iraq vote and then firing up Google and Nexis to find all the many points of inconsistency between what she's saying now and what she was saying throughout 2003. But why bother? The real question is whether we want to go through another election cycle dominated by the question of whether or not the Democratic nominee is a flip-flopper. As a flip-flopper myself, I can hardly maintain that flip-flopping on Iraq is the greatest sin in the world. But if you're going to flip-flop then, I think, you're better off just saying (à la John Edwards) that in light of events you've changed your mind.
Personally, exactly what people want to say about the retrospective issue isn't the most important thing to me here -- I'd rather here about forward-looking issues. Candidates, naturally, like to stay vague. I don't take it as a good sign that she seems determined to position herself as the "most hawkish" of the major contenders in the race. A reflexive desire to appear tough was, pretty clearly, a major factor in the mistakes of the past . . . I'd like to see a president who's over that.
Two On Iran
In case you were wondering, here's the Spartacist take on the Iranian nuclear issue:
More nuanced ideas are also available this fine weekend. Laura Secor's excellent look at the Iranian political scene makes several points explicitly and I'd recommend you read the article yourself though you can also find Ogged's take here. A couple of additional points are made implicitly by the article. One is simply that Iranian politics is complicated. It's complicated institutionally, it's complicated ideologically, and it's complicated in terms of personalities and factions. The other point is that while you'd certainly rather live in a liberal democracy than under the Iranian political system, this is no kind of totalitarianism and the many people throwing that word around are just warmongering ignorantly.
The other must-read, via David Kurtz, is The Observer's look at the actual state of the Iranian nuclear program. It's not so hot. Building nuclear bombs is hard. The Iranians don't have access to the method materials, nor is the program funded as heavily as it might be. Right now, they aren't making very much progress.
Single Issue
Joe Lieberman says either Democrats fall in line behind George W. Bush or else he's voting for John McCain:
"I'm open to supporting a Democrat, Republican, or even an Independent if there's a strong one," the U.S. Senator from Connecticut told "Fox News Sunday." . . .
Asked about the current field of Democrat contenders for the presidency, all of whom have strong opposition to Bush's Iraq policy, Lieberman said, "You make a decision based on a whole range of issues. But obviously, the positions that some candidates have taken in Iraq troubles me. Obviously, I will be looking at what positions they take in the larger war against Islamist terrorism."
Do I need to go drag up all the times back in 2006 when Lieberman and his supporters urged Democrats not to make too big a deal out of disagreements on Iraq? I don't necessarily think Lieberman is wrong about this. If I were in the Bush/Cheney/McCain Crazy Zone I'm not sure I could stomach voting for a reasonable candidate either.
Forgot About Tim
The by-week preview of the No Football Era of American sports got off to a promising start with a thrilling Spurs-Lakers Sunday afternoon game on ABC. I realized that I don't think I've actually seen a full Spurs game so far this season (they start late, you know) and that San Antonio has weirdly dropped off the map as a championship contender according to most commentators. The case for the Spurs, however, seems very strong.
For one thing, the balance of curmudgeonly clichés overwhelmingly favors the Spurs. They trounce the competition in terms of players who Know How to Win the Big Games. They've got Popovich. They've played 30 games against the Wester Conference and Phoenix has only played 23. Defense wins championships. Tim Duncan's a lock for the hall of fame. I'm not a big believer in these kind of sportswriter perennials, but it's unnerving to never hear them. And I do believe in them at least a little; when you have a veteran team that's won championships before, you don't necessarily ask them to put the league-best regular season together. They're confident, maybe coasting a little, maybe making sure there's gas in the tank for the playoffs. But besides that, the Spurs also have quantitative factors going for them -- Dallas has the better record, but the Spurs have the better point differential. Phoenix is amazing, and, obviously, they're aesthetically brilliant as well as good at winning games, but I do think their act won't work nearly as well in the playoffs. So it still looks like San Antonio to me.
Romey's Opportunism
I've been aware of the buzz around Mitt Romney's very late in life conversion to cultural conservatism, but it seemed to me that either nobody noticed how recently this had happened or else that I'd completely lost my mind. I'll tell you that, for example, I lived in Massachusetts in 2002 and very clearly remember his campaign strongly emphasizing his pro-choice views. Then I left the state in the spring of 2003, and a bit more than a year later there was suddenly talk of him running for president. At any rate, you won't frequently see me recommending Weekly Standard articles, but Jennifer Rubin has a nice piece running through all of this. Look, for example, at the Planned Parenthood question sheet he filled out in 2002:
Do you support the substance of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade? YES
Do you support state funding of abortion services through Medicaid for low-income women? YES
In 1998 the FDA approved the first packaging of emergency contraception, also known as the "morning after pill." Emergency contraception is a high dose combination of oral contraceptives that if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex, can safely prevent a pregnancy from occurring. Do you support efforts to increase access to emergency contraception? YES
As you can see in the Medicaid answer, he wasn't even a moderate on the issue -- Romney was taking a strong, strong pro-choice stance. Maybe pro-lifers just enjoy being lied to, but I think it's got to be obvious at this point that you can't trust anything Romney says on the subject of what he thinks about political issues. It doesn't seem like a quality you'd want in a presidential nominee.
It Has a Name
Sebastian Mallaby contrasts McDonalds' success at adapting to the rise of anti-McDonalds' sentiment around the world with the way the United States just keeps becoming more and more hated:
But McDonald's has changed in more appealing ways as well -- ways that reflect the problem-solving grit of American business. It has listened to its health critics and adapted: It sold 304 million pounds of mixed greens in 2005, and the U.S. operation claims to be the nation's largest purchaser of apples. The company has bent over backward to demonstrate its interest in the environment and animal welfare; it has teamed up with the University of Miami to improve conditions for tomato pickers and with Conservation International to acquire its fish sustainably. Meanwhile, the franchise has kept up with evolving tastes: It has revamped the easy-wipe decor; its coffee is less watery.
It's a fair enough point, though government-to-business analogies are always problematic. Then Mallaby ends with a kicker. "American business succeeds in the world because it morphs, shape-shifts, learns from its mistakes; it is too paranoid, too anxious to please its customers, to stick with formulas that aren't working," he writes, "The question posed by last week's BBC poll is whether American government can mimic that agility." Well, what a nice center-right I-used-to-work-for-the-Economist way of putting things. Business good and nimble, government clumsy and inept. But of course the problem here isn't that "American government" has proved reckless and stubborn and trashed America's global image. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, etc. have done these things. They've ordered the unilateral invasions. They've ordered the kidnapping and torture and indefinite detention. They've abrogated the treaties and refused to sign the others. There's not an abstract government problem here, there's a concrete Bush administration problem.
The Constitution: Pretty Disappointing
I recently finished Sanford Levinson's book, Our Undemocratic Constitution, a comprehensive look at the case that we should hold a constitutional convention and try to write a new one based on the lessons about history and institutional design that have been learned over the past 200 or so years. It's a very good book. Indeed, I'd say my least favorite part was simply the title. If you define "democratic" as very narrowly meaning "majority rule" people will rightly say "it's not so bad to be somewhat undemocratic." But if you give "democratic" a more sophisticated, thicker meaning, then arguments about whether or not something is democratic get very airy and confusing. What Levinson is arguing is simply that the constitution is bad in a wide variety of ways. Jonathan Chait gets at one of those ways, the 22nd Amendment's prohibition on running for president over-and-over again. Thus, as he points out, we get Hillary Clinton running for president as a kind of stand-in for her husband, much as Al Gore did in 2002. And worse -- we'll never get to repudiate Bush:
If we had a straight dictatorship, Bush would long ago have been dragged out of the White House either by an angry mob or by disgruntled generals. (Note to oversensitive conservatives: I'm strongly against both dictatorships and assassinating Bush or any other president.) If we could vote for whoever we want, regardless of prior service, Bush would probably be dumped unceremoniously in 2008. Only our kooky current system lets him retire undefeated.
22nd Amendment aside, it's worth pointing out that we wouldn't be in this mess if we had parliamentary government like every other country. Either there would have been an election sometime in the recent past that Bush would have lost, laying the groundwork for a dramatic shift in policies, or else like Margaret Thatcher in 1990 Bush would have been dumped by his own party which was worried that his failed policies were dragging them into the ground and we'd have seen at least a medium-sized course-correction.
Instead, Bush has been repudiated and yet nothing's changed. Worse, political debate in the country now centers around where people stand on essentially meaningless questions. Should congress pass a symbolic resolution against the surge, or pass a destined-to-be-vetoed resolution preventing the surge? The impact is the same in either case, but such disagreements will be the stuff of many an intra-Democratic feud for two years. In a proper country, the fact that the whole party agrees on the underlying question -- to surge or not to surge? -- would be carrying the weight here. A new prime minister would come in and begin disentangling ourselves from Iran rather than digging the hole deeper.
New Toys
I normally only see new internet toys after 9,000 other people seem to have recommended them, but I haven't seen Dumpr.Net get much play. It's a website that interacts with your Flickr account to generate modified versions of the photos you already have uploaded. For example, I took my shot of Kriston under red light and used Dumpr's Museumr program that places your photo inside a frame at one of several museums around the world.
They have various other features, though in my opinion the Museum one is the best. And if for some reason you don't have a Flickr account, you can just upload a photo from your hard drive. But why don't you have a Flickr account?
Something to chew over while contemplating the rise of the blipster ("a person who is black and also can be stereotyped by appearance, musical taste, and/or social scene as a hipster"). Crucial back context provided by The Onion's classic look (from the part of the paper that isn't jokes) at "Alternative Rock Radio's Race Problem."
Hope for the Middle East
Gilbertology madness spreads to the United Arab Emirates (where, incidentally, Martin Peretz asserts there's no culture). This comes to me via Dan Steinberg's DC Sports Bog (not a typo), your go-to source for the latest in Arenas anecdotes every day of the week.
Speaking of which, look how crude GilbertArenas.com is. Surely it would be worth his while (or Adidas') to buy the URL and put a real website up there.
Burying the Lead
Sure it's amusing that some Finnish guy has written a novel comprised entirely of SMS messages but it's the final graf of the AP story that has the real news: "Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen recently made tabloid front pages after reportedly having broken up with his girlfriend with a text." That's seriously cold. And mixed with Finland's record of pro-Nazi and pro-Soviet foreign polices makes me wonder if we're taking the Finnish threat seriously enough. It seems to be a country run by madmen. I was actually in the Helsinki Airport for an incredibly long layover once and it seemed frighteningly clean, even by Nordic standards.
Pretty Girls Make Graves
Another band I like breaking up: "We are sorry to announce that our upcoming tour in May will be our last. Nick quit the band and the rest of us feel like it wouldn’t be right to continue on without him. The 5 of us feel very lucky to have met and worked with some truly amazing people over the years. Thank you all so much." To bad. But, as I said of Rainer Maria, in some ways I think it's better for a band to call it quits while I'm still sad to see them go. Here's "Speakers Push the Air":
Also note their crucial song "Parade" about organizing a strike.
Women and the News
I agree with Atrios that Linda Hirschman seemed unduly dependent on anecdotal evidence. That said, there's plenty of information in the Pew Center's survey of media consumption habits to support what she's saying. Download the detailed demographic tables and see for yourself. 44 percent of men, but only 38 percent of women, say they read a newspaper yesterday. Young men, middle aged men, and old men were all more likely to read a newspaper than were women of the same cohort. Men were also more likely, across age group, to have read about the news online.
Just 32 percent of working mothers and just 33 percent of single parents (a group overwhelmingly composed of women) say they read a newspaper yesterday. Women also listen to less radio news than men (31 percent as opposed to 42 percent say they listened yesterday) and watch TV news in about equal numbers (57 percent to 58 percent). Women were more likely to watch the nightly network news, but less likely to watch cable news channels, and way more likely to watch morning shows. Fewer women (3 percent against 6 percent) said they regularly watch C-SPAN, slightly fewer women (16 percent to 18 percent) say they regularly listen to NPR, fewer women (16 percent to 13 percent) say they regularly read newsmagazines, fewer women (7 percent to 3 percent) say they regularly read business magazines, and fewer women say they watch The Daily Show.
I don't think these facts should be read in a disparaging way (i.e., "women are dumb") since there are lots of obvious explanations for them -- women have less free time in general thanks to the "second shift," news content is overwhelming generated by men, there's a lock-in factor where people who expect their audience to be male don't try to appeal to women, the construction of what is and isn't "political" embeds certain male assumptions, women are poorer on average, etc. -- but they are the facts. Women consume less news than men, and the news they do consume draws disproportionately from network television broadcasts that, as you can rapidly confirm by watching, are truly dismal in terms of information content.
UPDATE: It should be said that every survey I've ever seen shows that the overwhelmingly majority of men are almost completely ignorant about the issues facing the country so it's not clear to me that there's any crucial significance to the gender gap. It's a simple fact of life that the voting is done by a population of people -- male, female, and otherwise -- who have very little relevant information at their disposal. Outside a narrow circle of political junkies, average people just aren't interested in politics.
When Broder Attacks
It's a good thing Time pays Joe Klein the big bucks since amateur bloggers couldn't deliver insights like this:
I know it's become common practice to slag David Broder in the blogosphere. But let me say this in David's defense: he is not an armchair pundit. Even now, at the age of 236, or thereabouts, he goes out and really does his homework, riding the buses and hitting the living rooms of voters in the crucial states. If you've ever wondered why people like me revere Broder, it's his work ethic--and not just his kindness, civility, judiciousness and institutional memory.
And given Broder's civility, it is really noteworthy when he hauls off and delivers a column like this about Hillary Clinton.
It is noteworthy that the mild-mannered Broder launched what is, for him, a vicious attack on Hillary Clinton. But does this, as Klein seems to think, indicate that Clinton did something seriously wrong? Clearly not. What she did was fail to ask David Petraeus questions at the Senate Armed Services hearing -- instead she gave a little speech. Considering that the subject under consideration was the deployments of tens of thousands of additional soldiers to Iraq, it's obviously the case that the seriously bad thing that happened there was either that some Senators supported this consequential decision or else that most Senators opposed it. You'd have to be a moron to think that the important thing that happened was Clinton's failure to ask questions. But Broder isn't a moron. And Broder isn't given to really attacking people. So what's going on?
Well, one might think a veteran political reporter -- author of a book on Bill Clinton no less -- might recall that Broder has a longstanding animus toward the Clinton family based, it appears, on his detrimental effect on the country club atmosphere of the Washington Establishment.
J-Pod's Fuzzy Math
Check this out. It's so absurdly wrong that one can't even say exactly what's wrong with it. Roughly, he thinks that if he weren't wrong, then he'd be right, and therefore he isn't wrong.
Slime?
I thought Greg Sargent did an adequate response to Joe Klein's response to me. I am curious, however, about Klein's view that my post undermined my reputation for "substance over slime." I genuinely don't think I slimed Klein at all. We seem to disagree about the significance of David Broder writing an unusually mean column about Hillary Clinton. Klein viewed Broder's unusual meanness as evidence that Clinton's behavior was unusually egregious. I view it as evidence of a continuing pattern of Broder bearing an irrational level of ill-will toward the Clintons. I think Klein and I even agree about Klein's view of the Clintons (seriously, read the book if you're interested; Klein's domestic policy views are significantly to my right, but it's still an interesting book).
For an example of actual slime, I think you have to turn to Jonah Goldberg's repeated writings on me at the Corner -- I'd just like to be clear as to whether or not Jonah's trying to say I'm an anti-semite as he seems to be waffling on this point.
Cut the What? How?
I'm not sure I really understand Chuck Schumer's obsession with the "50 percent" concept, but most of his ideas seem pretty good. This one, though, I don't get:
REDUCE PROPERTY TAXES THAT FUND EDUCATION BY 50%
* Encourage localities to cut property taxes that fund education by 50% over ten years by freezing them now.
* If unforeseen circumstances arise, restore the highest income tax bracket to mid 1990s levels before taking away the property tax reduction.
I, too, would like to see primary and secondary education become less reliant on property taxes as a means of financing schools. There are a lot or problems with property taxes and relying on them at all is mostly an archaic holdover from long past days and few if any of the rationales for reliance on property taxes still exist. That said, encourage localities to do this how? And how do you make up that 50 percent funding shortfall? The question could be answered easily -- "cut property taxes by 50 percent and replace the money with a new Value Added Tax" or something -- but it really does need to be answered. Clearly, the political difficulty in reducing reliance on property taxes isn't that it's hard to cut them, it's that it's hard to raise the missing revenue through some other new tax.
Oh, the Irony!
Does the cognitive dissonance ever get to be too much? Bush warns Iran he'll "respond firmly" if they interfere in Iraq! We're honestly in full-on crazy mode, people -- we have over 100,000 troops in Iraq and our government threatens to overthrow the Iranian regime every once in a while. Shockingly, the Iranians plan to fight back. Some people wonder why I'm so worried we're going to get into a war with Iran. No doubt after we bomb we'll be doubleplus outraged that Iran has the gall to retaliate.
Bad Government Made Worse
Just the thing to brighten your morning -- the Bush administration tackles the problem of political hacks having insufficient control over regulatory policy. You, too, were probably sitting at home thinking "government regulations are proffered with too much professionalism and deference to expert opinion, our lobbyists paid for this administration and yet we don't have 100 percent control over the process." Then came Bush ready to save the day.
Portions of the article, meanwhile, reads like a dispatch from the 2001-2003 era of Pravda-style reporting from our beloved friends in the newspaper business. "Business groups welcomed the executive order, saying it had the potential to reduce what they saw as the burden of federal regulations," writes Robert Pear, "this burden is of great concern to many groups, including small businesses, that have given strong political and financial backing to Mr. Bush." He couldn't find even one example of a gigantic corporation that might benefit from a lessening of this burden? Earlier in the article he reported that "business executives and consumer advocates said the administration was particularly concerned about rules and guidance issued by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration." Is all of that unfair EPA crackdown on people who pollute too much really just burdening the small businesses? Mom & Pop's general store? The bed and breakfast up the road? Really?
The narrow point here, clearly, is to make money for Bush's donor base. As is often the case, however, the administration seems determined to broadly demonstrate the conservative case against activist government through its own malice and incompetence. Bush is giving us all a nice lesson in public choice economics.
The Persian Hand
As you've probably heard if you follow the news at all, for the first time in nine months a suicide bomber has struck Israel, murdering three people in a bakery in Eilat. The Israelis had become quite good at blocking the infiltration of attackers from the West Bank through their use of checkpoints, a giant wall, restrictions on Palestinian movement, etc., but this guy came through from Egypt. What I don't see in either that Times story or in The Washington Post's account is the effort to blame this on the enemy du jour, Iran. Fortunately, yesterday at 3:30 PM Eastern Time my inbox was hit with a press release from The Israel Project glossing the events thusly: "Iran-backed Terror Group Behind Attack in Eilat". They note, accurately enough, that Iran provides financial support to Palestinian rejectionist groups including most notably Palestinian Islamic Jihad and then swiftly move to the Iranian nuclear program:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and believes it is his duty to bring about an apocalyptic war that will usher in the 12th Imam, a Messiah-like figure of Shiite Islam. A group in Iran says it has recruited 25,000 people to carry out martyrdom attacks against the West, and Tehran is pursuing a nuclear program in defiance of the U.N. Security Council.
You may recall from the Iraq Debate that these kind of truthy charges about Saddam Hussein's role as a sponsor of Palestinian terrorism played a prominent role. These are good talking points for the hawks because they have the virtue of -- unlike many of their talking points -- being firmly grounded in some actual facts. The purpose, clearly, is to get people to leap beyond the facts and believe either that Iran is likely to give PIJ/Hamas/Hezbollah a nuclear bomb, that "Iranian support for terrorism" means Iran is hell-bent on sponsoring terrorist attacks on American soil and may have been involved in 9/11, and to believe that Iran is the main cause of Palestinian terrorism. This last you may recall from the "road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad" school of thought which held that with Saddam out of the way the Palestinians would suddenly fold and Israel could achieve that glorious combination of a stable peace deal without giving anything up they want.
Drinking! At 20!
Every once in a while along comes a reminder that the United States labors under an absolutely insane alcohol-regulation regime. For example, via Sommer comes an article about how San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsome has a twenty year-old girlfriend. Except that's not actually what the article is about. Instead, it's about whether or not his twenty year-old girlfriend has . . . consumed alcohol.
It's not about whether she's been on drunken binges. It's not about whether she's driving drunk. It's not about whether she's an alcoholic. It's about whether she -- a twenty year-old, old enough to drive, to vote, to join the military, to have a full-time job, to be dating the mayor of major American city -- sometimes drinks alcohol. As in "Photos of Mountz holding a wine glass during the opening of the new Westfield San Francisco Shopping Center, where Newsom also made an appearance, raised some eyebrows." Seriously? That raised an eyebrow. An adult woman holding a wine glass at a celebratory event? I know, I know, maybe she was just holding it for a friend. Otherwise she's a hardened criminal. Just like me and, well, everyone I know.
UPDATE: Mark Kleiman's American Interest article on drug regulation is chock full 'o ideas, but has one proposal that's particularly on point:
If someone is convicted of drunken driving, or drunken assault, or drunken vandalism, or repeatedly of drunk and disorderly conduct—if, that is, someone demonstrates that he is either a menace or a major public nuisance when drunk—then why not revoke his (or, much more rarely, her) drinking license? [...] A ban on drinking by bad drinkers (unlike the current ban on drinking by those under 21) would have an obvious moral basis. Evading it, for example by buying liquor for someone on the “Do Not Drink” list, would be clearly wrong and worth punishing.
That would make much more sense, wouldn't it?
"Democrat Party"
With a couple of articles out about the president's use of the incorrect "Democrat Party" locution, Ezra Klein's question seems worth answering:
Do we have any actual data showing that the term hurts Democrats? Particularly given that, in fact, the proper plural for Democratic people is "Democrats?" I'm not doubting that the right's intentions are malicious, but this bit of schoolyard-style word manipulation seems far below anything that will actually impinge on the electorate's preferences and sensibilities.
I disagree. Very strongly. Primarily, this is not a question of Luntz-style linguistic manipulation, but a question of basic dignity and honor. It related to Josh Marshall's "bitch-slap theory" of electoral politics. The key charge against liberals is that we're weak. Weak on Communism. Weak on crime. Weak on terrorism. Weak-minded, soft-hearted, weak, weak, weak. Well, what's the key sign of weakness: a person who won't stand up for themselves.
To call someone by something other than the name he wishes to be called by is rude. To make a mistake is forgivable, but to persist -- deliberately -- in declining to use your adversary's proper name is rude and insulting. It's not a big deal unless you take standing up for yourself to be a big deal. When Democrats go on TV and let a conservative get away with the phrase "Democrat Party" it's signaling that Democrats are weak. They're too weak to stand up for themselves. They're too weak to have a sense of group solidarity or party loyalty. They're inclined to let things slide. They don't want to make a scene. They don't like to have a fight. They're weak. Is a political party that can't even protect its own name really going to keep America safe?
What's more, it establishes the conservative media as a truth-free zone. Presumably, if CNN cared about accuracy it would not employ people are regular commentators who can't correctly name America's older and larger political party. Nor would ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, C-SPAN, NPR or any other media outlet. Yes, yes it would initially seem petty and bizarre of all these outlets to insist that people either name the party correctly or else not appear. But the fact that this would seem petty and bizarre is the point: "Democratic" is the correct word and this isn't an obscure point. That everyone lets conservatives say "Democrat" over and over again is part of establishing mainstream acceptance of the idea that the conservative media operates in an accuracy free zone. They're propagandists and that's okay by the MSM -- no need to get things right!
More "Democrat"
To answer Spencer "Democrat Party" is a slur just because it's wrong. Calling Spencer "Spencer" is appropriate. Calling me "Spencer" is insulting. Not because "Spencer" is an insult but because it's insulting to repeatedly call someone by the wrong name.
Power Rankings
Here's a question: What are things like Marc Stein's NBA Power Rankings supposed to be rankings of? I take it that the idea is to improve upon simply looking at the standings so that you can include things like strength of schedule or say take into account the fact that the Nuggets played most of the season so far without their current lineup. But still, what's it a ranking of? Looking at the current list, it's hard to say.
Is it a ranking of objective team quality? But surely not even Gilbert Arenas actually thinks the Wizards are better than the Rockets. Conversely maybe the idea is to say how far these teams are likely to go in the playoffs. The Wizards are worse than Houston, but stand a much better chance of playing in a Conference Championship game. But then again, the Bulls have a much better chance of playing in a Conference Championship game than do the Jazz. The whole thing seems arbitrary, not just in the sense that I disagree with Stein's ratings but I actually can't tell what the criteria are supposed to be.
I'm Questioning Something
New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz writes:
If you buy today's WSJ, you'll also get a 3/4 of a page premium: Fouad Ajami's dazzling essay on why the Sunnis are being defeated in Iraq, and why it is right that they should be. It's my estimate that Saudi Arabia will accede to Shia dominion in Iraq; in any case, it hasn't many options. It certainly doesn't have battalions to fight it. Sunni Jordan has even fewer options, and it is not heroic. This is also the end of Egypt as a diplomatic intermediary. It has zero cards to play in Iraq. The Arabs know that increasingly it is standing on very wobbly knees. Soon, its nationhood will be questioned ... and not just by me. Sunni Egypt can't even function as a middleman between Israel and the Sunni Palestinians. But that gets me on to another subject.
What does this mean? Are we questioning the nationhood of Egypt or of "the Arabs"? And why are we celebrating the rise of Shi'a power in Iraq while simultaneously we're in the grips of white-knuckled fear about Iran? Ajami's article is no better -- full of baffling, unsupported assertions. "Iraq's Shia majority . . . has come to view the Palestinians and their cause with considerable suspicion." Since when? Have we forgotten about this so quickly?
The New "Anti-Semitism"
As if on cue, The New York Times reports "Essay Linking Liberal Jews and Anti-Semitism Sparks a Furor". The essay is by David Harris. The publisher is the American Jewish Committee. To be flip about it, the defining characteristic of the "new" anti-semitism seems to be that it isn't anti-semitism. Certainly, to qualify as a "new anti-semite" it doesn't seem to be necessary to have a bigoted view of the Jewish religion or of Jewish people as an ethnic or cultural group. The author pretends to argue that hostility to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state is the defining characteristic of the "new" anti-semitism, which is fairly ridiculous on its own terms, but as you read through the examples that's clearly not what he's saying. Rather, his view is that some people make what he regards as extreme or over-the-top criticisms of Israel, and that anti-semites would also make such criticisms, so therefore anyone who criticizes Israel too stridently is either practicing anti-semitism or else creating it.
Needless to say, similar standards don't apply elsewhere. Check out my friend Mark Leon Goldberg's post about Anne Bayefsky's ridiculous accusation that "the U.N. provides sustenance for the Iranian genocidal threat, which is directed at Israel now, and America next." That's a crazy, absurd, and horribly unfair thing to say. It's not, however, evidence of racial animosity against Persians, or South Koreans or whomever. By the same token, criticism of Israel -- even ill-informed, unfair, unduly harsh criticism of Israel -- isn't anti-semitism, it's political disagreement.
At any rate, when you think about it, things like this essay or Jonah Goldberg's little McCarthyite smears aren't really about convincing people that I'm an anti-semite, or that Tony Judt or Adrienne Rich or Tony Kushner is. The idea, basically, is to scare the goyim who figure that while liberal Jews can take the heat, they probably can't, and had best just avoid talking about the whole thing. And based on my observations of the blogosphere, it works pretty well as a tactic.
Hilarious
Andrew Sullivan and the Heritage Foundation identify "ten myths" about the Bush tax cuts, including the particularly insidious myth that revenue reductions mean that "Tax revenues remain low." On the contrary! As Heritage points out, "Tax revenues are above the historical average, even after the tax cuts."
I wonder, did they calculate the average dating back to independence in 1776 or only back to the constitution taking effect in 1789?
In related developments, a twelve inch black and white television has better picture quality than a player piano and our troops in Iraq are only insufficiently equipped if you forget that the historical average indicates that soldiers typically rely on horse-drawn transportation.
Chuck Hagel: Rightwinger
In case this isn't clear, check out Cenk Uygur's post on Chuck Hagel -- if you look at his record in the Senate, what you'll see is an honest to God conservative Republican representing the state of Nebraska. You'll also see a guy who's said a lot of very tough and smart things about the Iraq War and George W. Bush's policies in the region in general. But he's not a moderate Republican by any standard; on a whole wide range of issues he's a very orthodox conservative. He doesn't seem to be a particularly enthusiastic culture warrior, but he votes with the Christian right all the time and their issues, and with business on their issues.
He's not, in short, really a Republican Joe Lieberman -- not someone with a whole array of stick-it-to-the-base notions. Outside of the foreign policy realm, there's not much to like here from a liberal point of view.
Sideshows and the Real Show
I'm with Kleiman and against Drum on the merits of the Barack Obama plan for Iraq. There's nothing wrong with Obama's plan. Although I will say that I don't think liberals should get too tied up in knots about the difference between symbolic resolutions, verbal calls, legislation Bush will veto, and all the rest.
The place where the rubber will actually hit the road here is when Bush comes to congress asking for a supplemental appropriation for Iraq. The Democrats will, presumably, want to amend that proposal in various ways. Bush will, presumably, threaten to veto amendments he doesn't like or maybe ignore them with signing statements. There's a decent chance of seeing a genuine showdown here complete with big, big controversies as to who, exactly, is holding up funding the troops need. If I had my way, everyone would keep their powder dry for that fight.
Clean
Leave it to Joe Biden to actually kick his campaign off with a gaffe:
Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
Clean?
Get Your Ticket
I'll go Tom Schaller one better -- not only do I think it makes sense for candidates for the nomination to pre-announce their VP choices and contest the primaries as a ticket, it seems to me that once a candidate has the nomination locked up he really ought to start announcing a "shadow cabinet" during the campaign season. It's very odd that the voters are essentially asked to choose blindly between two competing possible chief executives without being told anything about the management teams they're planning to bring on board.
Dry Powder
I said in this post that liberals should "keep our powder dry" in terms of Iraq stuff until the supplemental appropriation request comes down in a couple of months. I didn't mean that in terms of avoiding criticism of the war or of the Bush administration. Rather, I meant liberals should keep our intra-party bickering powder dry. There simply isn't an important practical difference between the different degrees of anti-warness that various politicians have staked out at this point. There will be important practical differences in terms of how people vote on proposed amendments to the supplemental request. That's the time to start really worrying about what people are up to.
Knowledge
I know things are getting tougher for Joe Biden, but earlier today Atrios raised the other big about him, namely how is it that people who are "knowledgeable about foreign policy" seem to have had such a poor foreign policy track record for the past several years. Elsewhere in the article, after the Quotation of Doom, comes this paragraph:
Mr. Biden says that support for his Iraq plan is growing. The influential New York Senator Chuck Schumer has declared at various times that he supports the plan—albeit in an uncharacteristically quiet manner—as has Michael O’Hanlon, a prominent Iraq policy expert at the Brookings Institution.
O'Hanlon, though, is another Biden. A guy who's "knowledgeable about foreign policy" but keeps getting everything wrong. It's really too early to tell at this point, but for me one of the major questions looking at the primaries is going to be what indication we have of whether or not any of our presidential contenders is likely to find the Democratic Party a better group of "knowledgeable about foreign policy" people instead of relying on the same old strategic class types. If not, the wide open road of the future starts looking pretty narrow.
There Can Be Only One
I'm all for more coverage of Sun Ming Ming, the absurdly tall China-born minor league basketball sensation, and if that means more coverage of the Maryland Nighthawks in general, then so be it. But I really don't think The Washington Post should be referring to Nighthawks point guard Randy Gill as "White Chocolate." I mean, does the basketball world really need a second White Chocolate? I have a hard time seeing it. Jason Williams is right here in the Wikipedia disambiguation page, and if any run-amok Gill fans try to change it, I'll just change it right back. So there.
Excommunication?
New Republic editor Martin Peretz not only endorses the AJC's "Jews who have different political opinions from ours are anti-semities" essay (naturally) but also advances the idiosyncratic view that George Soros isn't Jewish.
Thunderbird
I've mostly moved to open source software -- Firefox, Vienna, Adium, NeoOffice, etc. The big exception is iTunes where Apple has me neatly locked into their software since I'm locked into their iPod. The other exception is that I use Apple's proprietary Mail program since it's always seemed fine. Is there any good reason to switch away from it and start using Thunderbird instead? Or, conversely, is there any good reason to avoid Thunderbird?
Oftentimes, I'm not exactly sure what it is Apple has invested in the proprietary software they bundle with their computers. Why bother with not charging for Safari when they could just not charge for Firefox? iTunes, I understand, is part-and-parcel of the iTunes Store revenue stream . . . but most of the rest seems pointless.
Round, Round, Round, and Round and Do it Again
In his LA Times column Jonah Goldberg concedes that Wesley Clark and I are not, in fact, anti-semites. Nevertheless, I think he think it's still okay for people to insinuate that we are anti-semites since he thinks Larry Summers didn't get a fair shake from feminists during an unrelated controversy.
I'd also be curious to know: Does Jonah think we should launch a war with Iran? To me, his rhetorical approach to this issue suggests that he does, but I don't want to make any leaps of logic or impute policy positions to him.
"Cut off"
If I may say so, I think the conventional formulation about "cutting off" funding for the war in Iraq is a little misleading. The embedded presumption seems to be that there is a continuing and infinite stream of war funding that continues to flow until either the president removes the troops or else the congress cuts the stream. The federal government does not, however, actually operate in this manner. Rather, appropriations are made providing finite quantities of funds for specific purposes, sometimes with the purpose including an intention to delegate some discretion to the executive branch.
There are some ins and outs, but the point is this the default path is for the government to run out of money. Absent additional appropriations by the congress, the war money will simply be spent and none will be left. Nobody needs to "cut the funding" -- all that happens, in legal/budgetary terms, is that no additional money is appropriated. In practice, obviously, it's not going to come to that -- even during the 1995 "government shutdown" they made sure military forces deployed abroad had money. The point, though, is that this is where the budgetary rubber hits the policy road. Bush has a policy he wants to implement. Sooner or later, he needs to come to congress asking for money. What you're going to want to see is a resolution that says, "of course we'll appropriate money for the war -- here's $X billion to pay for a withdrawal plan scheduled to end by Date Y after which no more of this money will be spent." Bush is going to want to argue that he should veto this bill and that anything other than an unadorned appropriation of money to be spent as he sees fits constitutes an abandonment of our troops in the field. Liberals are going to want to argue the reverse -- that failure to sign the appropriation with the withdrawal proviso constitutes abandonment of the troops in the field.
Oh, Lord
They actually publish some pretty crazy things in op-eds that don't mention me. Check out David Ignatius gushing all over Condoleezza Rice and thank the good lord that Greg Djerejian already rebutted it.
Also worth a read are Max Boot's neoimperial dreams. Before you read his column, though, read Kevin Carey on the link between school funding and education reform. His argument is that legislators (voters, etc.) will be willing to pony up more money for schools, but only if they're assured in advance that it's not just "more money for the same thing." That all sounds like how a reasonable world would work. Now turn back to Boot. Notice that he's calling for the expenditure of hundreds of billions of additional dollars in order to do, yes, the same thing. And notice how eerily plausible it is that he'll actually get his way.
At Their Word
Arnold Kling doesn't write much about foreign policy, but his ideological manifesto nicely lays out one of the presuppositions behind frequent Munich-invocations in the American political debate:
10. When foreign leaders issue threats against us, we take them at their word and act accordingly.
The only problem with this principle is that it's totally nuts. For one thing, is there a reason we take threats at face value but not other kinds of statements? Presumably we don't, as a rule, take all statements made by foreign leaders at face value. We don't do this for the same reason we don't, as a rule, take all statements made by people in general at face value: Sometimes it serves people's interests to lie. If it sometimes serves people's interests to lie, this applies to foreign leaders as well. It applies to both the threats and the non-threats of foreign leaders. You should always, obviously, take into account what people are saying to you. In general, however, and especially in international politics, it rarely makes sense to evaluate statements at face value.
To take an example, when George W. Bush promised to "end tyranny" as a general phenomenon around the word, should the People's Republic of China took his threat to overthrow their government at face value? Launched a pre-emptive nuclear strike? Of course not. That would be stupid. People say things for all kinds of reasons -- responses need to be tailored to the actual situation, not to remarks others utter. What's more, think how easily foreign leaders could push us around if they knew all threats would be responded to as if they were 100 percent credible.
Inequality and so Forth
I liked Brad DeLong's take on inequality a lot. Brad Plumer's essay on rich people controlling the political system is also very good. It's worth tying the two together as well. Sometimes, for example, you get something like the Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in which a relatively small number of people (the executives of large media companies, the owners of large media companies, and a handful of superstar content creators) who were all far wealthier on average than the typical American used their wealth to get congress to effectuate a significant transfer of wealth away from the vast majority of citizens and toward them.
You rarely see such direct examples of rich people using political clout to simply confiscate wealth and further enrich themselves, but it's hardly unheard of either. I recommend Dean Baker's book, The Conservative Nanny State. On a micro-scale ask yourself why it is that in Washington, DC (and as best I can tell pretty much all major American cities) that city services are delivered better and faster to the neighborhoods where rich people live, further increasing the value of the property they already own.
"I Have Not"
So...watching Diane Feinstein question DNI-designate Mike McConnell it turns out that the new Director of National Intelligence . . . hasn't read the forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Nothing like the sweet, sweet professionalism of the Bush administration.
Chirac on Iran
From where I sit, the real significance of this story about Jacques Chirac going off-message on Iran is to underscore something I've said before -- it's not clear that bombing Iran would delay Iranian acquisition of a nuclear weapon at all. Virtually every country on earth could be doing less than it currently is to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon. As we see in Chirac's remarks, in virtually all of these countries there is some substantial disagreement as to how big of a deal the Iranian nuclear program is. Beyond the strict merits of the question, there are two factors militating toward a hard line on Iran. One is that the United States wants other countries to take a hard line, and our words carry some weight. A second is that other countries don't want the United States or Israel to do anything crazy and start a war.
If a war starts, obviously, that second rationale goes out the window. For some countries, the first may go out the window as well. At the margin, countries with aspirations to greatness (Russia, China, France, India, Brazil, etc.) all face a constant dilemma between kissing the hegemon's ass and wanting the undermine the hegemon. The more we act like a rogue hegemon -- launching or supporting aggressive warfare against other countries -- the more at least some of those of those countries will opt for less ass-kissing and more undermining. Both considerations indicate that military strikes on Iran are likely to erode other countries' efforts to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb.
It's crucial not to sell those efforts short. Russia and China have taken a beating in the American press -- especially the hawkish press -- for not cooperating with the Bush administration as much as one might like. And, indeed, one could ask them to do more. On the other hand, they could be doing much less. At the limit, China could simply accept a whole bunch of money in exchange for sending some Chinese nuke-building guys and nuke-building machines over to Iran: Bomb! I'm not a fortune-teller, so I can't tell you how big the impact of strikes would be on foreign countries' attitudes, but the point is simply that it's a huge X Factor that hawks are absolutely refusing to reckon with.
Iraq Kabuki
Clearly, if you know my views on Iraq you'll guess I'm not super thrilled about the wording of the Warner Resolution on Iraq. Certainly, I'm sympathetic to what Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold are saying about it. Triple certainly, I was a fan of the Kerry-Feingold resolution back in the day, and were I in a position to influence actual White House policy, what I'd be doing is moving as swiftly as logistically feasible to the removal of American troops from Iraq. That said, I tend to agree with Ed Kilgore that it would be a mistake to jab the knives in the back of this resolution. At the moment, absolutely anything that congress says or does about Iraq is pure kabuki. In ka |
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