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.
Andrew linked yesterday to Zeyad Kasim's map of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad -- the city has become substantially segregated by now, as every occasional massacre prompts a larger number of people to move before they become the next victims.
That's the state of play right now with 160,000 American troops in the country and with a policy decision made to station a larger proportion of US forces specifically in Baghdad than had been the case earlier. So, yes, it's true that terrible things will happen if we have the military leave Iraq, but terrible things are happening right now and our military can't stop them.
There's a striking paragraph near the top of Fred Kaplan's latest column that I've seen quoted on a bunch of progressive blogs, but his more important point comes deeper into the piece explaining the problem with the idea that success in working with locals in Anbar Province against al-Qaeda is a promising stepping-stone to nationwide stability:
But in these alliances, we're dealing with tribesmen who are cooperating with us for a common goal. It is not at all clear on what basis these various local Sunni factions can be stitched together into some seamless security quilt—or why, because they've agreed to help us kill jihadists, they might suddenly agree to stop killing Shiites, compromise their larger ambitions, redirect their passions into peaceful politics, and settle into a minority party's status within a unified government.
Alliances of convenience rarely outlive their immediate aims. Josef Stalin formed an alliance with the United States and Britain for the purpose of defeating Nazi Germany. But once the war was over, he had no interest in integrating the Soviet Union into the Western economic system.
Kaplan notes that this idea appears to have come to the administration via Steven Biddle, a very sharp analyst, who thinks his own plan has "maybe one in 10" chance of generating "something like stability and security in Iraq." You'd have to be out of your mind, really, to adopt a military strategy whose author thinks the odds of failure are overwhelming unless the alternative was something like national extinction. In many ways, I feel like the requirement of "serious prospects of success" is the most unfortunately overlooked aspect of just war doctrine. Unfortunately for us, the country has George W. Bush on hand so a strategy that you'd have to be out of your mind to adopt is precisely what we're going to get
As you may know, a little while back a soldier serving in Iraq writing under the pseudonym "Scott Thomas" did a piece for TNR detailing the morally deadening aspects of wartime service in Iraq. The Weekly Standard and the conservative blogosphere whipped themselves into a frenzy wherein they convinced themselves that Thomas' story was bogus. In the course of doing so they accidentally confirmed a key detail -- Thomas unit did, just as he wrote, uncover a bunch of children's bones during the construction of a combat outpost.
The critics, however, managed to convince themselves that their discovery of this children's grave incident actually debunked Thomas' claim that he had found a mass grave even though his article didn't claim this. At the same time, the Standard was reduced to arguing that Thomas couldn't have witnesses soldiers using a Bradley Fighting Vehicle to kill dogs because -- ta da -- to do so would violate Army Standard Operating Procedure. Then they started making a big deal out of the idea that TNR editor Frank Foer labeled said he knew Thomas was a soldier with "near certainty" -- why not total certainty?
Well, now here he is -- his real name is Scott Thomas Beauchamp, he's a soldier, and as best I can tell nobody has yet brought forward any serious reason to doubt his story. Needless to say, rather than spend some time reflecting on the fact-free zone the conservative press is trying to create, Jonah Goldberg is attacking Beauchamp while Mark Steyn argues that Jonah isn't attacking him viciously enough.
That's just crazy. All these people need to stop. They need to take a deep breath. They need to apologize to the people at TNR who've wasted huge amounts of time dealing with their nonsense. And they need to think a bit about the epistemic situation they're creating where information about Iraq that they don't want to hear -- even when published in a pro-war publication -- can just be immediately dismissed as fraudulent even though the misconduct it described was far, far less severe than all sorts of other well-document misconduct in Iraq.
Back in March, I wondered why AIPAC was so eager to join forces with a man whose support for Israel is grounded in the belief that his favored foreign policy will spark a giant war that ends in the destruction of Israel at the hands of a Russo-Arab alliance. The man in question was John Haggee and his group is Christians United for Israel. Max Blumenthal went to the CUFI conference and made a video:
And their motives are, in fact, mixed. Some say they support Israel because Islam is a satanic faith. Others say it's part of their plan to bring about the apocalypse. All seem united in their hopes that someday there will be no Jews. They want a preventive attack on Iran. And Joe Lieberman thinks they're great. The link is via Rick Perlstein who has more on apocalyptics' influence on the White House.
If at some point in the future Al From gets interested in why Democratic presidential candidates have started snubbing his parties, he might want to look back at this AP story where he attacks the Democratic presidential candidates for snubbing his party, and ponder it just a bit.
It's just not a very nice thing to do. Not a very good way to win friends and influence people. I see very little evidence (for better or for worse) that Democrats have lost interest in being seen as moderate or centrist or in courting self-identified moderates and independent voters. The "radical center" is alive and well at the New America Foundation, the Third Way strategy group is the hottest thing in town, etc. From has just made a lot of people dislike him, personally, in a way that makes Democratic candidates think that hanging out as his events isn't a great career move.
He could have easily downplayed the significance of this, graciously noted that the candidates are busy and have other things to do, observed that Hillary Clinton helped found his organization and Barack Obama's top economic advisor is listed on the DLC staff page, and noted that the Democratic line on national security is now the mainstream one. Instead, he attacked the candidates for "tunnel vision." It's not a good way to make friends.
To revisit Robert Samuelson's column from yesterday, several people have pointed out to me that irrespective of mathematical quibbling, Samuelson's gotten the physics of home energy use wrong. Energy usage should grow proportionately to the surface area of your house, not to its volume.
One should also agree with Ben Adler that Samuelson's core point about "Prius politics" makes no sense. Samuelson argues that Prius ownership is really about "showing off" rather than curbing carbon emissions. And, no doubt, part of the appeal of Prius ownership is showing off. But you're showing off by reducing carbon emissions. Environmental concerns are plagued by collective action problems and if social prestige (or condemnation) can help overcome those problems that's a good thing, not an example of people being hypocrites.
One thing I think that people like Russell Baker don't get about the ongoing demise of newspapers, is that technological change actually has created a situation where the world has too many newspapers. He writes, for example, that:
Besides the Los Angeles Times, the papers showing the ravages of extensive cost-cutting include many once ranked among the country's finest: The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Des Moines Register, The Hartford Courant, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the San Jose Mercury News, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example.
Now, I mean, you have to ask yourself why do these papers exist at all? Suppose that besides the Associated Press and Reuters and ABC and NBC and CBS and CNN and PBS and NPR, the only domestic sources of congressional coverage were The Washington Post and the DC bureaus of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal what, exactly, would be the problem? The problem can't be that the world needs more than eleven different people writing the story on last night's Senate filibuster. Rather, the problem is that, historically, it's been hard to get the New York Times or The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal in San Jose or Miami or Saint Louis.
Baker snarks that "How the Internet might replace the newspaper as a source of information is never explained by those who assure you that it will." But it's clear enough. "The Internet" can't replace The Los Angeles Times's congressional coverage, but the congressional coverage of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post (plus the wire services, plus the non-print media) plus The Hill plus (if you're willing to pay) CongressDaily, CQ, and Roll Call most certainly can. What "the Internet" can do is make it very, very, very easy for a person in Los Angeles to access that kind of coverage.
The existence of "more newspapers" is very good for newspaper writers -- it means more journalism jobs. But if you live in Miami, then the San Jose Mercury News (which still does some excellent work, mind you) doesn't do you any good in the pre-internet era. Thanks to the internet, you can read any newspaper from anywhere. Which is great for newspaper readers. But it means the world doesn't need nearly as much duplication of the basic national news function. Which is -- I don't deny it -- probably bad for journalists. But I think it's good for journalism.
Or, at a minimum, it's good for journalism about national politics. And I'm pretty sure it's good for journalism about international issues. It may well be bad for reporting on local issues.
Are there people who actually rely on Larry Kudlow for investment advice? Wouldn't that be a crazy thing to do? If anyone actually does, shouldn't the free market in its infinite wisdom call forth a good means of making money off the suckers in question. I don't mean to disparage the specific claims he makes there, but in general its obvious that the guy doesn't know squat about anything.
Yesterday, with reference to the bizarre nuclear deal the Bush administration reached with India, Robert Farley made reference to our shift toward an attempt to impose an "arbitrary and self-interested" non-proliferation regime on the world, an attempt that's doomed to failure. And quite so. It's worth saying, though, that in the particular case of the India deal and self-interested is doing the bargain a kindness. What's happening in this deal is that we're granting India concessions related to its nuclear program and India is giving us . . . essentially nothing in exchange.
This passed congress thanks to a lot of effective lobbying by Indian American business associations, complete with a revolving door lobbying job for former US assistant secretary of state for arms control Stephen Rademaker once the deal was sealed. The negotiations themselves, meanwhile, were all messed up. Bush headed off to India in March 2006 hoping to conclude a deal but without one actually in place. The administration then appeared to be so determined to accomplish something on the trip and stage a big photo op that it was willing to agree to a deal that didn't achieve anything in particular for the US other than to allow the photo op.
Meanwhile, from a neoconnish perspective the fact that this undermines the nonproliferation regime is probably a good thing. They hate the idea that diplomatic agreements might actually work and undermine their efforts to start an endless series of wars.
Okay, so, Barack Obama said Hillary Clinton's criticisms of him sounding like the sort of thing Bush or Cheney would say. According to Marc Ambinder, in a not-yet-aired interview with CNN, Clinton responds "“Well, this is getting kind of silly. I’ve been called a lot of things in my life but I’ve never been called George Bush or Dick Cheney certainly. We have to ask what’s ever happened to the politics of hope?"
Here we have Clinton riding what's surely her greatest asset. Everybody knows that the right has a unique loathing for Hillary Clinton so it just seems incredibly implausible that she could have any sympathy for the Bush/Cheney view of the world. Nevertheless, Clinton must know that a lot of people think that the more hawkish faction of the Democratic Party are, in fact, proposing to put put the Bush Doctrine under more competent management rather than actually abandon it. She follows up with, "I have been absolutely clear that we’ve got to return to robust and effective diplomacy. But I don’t want to see the power and prestige of the United States President put at risk by rushing into meetings with the likes of Chavez, and Castro, and Ahmadinejad."
Obviously "rushing" into meetings is a bad thing, but this idea that the "power and prestige" of the president would be "put at risk" by meeting with the leader of a foreign country with which the US government has various issues worth discussing really does sound like what Bush thinks about these things. I should also note that by most accounts the Clinton campaign is deliberately seeking to woo the vile Cuban exile lobby with this Castro business which most people I know in DC seems to think is very clever of her.
William Lind has an article in The American Conservative with a provocative proposal about Iraq that, I think, manages to highlight the extent to which a lot of the Iraq discussion has become misguided. Lind's basic idea is that we should make some kind of accommodation with Iran, get our troops out of Iraq, and hope that Muqtada al-Sadr (or perhaps and equivalent populist, anti-American Shiite) takes the country over.
As it happens, I agree with Lind that this would be an okay outcome given the realistically possible options. One must see, though, that to many American observers "limiting Iranian influence in Iraq" is a top-tier priority. The way Lind sees it, our top priority is just that someone or other effectively control Iraq territory so that non-state actors (i.e., al-Qaeda) don't run free. The point, though, is that you can't talk about which plans will "work" for Iraq unless you talk about what it is we're trying to accomplish in broader regional terms. The "check Iranian influence" theory is very, very popular in Washington and, I think, is most of what's actually motivating the "residual forces" crowd. But the disagreement there is about broader strategic priorities and not about Iraq as such.
Defense Department photo by Master Sargent Jonathan Doti, U.S. Air Force
I have a great deal of sympathy for Ed Kilgore's skepticism about impeachment. Given that there's not a decent prospect of success, the question of whether or not it makes sense for Democrats to embrace this idea amounts to a question of whether or not it makes sense as political positioning. And it's by no means obvious to me that it does make sense as political positioning. That said, once you have the Director of the FBI testifying before congress that the Attorney General of the United States has been lying to them as part of a broad coverup of an illegal spying operation, you're passed the point where impeachment talk is a fringe concern.
Which I why I have to register some dissent from Ed's view "the questions about the 'I-word' need to be honestly addressed, without the presumption that anything less is craven." At the end of the day, the argument Ed's making really is an argument from craveness -- it's the argument that Democrats should fear the results of playing with fire, not the argument that there are no crimes in this neighborhood. Fundamentally, I think the case for craveness has some merit, and I'm not scandalized that lots of politicians don't want to embrace it, but I'm by no means unhappy to see folks with safe seats talking about it. One way or another, investigations need to continue into the domestic spying program, into the US Attorney firings, into the Scooter Libby pardon, etc., etc., etc. and without prejudging the case one should say that insofar as hard evidence (which really is different from "good enough for journalism" evidence) of abuses of power keeps surfacing, that their ought to be consequences.
It's not, after all, as if Bush is reacting to the news that FBI Director Mueller "contradicted the sworn testimony of his boss, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, by telling Congress that a prominent warrantless surveillance program was the subject of a dramatic legal debate within the Bush administration" by getting mad and sacking Gonzales or anything.
Some excellent media analysis from Brian Beutler. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have an argument. Among pundits, "Conservatives are saying exactly what you'd expect--that Hillary's correct, and that diplomacy is bad and that nobody will ever support Obama's idea." On the other side, you see liberals arguing that Obama's right, right? Or else liberals arguing that Clinton's right? Well, no:
Liberals, of course, responded as they always do--by neglecting to evaluate the merits of the two positions and offering instead a maddeningly typical meta-analysis of the argument--one that defaults with 100 percent regularity to the idea that only hawkish ideas seem serious.
There are a lot of ways in which the progressive punditocracy is more admirable than the conservative one, but this really and truly isn't one. The candidates, as Brian says, are for the first time having an exchange that at least seems to reveal something about their approach to foreign policy and ideas about how the United States of America should relate to other countries. This would be a good time for progressive journalists to try to provide their audience with arguments about who's right, arguments that, if persuasive, could shift the direction of public policy. The amateur-hour political analysis is silly -- as is always the case, Obscure Political Controversy X will prove politically damaging to Candidate A if and only if the press gives Candidate A negative press coverage as a result of OPC-X.
Like a Kabuki story, though, you can already see how this is going to play out. Not only will Thomas's character be dragged savagely through the mud (Michelle Malkin is leading the charge over at her site), but eventually some small part of Thomas's account will turn out to be slightly exaggerated and the right will erupt in righteous fervor. They were right all along! Thomas did make up his stories! The left does hate the troops! The war is going swimmingly! At least, it would be if the MSM weren't undermining it at every turn.
But it's worse than that, eh. People want to know what's happening on the ground in Iraq. And every day, you have official sources willing to tell you that things are improving, everyone's hopeful, the troops want to win, Go Army!, why do you hate America?, support the mission, etc. Meanwhile, Iraq is actually way too dangerous for even a very enterprising western reporter to just kind of wander around the country observing things and reporting them independently. For certain kinds of information, one needs to be able to rely on the statements of people in the military.
What the right is trying to do is establish a precedent where if you say things the right doesn't want to hear anonymously then you'll be treated with a presumption of guilt. No matter how vindicated the article may be, it's still the case that TNR expended a lot of person-hours on re-verifying things even though nobody on the right raised any serious reason to doubt the story other than that it wasn't something they wanted to believe. It's extremely difficult to operate that way, and people won't want to. But suppose you do identify yourself. Then you get the full Michelle Malkin treatment -- character slimed, all kinds of personal details splayed across the internet, don't say you weren't warned. Thus, we'll have all our information coming from official sources, just as the right likes it (until, of course, there's a Democratic administration).
If there was any goal in state-level politics that would justify weird abuses of power, I think trying to dislodge State Senate President Joseph Bruno from authority in Albany might just be it. New York State politics is, in general, just horrible beyond belief, featuring all kinds of shady deals, near-dictatorial authority in the hands of the bosses, etc., etc., etc.
That said, Elliot Spitzer's really gotten himself covered in muck here. I'm not sure it's quite right to draw a parallel between the privilege claims Spitzer is asserting and the ones Bush is asserting, since it's entirely possible that New York State law is legitimately different from federal law on this score, but the underlying conduct that prompted the investigation Spitzer is stonewalling is ridiculous.
Basically, Spitzer directed the State Police to go investigate Bruno in hopes of digging up dirt that could be used against him in order to help the governor gain leverage in their political battles. Precisely the reason why I get upset about things like, massive illegal secret surveillance programs, is that they're prone to just this sort of abuse. It's just really, really egregious behavior.
I haven't seen any publicity around this yet, but if you go to eMusic, the new Stars album In Our Bedroom After the War is now available. I haven't finished listening to it yet, so I'll refrain from further comment, but I just thought I'd get the word out.
Incidentally, I note that the official release date isn't until September 25. What's the point of this kind of delay? I mean, I realize it happens all the time these days, but it seems weird.
I'm sometimes not sure whether or not stuff that pops up on the Atlantic frontpage is available to non-subscribers (you should, naturally, subcribe) but this December 2004 Robert Kaplan article about how the rise of the moderate Islamist AK Party in Turkey is a good thing is really good and well-worth digesting in light of their recent electoral victory and some of the fretting over it I've seen.
Here's a September 25 letter to The Wall Street Journal from General P.X. Kelley, Commandant of the Marine Corps during the Reagan administration, praising a wingnutty Wall Street Journal op-ed as "a superb counterpoint to those 'nay-sayers' who have failed to understand how our commitment [to South Vietnam] did, in fact, stem the tide of Communism in the region." And here he is in the November 25 Washington Post titled "Don't Give Terrorists A Timetable." He's not, in short, much of a liberal.
In today's Washington Post he teams up with Robert F. Turner, a Reagan administration lawyer, to point out that George W. Bush is committing war crimes. I can't imagine Bush or Cheney actually ever being made to stand trial at the Hague but, at a minimum, I look forward to there being some list of countries neither man can visit lest he face an arrest warrant.
In response to Baghdad residents enjoying a decreasing number of hours per day during which their electricity works, the Bush administration has decided to stop keeping track of this indicator.
J-Pod can snark all he likes, but I think the evidence strongly supports the contention that Frank Foer sees himself as repositioning The New Republic as a non-ideological or post-ideological enterprise. If J-Pod thinks that's a somewhat odd direction to go in, I don't disagree, but it's been a consistent theme of things Foer's said about the magazine since taking over.
But this gets us to what's really weird about the Scott Beauchamp pseudo-scandal, namely that the theory that TNR would publish a bogus article alleging mild misconduct on the part of American troops in order to advance TNR's anti-war agenda tends to founder on the fact that the magazine doesn't have an anti-war agenda. This isn't an obscure fact about the magazine! Do they imagine there was an editorial meeting where Brad Plumer said "let's run an editorial about how the US should withdraw from Iraq" and Foer countered, saying "nah, too obvious, instead of coming out against the war let's make up a story about killing dogs" and everyone cheered while Lawrence Kaplan sulked in the corner? Wouldn't cutting down on the number of Robert Kagan feature articles the magazine runs be a smarter way of shifting left on foreign policy? I feel like a bit of an idiot needing to defend a not-anti-war publication's decision to publish a not-anti-war article against an onrushing tide of idiots, but that's apparently what the world's come to.
Here's some more from Brian Beutler on the worsening US-India nuclear deal. As approved by congress, we were going to violate international law and give India nuclear assistance unless India made a new nuclear test. The Indians, it seems, were prepared to look that gift horse in the face, so the Bush administration is hatching one of its ignore the law schemes, whereby "Bush has agreed to go beyond the terms of the deal that Congress approved, promising to help India build a nuclear fuel repository and find alternative sources of nuclear fuel in the event of an American cutoff, skirting some of the provisions of the law."
Needless to say, we'll also be urging the international community to clamp down on Iran's nuclear weapons program. The background here is that conservative Republicans think the NPT is useless and that the correct way to prevent "bad guys" from acquiring nuclear weapons is brute force (c.f., invasion of Iraq, desire to go to war with Iran) -- a series of unprovoked, illegal, preventive wars. Liberals tend to think that's wrong, but Democratic Party elected officials are really, really good at putting important questions of principle aside in order to pander to domestic ethnic lobbies, thus most Democrats backed the bill (including Sens. Clinton and Obama -- if John Edwards or Bill Richardson has ever said anything about this please let me know)
Not only do I agree with Ezra (who, I guess, is agreeing with me) about this newspaper business, but one should go further -- on the internet, nobody even knows you're a newspaper. Which is to say that in our bold digital future, and even to some extent our present, the distinction between a "newspaper" a "magazine" a "television station" a "radio network" a "wire service" etc. all collapses. At the moment, true, nobody's confusing The New York Times with CNN, but it's still the case that nytimes.com contains a mixture of words and video clips, whereas CNN.com contains . . . a mixture of words and video clips. For that matter, TheAtlantic.com also contains a mixture of words and video clips.
A new Democracy Corps survey indicates that young people (i.e., those aged 18-29) hate the Republicans. Or, at least, the GOP is massively unpopular. Some non-obvious things I gleaned from the report:
White young people like the GOP just fine; the GOP has a two point advantage. The issue is that black and hispanic youth loathe Republicans and the younger demographic has disproportionately few non-Hispanic whites.
Democrats have an edge among college graduates, but it's small at +6 compared to the advantage with less educated groups.
Young people don't really like John Edwards. He gets a negative six net rating, similar to John McCain (negative eight), but way worse than Clinton (+10), Giuliani (+11), or Obama (+18)
When you think it through, none of that is actually all that surprising, but it's worth keeping in mind. The internet features a lot of young, college educated white male liberals (oftentimes big John Edwards fans!) and it is true that young people are pretty liberal these days. Nevertheless, it's not true that the young college educated white male liberals of the blogosphere are typical of the youth cohort. The Democratic leanings of young people are driven by giant advantages among women (+28), people with no college education (+28), Hispanics (+42), and blacks (+76). Your typical twentysomething white male college graduate seems, just like a typical thirtysomething (or fourtysomething, or...) white male college graduate to be a Republican.
I'm never really sure when the best time to post about people's books is, but since the book party for Chris Mooney's Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming is beginning very soon, I figure this is as good a time as any. When Chris' first book, The Republican War on Science, came out one common line of response was "well, aren't liberals just as bad." The new book is, in a sense, a rebuttal to that. This isn't, in short, a prolemic about how global warming is causing massive hurricanes and coal interests are responsible for the destruction of New Orleans.
Instead, it's a very serious, measured, thoughtful, interesting look at complicated issues in play here, where the science isn't always perfectly clear nor is it always clear how scientists ought to behave when a pressing political issue impinges on an area where scientists know something about the issue, but there's also a great deal of uncertainty. Personally, I like reading science books more than I like reading political books (in part, obviously, because I read and talk about politics all day anyway), but Chris' book combines genres in the best possible way.
New York Governor Elliot Spitzer seems to be semi-backing down on the question of whether or not his aides can testify about why State Police were spying on State Senate leader Joseph Bruno. The new idea is to get them to testify before an inquiry led by the state ethics commission in order to pre-empt Bruno's preference of holding hearings in the Senate to humiliate the governor.
This Times article about Spitzer's relationship with NY Attorney-General Andrew Cuomo is also pretty interesting. In context, it helps make the point that in regard to this matter at least, American political institutions are sort of operating as intended. Bruno and Spitzer are going at it, obviously. But Cuomo, rather than acting as first and foremost a loyal Democrat and seeking zealously to shield Spitzer from scrutiny, is acting first and foremost as a selfish, ambitious politician happy to embarrass both Spitzer and Bruno in hopes of himself becoming governor some day.
Much of the crisis in Washington today boils down precisely to the congressional GOP's unwillingness not so much to "do the right thing" but unwillingness to even be petty and power-hungry; their decision to see their job as backstopping the president come what may rather than to jealously horde the powers of their own offices.
Don't tell Mark Penn or the national press corps, but it seems (via Andrew Sullivan) that the public mostly backs Obama on the question of meetings.
As some people have pointed out, it's a little bit unclear what, exactly, the policy disagreement here amounts to. The political disagreement, though, is pretty clear. Clinton is making the same kind of calculation that led people to think Democrats needed to authorize the war in 2002, or keep quiet about the NSA surveillance program in 2005, or posture as "tough" on Iran in 2006, etc., etc., etc. Those kind of political calculations, however, have implications for governing. First John Edwards by taking on the "war on terror" construct, and now Obama by challenging the Very Serious People on the subject of meetings are starting to edge toward a new Democratic approach -- one that involves actually challenging the post-9/11 miasma into which the national conversation about foreign policy has landed -- while Clinton is still fully inside the defensive crouch.
The essay is a little rambly since it's structured as a review of a bunch of books, at least one of which seems to have been a bit off-topic, but Samantha Power sure is smart.
Something doesn't add up here, eh? Just yesterday, Helen Cooper, Mark Mazzetti, and Jim Rutenberg reported for The New York Times on "Saudis’ Role in Iraq Frustrates U.S. Officials". Specifically:
One senior administration official says he has seen evidence that Saudi Arabia is providing financial support to opponents of Mr. Maliki. He declined to say whether that support was going to Sunni insurgents because, he said, “That would get into disagreements over who is an insurgent and who is not.”
The officials speaking to The New York Times had to stay anonymous because "openly criticizing Saudi Arabia would further alienate the Saudi royal family at a time when the United States is still trying to enlist Saudi support for Mr. Maliki and the Iraqi government, and for other American foreign policy goals in the Middle East, including an Arab-Israeli peace plan." Nevertheless, the sources were "clearly intent on sending a pointed signal to a top American ally" in part "because it appears that Saudi Arabia has stepped up efforts to undermine the Maliki government."
Today, though, comes a different Times article, David Cloud's "U.S. Set to Offer Huge Arms Deal to Saudi Arabia". This $20 billion package had been getting held up by Israeli concerns, but "senior officials who described the package on Friday said they believed that the administration had resolved those concerns, in part by promising Israel $30.4 billion in military aid over the next decade, a significant increase over what Israel has received in the past 10 years."
Putting this all together, we're going to give Israel billions of dollars in bribes in order to get them to not object to our decision to sell huge quantities of advanced weaponry to a country that is arming the people we're fighting in Iraq. Makes sense to me!
Photo by Flickr user al-Fassam used under a Creative Commons license
Maybe if the Prime Minister of Iraq doesn't like our commanding general in Iraq and wants us to stop arming Sunni groups, but the US government thinks our commanding general is a smart guy and we want to intensify the arming of Sunni groups that we ought to step back, take a deep breath, and decide to leave Iraq to the Iraqis.
It would be ridiculous, after all, to sack an American general because Nouri al-Maliki wants us to. But it would also be ridiculous for an American general to be running around Iraq implementing policies contrary to those of the Iraqi government we're supposed to be supporting. The best solution is to shake hands and go our separate ways.
On top of whatever else has been said, Anne-Marie Slaughter's Post op-ed seems to involve an odd definition of "partisan"
The true believers in the Bush revolution are furious. John R. Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, sounded the alarm in February with a broadside against the agreement that the State Department and its Asian negotiating partners had reached with North Korea, warning President Bush that it contradicted "fundamental premises" of his foreign policy. [...] Tony Smith published a blistering essay on Iraq in The Washington Post several months ago, attacking not neoconservative policymakers but liberal thinkers who had, he argued, become enablers for the neocons and thus were the real villains. [...] In the blogosphere, pillorying Hillary Clinton is a full-time sport. [...] Obama has come in for his share of abuse as well.
Say what you will about this stuff, but none of it is partisan. Bolton was, after all, perfectly correct to say that the deal Nick Burns struck with North Korea and that Bush agreed to contradicts the basic premises of the Bush foreign policy. The partisan thing for Bolton to have done would have been to keep his qualms quiet and let the Great Leader bask in praise. Similarly, for Democrats to attack Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama isn't partisanship. What's partisanship is when people refrain from criticizing their party's leading figures.
I think this is a pretty strong contender. Let's consider that this -- "my own view is that, considering the efforts all candidates go to in creating their image, discussing what they wear and whether they display cleavage at work, or ever, in their quest to make the nation comfortable with the idea of them holding ultimate power is legit" -- isn't even the most ridiculous thing Lisa Shiffren says.
Like a lot of people, I used to be a huge Simpsons fan and then kind of drifted away from the show over the years. The movie, though, is totally hysterical, much like the show in its happiest of days. It even has an awesomely mixed politcal message so I'm sure the blogosphere can spend next week arguing over it.
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Heads in the Sand
