There's an awful lot that's weird about Ron Fournier's writeup of the Democratic presidential forum, but this is particularly weird:
"I think it's a position that John certainly has taken," she said, drawing laughter from the crowd. It was not clear whether the audience was laughing with her or at her.
I was in the room, and I promise you it was totally clear that the audience (myself included) was laughing with her. I'm genuinely baffled as to how there could be confusion about this: she made a joke and people laughed, including a lot of people who probably won't vote for her. It was, in the moment, pretty funny.
Via Isaac Chotiner, Matt Continetti busts out what's rapidly becoming my least-favorite argumentative tactic. He says that in response to the Pollack/O'Hanlon op-ed, "Antiwar Democrats immediately started dancing the Iraq shuffle, in which you ignore your opponent's arguments, shift the terms of the debate, and attack his motivation and character." He then supports that contention by . . . ignoring all the counterarguments that have been offered.
It's a big, bad internet out there and it'll always be possible to find all kinds of responses to any widely discussed event. And, yes, if you deliberately ignore the more substantive responses in favor of purely focusing on the derision -- derision that will often be motivated by the fact that substantive responses are already widely circulating -- you can "prove" that nobody's grappling with the arguments easily.
In non-NBA sports news, Barry Bonds tied Hank Aaron's home run record last night. This opinion is, presumably, valueless since I'm not really a baseball fan, but I take a controversial pro-Bonds position. It's unfortunate, perhaps, that the holder of an important record should have played during the steroid era. Still, I don't see the achievement as meaningfully "tainted" by allegations of Bonds' steroid use.
The use, after all, is presumed to have happened during a time when steroid use was widespread in the league, presumably by, among others, the pitchers whose pitches Bonds was hitting and the fielders who were running down his fly balls. If there were some evidence that the introduction of steroids into the game biased things overall in the direction of more home runs, that would be one thing, but my understanding is that research doesn't show that. See, i.e., this paper PDF: "Before we can reach any conclusions about the contribution of steroids to performance in professional baseball, we first must know something about home run hitting. What was home run hitting like before there were steroids? What is it like now that there is some evidence of steroid use? In a nutshell, the answer is that there are no differences." Bonds is the greatest hitter to ever play, steroids or no.
Photo by Flickr user FemaleTrumpet02 used under a Creative Commons license
Ever since I stopped smoking, I drink a ton of caffeine and find myself occasionally amused by others' notion of prodigious consumption -- "drank my crack, starbucks iced coffee, two of them" -- Beutler told me yesterday afternoon he'd been so tired he drank two coffees and a Diet Coke which is what I drank before 9AM Saturday morning and had easily doubled by noon.
At any rate, I really didn't use to be like this. Always enjoyed my morning coffee and my diet sodas, but without the constant cigarette-based infusions of stimulant, it's a whole different story. Much better for me than the previous situation, I suppose, but for 2008 I should probably work on getting things under control.
This Chicago Tribunearticle about the new West Building at the McCormick Place Convention Center sure makes me wish YearlyKos had been held there rather than in the "even-larger South Building, which flaunts a grand concourse that's more than twice as high as the one at the United Terminal at O'Hare International Airport" and managed to be so enormous that it made a very large gathering feel dreary and empty all the time.
Of all the weird notions to pass through Washington in recent years, surely the hardest to explain was the notion that earmark disclosure would cut down on the number of earmarked projects. Members of congress insert earmarks in order to get credit for earmarking, so it should have been entirely predictable that more disclosure leads to more earmarks. After all, what member of congress wants it to be public knowledge that he's in the bottom 20 quintile in terms of brining home the bacon? That's an idea issue to add on to any general election or primary challenge -- Rep. So-And-So is lazy and out of touch with his district.
While I've been busy conventioneering, it appears that the House of Representatives passed a really unfortunate surveillance bill. Spencer Ackerman reports on the White House's direct interventions to thwart a compromise and here's Marty Lederman on the bill itself.
Anyways, the Democratic presidential candidates all seem opposed to this, but I'd put the odds of any of them actually taking action to reduce their own powers once in office at approximately zero percent. Then, perhaps, at some point years from now, some story will break about a truly abusive use of these surveillance authorities (just look at what Elliot Spitzer did with the State Police and imagine what uses an oversight-free mass wiretapping scheme could be put to) and there'll be some kind of rollback.
In today's edition of the annals of the new gilded age, Hal Steger informs us that "a few million doesn’t go as far as it used to." As Gary Rivlin reports:
Silicon Valley is thick with those who might be called working-class millionaires — nose-to-the-grindstone people like Mr. Steger who, much to their surprise, are still working as hard as ever even as they find themselves among the fortunate few. Their lives are rich with opportunity; they generally enjoy their jobs. They are amply cushioned against the anxieties and jolts that worry most people living paycheck to paycheck.
But many such accomplished and ambitious members of the digital elite still do not think of themselves as particularly fortunate, in part because they are surrounded by people with more wealth — often a lot more.
This is part of the weirdness of the new era of hyper-inequality, where not only does the top one percent pulls away from the other 99 percent, but the top 0.001 percent pulls away from the other 99.999 percent. Even very rich people feel the even richer pulling further and further away and don't feel themselves to be as privileged as, objectively speaking, they really are.
It seems that when Tom Tancredo got asked about the fact that the State Department called his plan to bomb Mecca and Medina to deter terrorism "reprehensable" and "absolutely crazy" he came up with this reply:
"Yes," Tancredo answered. "The State Department -- boy, when they start complaining about things I say, I feel a lot better about the things I say, I'll tell you right now."
It's striking to recall how recently it was that this sort of "if the knowledgeable professionals at the State Department think it's a bad idea, it must be the right thing to do" mentality was conventional wisdom among conservatives and liberal hawks -- "Arabists" was a term of derision to indicate people without the vision and idealism necessary to give us a horrifying bloodbath in Iraq and call it democracy.
Moira Whelan reminds me of an easily overlooked moment during the YearlyKos Democratic debate when Barack Obama emphasized that thought China is in some sense a competitor, it's not an enemy of the United States and we should strive to avoid turning it into one.
I wholeheartedly agree and think this is by far the biggest issue in this campaign that nobody's talking about. Sentiments about China policy tend not to break down along straightforward party lines. I think Bush's China policy has been mostly okay (certainly a triumph compared to most of the other things he's done) whereas neocons like Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan saw a "National Humiliation" in Bush's unwillingness to gin up a war with China over the EP-3 spy plane incident. Under the circumstances, it'd really be nice to hear what some different candidates think about this issue in some level of detail, but instead Obama made this brief remark and then we heard about China (from him and from the others) in purely economic terms rather than as a foreign policy issue.
Photo by Flickr user Mooney47 used under a Creative Commons license
Paul Krugman does an excellent job of expressing something I was mumbling incoherently while walking around Chicago the other day:
And even if you believe Mrs. Clinton’s contention that her positions could never be influenced by lobbyists’ money — a remark that drew boos and hisses from the Chicago crowd — there’s reason to worry about the big contributions she receives from the insurance and drug industries. Are they simply betting on the front-runner, or are they also backing the Democratic candidate least likely to hurt their profits?
This is the right point to make about candidates and their donors. Worrying about whether or not contributions are corrupting people is rarely going to provide a definitive conclusion and doesn't necessarily tell you much about the merits of a proposal, either. The issue is that we should probably assume the people giving the money have some basic level of competence. The health care industry has, over the years, become a major financial backer of Clinton's. It seems they feel that she doesn't pose a huge threat to their interests. Maybe they're making a huge mistake but, as Krugman says, given that she hasn't committed herself to anything resembling a specific universal health care plan, we have to worry that they may be right.
Here's the video. He's pointing out that the people now telling us something awful will happen if we leave Iraq are the very people whose dim understanding of Iraq has us in the current jam:
The best part of the clip, though, is when Mitt Romney interrupts with the nonsensical question "has he forgotten 9/11?" I'm not sure anything better sums up the vacuity of conventional present-day conservative thinking about national security than that intervention: the presumption that, somehow, endless invocations of that horrible crime will justify anything at all, no matter how unrelated, how pointless, or how counterproductive it may be.
Is made by Michael Tomasky and focuses on the pragmatic case that it's "the dumbest move the Dems could make." And certainly I'm sympathetic to that political judgment. Were I Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or someone else charged with winning elections, this seems like a risk that mostly features downside. But as a journalist, or a pundit it seems odd to primarily focus on this point.
That the votes aren't there is a completely sound point. But on the other hand, it's uncontroversial to say the Democrats need to do oversight, need to bring things to light. Why shouldn't Democrats maintain as a goal that if such oversight reveals further evidence of crimes to convince the opposition and the public of that fact? It's all fairly hypothetical, yes, but it seems curious to prejudge the outcome of an investigations into an unpopular and seemingly criminal administration in its favor merely because pointing out the constitutional implications of its criminality would be politicaly inconvenient.
The traditional answer, the U.N. Security Council, no longer suffices, if it ever did. Under the United Nations Charter, states are prohibited from using force except in cases of self-defense or when explicitly authorized by the Security Council. But this presupposes that the members of the Security Council can agree on the threat and the appropriate response. From Rwanda to Kosovo to Darfur, however, and from Iraq to North Korea to Iran, the Security Council has not been able to agree and has failed to act decisively. Its permanent members are deeply divided by conflicting interests as well as by clashing beliefs about the nature of sovereignty and the right of the international community to intervene in the internal affairs of nations.
If not the Security Council, then who? The answer is the world's democracies, the United States and its democratic partners in Europe and Asia. As the war in Kosovo showed, democracies can agree and act effectively even when major non-democracies, such as Russia and China, do not. Because they share a common view of what constitutes a just order within states, they tend to agree on when the international community has an obligation to intervene. Shared principles provide the foundation for legitimacy.
What is a patriotic Chinese defense official supposed to make of the idea that the United States claims that it and its key allies should be permitted to invade any country anywhere without China's agreement while China, presumably, can only intervene with the approval of UNSC P-5 members like the US, France, and England? It would be one thing to try to read the Kosovo precedent as saying that NATO won't give China a veto over actions in its own backyard.
But to survey the wreckage in Iraq, and conclude that despite the lessons seen there we can't defer to the UN (even with an exception for self defense) on the grounds that the UN might sometimes say no is very weak tea. Meanwhile, for all this talk of an alliance of democracies, I see no particular sign that India, South Africa, Brazil, etc., are actually clamoring for a more interventionist United States or Russia's marginalization on the world stage. I don't say we should give China and absolute veto over US policy, but if we don't want China to become an enemy we need the international rules of the road to be something a responsible Chinese leader could possibly accept. Two-tiered sovereignty that classes China among the disfavored nations isn't going to cut it.
I, for one, am totally shocked to learn that the Bush administration's efforts to flood the Iraq war zone with weapons hasn't so much generated law, order, and security as it has created a situation where "U.S. military officials do not know what happened to 30 percent of the weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces from 2004 through early this year as part of an effort to train and equip the troops."
This is the kind of thing that makes proposals to refuse to admit defeat in Iraq by maintaining an indefinite "train & equip" mission there so potentially dangerous. Introducing more and more weapons and expertise in using them into the civil war dynamic runs the risk of just making things worse. The good news, however, is that as best I can tell from the article the GAO thinks things are better in 2006-2007 than they were in 2004-2005. The bad news is that the especially bad period for the equipment program when "weapons distribution was haphazard and rushed and failed to follow established procedures" came "when security training was led by Gen. David H. Petraeus, who now commands all U.S. forces in Iraq."
Photo by Flickr user Joe Logon used under a Creative Commons license
Via Robert Farley, a great Kingdaddy post on how the existence of modern electrical infrastructure in Iraq erodes the viability of a traditional "enclave" approach to counterinsurgency.
Here's an interesting test case for the press. It seems that at yesterday's GOP debate, Rudy Giuliani derided the idea that higher taxes raise revenues as a "Democratic, liberal" assumption and put forward his alternative view that you generate revenue by lowering tax rates. This is a stunning confession of total ignorance of tax policy and economics by the GOP front runner. So how did the press cover it? Chris Cilizza at the Fix lives down to my expectations by totally ignoring the fact that Giuliani is incorrect:
"There is a liberal Democratic assumption that if you raise taxes, you raise more money," said Giuliani to huge applause from the crowd assembled at Drake University.
Michael Shear in The Washington Post's page A1 story also doesn't care about the merits of the issue:
Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani sparked loud applause when he declared that "the knee-jerk liberal Democratic reaction -- raise taxes to get money -- very often is a very big mistake." And Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) declared his disappointment in the Democratic push to end the war in Iraq.
Nor does Stephen Braun of The Los Angeles Timescare at all whether or not GOP tax policy makes sense:
Referring to last week's devastating bridge collapse in Minneapolis, the GOP rivals found common ground in insisting that increased private investment from cutting taxes would provide more money to repair the nation's failing infrastructure. And they teamed up in turning their aim at the Democratic Party's presidential field.
Adam Nagourney at The New York Times, by contrast, doesn't go nearly as far as I'd like, but does way better than his colleagues at the major papers. Here he is on the NYT political blog:
Mr. Giuliani proceeded to explain that when he was mayor of New York he had cut taxes, and that those tax cuts had produced revenues that allowed him to finance bridge reconstruction. (Actually, there’s a good argument that it was the stock market boom in New York that brought all that money into the city’s coffers, but we’ll let that pass for now).
And here he is teamed up with Michael Cooper in the print edition:
Mr. Giuliani said that as mayor of New York, he had increased revenues to pay for bridge and road repair by cutting taxes, thereby jolting the economy, and that he would do the same thing as president. The city’s treasury in that period was flush largely with revenues produced by the stock-market boom of the late 1990s.
It'd be nice to see reporters go further than Nagourney does here, but improvements at the margin deserve recognition and the Times is doing a much better job than the Post here.
I found Michael Ignatieff's reflective essay on getting things wrong about Iraq to be somehow pleasantly soothing. But then someone pointed out to me that the whole thing is founded on the absurd premise that his errors in judgment have something to do with the mindset of academia versus the mindset of practical politics.
This is, when you think about it, totally wrong. Academics in the field of Middle East studies were overwhelmingly opposed to the war. Similarly, international relations scholars opposed the war by a very large margin. The war's foci of intellectual support were in the institutions of the conservative movement, and in the DC think tanks and the punditocracy where the war had a lot of non-conservative support. People with relevant academic expertise -- notably people who weren't really on the left politically -- were massively opposed to the war. To imply the reverse is to substantially obscure one of the main lessons of the war, namely that we should pay more attention to what regional experts think and give substantially less credence to the idea that think tankers are really "independent" of political machinations.
One of the most interesting people I met at YearlyKos was Dan Grant, who worked in Afghanistan and Iraq on democracy-building programs and is now running for congress in Texas' 10th congressional district. It's not the most liberal seat on the planet, but the GOP incumbent ran unopposed in 2004 and only got 55 percent of the vote in 2006, so given that the very softest of targets have almost all broken Democratic already and that the larger political climate continues to be very favorable to Democrats (see, e.g., this PDF from Democracy Corps).
Dan himself is both a cool guy and also has the kind of meaningful, detailed knowledge of US Middle East policy issues -- not just the right stance on the war, but real understanding of and engagement with what's happening -- that it seems to me the congress could use more of. He also has a good politician's voice, firm handshake, and ability to very earnestly say things like "the mortar shells didn't really care whether or not I was wearing a uniform when they blew up my office." At any rate, I don't think I really endorse candidates per se, but check out his website.
I have to agree with Sam Rosenfeld that Jon Chait's argument about the significance of neocon Robert Kagan teaming up with "Iraq war opponent and former Howard Dean supporter" Ivo Daalder to write an op-ed would be more convincing if Daalder had, in fact, opposed the Iraq War rather than supported it.
Lucy Caldwell has the news that Caroline Giuliani's Facebook profile "designates her political views as "liberal" and—until this morning—proclaimed her membership in the Facebook group 'Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack).' According to her profile, she withdrew from the Obama group at 6 a.m. Monday, after Slate sent her an inquiry about it."
Gonzales informed Pearl that the Justice Department was about to announce some good news: a terrorist in U.S. custody—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who was the primary architect of the September 11th attacks—had confessed to killing her husband. [...] There were no named witnesses to his initial confession, and no solid information about what form of interrogation might have prodded him to talk, although reports had been published, in the Times and elsewhere, suggesting that C.I.A. officers had tortured him. At a hearing held at Guantánamo, Mohammed said that his testimony was freely given, but he also indicated that he had been abused by the C.I.A. (The Pentagon had classified as “top secret” a statement he had written detailing the alleged mistreatment.) And although Mohammed said that there were photographs confirming his guilt, U.S. authorities had found none.
A surprising number of people close to the case are dubious of Mohammed’s confession. [...] Asra Nomani [,] Special Agent Randall Bennett, the head of security for the U.S. consulate in Karachi when Pearl was killed [,] And Judea Pearl, Daniel’s father[.]
“K.S.M. is the poster boy for using tough but legal tactics. He’s the reason these techniques exist. You can save lives with the kind of information he could give up.” Yet Mohammed’s confessions may also have muddled some key investigations. [...] Colonel Dwight Sullivan, the top defense lawyer at the Pentagon’s Office of Military Commissions, which is expected eventually to try Mohammed for war crimes, called his serial confessions “a textbook example of why we shouldn’t allow coercive methods.”
The Phoenix Program, from the Vietnam War. Critics, including military historians, have described it as a program of state-sanctioned torture and murder. A Pentagon-contract study found that, between 1970 and 1971, ninety-seven per cent of the Vietcong targeted by the Phoenix Program were of negligible importance. But, after September 11th, some C.I.A. officials viewed the program as a useful model.
One psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell [...] Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that “learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.” Mitchell, he said, “draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ ability to forecast the future—when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence.”
“At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”
According to sources familiar with interrogation techniques, the hanging position is designed, in part, to prevent detainees from being able to sleep. [...] An American Bar Association report, published in 1930, which was cited in a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, said, “It has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired.”
“Waterboarding works,” the former officer said. “Drowning is a baseline fear. So is falling. People dream about it. It’s human nature. Suffocation is a very scary thing. When you’re waterboarded, you’re inverted, so it exacerbates the fear. It’s not painful, but it scares the shit out of you.” (The former officer was waterboarded himself in a training course.) Mohammed, he claimed, “didn’t resist. He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” He said, “A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable. K.S.M. was just a little doughboy. He couldn’t stand toe to toe and fight it out.”
Ultimately, however, Mohammed claimed responsibility for so many crimes that his testimony became to seem inherently dubious. In addition to confessing to the Pearl murder, he said that he had hatched plans to assassinate President Clinton, President Carter, and Pope John Paul II. [...] [E]ven supporters, such as John Brennan, acknowledge that much of the information that coercion produces is unreliable. As he put it, “All these methods produced useful information, but there was also a lot that was bogus.” When pressed, one former top agency official estimated that “ninety per cent of the information was unreliable.
So in summary, what they've hit upon is a protocol based on the best practices developed by Soviet and medieval torturers alike to accomplish torture's traditional goal -- the extraction of false confessions -- and seem to have wound up with a bunch of false confessions. Which, of course, is precisely what you'd expect to wind up with if you thought for a minute about why governments have, historically, resorted to the systemic deployment of torture.
The Project on Defense Alternatives has a report out, "Toward a Sustainable Defense Posture" arguing for some modest reductions in America's currently gargantuan defense budget. Specifically, they say that "Cutting two air force fighter wings and two navy fighter wings (along with their associated aircraft carriers) can save the nation more than $60 billion over the next five years." More than enough to finance America's share of a global universal education plan with plenty left over for mosquito nets or clean drinking water or whatever else you like.
Because if they included Mexico or Brazil or South Africa, there would be a small chance of intervention being vetoed. (And, of course, how stupid is Daalder to think that Kagan would respect France's veto in a future debate over intervention?)
Exactly. But this is precisely the problem. A lot of folks -- normally disgruntled former Iraq hawks, but also including Daalder who I think never backed the war -- seem to be grasping for an international mechanism that would provide legitimacy but somehow also never block actions the US government wanted to take. Obviously, though, this isn't going to work. The idea that some international organizations say-so might grant legitimacy to something or other is inextricably bound up with the idea that the IO might say no.
In Chicago I read this Joe Klein column on the DLC that, by the dates, must have been submitted before The New York Times published Noam Scheiber's op-ed on the DLC but been published a bit later. They both, however, say essentially the same thing: The organization has basically [UPDATE: the rest of this sentence originally went missing from the post for some reason] outlived its usefulness.
What's more, several "centrist" or "New Democrat" types were around at YearlyKos and they all basically agreed with Klein and Scheiber (who are, themselves, really members of this same political tendency), which I found interesting. The proliferation of centrist groups in particular -- Third Way, CNAS, Hamilton Project, etc. -- plus the broader proliferation of groups doing independent policy analysis (Center for American Progress, New America, etc.) has basically created a situation where the DLC as such increasingly stands out for its leaders' (and in particular Al From's) idiosyncrasies rather than anything capable of mustering broader support.
Mike Crowley, seeking vacation-themed music videos in honor of the Iraqi parliament's decision to defer political reconciliation and focus on taking a holiday instead, offers us Madonna's "Holiday." I'll counter with Green Day's "Holiday."
It turns out that there doesn't seem to be a video for Weezer's "Holiday," which is probably my favorite song with that title.
For even more coverage of the Daalder/Kagan op-ed see Mark Leon Goldberg, who points out that in the post-Cold War era the UN Security Coucil actually authorizes the deployment of troops fairly frequently. It's refused to do so twice, and one of those times was Iraq, so by any reasonable criteria adopting a "listen to the UN" rule wouldn't have been superior to what was actually done in the world. One might add that a far larger problem than inability to secure UN approval for worthwhile missions is the unwillingness of member states to contribute sufficient resources to authorized missions.
Last, one should note that the Daalder/Kagan alternative of using force when our "democratic partners in Europe and Asia" agree and, indeed, "even when some of our democratic friends disagree" arguably means that Iraq fits the test. We didn't get much meaningful help from any country other than the UK, but the formal coalition was quite broad and included Albania, Australia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, and Turkey among European or Asian democracies.
In other words, if you think the main lesson of Iraq is that we need to pretend we've learned important lessons while adhering to the same basic doctrines, then this is a great proposal.
Another classic "me or your lying eyes" moment as George W. Bush decides to contradicts Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the question of Iran's role in Afghanistan. Karzai, who only lives in Afghanistan and runs its government, calls Iran "a helper." Bush, though, says he's got it wrong.
I agree with Bruce Bartlett (and, I think, a lot of people these days) that the main thing the gay marriage debate demonstrates is that the government should really get out of the marriage business. The sanctity of marriage and the legal rights of romantic couples are, at the end of the day, conceptually distinct issues that really ought to be distinguished.
The way things ought to work is that a couple is granted a civil union (or not) by the state which entails certain legal rights and responsibilities and granted a marriage (or not) by a church, mosque, or synagogue which confers whatever status it is that the relevant faith community deems applicable. There's nothing wrong, even, with having a merged service or giving clerics the power to perform the civil ceremony simultaneously with a religious one (tradition and convenience alike indicate that one shouldn't need two ceremonies), but as a technical legal matter it should stay separate. Individual religious leaders (and denominations) either will or won't officiate gay marriages (just as many rabbis won't perform a mixed marriage) and that will remain their business, which is what it ought to be. Meanwhile, gay couples and straight couples could enjoy not only the same rights (as in a standard "civil union" scheme), but the same status under civil law as well.
I'm almost done with Peter Hart's Mick: The Real Michael Collins, and though the book has some commendable aspects to it, it also has a certain quality that keeps rubbing me the wrong way. Louis Menand's critique of the biography genre seem to perhaps overstate the case, but at least nail the problem with Hart's book:
[T]he premise of biographies is that the private can account for the public, that the subject’s accomplishments map onto his or her psychic history, and this premise is the justification for digging up the traumatic, the indefensible, and the shameful and getting it all into print. How centrally that kind of information figures in the biographical account depends on the tact and ingenuity of the biographer, but a biography that did not use events in its subject’s personal life to explain his or her renown is almost unimaginable. Still, the premise poses a few problems.
For one thing, it leads biographers to invert the normal rules of evidence, on the Rosebud assumption that the real truth about a person involves the thing that is least known to others. A letter discovered in a trunk, or an entry in a personal notebook, trumps the public testimony of a hundred friends and colleagues. Biographers go into a professional swoon over stories that some famous person has made a bonfire of a portion of his or her correspondence, or that notebooks in an archive are embargoed until the year 2050. That stuff must explain everything! Why should we especially credit a remark made in a diary or a personal letter, though? The penalty for exaggeration and deception in those forms is virtually nonexistent. People lie in letters all the time, and they use diaries to moan and to vent. These are rarely sites for balanced and considered reflection. They are sites for gossip, flattery, and self-deception. But diaries and letters are the materials with which biographies are built, generally in the belief that the “real” person is the private person, and the public person is mostly a performance.
As Brendan Nyhan says this seems in many ways to parallel some of the pathologies of political journalism. John Edwards' anti-poverty program should be dismissed because he has a big house. Collins was "really" driven by personal ambition rather than Irish nationalism as can be seen in his 1916 correspondence about the possibility of moving to Chicago.
As everyone knows, the real culprits for the failure of American policy in Vietnam aren't the hawks who ran the show throughout 20 years of U.S. effort to prop up South Vietnam, but rather the opponents of the policy, who handed the enemy the win in congress that they couldn't achieve on the battlefield. Except, Gary Farber points out that neither Richard Nixon nor Henry Kissinger (via Jim Henley) appear to have believed the war was winnable in the early 1970s.
As you can see, along with the completely understandable goal of defending Israel Proper, the wall involves various kinds of land-grabs along the border, and also more than a few penumbras and emanations aimed at securing the more far-flung settlements. This, combined with the gray "Jews only" roads that criss-cross the West Bank, constitutes a major inconvenience for tens of thousands of Palestinians and seems to lay the groundwork for a situation where the Palestinians on the other side of the wall enjoy some kind of autonomy or even formal independence while remaining essentially under Israeli control.
That said, I wonder how convincing any pro-life voters are really going to find this whole line of attack. What's the specific concern about Romney's evident lack of genuine principles on these issues? He seems to me to be eminently willing to govern as a pro-lifer in terms of his judicial appointments which seems to me to be 90 percent of what's at stake here. It's true that his explanation of his position doesn't make a ton of sense, but these constitutional amendments and so forth aren't going to be enacted anyway so who really cares?
According toThe Washington Post, he says "Obama is becoming the antiwar candidate, and Hillary Clinton is becoming the responsible Democrat who could become commander in chief in a post-9/11 world." One can try to speculate that Kristol is playing some odd angles here, but I think the record indicates that he's genuinely more committed to war -- criticized Republican critics of the Kosovo War, criticized Bill Clinton for not killing enough people during the Kosovo War, backed John McCain in the 2000 primaries -- and based on the evidence thinks Clinton will be more sympathetic to his agenda than the alternatives.
I think George Packer does his readers a disservice by trying to construct a parallel between conservative reaction to Scott Beauchamp and liberal reaction to O'Hanlon/Pollack:
The same people who believed the first story refused to believe the second, and vice versa. In a sense, they believed or refused to believe each story before it was published—even before it had occurred. What mattered was whether the story supported or undermined their view of the war. This kind of thing depresses me even more than the thought of Bradley Fighting Vehicles running over stray dogs.
But that's not what happened. I haven't seen people question the veracity of specific anecdotes Pollack and O'Hanlon offer. In fact, it would be absurd to do so. If they say they spoke to soldiers whose morale was high, no doubt that's because they did, in fact, speak to soldiers whose morale was high. What I, and others, have done is question the strategic judgment they offered about the surge. We suggested, moreover, that their upbeat analysis of the situation should be put in the larger context of them both having extensive records of poor judgment on Iraq, with errors invariably coming from being too hawkish.
The right, meanwhile, not only insisted without evidence that Beauchamp was lying, but suggested that the publication of his story was motivated by The New Republic's desire to undermine the war even though TNR has never opposed the war and doesn't oppose it today.
UPDATE: By the same token, I should say that the whole thing is apples and oranges. If you agree with the main point of the Pollack/O'Hanlon op-ed, there's an obvious policy upshot: the surge should be continued for months and talk of withdrawal should be stopped. The Beauchamp article, meanwhile, no matter how true or false it may be, has no implications whatsoever. "This dude killed some dogs, therefore we should leave Iraq" would be an absurd argument.
Consider John Edwards, who the press and Republicans have cast as the heartthrob of the resurgent "left". The centrepiece of Mr Edwards' agenda is a call for universal health coverage. It sounds radical to American ears, perhaps. But Margaret Thatcher would have been chased from office in the UK if she had proposed a health plan as radically conservative as Mr Edwards' - under which private doctors would supply the medicine, and years would still pass with millions of Americans uncovered.
Mr Edwards wants to lift the minimum wage substantially, and to boost wage subsidies for low-income work besides. But the outer limits of Mr Edwards' ambition would leave low income work less generously compensated than the minimum wage and subsidy blend enacted by Britain's New Labourites Tony Blair and Gordon Brown - arrangements Conservative party leader David Cameron says suit him just fine. [...]
I could go on, but you get the point. The fact that a Thatcher-Cameron-Buffet agenda can be hyped as "populist" says more about propaganda success and media norms than anything else. Over three decades, America's conservative movement has so deftly shifted the boundaries of debate to the right that even modest adjustments to the market system can be cast as the second coming of Marx without anyone blushing. Today's phony populist fears also remind us that the real problem with the media is not ideology but stenography. If official sources call something "populist" often enough, it is.
This is, in many ways, music to my ears. That said, I do think one of the main things this illustrates is another point entirely -- the extent to which populism is a style rather than an ideology. John Edwards doesn't just talk about his policies as good policies, he talks about wresting control over the government from entrenched economic elites and deploying its power on behalf of ordinary people. That is populism and it's different from what a UK Conservative can or would say. Or, rather, a UK Conservative can adopt a populist style or pose, but would need to change the target around to make it something like wresting power from arrogant bureaucrats or public sector unions.
Populism is a real thing, and a quite analytically useful category, but it's not a kind of policy agenda, it's a kind of way of talking about policy.
Harold Ford and Martin O'Malley have a very curious op-ed in The Washington Post speaking up for the continuing vitality and necessity of the DLC:
Most Americans don't care much about partisan politics; they just want practical answers to the problems they face every day. So far, our leading presidential candidates seem to understand that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. That's why they have begun putting forward smart, New Democrat plans to cap and trade carbon emissions, give more Americans the chance to earn their way through college, achieve universal health care through shared responsibility, increase national security by rebuilding our embattled military and enable all Americans who work full time to lift themselves out of poverty.
There are a few different ways of looking at this, but I don't think anyone on the left has ever derided the DLC because they don't like universal health care or curbing carbon emissions. Similarly, if the DLC vanished tomorrow we'd have plenty of other outlets prepared to devise health care plans and cab-and-trade schemes. Indeed, as I was saying yesterday, it's precisely the proliferation of alternative venues for this sort of thing over the past 10 years that's made the DLC so dispensable.
The thing that, by contrast, really makes the DLC stand out from alternative institutions like the New America Foundation or the Center for American Progress was its steadfast support of the Iraq War, going so far as to provide a platform for hard-core right-wingers like Marshall Wittman on a common platform of anti-Bush militarism. Now they want to talk about their plan to "increase national security by rebuilding our embattled military" which is nice, though no such plan seems to actually exist, but again is totally indistinct from what you can get everywhere else.
Michael Rubin decided this morning to accuse my friend and former colleague Mark Leon Goldberg of committing "outright fabrication for the sake of politics" in this years-old item. Since Mark doesn't have a blog where it would be appropriate to respond, he's kindly agreed to post a response here, to wit:
Using L'affaire Beuchamp as a pretext, Michael Rubin lashes out at me for allegedly making stuff up about his bubbly deportment prior to Ahmed Chalabi's fall 2005 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. I feel I should defend my honor.
I recall that day well. It was Chalabi's first public appearence beforeWashington's most influential pro-war think tank since his allegations about Iraq's WMD program were proven false. What seemingly got Rubin's blood boiling was not anything Chalabi said, but my description of Rubin in a November 200 American Prosepct piece about the event. Here is the sentance in question: "Inside the plush conference center, a beaming Michael Rubin, AEI fellow and former aide to Iraq viceroy Paul Bremer, bounced around like a 6-year-old at Hanukkah."
Now, Matt was sitting next to me at the time. He can also attest that there was a palpable excitement in the air, and that Rubin contributed to that by zipping across the room, enthusiastically greeting various conference goers the meeting. I don't doubt that Rubin helped a blind man find his seat, as he says he did. But he certainly was beaming before the lecture.
Rubin also says I was mocking his (our) religion. On the contrary, I was mocking him, not Judaism. Still, if Rubin recalls this one sentence after all these years, then I must have really touched a nerve, so I apologize for the snark.
I'll add two observations. First, the idea that Mark would, as part of a nefarious ideological scheme, fabricate Rubin appearing to be very excited by the event his institution was hosting is absurd on its face. What political agenda, exactly, does this help advance? Second, while I've grown accustomed to hair-trigger accusations of anti-semitism from neoconservative foreign policy types, this one is really absurd. It's now mocking Judaism for a Jewish writer to write something implying that Jewish children are excited by the prospect of Hanukkah gifts? Come on.
I'm never writing for The Guardian again! Honestly, though, I think having a reporter gunned down by an unseen sniper in a crowded train station the day after he publishes a major intelligence community leak might be a bit too obvious. Have they never heard of making it look like an accident?
Or, at least, TimesSelect may be going goodbye. My strong suspicion is that the dawn of the internet is going to make being an important opinion writer less financially lucrative, relative to other professions, than it once was.
When I read this story about conditions falling apart in Basra after British troops handed practical control over to the locals, I thought it was yet-more ammunition for my quest to persuade whoever will listen that the US ought to end its tragic military engagement in Iraq. Somehow, though, I never got around to writing the post and it occurs to me that, of course, the article could be used to prove the precise reverse -- that we can't afford to leave lest we wind up with a country-sized Basra.
This sort of thing, ultimately, is why no conceivable September report will make any real difference to the Iraq debate. It's not that ideological blinders prevent people from seeing the facts, it's that the facts don't really determine anything. Signs of improving conditions can be a reason to stay or a reason to leave. Signs of deteriorating conditions can be a reason to leave or a reason to stay. Ultimately, the issue doesn't hinge on fine-grained appreciation of the facts, nearly so much as it hinges on broader questions of how you look at American interests in the region and whether or not the prospect of spending tens of billions of dollars a day for an indefinite period of time on maintaining a military presence in a foreign country against the will of the population is the kind of thing that makes you queasy.
Due to a timing error, I didn't realize when the Democratic debate was on, and wound up only catching the post-game spin. I hadn't realized until this very segment with Chris Matthews that David Axelrod sports that preposterous moustache -- he should consider a shave. That said, on the merits Hillary Clinton's notion that it's inappropriate to debate Pakistan policy in public doesn't really make sense to me. Just deciding that we can trust our overlords to do the right thing -- even if they're Democratic Party overlords -- hasn't worked out extremely well for us in the past. That's how we got into Iraq.
ASTERISK WATCH....Barry Bonds has finally hit home run #756. Can we now please go back to ignoring him?
I say: No. The man holds the record for most career home runs and most home runs in a single season. What's more, not only did he hit 73 home runs in 2001, but he also "managed to shatter two of Babe Ruth's longstanding records -- most walks (177) and highest slugging percentage (.863) in a season." That record of walks stood until . . . the next season when he drew 198. Then in 2004, he drew 232 which helped hold him to 45 homers but helped power him to an OBP of .609, a major league record. He had nine different seasons with over 30 stolen bases, plus two 29 SB seasons and a 28 SB season.
He is, in short, the greatest offensive player in the history of baseball. Not being someone who pays much attention to baseball, I don't pay a ton of attention to Bonds, but it's silly for people to just shut their ears and pretend this didn't happen. Yes, it appears that during the period when Major League Baseball had no steroid policy, he took steroids. And the day when MLB invalidates all the other records from the Steroid Era -- rescinds the World Series titles and the division penants, takes back the Cy Young awards and the Golden Gloves, etc., etc., etc. -- I suppose it would make sense to take Bonds' achievements away too. But until that happens, the records are the records and he played better than anyone else.
The hasty passage of the massive USA PATRIOT Act, a scant 45 days after those attacks, was ill-considered but understandable. Six years later, however, the administration has grown comfortable with the prerogatives panic affords. And, perversely, it has learned that it can continue to wield those prerogatives even under a Democratic majority, provided it insists on regarding Congress always and only as a last resort. [...]
But then, that was almost certainly the point. Ingenious as the White House has proven at recreating the expedient panic of 2001, however, it is not September 12 anymore. Along with a chance to more cooly appraise the terrorist threat, the intervening years have provided ample evidence of how little this administration can be trusted with its existing powers, let alone new ones. When lawmakers return to Washington this coming September, they might try a bit harder to recall the year as well as the month.
It should be kept in mind, however, that most Democrats didn't capitulate at all and of those who did some unknown and unknowable portion probably just agree with Bush that executive power should be essentially unlimited.
More from the annals of intellectual property enforcement run amok, as Reuters reports that "Police have arrested a high school student suspected of posting his own translation of the latest Harry Potter book on the Internet weeks ahead of the official French release date, a newspaper reported on Wednesday." Obviously, the Gallimard/Potter/Rowling marketing machine couldn't possibly stand up to the web-only release of three chapters worth of amateur translation by a sixteen year-old without getting the long arm of the law involved.
I'm not seething with anti-Saudi resentments like various folks on both sides of the aisle, but insofar as Mark Steyn wants to engage debates with his readers about the best ways to stick it to Riyadh, someone might as well explain basic economics to him:
And, besides, the premise is completely false: If you trade in the Expedition for a Honda Civic, that oil you save won't stay in the ground and thus impoverish the Saudis; it will merely be sold to the Chinese and Indians and other fast developing nations who will replace America and Europe as buyers of the cheapest and most easily extractable oil in the world. So the sheikhs will be as rich as ever and funding as many Islamist nutters. But we'll be driving worse cars and feeling virtuous.
Yes, it's true that US reduction in demand for oil won't necessarily reduce the aggregate quantity of Saudi oil reaching world markets (it sort of depends on a lot of factors), but reduction in the demand for oil reduces the price of crude and therefore the revenue of oil exporting countries. It does so, moreover, whether or not the oil exporting country in question specifically exports oil to the United States. And, indeed, even if total world demand doesn't go down because rising Indian and Chinese demands exceeds the reduction in US demand, that still leaves oil prices lower than they would have been had the US not reduced its demand.
Reviewing the debate coverage and watching recordings of some key exchanges, it's really striking how invested Hillary Clinton's campaign is in the idea that there are no important policy differences between the candidates. This is a theme she's struck at previous debates, but her recent do-si-do with Obama about Pakistan is particularly telling in this regard, since she actually does want to be critical of her rivals, but at the same time wants to deny that she's staking out a different position wherein she lets OBL run free and/or drops a nuclear bomb on his head.
All this could be true, but it intersects with the non-specificity of her campaign in suspicious ways. If her campaign contributions from lobbyists don't tell us anything about policy differences between her and her rivals why can't she say she agrees with Bill Richardson that we ought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 90 percent by 2050? Or can she say she agrees with John Edwards that we ought to force insurance companies to compete with a Medicare-like public sector alternative? If her Iraq vote is just about the past, why can't she reassure us that she won't be listening to Ken Pollack, RIchard Holbrooke, and the rest of Team Hawk the next time around?
The idea that all Democrats want the same things and will listen to the same people so all we need to do is find the person who's got the savvy to implement the agenda we all agree upon is tempting. It's tempting and, in principle, it could even be true. But I would want to see actual evidence that it's true, not just a generic reassurance.
Photo by Flickr user Sskennel used under a Creative Commons license
To me, the only epistemic value of knowing that Michael Gordon says official sources say Iranian-supplied weapons "accounted for a third of the combat deaths suffered by the American-led forces" last month is that whatever the truth of the matter is to establish a theoretical maximum on Iranian culpability in the death of American soldiers. The administration is lying (for them not to be lying would be unprecedented) and Gordon is passing on what his sources tell him.
As a policy matter, looking at the Iranian support issue tends to highlights how pointless it is to get one's hopes raised by such minor signs of progress as may or may not be thought to exist in Iraq. Iran is charged with supplying a bit more than 100 explosive-formed penetrator bombs to Iraqi militants per month. Iran is also a bit of a rinky-dink third world country. But even they clearly could be providing a lot more weaponry than that were they so inclined. Hezbollah's armaments are, for example, much more sophisticated than that. If the Iranians ever were to reach the conclusion that the US were in danger of achieving its goals of creating a stable Iraq happy to play host to large US military installations and serve as an anti-Iranian bulwark in the region, Iran could easily step up its assistance and then you're back to square one.
The issue here, then, really isn't where, exactly, these EFPs come from and why. The issue is whether you think it serves US interests to try to reach an accommodation with Iran so they we can fight terrorism by trying to fight the al-Qaeda terrorists who want to come here and kill or, or whether you think it serves US interests to continue picking unprovoked fights with tangential adversaries. But before you pick what's behind door number two, just keep in mind that a US-Iranian escalation cycle will certainly lead things to get much, much worse over the short and medium terms.
Meanwhile, Ezra Klein notes that Michael Gordon doesn't appear to have actually seen the evidence for Iranian complicity in this EFP business. Rather, "American intelligence says that its report of Iranian involvement is based on a technical analysis of exploded and captured devices, interrogations of Shiite militants, the interdiction of trucks near Iran’s border with Iraq and parallels between the use of the weapons in Iran and in southern Lebanon by Hezbollah."
This, of course, raises the perennial question of what kind of intelligence a country that's decided to deploy systematic torture as an interrogation method is actually getting. Were the militants handed over to some sub-agency charged with assembling a dossier on Iranian meddling in Iraq and then tortured until they confessed to getting Iranian help? Presumably if you let me torture them until they admit that the weapons have nothing to do with Iran, my interrogation would produce that result.
Via Brian Beutler, the AFP tries a revolutionary experiment in writing their story in such a way as to make readers better informed about the issue at hand rather than more familiar with the president's propaganda. Here's the lede:
US President George W. Bush charged Monday that Iran has openly declared that it seeks nuclear weapons -- an inaccurate accusation at a time of sharp tensions between Washington and Tehran.
Oh, my! Imagine the world we might live in if this were the standard way to open a newspaper story about the president making a false or misleading claim.
It looks like Elizabeth Edwards, in an apparent effort to alienate her husband's supporters, whined to CNN that "In some ways, it's the way we have to go. We can't make John black, we can't make him a woman." Really, though, would it be impossible to make him a woman? It seems to me that the first post-op m-to-f transgendered presidential candidate could garner plenty of attention.
Meanwhile, my hope had always been that if white male privilege were to suddenly collapse during my lifetime I'd just play up the Cuban angle, but Bill Richardson gets less media love than Edwards.
Mr. Damasio cited a question that asked students to identify the most likely effect of an increase in the hourly wage of babysitters. Eighty percent of students answered correctly that the time spent by teenagers on babysitting would likely go up while the time they spent on other activities would decrease, he said.
If you want evidence that I'm not a real liberal, look no further than the fact that I would have said the reverse -- raise wages for babysitters and parents will purchase fewer person-hours of babysitting and more Baby Einstein DVDs. Teenagers, meanwhile, will spend more time in the Taco Bell parking lot wishing they had fake IDs.
UPDATE: The more I think about it, the more ridiculous this becomes. How do we know teenagers won't cut down on babysitting because of the income effect? I feel like it's plausible that teenagers are lazy and just want to earn a certain baseline income and then will want to spend more time in the Taco Bell parking lot wishing they had fake IDs (this is my impression of suburban adolescence, we didn't have Taco Bell parking lots in Manhattan). They've gone and asked a complicated question that should be researched properly.
Also: John Kerry Wants to Defend the Country With Spitballs
Michael Gerson's banal musings on how Shakespeare is good, and partisan meanies are bad, would be merely annoying if not for the fact that it's author is Michael Gerson. Gerson's previous job, you'll recall, was as a partisan political operative working for George W. Bush. All those speeches about how Saddam Husseins nuclear weapons were going to kill your children unless you voted for Republican congressional candidates in 2002? They came out of his shop. Speeches about how John Kerry was going to personally hand your kids over to Osama bin Laden? His shop. Bizarre lies about cuts in the top income tax rate being designed primarily for the benefit of small businessmen? His shop.
At any rate, there's a great article about Gerson not even written by an embittered liberal forthcoming in the new Atlantic that I would link to, quote, etc., etc. but it hasn't come forth yet. Keep your eyes peeled.
Photo by Flickr user grendelkhan used under a Creative Commons license
As a Nancy Pelosi apologist and a Barry Bonds apologist, I'm glad to see Pelosi standing up for San Francisco values and hailing Bonds for taking his "rightful place among sport's immortals."
This via guest bloggin' Steve Bainbridge who also correctly notes that baseball is kind of dull. Which seems like as good a time as any to mention that, in my opinion, Oleksiy Pecherov would benefit from some 'roids.
Josh Marshall sums up the latest on the Scott Beauchamp matter:
The Weekly Standard, which has been leading the charge against Beauchamp, says another unnamed military official told the magazine that not only had the Army found Beauchamp's written accounts to be false but that Beauchamp himself has now signed a recantation of all his claims. So case closed; he fessed up. Yet when TNR contacted the Army public affairs a Maj. Steve Lamb told them: "I have no knowledge of that."
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but by Weekly Standard epistemic standards, if the Army PR people say they don't know about a recantation, then it must be that no such recantation exists, right? At the same time, though, the Army says they investigated this and nobody corroborated Beauchamp's claims. TNR says they have spoken to people who backed Beauchamp up. Given that the Army seems to have decided to discipline Beauchamp for writing what he wrote, I'm not sure why you'd expect anyone to corroborate the story while talking to Army investigators.
I hadn't realized that Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson actually comes up in today's Post editorial about how Democrats should be grateful for White House concessions on the issue of whether or not White House employees, including Michael Gerson, can be made to testify before congress.
Americans Against Escalation in Iraq has been organizing protests here and there in Randy Kuhl's Upstate New York district, something I believe they've been doing to many Republican members around the country. Well, he got interviewed recently by the local paper, and here Jerri Kaiser reports that he seems a bit freaked out:
Kuhl said that he wasn't at his offices when the protesters in Bath and Fairport were there. When I asked him if he had ever protested, he said "Yes, when I walked off the floor in Congress recently." I asked if that means he thinks the protesters have a right to do so and he again said "yes, just not over the line." He said that the types of protests have caused him to rethink security at his offices and that means securing doors. He said they are "more protective now" and that he "thought about packing."
Kaiser herself is a typical left-wing radical -- born in a small town in South Carolina, moved to Upstate New York about six years ago, mother of four, active in her local church, that sort of thing -- so you can see why she asked him about this. At any rate, I think it's pretty clear that Republican members across the country have plenty to fear from anti-war sentiment. The vast majority of GOP members are, of course, going to be re-elected one way or another. But the war's become so unpopular that you can hardly call any of them "safe" as such -- a talented Democratic challenger could win just about anywhere, much as the conditions of 1974 left the field wide open for geographically unlikely wins.
. Before 1965, public attitudes on the welfare state and on race, as measured by the annually administered General Social Survey, varied year to year independently of one another: you could not predict much about a person’s attitudes on welfare politics by knowing their attitudes about race. After 1965, the attitudes moved in tandem, as welfare came to be seen as a race issue. Indeed, the year-to-year correlation between an index measuring liberalism of racial attitudes and attitudes toward the welfare state over the interval 1950–1965 was .03. These same two series had a correlation of .68 over the period 1966–1996.
The Center for American Progress' Iraq Timeline, charting various Friedman Unit-esque pronouncements over the years is a thing of beauty. It also reminds me specifically of Will Marshall's January 2004 proclamation that "America has about six months to break the resistance and give the new Iraqi government a fighting chance to survive. It would help if our leaders stopped casting anxious glances toward the exits." In January 2004, I thought much the same thing. And, indeed, to this day, I still think that was more-or-less the correct judgment.
But that's exactly why, by the end of 2004, I thought it was time to schedule a withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. It really was true that if armed resistance had been subdued during 2004 and Iraqis of all stripes been persuaded to pursue their political grievances, including grievances with the existence of a US military presence in Iraq, through the scheduled elections that Iraq would have been a much happier place. It also really was true that if this window of opportunity slipped by, and the new Iraqi government was born compromised by violent sectarian conflict, that the situation was, in important respects, doomed.
Which is all by way of observing that unlike the other people on this list, Will Marshall both still opposes withdrawal from Iraq and has, in the past, responded to posts on this blog. So I'd be interested to know what Marshall thinks of the fact that 43 months ago he said we only had about six months to crush armed resistance before we tipped past the point at which our involvement would become useless. I agreed with him then, and I still agree with him now -- why has he changed his mind?
I wrote a bit about this yesterday, but there really is something fishy about the new NAEP test in Economics. Kevin Drum notes for example that looking at three different NAEP subject tests together you get the absurd result that "35% are proficient in reading and 23% are proficient in math, but 42% are alleged to be proficient in economics." One of the sample questions, meanwhile, seems to confuse the idea of a "risk" with the idea of a "cost."
[O]ne thing that's striking about the current Democratic field is how few tough political races they've won. Bill Clinton won a number of competitive races in Arkansas before entering presidential politics. However, the top three contenders for the Democratic nomination have a combined total of two wins in competitive general elections above the state legislative level (Hillary's Senate victory in 2000 and Edwards's in 1998; Obama's 2004 Senate victory came against Alan Keyes) and only three wins total (add on Hillary's re-election in 2006). Only one of those -- Edwards's win in 1998 -- came in unfavorable territory.
Right, Edwards' 1998 race in North Carolina is the only time any of these three have shown an impressive ability to beat Republicans. Even here, by 2004 polls seem to have indicated that taking sufficiently liberal positions to make an Edwards presidential primary campaign viable had rendered him unpopular in North Carolina and since then he's only moved farther left. It's interesting to note that Obama actually has been in several tough races, at various levels, one of which he lost, but all his difficult campaigns have been against other Democrats.
UPDATE: I quoted text with a slight error, the corrected version: "This post previously said the top three Democratic presidential contenders had won three times above the state legislative level. In fact, they've won four times. The error has been corrected above."
One could drive oneself insane blogging this all the time, but I genuinely think that every single person involved in covering politics for a major newspaper needs to take some time to think about the possibilities that their articles, as written, reduce the level of informedness in the population. Say, for example, you didn't follow American politics or public policy at all. You'd probably have no opinion as to whether or not the Democratic congress is plotting the largest tax increase in American history. Then you read Peter Baker's Washington Post article:
Appearing before cameras at the Treasury Department alongside his economic team, the president vowed to veto spending bills that exceed his targets, and he accused Democrats of plotting the largest tax increase in history to fund an additional $205 billion in discretionary spending over five years. . . .
Democrats quickly returned fire, noting that Bush inherited a surplus that turned into a deficit and that he never vetoed a spending bill during the six years that Republicans controlled Capitol Hill, even as the budget grew by 50 percent.
Now, based on this, one would probably conclude that Democrats are, in fact, planning the largest tax increase in American history. One certainly would not conclude that what Democrats are proposing is that tax legislation that Bush himself proposed years ago be allowed to proceed in the manner that Bush proposed, and that all of the arguments about affordability that Bush made, when proposing this tax legislation back in the day, were founded on the premise that the legislation would operate as proposed, complete with a phase out and so forth.
It's barely worth mentioning because this happens all the time, but it's necessary to mention precisely because it happens all the time. Baker's article is by no means a bad one relative to the prevailing standards of the day, but even so it does more to assist the powers that be in their effort to mislead people than it does to help people understand what the powers that be are doing.
You are a total feminist. This doesn't mean you're a man hater (in fact, you may be a man).
You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It's a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action.
Smallpox was a great success but not a fluke. Among other historical foreign aid successes are immunizations, oral rehydration therapy and the green revolution.
More broadly, when we pay a few hundred dollars for fistula surgery so that a teenage girl no longer will leak urine or feces for the rest of her life, that operation may not stimulate economic growth. But no one who sees such a girl’s happiness after surgery can doubt that such aid is effective, for it truly saves a human being.
The "more broadly" here really needs to be emphasized. Economic growth is a crucial thing, especially for desperately poor countries, but it is what it is and there are other things on the table as well. To get growth, you need good policies. India, having adopted better policies, has enjoyed a good deal of economic growth over the past 10-15 in a way that no aid program could possibly deliver. On the other hand, India is still a desperately poor country and it's the kind of place where a lot of kids die of measles for lack of vaccines. Over time, if India keeps growing economically, one imagines the government will get a universal vaccination program (or something close to it) up and running, but the rich world could easily afford to step in here and help out.
The growth impact of something like that is going to get swamped by the much larger issues in play and ultimately India's success is going to be determined by Indian policymakers (and whether or not the country gets into a nuclear war with Pakistan) rather than foreign aid officials, but that doesn't mean that a well-designed program to save some lives can't, in fact, save lives.
I enjoyed Glenn Greenwald's take on the "foreign policy community". Let me observe, however, that he left one crucial trope off the list. One is not supposed to question the motives of members of the foreign policy community. If Barack Obama says we need to be willing to make surgical strikes in Pakistan even if the government in Islamabad isn't willing to act, it's perfectly okay to say he's doing this, in part, to emphasize a hawkish side to his views. If union leaders are reluctant to endorse John Edwards despite his union-friendly views, it's sperfectly okay to say they're reluctant because they don't want to alienate the eventually winner and they don't think that winner will be Edwards. If Chuck Schumer wants to preserve special tax breaks for hedge fund managers it's okay to point out that this has something to do with the fact that many of his constituents work in the financial services industry and generously support his career with campaign contributions.
But insinuate that leading foreign policy analysts are driven in part by careerism and not just determined pursuit of the truth, and people get the vapors.
Yesterday I mentionedThe Atlantic's forthcoming Michael Gerson story, and now the print issue is in subscribers' hands and the article's been placed free online for non-subscribers. Check it out. The piece is by Matthew Scully, who worked for Gerson is the speechwriting shop.
It's a fun read for the bitchy insider dish, but it does raise some serious questions. Gerson, according to Scully, built up his glowing media coverage primarily by lying to reporters, notably including The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, but also a broader crew. Now, of course, instead of whatever fate one might expect from a key aide to a disastrously failed president, Gerson is a certified member of the Establishment, penning columns for the Post from a perch at the Council on Foreign Relations. Is that really the sort of person the Post opinion pages want to be employing? (I mean, it probably is, but it shouldn't be).
UPDATE: Not free! I lied. You should really consider subscribing -- at $2.45 an issue (and the issues are long) The Atlantic is, when you think about it, astoundingly cheap and full of great content.
Brian Beutler observes that the administration seems to be doing its best to ensure that a certain number of exonerated people don't manage to get out of military custody at Gitmo or elsewhere. Could the reason be that "the administration is hampering the process so that some of these don't someday describe the torture techniques used against them to a lawyer or a judge or the media"? That's the kind of irresponsible speculation you'll only find on a blog, but it's much needed speculation, considering the circumstances.
The unspoken truth here, I suspect, is that Obama has struck on the central folly of our post-9/11 counter-terrorism defense policy -- strike hard where they aren't and go easy where they are. I think everyone can see this. But Obama got there first. So they need to attack him for saying it.
It's not, though, just that he got there first. As I've said before, it's that it's much easier for him to get there. It's one thing for Hillary Clinton to concede error in her estimation of George W. Bush and gesture at faulty intelligence, but it'd be another thing for her to pivot around and say the whole thing was just a really blunt, crude, and obvious error. What happens then to the experience argument? But Josh is right: That's what this is about on some level.
The idea of copyright is not that creators deserve your money, but that you, the citizen, deserve a world in which creators have incentives to create. The fashion industry is perfectly vibrant as is. The world is full of high-end fashion designers, low-end ripoffs, national and global middlebrow chains, endlessly shifting whims, stores and boutiques of all sort -- everything a person could want. Absolutely nobody is sitting around the house saying "I have all this money to spend on clothing, but there's just nothing new out there to buy."
We're doing fine. I'm tempted to say "what's next, licensing fees for recipes we use at home" but I'm afraid congress will pass a law mandating licensing fees for recipes we use at home. I call copyright on the idea of "scrambling" eggs.
I dunno if Kevin Drum's just being grumpy here, but if you can't see any daylight between Samantha Power's views and those of the dread Very Serious People, I think you're probably not looking very hard. I don't think this (in The New Republic, no less; PDF) was the standard VSP view of things in March 2003:
The exceptionalist impulses behind Bush's choices have been with us for a long time. What distinguished this round was that by 2002 the checks that could usually be counted on to rein in a president's militant moralism had vanished. On Capitol Hill, the House International Relations Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had gone out of fashion; Banking and Appropriations were in, and the globetrotting internationalists of yore had been replaced by a younger, untraveled, uncurious lot. They wouldn't challenge a wartime president's worldview. Congress nodded or whimpered. It did not meaningfully dissent, a devastating abdication for the branch responsible for investigation, legislation, and financial control. The media withered as well, becoming the home for Bob Woodward-style stenography rather than Woodward and Bernstein-style scrutiny. And the American people remained relatively insulated from the vitriolic anti-Americanism bubbling abroad.[...]
In this assessment, intentions, because they are unknowable and untrustworthy, are irrelevant. Abroad, they judge what they can see: means and results; and our policy choices in other arenas have harsh ripple effects on perceptions of our Iraq policy. The multidimensional picture is less persuasive than the single-issue picture: The U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought. It needs not tweaking but overhauling. We need: a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United
States.[...]
But, in using hard power, it is essential for the long struggle that the United States win international support and demonstrate its legitimacy. This requires giving before we demand. Doubling foreign aid is progress; proposing $15 billion for AIDS is extraordinary--but none of these gestures gets at the contradictions at the heart of U.S. foreign policy. [...]
Embedding U.S. power in an international system and demonstrating humility would be painful, unnatural steps for any empire, never mind the most potent empire in the history of mankind. But more pain now will mean far less pain later.
And, recall, again, this was before the Great Disillusionment with Bush and with the Iraq War. It's true, as Kevin says, that Power's not an isolationist or a pacifist and believes the United States should play a large role on the world stage. But it's silly and counterproductive for those of us -- people like me and people like Kevin -- to agree with the VSPs that pacifism or withdrawal from the world are the only viable alternatives to knee-jerk militarism and foreign policy by cliché.
Have you heard the one about Mitt Romney at the "Ask Mitt Anything" event? It seems that someone asked him how many counties Massachusetts has. Mitt said "thirteen." An aide corrected him and said "ten." The actual answer is fourteen.
It's true that this displays less ignorance than one might imagine since county-level government in the Bay State is fairly insignificant. The weird thing, though, is that Romney for some reason felt he couldn't admit that he didn't know. Presidents are bound to face topics they don't know anything about (nobody could be knowledgeable about every issue that crosses the Oval Office) and need to respond to ignorance in appropriate ways.
I don’t know what it is about the game that has changed—maybe it’s my preferences that have changed—but I don’t enjoy the game very much any more. I think the problem is that there are too many people on too small of a court. Sometimes I feel that I’m watching a rugby scrum, waiting for an orange ball to pop out towards the hoop and hope that there is no whistle. My solution would be to increase the size of the court, which of course won’t happen since the court is constrained by the size of arenas. I think this would open up more passing and reduce fouling.
If you wanted to do something along these lines, the smart move would be not to make the court bigger (constrained by arena size), but to make the game four-on-four instead of five-on-five and then possibly make the court somewhat smaller (but not as much as 20 percent smaller). That would open the game up without requiring bigger arenas, and would also serve to de facto un-dilute the talent pool.
I, however, basically agree with Tyler Cowen that I like the existing NBA just fine and don't really care that others don't like it. One thing that's true of basically all of the existing American sports leagues is that if you eliminated some of the poorly-performing franchises things would be more fun for the fans of the remaining ones.
One of the Atlantic's crack team of interns has pointed out to me that many of the arguments I've made here about the press, objectivity, and getting spun were summed up in proper essay/argument form by Brent Cunningham in a 2003 Columbia Journalism Review article called "Rethinking Objectivity." Rather than balance that out with the observation that "some critics" think this intern is wrong, I'll just conclude with the fact that he was, in fact, correct and you should read Cunningham's article.
James Fallows notes a minor glitch in the PRC's censorship efforts, as International Olympic Commission chief Jacques Rogge's statement that, in Jim's paraphrase,"the air in Beijing was so bad that some events (like, the ones where athletes have to breathe) might have to be postponed" slips through the cracks.
China's apparent inability to get the situation under control on a sustainable basis is going to lead them to try out some experiments in authoritarian environmental protection like "ordering half of Beijing's cars off the road for a few days, to see how much difference it makes in pollution" to see if that can take care of their Olympic problems.
Photo by Flickr user Kevin Dooley used under a Creative Commons license
Brian Beutler points out that TNR senior editor Charles Krauthammer is now accusing this ferociously pro-war magazine at which he got his start and which still now and again provides him with a platform from which to put forward his trademark combination of inaccurate smears and normatively repugnant views of being driven by a desire to find content that "fits perfectly into the most virulent narrative of the antiwar left."
At any rate, I've been torn by two contending impulses throughout this saga, and Krauthammer's attack leaves me shifting back toward my initial one, which was to find it amusing to see TNR ripped to shreds by the same pack of attack dogs they spent years egging on.
CORRECTION: Krauthammer is a contributing editor, not a senior editor at TNR. Contributing editor is basically a non-salaries honorific that some magazines, TNR included, hand out to people. I apologize for the error.
I think one needs to sympathize with John Dingell's view of the climate change issue. Environmental leaders have concluded that it's impossible, in the short term, to pass legislation adequate to the scale of the problem. The inconvenient truth, it seems, is just a little too inconvenient and people don't want the kind of taxes and so forth that would put a dent in emissions. So, instead, they've hit upon the most convenient solution: Higher CAFE standards, easy, popular, and with the costs hidden and mostly born by car companies.
This is, however, a bit inconvenient for the auto industry and those who work in it -- i.e., Dingell's constituents. What he's saying with his "yes to unrealistically aggressive action on climate change, no to high CAFE standards position" is, basically, "stop giving me shit about this." And he's right. Either Democrats are going to commit to taking politically inconvenient -- inconvenient for all of them -- stands to curb carbon emissions, or else emissions won't be curbed. At the moment, the party isn't there. So why should he be singled out as a figure of opprobrium for doing, in essence, the exact same thing as everyone else and refusing to take a stand that's inconvenient. Your average Democrat who wants to raise CAFE standards isn't running any political risks by doing so.
Justin Logan notes neoconservative Eli Lake's Bloggingheadsed definition of "victory" in Iraq as "“avoiding a competitive, confessional genocide."
I continue to want to point out that there's no particular reason to believe that the alternative to an endless US military presence in Iraq is genocide. As Daniel Chirot & Clark McCauley point out in their excellent study Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder, genocide is by no means the typical response to civil conflict between ethnic groups and the odds of a particular conflict avoiding a degeneration to that point can be significantly enhanced by outside actors without resort to direct armed intervention.
Ken Pollack, interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman of CFR, tells presidential candidates they should just not talk about Iraq "until early 2008," which would certainly be helpful to a certain vulnerable-on-Iraq front-runner I can think of.
Allright. I've been looking forward to disagreeing with Megan McArdle about a crucial issue of public significance and here we go as she accuses Paul Krugman of making "completely unfounded aspersions on the competence of the Treasury Secretary."
That's totally insane.
The foundation of my massive suspicion of Hank Paulson's competence is that he voluntarily went to work for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. I'll grant that this is a defeasible suspicion and if Paulson manages to perform some skilled financial wizardry I'll revise my view, but for Paul Krugman and I to assume ineptitude or corruption at this point is just common sense. The Bush administration has, up until now, never made economic policy in the public interest so I would be shocked if they were to do so now. My instinct is to say that columnists overrate the odds of major financial crises (columnists always overrate the odds of something dramatic happening), but that insofar as things happen Bush and his subordinates will use it to try to further redistribute wealth upwards rather than to improve living conditions for ordinary people.
I finally took the opportunity to watch Chris Wallace's Fox News Sunday interview with Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon and it includes this intriguing dialogue:
WALLACE: Now, am I right that both of you are supporting Senator Clinton's campaign for president? Is that correct?
O'HANLON: It's correct in my case.
POLLACK: I think that we...
WALLACE: You don't have to announce right now if you don't want to, Ken. But go ahead.
POLLACK: I was just going to say, we both work at the Brookings Institution. It's a non-partisan organization. We make our calls based on what we see.
If you watch the video clip, Pollack appears to be stifling an affirmative answer, but I'm not sure. My main focus, however, is on O'Hanlon due to the previously declared Michael O'Hanlon Primary. Obviously, O'Hanlon endorsing Clinton isn't the same as Clinton promising to give O'Hanlon a high-level position, but it's not all that different either.
The Blogosphere Diversity Post You've Been Waiting For
Via Kay Steiger, an Ellen Goodman column on male domination of the political blogosphere, that quotes some good points from a few colleagues and friends. The core point:
I began tracking the maleness of this media last spring while I was a visiting fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. An intrepid graduate student created a spreadsheet of the top 90 political blogs. A full 42 percent were edited and written by men only, while 7 percent were by women only. Another 45 percent were edited or authored by both men and women, though the "coed" mix was overwhelmingly male. And, not surprisingly, most male bloggers linked to male bloggers.
This is certainly in line with my experience, but it does raise the obvious question -- not is the progressive political blogosphere male-dominated, but compared to what is it male-dominated? To the congress? To the political media? My sense is that the progressive political blogosphere, though more male than the general population or the Democratic Party's voting base, is less male-dominated than is the "traditional" liberal pundit class. I don't, however, have actual data on this.
I suspect that Garance Franke-Ruta does have the data and I'd be interested in seeing that kind of comparison. When you see something relatively new like the blogosphere it's inevitably going to be touched by broader social currents, including the ones that disadvantage women, but imperfect though it may be is it a step forward or a step backwards? Goodman acknowledges that her column "is the kettle of the MSM -- mainstream media -- calling the pot of the netroots male" but it would be nice to actually know the breakdown.
Perhaps the most trivial problem associated with the sub-prime mortgage meltdown is that it's given renewed prominence to a series of issues about which I know nothing. That said, The Nation's view on this seems wildly overblown:
The dismantling of financial regulation, likewise, did not begin with Bush I or II or even Ronald Reagan. It began in the late 1970s, when Democrats were in power. Are the Dems prepared to address their big mistakes and begin the hard task of re-regulating the banking and financial systems to protect the people from the familiar spectacles of outrageous gouging and unpunished crimes of fraud?
Something much, much, much worse than what's happened over the past couple of weeks would need to happen before I found it plausible that comprehensively rolling back three decades of financial deregulation is the appropriate policy response here. Tweak something or other? Sure. It seems to me, though, that the main thing is to try to ensure that whatever bailing out and whatnot happens is designed to minimize losses for middle class and working people rather than to minimize loss for millionaire investors and traders. It's not clear to me that there's any regulatory fix at all for the fact that asset bubbles happen sometimes.
Let me note something else from the O'Pollahan appearance on Fox News Sunday. First, O'Hanlon concedes that there's been no political progress in Iraq. Then Pollack concedes the same. Then he says that "this level of political stalemate is absolutely unacceptable. And I agree with Mike entirely that we can't give this much more time." So, if in a few months things aren't any better then it's time to leave, right? No, of course, not. As is well known, integral to being Very Serious is the idea that tomorrow is never the right day to end the massive American military presence in Iraq. Instead, Pollack says that "the administration needs to be pushing much harder and maybe even thinking about, if the surge continues to work in terms of providing security, can we move to a different government, one that actually would be able to strike these hard bargains."
Chris Wallace, journalistic instincts perking up at the sight of a newsworthy coup proposal asks "When you say a different government, meaning ousting Maliki and putting another man in?" Pollack, because he's a smart guy recognizes that this is a bad idea and says he "wouldn't necessarily suggest that the United States try to oust anyone" since, after all, "Our experience of ousting foreign leaders has been a very bad one." At this point, however, he proceeds to suggest ousting Maliki:
But I think what we could do is go to the Iraqis and say, "Look, you're planning to have national elections in 2009. This government is deadlocked. It can't do it. You need to move those national level elections up and get a new parliament, hopefully one that actually can produce real results."
Will we be giving the Iraqi electorate explicit instructions on who they're supposed to vote for in these elections?
This op-ed came out a couple of days ago, but I find the argument from Wesley Clark and Kal Raustiala that terrorists are criminals, not soldiers and deserve to be treated as such has a great deal of merit. There was this fad, post-9/11, for deciding that treating terrorism as a "miltiary" rather than a "law enforcement" problem would constitute getting serious about it, but that's mostly proven to be a huge fiasco.
Now, of course, the "law enforcement" problem of Osama bin Laden ran into the snag that he was located in a country whose de facto government was protecting him and encouraging his activities. That -- Taliban control of Afghanistan -- was properly defined as a military issue, but it's been a huge mistake to take the view that, in general, we're in a "war" with what amounts to an unusually bloodthirsty but only medium-sized criminal syndicate.
The estimable Joseph Cirincione makes the case for a more ambitious non-proliferation policy:
There is now a flurry of efforts crossing party and ideological lines to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and the number of nations that have nuclear weapons. Most prominent is the appeal this January from Democrats William Perry and Sam Nunn and Republicans George Schultz and Henry Kissinger for “a world free of nuclear weapons.” These veteran cold warriors strongly supported the nuclear build-ups of the past. Now, their action plan includes many of the elements of the early Truman era: deep cuts in existing arsenals, a global ban on nuclear tests, a halt in production of new weapon materials, and international control of the entire uranium enrichment process, including the formation of an international fuel bank for nuclear reactors. Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed ElBaradei urges similar steps, as do projects from a dozen research institutes. And some members of Congress and presidential contenders have picked up parts of these proposals.
He says the country's political leadership should pick up on these cues and show some international leadership. I should add that while I wouldn't want to call Cirincione deeply unserious, that along with mocking Very Serious People in the national security world it would do this blog good to point out some good ones, and Cirincione's on that list.
This is yesterday's news in some ways, but Katie Halper makes a good point here -- with all the millions of column inches expended on nit-picking Michael Moore, shockingly little attention seems to have been paid to his weird decision to let SiCKO uncritically accept the Bush administration's claims about the quality of conditions for prisoners at Gitmo all for the sake of a pretty silly scene.
GFR semi-answers my question about gender balance in traditional media to gender balance in blogs, but says you can't really do direct comparisons because the structures are different. Here she says:
My experience in Washington is that virtually every woman who is in charge of anything has a reputation as either crazy or a bitch. It’s really striking how many times people preface their remarks about women leaders to me with, “She’s crazy, but,” as a kind of apologetic move they feel is necessary before they can quote a female figure, and as if they would somehow be tainted by quoting or referring to her without first running her down. It’s a tiresome tic.
But this, sure, has nothing in particular to do DC or political circles in particular rather than the treatment of women in leadership roles in general. If anything, I've found this somewhat less true of Washington than of other places where people are less politically conscious.
I wonder about things like Wayne Barrett's devastating takedown of Rudy Giuliani in The Village Voice. Mark Kleiman, for example, notes that it appears one factor in Giuliani's otherwise baffling decision to put the NYC command post in the World Trade Center was that he wanted to use it as a love shack in which to conduct his affair with Judy Nathan.
Kevin Drum ponders whether this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back even though "the Christian right has at least semi-forgiven Giuliani for his stands on abortion and gay rights. And the philandering and the messy divorce don't seem to have hurt him all that much either." The attack seems like it could, in principle, be very damaging. But coming from liberals it almost seems to me to help Rudy, whose campaign seems to be premised in part on the idea that if Village Voice writers hate him so much, he must be doing something right. I feel like these kind of stories would need to appear in National Review to draw blood. Otherwise, it's the equivalent of how Hillary Clinton's conservative detractors are her primary campaign's best friend.
This is kind of outdated, but this website from the era of Susan Estrich's beef with Michael Kinsley over women's representation in the LA Times opinion section has some data on gender diversity in the MSM that seems to me to suggest that the blogosphere is probably somewhat less skewed. Of course, the total number of people with elite op-ed columns gigs is so small that minor changes make a big difference. Thanks to Gail Collins' addition to the roster The New York Times has now doubled the number of women with regular columns on the op-ed page. Seven of the Eight Elect are white, but one African-American columnist out of eight actually means that blacks are slightly overrepresented relative to their share of the population.
The Post op-ed roster is more confusing but seems to include a smaller proportion of women and blacks than does the Times. Neither paper includes any Hispanic columnists.
UPDATE: Jane Hamsher looks more closely at the blogosphere and sees many more women in top positions than Ellen Goodman found. It occurred to me that I don't actually have any idea how many of the DailyKos frontpagers are women. McJoan is and MissLaura is, but it just occurred to me that I'd kind of been assuming that "BarbinMD" is a woman because "Barbin" sounds like "Barbara" and Barbara is a woman's name even though, obviously, that line of reasoning doesn't make any sense. You can, of course, look it up and it turns out that BarbinMD actually is a woman named Barbara. I don't, however, actually make a habit of looking up the "real" names being people's pseudonyms.
Jeff Zeleny and Marc Santora have a good article up in The New York Times about how "Even as they call for an end to the war and pledge to bring the troops home, the Democratic presidential candidates are setting out positions that could leave the United States engaged in Iraq for years." Specifically:
John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, would keep troops in the country to intervene in an Iraqi genocide and be prepared for military action if violence spills into other countries. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York would leave residual forces to fight terrorism and to stabilize the Kurdish region in the north. And Senator Barack Obama of Illinois would leave a military presence of as-yet unspecified size in Iraq to provide security for American personnel, fight terrorism and train Iraqis.
One way to look at this is to try to decide who has the least-bad plan here. A better way to look at it is that the situation on the ground is evolving, the candidates are all being vague, and it's more important to build the strength of certain ideas in hopes of shifting the entire debate further in the direction of complete withdrawal. The problem with all of these plans is simply that they won't work. It'll be untenable to keep small numbers of troops stationed in the country in the way the candidates' rhetoric seems to envision. What they're saying they'll do will either result in us going back to a big (80,000-100,000 or more) force or else down to essentially zero.
The correct answer is essentially zero. The candidates all realize that the status quo is untenable, but can't seem to bring themselves to see that the alternative to the status quo is to leave and let Iraq's fate be determined by the Iraqis.
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Heads in the Sand
