I couldn't say that I have an informed opinion about the controversy that makes for the subject of this Glenn Kessler article in The Washington Post. I was, however, somewhat heartened to read this lead: "Shortly after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took office in 2005, she was surprised to discover that her staff could not answer a simple query: How much does the United States spend each year on promoting democracy overseas? [...] After nine months, Rice finally got her answer: $1.2 billion."
It dawned on me to wonder about this one morning in 2004 and I was foolish enough to think that Google and Nexis would cough up the answer. It's possible that critics of the streamlining process that Rice has tried to implement are right, but she's certainly correct to be disturbed by how murky the traditional process has made things.
That Mitt Romney has some unhinged supporters is no surprise. That the governor himself is sufficiently unhinged to be photographed standing next to his unhinged supporters' unhinged signs is a bit more surprising. Last, we get the unadulturated buffoonery of campaign spokesman Kevin Madden's email to Eric Kleefeld: "The governor stopped briefly for a picture with a supporter who just happened to be holding their own sign with an alliterative play on words. I don’t think it was equating or comparing anyone."
I was a bit surprised to read my colleague Marc Ambinder write last week that "fairly or unfairly, a healthy chunk of the national political press corps doesn't like John Edwards [. . .] Fairly or unfairly, there's also a difference in narrative timing: when the first quarter ended, the press was trying to bury Edwards." It hasn't been my experience that the press has a noteworthy special dislike for Edwards. But then you get this especially ridiculous passage from a ridiculous New York Times article:
“You neither want to be seen as somebody who cares too much about appearance or too little,” said Jay Fielden, the editor of Men’s Vogue. His magazine’s July-August cover shows John Edwards looking model-handsome and yet sufficiently populist. He wears, as Mr. Fielden pointed out, a Carhartt field coat from his own closet, presumably in an attempt to deflect scrutiny away from his wealth, his North Carolina McMansion and his costly grooming habits and toward the antipoverty agenda he pursued last week on a sweep through the South.
Edwards' coat choice was part of a nefarious plot to "deflect scrutiny" from the size of his house and toward his anti-poverty message? And his health care proposal was, I suppose, part of a scheme to distract people from the vital question of what kind of laundry detergent he uses.
I don't really know what to say about the controversy various rightwing bloggers and The Weekly Standard are trying to gin up over this TNR diarist article attributed to a soldiers currently serving in Iraq publishing under a pseudonym. Obviously, it's not beyond the realm of the conceivable that The New Republic would be taken in by a fabulist or else that they would just decide to publish slanders against other people, calling them anti-semites or Nazi collaborators or whatnot.
That said, the specific contentions being made against the piece (most of them can be found by scrolling around the Standard's blog) are pretty unconvincing. You have a bunch of nitpicking about the technical details of some of the hardware described, plus some Army public affairs people denying that anything improper would happen in Iraq, plus a lot of huffing and puffing. On the other side, TNR says their editors have spoken to other soldiers who witnessed the key events, and they corroborate the story.
On some level, this is a simple numbers game. If you had any group of people where 95 percent of them behaved extremely well all the time, you'd call that a very upstanding group of people. But if that was a group of 150,000 people, that would still leave you with 7,500 bad apples. Military officers will tell you that they, like supervisors everywhere, probably spend 95 percent of their time worrying about just 5 percent of their subordinates -- the troublemakers. And say they generally do a good job of it, and on any given day 95 percent of the 7,500 bad apples are still perfectly in check. Well, that's still 375 heavily armed people in a strange country far from home where they don't speak the language and are regularly subjected to stressful, dangerous conditions.
And this situation persists for seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for over four years. Under the circumstances, it would be shocking if there weren't random acts of cruelty happening in Iraq. Understanding this is crucial to understanding military strategy -- in particular, a strategy that depends on every single soldiers doing the right thing all the time is very unlikely to succeed; you just can't make plans grounded on the premise that you have hundreds of thousands of completely perfect people at your disposal. If Bill Kristol really wants to take the view that all soldiers are flawless and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor, that explains a lot about Kristol's inability to every reach the correct conclusions about any substantive national security issues.
We consider how much of the top end of the income distribution can be attributed to four sectors – top executives of non-financial firms (Main Street); financial service sector employees from investment banks, hedge funds, private equity funds, and mutual funds (Wall Street); corporate lawyers; and professional athletes and celebrities.
Their analysis suggests that "Main Street" CEOs -- the heads of firms outside the financial sector -- comprise a relatively small proportion of the super-rich (obviously, CEOs earn a good deal of money) citing such factoids as "the top 25 hedge fund managers combined appear to have earned more than all 500 S&P 500 CEOs combined (both realized and estimated)."
This chart is by far the most interesting thing about the New York Times article it accompanies. It not only makes the obvious point that Rudy Giuliani was considerably better-liked by white New Yorkers than by black ones, but also the less obvious point that opinion trendlines among these two groups actually diverged quite a bit.
Throughout Giuliani's first term, his popularity with white New Yorkers tended to decline slightly -- the results, one supposes, of inevitable disillusionment. Giuliani's African-American constituents, by contrast, were warming toward him considerably. He was never a popular figure among black New Yorkers, but did go way, way up in the opinion ratings as crime went down. Which leads to under-considered subject of the period between Giuliani's second inauguration and 9/11 -- during his first term, he turned around a lot of skeptics and cruised to re-election in 1997, but by 9/11 he'd managed to re-alienate a huge number of people. Notably, it sort of seemed as if he couldn't handle the idea of liberals and blacks warming to him and was actually casting about for stupid controversies to wade into in order to get back in touch with his combative persona.
Harriet Rubin's profile of CEO book collections includes the notion that "it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars." She also informs us with great reverence that "Mr. Leach has stocked his cabin in the woods of North Carolina with the collected works of Aristotle." Not to disparage the wisdom of the ancients, but the complete works of Aristotle are available as a two volume set from Princeton University Press that costs $80.75 at Amazon and is eligible for free SuperSaver Shipping.
It's not that impressive a collection. Indeed, it appears that you can secure the entire Loeb Classical Library for less than $10,000. This is, admittedly, a lot of money, but it's an awful lot less than "several hundred thousand dollars" and it would certainly constitute a serious library on a subject -- indeed, on several subjects.
If you live in the UK, you can watch the first episode of The Wirestreaming courtesy ofThe Guardian. If you live outside the UK, instead of watching the episode (you can't!), maybe you can explain to me how the internet knows where I am (or maybe I'll see if Google can tell me).
It's an odd little world we live in. By any reasonable standard, in 2002-2003 Michael Gerson, in his role as White House speechwriter, helped outline a foreign policy approach that, whether you liked it or not, was certainly audacious and new -- taking some strands that had long existed in US political culture and taking them much further than they'd ever gone before. If all this had gone well, Gerson could have left his government job and become a pillar of the Washington Establishment. Since it turned out to be a tremendous failure, instead he got a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship and a Washington Post column.
And now he's being savagely attacked by Michael Ledeen and Mark Steyn for being insufficiently enthusiastic about broadening the war to include attacks on Syria and Iran. "No surprise, then, that Gerson has no stomach for forceful action against the Syranians. He's for sanctions-plus-hard-bargaining." Sanctions! Hard bargaining! Ha! "I don't believe the President thinks of Syria and Iran as mere 'accelerants,'" writes Steyn, "But it's unnerving that someone so close to him these past six years does."
Has the world gone mad? Katherine Jean-Lopez points out that Rudy Giuliani is taveling to the UK where he will "seek Baroness Thatcher’s blessing when he delivers the inaugural Thatcher lecture organised by Atlantic Bridge, a think tank, in London in September." Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson have already been to visit with her.
A Phoenix fan puts together a decent case that corrupt ref Tim Donaghy may have fixed Game 3 of the Suns-Spurs playoff series in San Antonio's favor:
The case would be stronger, however, if the fan had actually restricted himself to calls (or non-calls) Donaghy made, instead of throwing in the kitchen sink. That said, we're obviously going to need to know more about this. One hopes that the FBI investigation will produce a reasonably definitive account of which games Donaghy was bending.
Margaret Talev reports for McClatchey Newspapers on the GOP's unprecedentedly frequent use of the filibuster. This chart, though, kind of says it all:
It's really pretty surprising to see this kind of record being broken at the present time. Abstractly, you'd think that the most filibustering would happen at a time more like 2005-06 when 40-odd Senators might see their use of the filibuster as the only possible way to stop legislation. Alternatively, you might see a lot of filibusters aimed at preventing a first term president from needing to veto legislation, as Senators agree to take the hit in order to help their president secure re-election.
It seems, though, that the GOP has decided that if they use filibusters to obstruct congressional action that the press will keep reporting this in a "congress fails to do X" kind of way rather than a "GOP obstructionism" kind of way, which makes filibusters a win-win for Republicans. Be that as it may, the filibuster is a bad idea and should be done away with. Given how hard the Democratic caucus whined about the "nuclear option" just a couple of years ago, they couldn't do it without being called hypocrites, but that's just further evidence of what a bad idea the "Gang of 14" deal was.
As Steve Benen says, Steven Hayes is clearly insane. That said, is Hayes more insane or less insane than Tim Russert, who decided that Bob Woodward, David Brooks, and Steve Hayes would be a good balanced panel to discuss the news? What kind of stupid stuff do I need to write before I get to go on Meet The Press to promote my book?
If you liked Paul Krugman's column on America's crappy internet -- or if you can't read it because you don't have TimesSelect -- then you're sure to love the longer article on this same subject that I did two years ago for The American Prospect. My article also spells out crucial linkages to the looming 700 Mhz spectrum auction, albeit in a slightly outdated way.
The other day I was walking down the street engaging in my frequent pass time of trying to think of new arguments for views I already hold. "Even if we fully converted to the use of plug-in hybrids," I said to myself, "we wouldn't see an especially dramatic improvement in the carbon situation unless we also made an implausibly large change in how we generate electricity in order to compensate for the higher demand for electrical power." Then I decided I should probably check to see if that was true before I wrote it, which I didn't feel like doing.
Well, what do I read on Gristmill except a post about how I'm totally wrong and there's a new report out from the Electrical Power Research Institute explaining my wrongness in some detail. To make the point qualitatively, though, power plants are much more efficient than are internal combustion engines, so whatever fuel source you use a plug-in hybrid is radically cleaner than a conventional car. Of course, insofar as you use clean energy instead, things get even better, but the switch is a big improvement even without changing the electrical structure.
Photo by Flickr user Mike Weston used under a Creative Commons license
George Packer details the ways in which there's been a bit of a rapprochement between military people and intellectual sorts in the 21st century, bred, primarily, by the exigencies of counterinsurgency: "The soldiers whose reputations have been made and not destroyed in Iraq—General David Petraeus, Colonel H. R. McMaster, Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl—have doctorates in the humanities."
"Desperate times," as he writes "breed desperate measures," including McMaster bringing an anti-war British political scientist to Iraq because he's knowledgeable about the country. Packer says that he's under "no illusion that this rapprochement between guns and brains is widespread or guaranteed to last" but one should probably be more pessimistic than that. As he pointed out, this has largely come about as a result of an Iraq-driven desperation. The trouble is that it hasn't worked. If hawkish intellectuals had understood more about military matters, if understanding of counterinsurgency had been wider-spread inside the military, if US elites had understood Iraqi history and culture better this misguided war never would have come to pass. Instead, this learning has all taken place in the futile context of a mission doomed to failure. The resulting experience is going to be an unpleasant one, and I think the odds favor a return to the post-Vietnam environment where academics deem the military too distasteful to contemplate and the military decides to borrow more deeply into the warrens of conventional firepower-oriented warfare.
When I was very young, I went to Fieldston Outdoors daycamp, which I recall as having been a generally fun experience, but which involved a lot of annoying folk music, including -- especially -- annoying Pete Seeger songs. Thus, all my life I've harbored a drudge against folk in general and Seeger in particular. Thus, imagine my delight when I discovered years later that Seeger wasn't just another friendly hippie, but actually a hard-core Stalinist, the kind of guy who followed the party line out of Moscow through the ups-and-downs of the Hitler-Stalin pact.
David Boaz (via Brad DeLong) spells out the details. I can't, however, really condone Boaz' bashing of the Little Red Schoolhouse which is near where I grow up and which I promise you isn't churning out little Communist footsoldiers.
The Pete Seeger post below aside, I wouldn't want to be taken as some kind of hard-line opponent of Communist cultural products. Last night, for example, some friends and I watched Viy, a Soviet horror film based on the Gogol short story of the same name, and it's pretty fascinating; taking a broad theatrical approach that you don't often see in movies, combined with some unusual uses of camera motion and perspective.
I'd never seen a movie based on a Gogol story before, but in retrospect it seems like very promising source material since he has plenty of narratives that work nicely at film length without extensive cutting. Are there others out there that people would recommend? Plus, he's funny. I suppose the unreliable narrative of The Nose would be hard to pull off, but someone should try.
Fishbowl DC's 2007 "Hottest Media Types Finalists: Female, Off Air" list is now up and running online. This year's edition is kind of full of friends of mine, so I'll refrain from offering an opinion, but just don't vote for Nedra Pickler who's evil.
Marc Ambinder speculates that John Edwards may be getting ready to go for the jugular at tonight's debate based on campaign manager David Bonior's remarks on TV yesterday. Here's what Bonior said:
With all due respect … the Clintons did not deliver on health care," Mr. Bonior said. "They had a very important choice to make back in '93: whether to do the North American Free Trade agreement or health care. They implemented the North American Free Trade Agreement that put literally millions of workers out of work in this country and destroyed, basically, our good trading relationships we had around the world. And then in the interim, they lost any capital they had to get health care passed. … The fact of the matter is it's been an absolute disaster on health care.
I'll wait and see if that happens. Let me observe, though, that throwing the long ball on trade is a time-honored method of running a populist insurgency in the Democratic primary and John Edwards actually tried it as recently as his 2004 race against John Kerry down the stretch. It hasn't yet worked. The innovating thing about the Edwards campaign thus far is that it's leveraged his personal qualities -- charisma, southern accent, boyish good looks -- into the opportunity to put forward base-pleasing platform items that are substantially more intellectually rigorous -- and substantively ambitious -- than this kind of thing.
At any rate, there were certainly some problems with NAFTA, but I don't really think you can seriously maintain that it led to a massive increase in unemployment or ruined our trading relationships around the world.
I was following a link from Gristmill, the enviro blog, so it didn't occur to me to have my astroturf detectors on, but as several people have pointed out the Electrical Power Research Institute study I mentioned this morning is coming from an industry funded shop and could just be entirely made up. Maybe I was right in the first place, and hybrids really won't help much unless we change our electricity habits. I'm hoping the Gristmill people will revisit this and explain why I should find the utilities trustworthy on this point.
Jon Chait takes the chance to revisit the subject of conservatives perpetually proclaiming themselves to be winning the war of ideas:
These days, of course, the Republican Party has been routed and conservatives are beset by panic and gloom. You'd think this would, at minimum, give us a small respite from boasts about the right's victory in the War of Ideas. But no. They're still at it. The new line, put forward by the likes of Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby and Hoover Institution fellow Peter Berkowitz, is that conservatives are more intellectually serious because they're having deep debates over first principles, while liberals enforce stultifying conformity. As Jacoby puts it, "[T]he right churns with serious disputes over policy and principle, while the left marches mostly in lockstep." Berkowitz bemoans "the absence on the left of debate or dissent," which he attributes in part to liberals being "blinded by rage at the Bush administration." [...]
Third, it's certainly true that conservatives today are more divided than liberals about whether the Iraq war has been a fiasco. I simply disagree about what this fact tells us. Conservatives see their split on this proposition as evidence of intellectual acuity. I see it as evidence that roughly half of all conservatives are barking mad. On last year's National Review cruise, as Johann Hari reported in these pages, Norman Podhoretz called the war "an amazing success" and insisted that "it couldn't have gone better." To believe this, you have to believe it was worth 3,500 American military deaths, many times that number wounded, tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and hundreds of billions of dollars to convert a brutal secular Sunni thugocracy into what may be, in a best-case scenario, a somewhat less brutal, but far more theocratic, Shia thugocracy. Maybe it's the blind Bush hatred talking, but I'm not terribly embarrassed that liberals are united in rejecting this notion.
See also Chait's longer essay on the subject of ideas which combines this sort of quality mockery with more of a positive case about how the political system actually operates.
Okay, so, with regard to the EPRI study business. The organization has a good reputation for doing real research, and the people who did the report in question are real scientists, nor is this the first study to reach the same basic conclusion (see, this, for example). What's more, the basic point is perfectly in line with common sense. Thinking in the longer term, the available options for making electricity generation greener seem much, much better than do the possible ways of creating greener liquid fuels and as Kevin Drums says plug-in hybrids are a good transitional technology that will create incentives to build the sort of infrastructure we would need to make electric-only cars a reasonable option at some point.
Long story short -- plug-in hybrids are a good thing. In particular, insofar as one feels the need to throw some kind of bone in the direction of the coal industry (exactly the sort of thing someone engaged in practical politics might want to do) using coal to create electricity and using electricity to power plug-in hybrids (or, indeed, electric cars) is much, much more environment friendly than is coal liquification.
To say a bit more about the eye-popping filibuster chart I posted earlier today, it's worth considering that the GOP's unprecedented use of the filibuster is, at the end of the day, part and parcel of a clear upward trend in filibustering over time. The Republicans, in short, are certainly perfidious, but their current filibustermania isn't a particular sign of perfidy nearly so much as it is the logic of a bad procedural rule playing itself out over time.
Fundamentally, this should worry people more than tactical gambits about how to paint the Republicans as obstructionists. The filibuster is a bad rule. The need for a bill to pass two different legislative houses elected by different constituencies and then be signed by a president who isn't responsible to the legislature is already plenty of countermajoritarian elements in the institutional porridge. In particular, progressive politics would benefit from making it easier to pass laws. Universal health care will be almost impossible to get enacted, but once enacted no country dismantles its health care system.
That's part of an advertising campaign launched by an industry group Health Care America who's agenda is to convince you that government-run health care would be evil. And, of course, it's true -- in systems with government-run health care systems you sometimes need to wait to see a doctor. Much as in the United States you need to wait on line to see a movie. Or how in the United states you need to . . . wait to see a doctor.
I'm fascinated as to what planet the maker of this ad lives on. Back in December I called my primary care physician's office to schedule an appointment. I got one in mid-March. Such is life. Waiting times are, obviously, a function of supply and demand. The private sector could easily organize an insurance scheme that made it much quicker and easier to get in to see your doctor -- your premiums and/or copayments would just need to be way higher. Similarly, just as a government-run subway system can reduce crowding by spending more money to run more trains, a government-run health care system featuring long waiting times for MRIs could . . . spend money and buy more machines.
It's far from obvious that zero waiting really is the optimal arrangement for all procedures, but one way or another the waiting issue has very little to do with whether or not the system is, in some sense, "government run." Indeed, my sense is that American Medicare recipients -- that's government run healthcare for the uninitiated -- tend to do less waiting than your average person with private insurance.
To continue this fight endlessly, I think Ezra Klein is completely misinterpreting the fact that higher-skilled workers get more vacation. There's a tradeoff between leisure and income. The more income you already have, the more interested you become at the margin to have more leisure rather than more income. We can see this from the exciting world of journalism, where the appeal of, say, earning $150 writing a Comment is Free piece instead of watching your The Shield season one DVD is going to have something to do with how much money you're earning from other sources.
This brings us to yet another problem with mandatory vacations -- it's regressive. Leisure is a "superior good" the kind of thing people put more value on the more money they already have. Working class people struggling to earn enough money to pay the bills aren't going to be made happier if they have more time off but earn less money. The sort of pernicious status competition cycles that Ezra postulated as the reason we can't leave this up to the free market are going to be most applicable way up near the top of the income distribution -- it's very plausible that Rich Lawyer A is putting in the hours primarily to show up Rich Lawyer B, but Convenience Store Guy is putting in the hours because he actually wants the money.
This all goes back to the issue of whether or not there's really such a thing as paid vacation. If you believe that additional vacation days procured for people through government mandates won't result in proportionate decreases in their money income, then of course mandating more vacation time is a good idea. Similarly, if I thought that mandating that all employers provide their employees with free cable wouldn't result in a proportionate decrease in their money income, I'd favor that, too. But the world doesn't work like that.
Hugo Lindgren glosses Tyler Cowen's view on what makes for good cuisine: "The magic ingredient, he elaborates, is extreme income inequality, which ensures a large reservoir of cheap labor to grow and prepare the food, as well as a sufficient number of rich people who, being rich, must eat well."
. . . but amidst The Weekly Standard's huffing and puffing about how "Scott Thomas" couldn't possibly have come across a mass grave in a particular area of operations where he allegedly said he came across one (crucially, he didn't actually say that), they inadvertendly corroborated the story. Thomas said he and other soldiers found a bunch of skeletons during the construction of a combat outpost. One of the article's detractors concedes that "There was a children's cemetery unearthed while constructing a Combat Outpost (COP) in the farm land south of Baghdad International Airport" and then gets very insistent that it was no mass grave. The article, however, just said they found a bunch of bones and then speculated idly that it might have been a mass grave. Well, turns out it was a children's cemetary.
Meanwhile, the case that nobody could possibly have driven around in his Bradley Fighting Vehicle killing dogs seems to essentially come down to the fact that "This would violate standard operating procedure (SOP) and make the convoy more susceptible to attack." I don't, however, think anyone ever argued that killing dogs was SOP, the claim was that it happened. Surely the Standard is prepared to concede that SOP, though standard, is sometimes violated.
If John Edwards or Barack Obama were the frontrunners at this point, I think they would have performed just fine in the debates. Edwards' highs are emotive and personal, and Obama's are lofty and aspirational, but they both hit them and they both had only minor moments of awkward. But, of course, Hillary Clinton is the front runner. She didn't stumble at all, she hit a few high points, and since nobody tried to tear her down, nobody succeeded in tearing her down. Under the circumstances, it's a clear win for her.
Nothing's going to happen until somebody with a better shot than Joe Biden or Mike Gravel makes a serious move, but I think the real contenders are making the right calculation that it's not worth their while to do it yet. I bet this race stays boring for a few months yet.
The morning after, I'm reminded that the intriguing difference of opinions in the debate was Barack Obama saying he'd be happy to meet personally with the heads of Syria, Iran, whatever whereas Hillary Clinton emphasized that the Bush administration had sidelined diplomacy too much, but said she'd only go so far as to actually meet with these people as the end of a diplomatic process, lest the meeting become a propaganda coup. Dana Goldstein says "Edwards agreed with her," though what I saw was him mostly equivocating.
At any rate, it's not a very important issue as such, but perhaps a window into wider disagreements about national security. Clinton articulated a position of continuity with her husband's administration, while Obama was hinting at a more drastic departure.
One thing that comes clear watching these debates is that there's an inherent tension between trying to turn them into good television and trying to provide some kind of illumination those of us whose views on the race shift around. I think everyone agrees that question eight about gay marriage produced some of the evening's highlights:
These were highlights, though, purely as television. Neither that question nor the other gay marriage one had any actual probative value. All the major candidates face the same dilemma -- to be viable in the primary, you need to be supportive of gay and lesbian equality, while to be viable in the general election, you need to be against gay marriage -- and they've all hit upon essentially the same policy solutions, and we all knew all of that already. It was interesting to watch them squirm, just as it's interesting to wonder which candidates are adopting a posture that's more sympathetic to gay marriage than their gut convictions and which are adopting a posture that's less sympathetic. In neither case, though, has anything happened that would sway one's vote -- the candidates all have the same stand that we know they all have.
The press seems to be very keen about Clinton's answer to the dictator meeting question. Whatever "presidential" means to the press -- and it seems to be mean non-pandering, serious, grave and reflective -- Clinton's answer was very "presidential."
Marc wonders if "those Democrats who watched the debate on television agree." I'm not sure. I do, though, have a question of my own for him. Doesn't "presidential" in this context, like "serious," just mean "relatively right-wing" rather than "reflective"?
UPDATE: Similarly, Marc sees "intellectual honesty" in Clinton's and Biden's statements on Iraq. I see the reverse. I see Clinton and Biden both taking relatively more right-wing positions on Iraq and then refusing to take responsibility for the fact that they don't favor a speedy withdrawal from Iraq by pretending that the military somehow "can't" organize one. Praise Clinton and Biden for being less dovish on Iraq than Edwards and Obama and praise them for, in turn, being less dovish than Bill Richardson if you'd like. But let's not pretend this is about neutral attributes of presidentialness and intellectual honesty, it's about policy disagreements.
Mike Crowley notes that in a stark contrast to the 2003 version of the event, none of the Democratic contenders will be attending the DLC's 2007 national conversation. I find this effort to play down the significance wildly unconvincing.
What captures the significance of this perfectly is that in 2006 Hillary Clinton addressed the DLC National Conversation. In 2005 she addressed the DLC National Conversation. In 2004 and 2003 the focus was on the Democratic presidential candidates, but in 2002 she addressed the DLC National Conversation. Back in 2001, she addressed the DLC National Conversation. She's the sort of person, in short, inclined to attend the DLC National Conversation event. Which is no surprise since her husband co-founded the group and she's a member of the leadership team. These days, though, she's running for president in an environment where lavishing the sort of praise on Al From that she lavished in 2001, then again in 2002, then again in 2005 and again in 2006 wouldn't suit her 2007 purposes very well. That's a change from 2003, when almost all of the contenders thought it would help them politically to be seen as DLC-friendly.
The flipside is that the significance is entirely limited to this sort of atmospherics. The DLC brand has become tarnished. On a policy level, though, I don't see a ton of change. Clinton hasn't radically revised her approach to things, she's the clear front-runner, and I don't know any centrist policy people who feel especially threatened by the possibility that one of her rivals might get the nomination. I hear, though, that some of the DLC leadership people are a little bummed that high-profile politicians don't want to hang out with them.
Michael Gordon reports that the Pentagon is planning on staying in Iraq at least through 2009 and, like the Cylons, they have a plan. The best part is when "the classified plan . . . calls for restoring security in local areas, including Baghdad, by the summer of 2008." I wonder if the 2004-vintage plan called for the country to be mired in chaos by the summer of 2007? I'm guessing it didn't, though. It seems to me that the tricky part is going to be less the planning to restore security than the actual restoring of the security.
Dave Weigel has the goods on the relaunch of the Victory Caucus website. Rather than haranguing Republicans out of expressing doubts about the war, the "new" idea is to become "a one-stop-shop for anyone interested in learning about what's really going on in the war."
What's really going on, of course, is that US forces are winning a brilliant victory against the combined forces of Ahmadenijad, al-Qaeda, Fidel Castro, and the Cobra Commander but the liberal media is covering it all up.
In the current Esquire, Thomas Barnett offers an enthusiastic look at the new Africa Command. Brad Plumer's not excited nor is the Center for Global Development. A member of John Edwards team has waxed fairly enthusiastically to me about this sort of thing, but was also indicating that it would be better to develop less militarized methods of trying to do it like the "Marshall Corps" proposal he's outlined.
I get a little queasy at the idea that we have meaningful national security interests in Africa (helping people not get sick and die is good, though) since by whatever definition we've decided the Horn of Africa is a strategically significant location everywhere is crucially important.
This is a reminder, I think, of why we should look forward to the day when the op-ed column is a dead format and everyone just blogs. Brooks' original column would, obviously, have been better if it -- like Nyhan's reply -- had come with links to data and charts. What's more, it'd be good if we could expect Brooks to reply to the sort of criticisms he's getting from Nyhan, Dean Baker, and others. Maybe he has something fascinating to say on his own behalf. But the way the columnizing world works, there's almost no chance he'll address his next column to trying to rebut the critics of this one. But a back-and-forth debate on this subject with links and charts and data would be much more interesting than what we're going to get instead where liberals decide Brooks is a liar and Brooks remains convinced that liberals are crazy.
I appreciate where Kevin Drum's coming from here, but I wouldn't want to give in 100 percent to farm subsidy fatalism. Back in the 1990s, a Clinton administration that was serious about policy and a Gingrich-led congressional GOP that was pretty serious about reducing spending, produced an okay farm bill. The Bush administration and the Bush era congressional leadership then went back on the okay parts of that bill and promulgated a terrible farm bill.
But things could have gone otherwise. Had Al Gore been President of the United States it's pretty likely that they would have gone otherwise. Had the Republican nominee been somewhat serious about public policy it's pretty likely that things would have gone otherwise. The current political moment in the United States isn't incredibly favorable to the sort of cross-partisan technocratic initiative that would produce a saner agricultural policy, but that can change and even right now things aren't hopeless.
Photo by Flickr user Liberalmind1012 used under a Creative Commons license
Robert Farley points out that it's not as if there was no US military involvement in Africa before the creation of a new Africa Command, it's just that responsibility for Africa was divided up in a pretty nonsensical way between different theater commands. AFRICOM organizes things more sensibly, and sets up a situation where the military officers making decisions about Africa have some incentive to develop meaningful knowledge of the continent.
This is interesting. One way of looking at the little Clinton-Obama exchange over talking to "enemy" foreign leaders was that Clinton was simply trying to underscore her experience level by adding a little nuance to the picture. That seems not to be the case, as she and surrogate Madeleine Albright are using the issue to hit pretty hard at Obama.
And, of course, if you construe what Obama said to mean that he intends to jet off to Pyongyang without any advance work having been done, I suppose that really would be "irresponsible and frankly naive," but that hardly seems like a fair assessment. It's strange for the front-runner to go on the attack like that, and especially odd given the political climate for her to be going out of the way to emphasize the idea that she's substantially more hawkish than Obama.
I would take issue with a variety of things Linda Hirschman says in her article bashing John Rawls, but surely it's obviously insane to blame Rawls for Democratic Party electoral defeats. I read it again, because I thought Hirschman might be making a more subtle claim, but, no, she's actually describing a causal connection between Democratic defeats and Rawls' philosophy, arguing that "It is not a coincidence that the only successful two-term Democratic presidency of the Age of Rawls was engineered in part for Bill Clinton by Bill Galston, a political theorist with a background in classical thought. "
I'm reasonably confident that this actually is a coincidence. You can read the classic essay on political strategy that Galston wrote with Elaine Kamarck "The Politics of Evasion" and you'll see it has very, very, very little to do with the sort of philosophical issues that divide him from Rawls.
Voting for the hottest media types in DC, 2007 is now open. I've decided that since I have roommates nominated in both the male, off-air and female, off-air categories, I should endorse both of them -- Catherine Andrews and Kriston Capps are totally, totally hot.
UPDATE: Catherine wants me to notify you that you need to scroll down to the bottom of the page to vote for her.
So I popped open my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at about 5PM on Saturday and finished it before going to bed at a perfectly reasonable hour. Ever since then, it's seemed like I should do a blog post on the blog, but I think I turn out not to have a lot of interesting things to say on the subject. I'll second Ross' recommendations of these spoiler-containing posts by Russell Arben Fox and Eve Tushnet.
What's more, like everyone else I enjoyed Megan McArdle's piece on the poorly sketched economics of the Harry Potter universe. My general feeling is that the Potter books fall along a pretty symmetrical quality curve, starting off okay, then getting better as the series' ambition grows, but then getting worse again as the series becomes more ambitious than J.K. Rowling can really pull off. The storyline of Hallows winds up calling for a level of big-picture world-building -- not just the economics of the wizarding world, but the politics and the international relations, too -- that's far off from Rowling's core strength of offering rich micro-level detail.
Lord knows I'm just the sort of liberal appeaser who thinks we should be trying to promote engagement with Hezbollah, but even I think it's a bit odd for The Washington Post to invite their leader to post in their "on faith" blog. Be that as it may, I don't quite get his sense of humor:
I would like to add, jokingly, that all men in the world, especially civil servants and high officials, are committed to the veil, since they cover all their bodies except their heads, where as the women also veil their breasts and their sexual organs, depending on the concept of sexual excitation that is broader in the Islamic view than the western one.
What? On a more serious note, he allows that "there is a juristic opinion that allows the woman to be a judge. And it is a ruling I am in favor of." And good for him, but he should be warned that it's a slippery slope from woman judges to woman senators and presidential candidates.
When Nancy Pelosi went to Syria earlier this year, she got reamed for it in the conservative mediasphere and blogs. The Confederate Yankee labeled it "propaganda coup that will be used by Syria, the terrorists they sponsor, and Islamists worldwide." Michael Rubin writing in National Review Onlinewondered before the trip "if she will cede the Assad regime a propaganda victory, as did Sen. Arlen Specter?"
You remember the whole spiel. At the time, I think most liberals -- and, indeed, most Americans -- understood this to be both unfair and also reflective of a pretty weird and wrongheaded underlying worldview. And yet, this is pretty similar to what Hillary Clinton's saying in her criticism of Barack Obama. There's this similar notion that the US can be mortally wounded by perfidious leaders having their photos taken with important American politicians, or that engaging in high-level diplomacy with a country is a reward we offer for good behavior rather than a standard method of relating to the world.
Johann Hari, a former left-wing Iraq hawk like myself, turns a review of a book by Nick Cohen, current left-wing Iraq hawk, into the opportunity for a great essay on the phenomenon. My main disagreement is that I think Hari overemphasizes the idea that democracy, freedom, etc. aren't important subjective aims of Bush, Cheney, neoconservatism etc.
I spent a lot of time puzzling over Bush's sincerity or lack thereof with regard to his idealistic rhetoric before the war, and in retrospect it was all wasted time. It's interesting to wonder how it's possible -- or if it's possible -- for a man to speak grand words about liberty in the morning and defending systematic torture in the afternoon, but it's not actually relevant. The main point was that there was simply never any good reason to believe the more idealistic aspiration sometimes associated with the war had any decent prospects of success. It was fundamentally dumb to think that invading and conquering Iraq could turn it into a stable liberal democracy if only we wanted it badly enough and that the main issue was whether or not Bush "really" wanted it. It was just fundamentally a dumb idea, and that's what I should have seen at the time. It still seems to me that Bush may well have been dumb enough to sincerely believe in it on some level, but it was still dumb -- that's what matters.
The age-old question of "liberal" versus "progressive" prompted a reasonably reasonable post from Martin Peretz, and a surprisingly unreasonable (see Henry Farrell) one from Jacob Levy. I describe myself both ways, and thought I'd introspect a bit on my usage of the terms.
To me, "liberal" denotes a certain political philosophy whereas "progressive" is more like a political coalition. Certain strands of environmentalist thinking are, for example, pretty philosophically alien to my approach to politics, but we're still all part of the same progressive political coalition, opposed to a conservative political coalition that fights any and all restrictions on industry's ability to pollute. More generally, the evidence strongly suggests that the vast majority of people don't have anything resembling a coherent political philosophy. Nevertheless, many of these voters are consistent members of the progressive political coalition out of self-interest, reflex, demographic habit, whatever.
Samhita Mukhopadhyay notes a brilliantly sarcastic and indignant Ann Crittenden response to Justice Kennedy's ruling in the "partial birth" case in Elle:
So, he rules, we'll spare you all that grief and sorrow by deciding you can't have a partial-birth abortion (if your state so decides), even though there was substantial testimony from medical experts and groups, such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, that this now potentially criminal form of second-trimester abortion is sometimes safer for women than other forms. This is for your own good, of course.
Where have we heard this before? You are too mentally challenged to master the rigors of a higher education, so we'll keep you out of universities for your own good. You are too gentle for the rough-and-tumble world of business, so we'll keep you out of the high-paying professions for your own good. You don't understand complicated political issues, so we'll spare you the confusion of voting, for your own good. You are too frail for competitive sports, so we'll keep you from running or swimming or discovering your body's capabilities, for your own good. And now paternalism's last stand is over motherhood. You don't know when you are ready to become a mother; whether you are suited to become a mother; what to do when something has gone dreadfully wrong with your pregnancy. So you can't decide.
The smartest thing I was ever taught about politics and media is that this sort of media coverage of politics in media outlets that aren't focused on politics -- coverage in Elle rather than Ms., the local news rather than the national news -- is the most important kind. It reaches the kind of ill-informed somewhat disengaged people whose views tend to swing elections.
The other day Brendan Nyhan caught George W. Bush lapsing into weird honesty on his opposition to expanding SCHIP. The problem, as Bush saw it, was that if these kids become insured, that might put us on a slippery slope to a dystopian future in which all kids and then all people have health insurance. Can't have that.
Today, John Boehner does him one better, grounding his opposition to SCHIP expansion on the idea that "Dragging people out of private health insurance to put them into a government-run program is ‘Hillary care’ come back.” But note here that while it's true that there will be some displacement of private health insurance here, nobody would actually be "dragged" out of the private sector. Rather, people would shift out of it if and only if SCHIP was a better overall deal. Which, of course, it almost certainly will be. Which, as Boehner kind of explained, is exactly why Republicans are dead set against expanding it.
Photo by Flickr user David Bolton used under a Creative Commons license
People don't like to make the monetary cost of a war the centerpiece of an argument against it. Nevertheless, it's striking how if you want to talk about early childhood development or public transportation or even "hard" things like monitoring parolees or hiring cops in this country, you immediately run into cost issues. Expanding SCHIP may be cheap and popular, but you'd better make it cheap enough to finance through gimmicks like cigarette taxes and so forth, because you just can't unleash the spigots of general revenue on something as trivial as making children not die when they fall ill.
For war, it's a different story. Mark Kleiman, for example, points out that at $200 billion a year, the war in Iraq costs $7,000 per Iraqi per year, which is more than double the country's per capita GDP. Now, obviously, it wouldn't have been literally feasible to give each Iraqi $4,000 in March 2003, then again in March 2004, then again in March 2005, then again in March 2006, then again in March 2007, and then start drawing our commitment down to $3,000 in March 2008, $2,000 in March 2009, etc. But if you could have pulled it off, it would have been enormously cheaper than what we actually did. It's this sort of thing that ultimately makes the humanitarian arguments around Iraq so fatuous -- this is just a ridiculously costly way to try to help people and when one talks about extending the deployment two or three more years in the hopes that the trend line will magically reverse, one is contemplating a truly massive expenditure of resources that could be more effectively deployed doing almost anything else.
UPDATE: PS note that annual expenditures in Iraq are way higher than the annual value of Iraqi oil exports. I do think that the large US military footprint in the Persian Gulf region is motivated by a sense that this is economically necessary to secure the area's precious underground fluids, but the numbers don't add up right.
Ron Brownstein hails the genius of Rudy Giuliani in calling for "federalism" as the solution to "social issues such as gay rights and gun control" which, according to Brownstein, "divide America so sharply largely because no one has found a single solution for them equally acceptable to both churchgoing conservatives and secular liberals." The possibility that Giuliani endorses a federalist approach to these issues as rank political opportunism doesn't seem to be on the table.
Be that as it may, this is mostly nonsense. Some issues are genuinely local in nature, and gun control has many truly local characteristics. "socially conservative and liberal states to each set rules that reflect the prevailing values inside their borders. But "gay rights or aspects of abortion" aren't like that. If it's wrong to murder gay teens, then it's wrong in Iran and wrong in Idaho, and also wrong in Illinois. Not, fortunately, that Idaho seems likely to legalize killing gay teens but it was just a couple of years ago that Texas really was asserting in court its right to imprison gay men. And, conversely, if abortion is the mass slaughter of human persons then it's not okay in California but wrong in Kansas.
These questions are controversial because . . . they're controversial issues, not because they're decided at the federal level. Besides which, people don't actually come neatly apportioned into "blue" and "red" types. There are plenty of social conservatives living in New York and California, and plenty of liberals living in Texas. You could try to decide these issues on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis and you'd probably get something closer to politically homogeneous districts (you could use ZIP codes maybe) but that would make nonsense of the whole project.
Spencer Ackerman reviewsCheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President, a very serious argument that's never been made with such care, by Steve Hayes:
Throughout 524 pages of turgid, soul-killing narrative, Hayes presents meaningless anecdotes about Cheney in robust detail -- did you know Cheney has "dozens" of books about fishing in his library? -- while skimping on most instances that could be expected to shape the man. A case in point: Cheney was with President Ford, whom he served as deputy chief of staff and then chief of staff, on April 23, 1975, when Ford authorized bringing the final American remnant home from Vietnam. What effect did proximity to the end of the defining foreign-policy debacle of the era have on him? Hayes doesn't tell us. Despite receiving vastly more access to Cheney than any other reporter, he instead quotes from press secretary Ron Nessen's memoir that Ford, Cheney, Nessen, and Donald Rumsfeld "stood there silently, staring at the carpet, alone with our thoughts, unable to say anything appropriate." Hayes opts instead to relate in detail world-historical flashpoints like the time when Liz Cheney was forced to admit that a Georgetown driver had totaled her dad's Mazda RX-7 while she had borrowed it.
I attended the conference that this RAND report is based on and found it very interesting. There were a bunch of different speakers, so it didn't reflect a single point of view, but most of the participants were extremely sensible. At the end of the day, you probably don't want to read a whole bunch of transcripts of a months-old RAND conference on Iran, but if you find yourself wanting to know more about Iran policy this would be a good thing to check out.
Back in April, Jonathan Rauch took on the subject of federalism and "hot button" social issues and also came to the Giuliani/Brownstein view that federalism makes these debates less contentious. Rather than argue a priori, Rauch contrasts the debate over abortion with the debate over gay marriage:
The result is a diversity of practice that mirrors the diversity of opinion. And gay marriage, not incidentally, is moving out of the realm of protest politics and into the realm of normal politics; in the 2006 elections, the issue was distinctly less inflammatory than two years earlier. It is also moving out of the courts. According to Carrie Evans, the state legislative director of the Human Rights Campaign (a gay-rights organization), most gay-marriage litigation has already passed through the judicial pipeline; only four states have cases under way, and few other plausible venues remain. “It’s all going to shift to the state legislatures,” she says. “The state and national groups will have to go there."
For one thing, Rauch's trend data here isn't particularly solid. Yes, gay marriage played less of a role in 2006 than it did in 2004, but that trend may not continue. The abortion debate has continued to be contentious for decades, but it has ebbed and flowed somewhat. But more to the point, insofar as Rauch is correctly identifying the dynamics of the issue here, I think there's a more plausible explanation -- the main arguments against gay marriage are actually factually disproven by increasing acceptance of gay partnerships. The dawn of gay marriage in Massachusetts and of civil unions in Vermont has not, in fact, led to the collapse of heterosexual marriage throughout New England.
The legalization of abortion, by contrast, actually has been associated with an increase in the number of abortions. If you believe that abortion is a serious moral wrong, there's nothing about seeing some jurisdictions legalize abortion that would make one rethink that. If, by contrast, you think that legal recognition of gay partnerships spells big trouble for family life, then looking at places where some of it exists will dispel those worries. One should also note that opposition to gay equality measures is highly generational in nature and is pretty clearly grounded in irrational prejudice rather than deeply felt philosophical disagreement.
I keep meaning to write this post, and then keep not doing it. But the point is to whine that the primary candidates aren't dealing with the questions that I want answers to. In particular, they talk a lot about Iraq, and to some extent about Darfur, but very little about slightly more abstract foreign policy issues. Some things I'm curious about (with parentheticals to note partial exceptions) that I haven't seen the contenders deal with:
Do you think it might help US non-proliferation policy if the US did a better job of living up to its NPT obligations (Obama mentioned this once, in the affirmative, briefly, in a speech)?
Should unilateral preventive military force play a role in our non-proliferation policy question?
Is turning Arab countries into democracies necessary (or sufficient) to reducing terrorism? Is it counterproductive?
Is it more important to check Chinese influence or to maintain friendly relations with China?
Has the Bush administration been too focused on the Greater Middle East at the expense of other regions?
Is US defense spending too low, too high, or about right?
Should we rethink our relationship with our Arab client regimes?
I agree with Mark Schmitt that "detailed plans" can be overrated, but at the same time I envy the ability of domestic policy pressure groups to make the candidates try to address their concerns.
The Butlerian Jihad, as everyone knows, is directed against "thinking machines" -- i.e., artificial intelligence -- not radical life-extending technologies. Indeed, the precious melange spice found only on Arakis is a radical life-extending technology and obviously the Jihad doesn't have a problem with that.
Wednesday Hezbollah Blogging: Now With More Accuracy and Precision
When I wrote yesterday about Muhammed Fadlallah's blogging I described him as Hezbollah's leader, which is wrong. Hassan Nasrallah is the top guy in Hezbollah. Fadlallah is often described as the "spiritual leader" of Hezbollah but what exactly this entails is a bit unclear. Some folks are indicating to me that he's distanced himself from Hezbollah in recent years, and in general he doesn't seem to be involved in the operational direction of the organization -- he's primarily a theologian and religious figure rather than a political leader as such.
If you assume that people are reading the entire article rather than just scanning the headlines and reading a few graphs, then Jim Ruttenberg and Mark Mazzetti have an excellent piece about the administration's claims about Al-Qaeda in Iraq's relationship to the terrorist group that attacked us on 9/11 and how those claims significantly distort our best understanding of the issue. On the other hand, a person who just read the headline and then got bored after four or five grafs is going to walk away having missed all the excellent analysis.
I don't blame the reporters for this, as such. They've taken the relevant facts and properly assembled them into inverted pyramid format -- and that's their job. But canny politicians have just gotten way too good at manipulating the media's conventions. There needs to be a way of writing this kind of story such that the incentives actually work against making these kind of misleading claims.
The new tax shouldn't be a pure "carbon tax," which would saddle coal-based energy production with steep price increases while allowing us to maintain our national addiction to oil with little abatement. Rather, a comprehensive energy tax ought to discourage in a relatively uniform way the use of all energy sources that contribute to global warming.
I don't get that at all. If an electric car drawing its electricity from a natural gas power plant (say) contributes to global warming, but does so to a much lower extent than does a car with an internal combustion engine burning liquid coal, surely this difference should be reflected in our tax policy. Our current energy mix is so carbon intensive that there are plenty of technologies that would both "contribute to global warming" and also constitutes progress toward reducing carbon emissions. One wants a tax that rewards such technologies, but rewards them less than even cleaner ones. That means a government-auction of emissions permits, or a simple carbon tax. What's the advantage of the alternative? It's a bit more friendly to coal companies that'll fight you to the death anyway?
This past week I read Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neil. You might know about this, especially if you lived in New England, but it's really a hell of a story. Basically what happened is that an Irish American Boston-based FBI agent from Southie named John Connolly hooked up with a Irish American Boston-based gangster from Southie named Whitey Bulger, and together they crippled the mafia in Boston, leaving Bulger to rule the streets in partnership with friends in the FBI who protected him and even helped get some people killed.
Then the really wild, can't make this stuff up, part is that the gangster's brother was both pals with the FBI agent in question and President of the Massachusetts State Senate.
Unfortunately, while the authors have a great story to tell, they don't do a great job of telling. They're two of the Boston Globe reporters who helped break this story open originally, and they're obviously formidable reporters. They're not, however, great at narrative pacing or structuring a book. Nor do they have a really good ear for what aspects of the story do and don't require further elaboration and context. Little things -- like the fact that the Boston FBI field office covers all of New England, that the South End and South Boston are different places, etc. -- aren't really explained properly and I wound up needing to look various things up online to really understand what was happening. Ideally, then, one would want to read a different, better book on the subject and I see that there is another one thought I have no idea if it's better.
Robert Samuelson's basic argument here -- that since the best measures to stop global warming are politically unpopular, it's obvious that environmentalists are all frauds and we shouldn't do anything to stop global warming -- is totally absurd, but he makes an interesting subsidiary point I hadn't previously considered, namely that one thing that would help on the climate change from would be this:
[E]liminate tax subsidies (mainly the mortgage interest rate deduction) for housing, which push Americans toward ever-bigger homes. (Note: If you move to a home 25 percent larger and then increase energy efficiency 25 percent, you don't save energy.)
I hadn't thought of that. Another point, though, is that now that I'm looking at the parenthetical on the page, I don't think Samuelson's math is actually correct. If your house is 100 Volume Units and requires 1 Energy Unit per Volume Unit per year to power, you're using 100 EUs/year. Increase the house to 125 VUs and you're up to 100EUs/year. Now increase energy efficiency to 0.75 EUs per VU per year and you're down to 93.75 EUs/year. Samuelson's right that having the tax code create incentives for people to save money in the form of buying very big houses rather than smaller houses plus an equity portfolio is bad policy, including energy policy, but on both this small point and on the broader point, a weird crankiness seems to be getting the better of him.
An awful lot of liberals I know seem unduly confident that when their favored candidate is elected President of the United States, he or she will withdraw American troops from Iraq. I think people should pay attention to Progressive Policy Institute chief Will Marshall when he notes that the major candidates at least sometimes seem to more-or-less agree with his case for indefinitely extending the US military occupation of Iraq. Marshall is also to be congratulated for, unlike the candidates themselves, speaking reasonably plainly about what it is he's proposing and trying to defend the idea on the merits. He endorses the CNAS plan favored by the more hawkish elements of the Democratic establishment and specifically endorses the idea that the goal of our Iraq policy should be not ending the war, not ending the occupation, not bringing the troops home, but rather:
Specifically, we should redefine our military mission in Iraq as enforcing three “noes” that are essential to protecting America’s strategic interests — no safe havens for al Qaeda, no genocide, and no wider regional war.
In an apparent outbreak of good news for John Edwards, the Obama-Clinton spat seems to be escalating today rather than declining, with the Senator saying "First of all, what is irresponsible and naïve is to have authorized a war without asking how we were going to get out. And I think Senator Clinton still hasn't fully answered that issue. The general principle is one that, I think, Senator Clinton is wrong on. And that is, if we are laying out preconditions that prevent us from speaking frankly to these folks, then we are continuing Bush-Cheney policies, and I am not interested in continuing that."
One thing I'd note here is that the thing Clinton actually said during the debate struck me as fairly reasonable. Then again, so did what Obama said. Her campaign's behavior since then -- trying to make big political hay out of Obama's alleged weakness, seeming to reverse her previous position on the direct talks issue, etc. -- has been pretty problematic. And it's worth saying that she actually did this before, attacking Obama after an earlier debate for having said that he would respond to a terrorist attack by first organizing emergency relief, and then second assessing intelligence to see who was responsible. According to Clinton's campaign, the "correct" answer was to immediately call for war (against whom?)
What this says about Clinton's actual foreign policy beliefs, I couldn't it. It does, however, obviously reflect a certain set of beliefs about politics -- specifically that more militarism is always better -- which happen to be the exact same set of beliefs that helped drive so many Democratic elected officials to duck and cover during the initial drive for war. To get the foreign policy right, you need on some level to have someone willing to challenge the hawkish political box. Clinton isn't just failing to do that, she's going way out of her way to re-enforce it.
As you've probably heard, Israel has for some time now been constructing a "security fence" -- i.e., giant wall -- to keep Palestinians in the Palestinian territories and Israelis safe on the other side of the wall. Reasonable enough, in my view. The only problem is that they've also peppered the Palestinian territories with Jewish settlers and the government isn't about to abandon them to danger. The result is the situation described in this fantastic Washington Post article on Hebron, a place where "the separation is enforced not only by Israeli barriers but also by military checkpoints and curfews intended to protect the roughly 700 Jewish settlers living within the city's most historic and religiously important areas."
These 700 Jews, voting, passport holding citizens of Israel, live in the same city as 150,000 Arabs, citizens of noplace, but subjected to the political authority of an Israeli government which makes every decision about how to administer Hebron with the interests of the 700 in mind, irrespective of the ways in which "securing the small Jewish minority has a potent impact on the lives of the city's 150,000 Arabs." I take the view that, taken as a whole, the "apartheid" rap on Israel is seriously unfair. But take a closer look at the specific situation in Hebron and I don't see what else you could call that particular state of affairs. And there's just no legitimate anti-terrorism reason for any of this. Far and away the easiest way to provide security for Hebron's 700 Jews would be for them to leave and go live in Israel.
I agree with Dana about this. Let me also re-iterate, for those who weren't convinced by the discussion of the politics of Transformers, that it's perfectly appropriate to try to analyze and understand the ideological and political themes of "non-serious" works. The relevant issue isn't whether or not JK Rowling meant to send such-and-such message about gender roles, or whether or not the intended audience is likely to consciously process the messages as there in the text.
The point is that all works -- and especially things like Harry Potter or popcorn action movies that have been assembled out of cliché and don't seem all that rigorously plotted -- reflect certain kinds of ideas about society.
Ezra Klein has the link to a fascinating paper by Larry Bartels and Christopher Achen about the ugly reality behind political decision-making. Rather than try to summarize the paper, I'm going to steal this one graph and talk about it, since I think it encapsulates things nicely:
The horizontal axis plots people's self-report about where they stand on the left-right spectrum on spending issues. The vertical axis plots people's self-report about where they stand relative to the Republican Party on the left-right spectrum on spending issues. The chart separates the answers out into one line for Democrats and one line for Republicans. Partisanship, however, is logically irrelevant to this question. Two people who self-identify as having the same view on spending ought to be the same distance from the Republican Party, even if one person is a Democrat and one is a Republican. But, as the authors observe, "they are markedly divergent, especially for people whose own positions do not happen to fall at the midpoint of the 7-point scale."
If you ask some different kinds of questions, you'll see that people usually vote for the party that they think reflects their views. One might think this means people are looking at where the parties stand, comparing that to where they stand, and then voting for the party they prefer. Bartels and Achen, however, use their way of looking at the data to argue that this is backwards -- people are committing to a political party, and then having done so simply convincing themselves that the party they're committed to shares those views.
Tim F. taking note of Alberto Gonzalez's seeming penchant for defying his constitutional obligations with regard to testifying before congress (as Josh Marshall notes this isn't optional, it's illegal for him to just refuse to answer) in a full and accurate manner, draws my attention to this old debate:
George Mason, a distinguished Virginian who refused to sign the Constitution because of its lack of a bill of rights, noted that “the President of the United States has the unrestrained Power of granting Pardon for Treason; which may be sometimes exercised to screen from Punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the Crime, and thereby prevent a Discovery of his own guilt.”
In light of the Scooter Libby matter, obviously, such things need to be taken seriously. There have been some inappropriate pardons in the past, but pardoning your own subordinates for official misconduct undertaken in support of your political goals has opened up a whole new can of worms. Gonzalez and anyone else can lie, stonewall, refuse to comply as much as they like, secure in the knowledge that not a single person will serve a single minute in prison for anything they do on George W. Bush's behalf.
