Betsy McCaughey Ross and John Stossel say yes, but Tim Noah says they're wrong and notes what the study showing strong performance for the US in the field of cancer survival actually concludes:
The significant differences observed in the study resulted not from a country's relative adherence to market principles in its health-care system, but rather from its relative wealth. "Countries with higher national expenditures on health … generally had better all-cancer survival." Survival rates tended to be highest in northern and Central Europe, middling in southern Europe, dreadful in the United Kingdom, and abysmal in Eastern Europe. Except for the anomalous poor survival rates in the U.K., these findings track with the relative wealth of the countries surveyed.
Meanwhile, though the UK is a wealthy country, UK per capital health care spending is ridiculously low. The salient thing about the NHS in all of these controversies is not so much its quality (very mixed) but its price (dirt cheap). The United States, meanwhile, spends a ton on health care and for our efforts get a system that performs well on this metric. But we could maintain our high level of overall health spending within the context of a different financing mechanism were we to choose to do so. Indeed, given that I don't see anyone proposing cutbacks of health expenditures to Canadian or British levels, that's almost certainly what we will do.
Via Marc Lynch, "Can't Win With Them, Can't Go To War Without Them" by Peter Singer (the one who writes about private military contractors, not the controversial philosopher). The basic argument, to quote Lynch's gloss, is that contractors are a kind of addiction "a cheap fix which allows for poorly conceived military interventions beyond the real means of the United States." Their use is counterproductive in counterinsurgency situations, yet we've organized ourselves so that it's impossible to conduct a counterinsurgency without them.
A friend who knows him well was swearing to me the other day that Patrick Healy is a really great guy, so I'll defer to the judgment of other on that, but does the world really need closer scrutiny of Hillary Clinton's laugh?
It seems to me that there's no real point in arguing about the significance of the rather large +/- 7 points margin of error on this Newsweek poll showing Barack Obama in the lead for the Iowa caucuses. For something like this, uncertainty about the likely voter screen are probably going to be a bigger problem than sampling error anyway.
But even more to the point, in a close, multi-candidate race the actual method used by the caucuses to allocate delegates starts to make a big different. This method is, especially on the Democratic side, very complicated and tactical voting can start to make a big difference. This is an issue I haven't seem much coverage of, probably because preparations for it on the ground won't start happening until much closer to election day, but one key factor in Iowa is going to be where Edwards and Obama supporters go in caucus sites where they aren't strong enough to win delegates for their guy. Part of what made Howard Dean's task in Iowa so difficult was that almost everyone who wasn't firmly in his camp was firmly against him. In DC, at least, people tend to have Hillary as their first choice or else as a third or lower choice. If that pattern exists in Iowa as well (and I'm not sure that it does) that can be a big problem for her.
Hendrick Hertzberg has an interesting footnote to the welcome demise of the effort to get California to split its electoral votes. This went down in part because of Arnold Schwarzennegger's decision to oppose it. And what may have motivated him?
Anybody remember the first Republican debate, on MSNBC back in May? I’ll bet Arnold does. He was in the front row at the Reagan Library when Chris Matthews asked the ten candidates if they would support changing the Constitution ever so slightly to make naturalized citizens eligible for the presidency. The vote onstage was eight to one against. (The one was Giuliani; McCain said he’d “seriously consider it,” which I count as an abstention.) Eight to one, in other words, in favor of crushing the ultimate and perfectly legitimate dream of the distinguished Governor of California.
If I were Schwarzenegger, I wouldn’t lift a finger to help these bozos.
It's good to see what's probably our dumbest constitutional provision finding a way to do some good for the world.
McMegan explains that "The lone benefit of losing all my CD's in the move to Chicago, and then my MP3s in two separate hard drive crashes, is that I have no dross--no embarassing choices left over from my adolescence, no random songs downloaded while writing the annual GSB follies." That drossless collection comprises 2,406 tracks. I, having been well-backed-up for several years now, have managed to compile 8,609 songs not all of which are among my absolute favorites.
It seems to me, though, that being in easy possession of a certain amount of random material is one of the great pleasures of the internet age. I wouldn't say that I ever really spend much time listening to The Advantage's rendition of the "Dr. Wiley Theme" from MegaMan 2, but it's sometimes amusing to play it for others during those moments when the conversation turns to memories of youth. And I prefer to think of Anti-Flag's "Captain Anarchy" as more a monument to a past era than an embarrassing choice left over from my adolescence. And who wouldn't want to own Avril Lavigne's live cover of Green Day's "Basket Case"? And the alphabet contains so many more letters. My only regret is that I don't have way more dross.
Via Ann Friedman, Alicia Rebensdorf considers the fembot phenomenon from a feminist perspective, with special attention to the Bionic Woman remake, the Heinecken fembot bots, and a new campaign for Svedka Vodka that I haven't actually seen. It's an interesting essay, but I think that in some ways it suffers from a failure to put fembots within the larger cultural category of representations of robots more generally.
From the R.U.R., the robot has almost universally been a locus of fear and anxiety rather than fantasy . . . the male robot's strength and endurance is a threat, not wish-fulfillment. Typically, the crux of the matter is that the robots betray their masters and take over the world (The Matrix, The Terminator, etc.) and robot stories that don't follow this scheme are so intensely against the grain that you get things like the movie version of I, Robot where, unable to fit Asimov's actual stories into our archetypes, they turn it into yet another robot rebellion tale.
I'm not sure if the right thing to say is that the fembot is a fantasy that serves as a counterpoint to the (presumptively male) robot, or else if consideration of the broader picture undermines the fembot-as-fantasy conceit, but I do think you need to consider the broader context. This is especially true insofar as these archetypes can coexist, as in the appearance of Priss, "a basic pleasure mode," in the midst of Blade Runner's tale of replicant rebellion.
As others have noted, here Bill Clinton shows people how it's done:
I only wish he'd done a tad less of the tu quoque and said a bit more about the reality of Iraq and the indefensible policy the GOP is seeking to defend.
Jim Fallows notes that that thing about how if you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly raise it to a boil the frog won't jump out happens to be false, which is too bad because it's a useful analogy for explaining a range of real-world phenomena. He's considering offering a prize to whoever can come up with the best replacement analogy, so have at it.
Tom Friedman says what needs to be said: "This: 9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again." Whatever else you want to say about Friedman, that's exactly right. Jim Henley's also correct to say (as, indeed, I myself said on the Sam Seder show earlier but I can't prove it) that one shouldn't let one's sense of bloggy knowingness blind one to the fact that Friedman is an enormously influential picture, and him coming around to this view makes an enormous difference.
Rick Perlstein takes a look at some of the revisionist literature on Vietnam and comes away -- unsurprisingly -- unimpressed. For more on this general subject, and in particular the malign influence the right's Vietnam revisionism has exercised, see Spencer Ackerman's piece on the other Vietnam syndrome, one of the last things he did for TNR.
It used to be the case that whatever you thought of his other hijinks, Joe Lieberman had quite sound views on the environment. Unfortunately, as Bill McKibben points out that's now less true than one would like:
On Capitol Hill, the situation is a little more interesting. The Democratic majority is finally beginning to move legislation that would commit the United States to long-term reductions in carbon dioxide emissions -- the first law Congress might actually pass in the years since global warming became an issue. But here, too, the legislative process is backing away from what science demands -- a strong bill put forward by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is in danger of being supplanted by half-measures proposed by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.).
In part, here, I can actually sympathize with Lieberman since had his bill passed four years ago when he first proposed it, that really would have been much, much, much better than what's actually taken place. Unfortunately, the nature of the beast is that with every wasted year that goes by, it becomes more and more necessary to take relatively drastic action.
On each side, the plans are basically united. The Republican plans make you pay more for your healthcare so you'll buy less. They do this by weakening the protection that insurance offers from health expenses. The Democratic plans bring everyone into the system, then use that leverage to reform the insurers and extract savings through efficiencies of scale.
This is why I do agree with Mark Kleiman that as far as domestic issues go, there's relatively little reason to focus on the fine-grained differences between the different candidates in the primary. If you're a liberal, the Democrats are all close enough to each other that the differences are bound to be swamped by the distance between what's proposed and what will actually come out of the legislative process. Much more important, as Mark says, to think about which candidate is likely to be most helpful (or least harmful) downballot or about who you trust most in the basically discretionary field of foreign policy.
Building a tunnel to connect your two houses. What I don't understand is why you would want two houses that close to each other. If I were super-rich, sure, I'd like to own several houses, but I'd want them in diverse locations to assist vacationing and so forth. One house per city seems like plenty.
... then Oliver Willis and Nick Beaudrot would be right that "[m]ilitary strikes against against Iran would quite clearly be an act of war; without Congressional authorization it would pribma facie be an impeachable offense." In the real world, though, I didn't see Bill Clinton getting impeached for bombing Serbia without congressional authorization even by a congress that was eager to impeach Bill Clinton so I wouldn't get my hopes up on that one.
Congress' de facto war powers have been reduced to the need to get congressional approval for war-related spending. What we just saw with Iraq, though, is that according to the media, if Democrats vote for a funded withdrawal of troops, and then Bush vetoes those funds and demands that Democrats give him a blank check, then it would be a failure to "support the troops" for Democrats to refuse to cave to this demand. We've also seen that many -- if not most -- congressional Democrats accept this framing. So if Bush decides he wants to bomb Iran, nobody in congress is going to stop him. Dana Priest, though, speaks for surprisingly many journalist when she says:
Frankly, I think the military would revolt and there would be no pilots to fly those missions. This is a little bit of hyperbole, but not much. Just look at what Gen. Casey, the Army chief, said yesterday. That the tempo of operations in Iraq would make it very hard for the military to respond to a major crisis elsewhere. Beside, it's not the "war" or "bombing" part that's difficult; it's the morning after and all the days after that. Haven't we learned that (again) from Iraq?
To me, though, it's important to avoid overstating the degree of military opposition to a bomb Iran policy. As best I can tell, the Army is dead-set against it. But the Army wouldn't be carrying the mission out anyway. It'd be shocking for the Air Force to suddenly come to appreciate the strategic limits of air power. In their minds, bombing Iran won't compound the error of Iraq; rather, it'll show the manifest benefits of doing things their way rather than getting bogged-down into an Army-style quagmire.
Jeffrey Goldberg's a colleague at The Atlantic so perhaps the less said about his TNR article on how John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt are anti-semites and it's about time someone had the courage to say so the better. Readers will know, obviously, that I disagree and probably be familiar with my views on the situation.
Oy. Here comes The Washington Postlambasting Hillary Clinton for not proposing a plan to "fix" the solvency problem that Social Security will face, years from now, if a series of historically inaccurate projects turn out to be accurate, even while they say nothing about the Republican candidates who likewise have promoted no such solutions. Clinton's position, that she's not going to put anything on the table in the context of this political campaign, is eminently sensible. Nor, the phasing-out of the program itself aside, should one really rule anything out. The Post even includes bonus inaccuracy:
Because Social Security increases are pegged to wages, rather than inflation, economic growth alone won't solve the problem. Fiscal responsibility first is fine; fiscal responsibility only is an irresponsible dodge, as Ms. Clinton well knows.
This is just wrong. Social Security benefit increases are, indeed, partially tied to wage rates but it's still true that the faster the economy grows the more affordable promised benefits become. Indeed, that's the basic premise of pay-as-you-go financing of social insurance schemes. The relatively poor present borrows from the relatively rich future. All the Post would need to do is to look back at past SSA Trustees' Reports and they would see that when the economy grows faster, the outlook for Social Security's finances gets bigger. They would also see that if the SSA updated its projections of likely future productivity growth to reflect the post-1995 return to pre-1973 levels of high productivity growth, that the alleged financial problems would substantially diminish.
It may (or may not) turn out that, in fact, the economy does not grow fast enough to close the financing gap. But this isn't a logical fact about the nature of the program, it's a contingent hypothesis that the Post seems to be subscribing to even though its editorial writers don't appear to understand what the hypothesis is or how Social Security works.
Via Garance Franke-Ruta, a fitting rejoinder to Mahmoud Ahmadenijad:
Meanwhile, Roger Cohen turned sensible all of a sudden:
"nonproliferation must prevail. It has prevailed in the past — in South Africa, Libya, South America. It must be made to work in Iran." Quite so (NB: in the business "nonproliferation" means diplomacy as opposed to "counterproliferation" which means blowing things up) and we should keep in mind that these real issues on the US-Iranian diplomatic agenda have, at the end of the day, nothing to do with Ahmadenijad's cartoonish antics.
Okay, I can't resist. Here's a novel thought I had on the issue inspired by Jeffrey Goldberg's piece on Walt and Mearsheimer. According to Goldberg, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy "represents the most sustained attack, the most mainstream attack, against the political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin."
This is an interesting rhetorical move. Rather than defending specific policies, or the policy views of specific groups and individuals, Goldberg has positioned himself as the defender of "the political enfranchisement of American Jews" as such, thus capturing the high ground in, among other things, the intra-Jewish debate about Israel and American foreign policy. Lots of Jewish relatives of mine who probably wouldn't approve of AIPAC's efforts to remove legislative language constraining George W. Bush from attacking Iran certainly do approve of "the political enfranchisement of American Jews" so if we shift the debate to that issue, Goldberg wins.
The trouble, of course, is that Goldberg has no particular interest in the political enfranchisement of American Jews as such. He's not talking about empowering Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein and Eric Alterman and Harold Meyerson and Josh Marshall and MJ Rosenberg and Daniel Levy. He's talking about empowering Jeffrey Goldberg and Alan Dershowitz and Martin Peretz and Charles Krauthammer. Which is fine. Obviously, you'd expect Goldberg to want to see people who agree with him empowered vis-à-vis those who disagree with him, but this has nothing to do with empowering "the Jews" and everything to do with empowering some Jews whose ideas have not, over the years, served the United States or Israel very well.
I said earlier that I couldn't prove I'd said something about Tom Friedman on Sam Seder's show yesterday, but it turns out the relevant incident is actually on this YouTube clip of the show:
So there. Wrong again, Yglesias. Also, yes, in the post referenced above I called Friedman a "picture" when I meant to type "thinker." Worst. Typo. Ever. And consider, just this morning I cracked open my copy editor's notes on my manuscript.
I've been away for a week working as a table facilitator at this year's Clinton Global Initiative. Sadly, we sign a non-disclosure agreement as a condition of participation, so I can't blog about it. Instead, I'm going to recommend a few books and presentations from the most impressive speakers I heard -- all focused around poverty alleviation, the track I worked in. Think of it as your chance to get the CGI experience in your own home, without the risk of running into Richard Branson in the men's room.
This seems to me to have been part-and-parcel of one of the most oddly executed PR strategies I've ever seen. The CGI managed to segregate the journalists out away from the action, essentially guaranteeing that we'd get bored and start thinking of things to complain about since they'd made it really hard to get any interesting stories. Meanwhile, why would you make participants sign non-disclosure agreements? Nothing secret was happening -- the working group stuff was all shown on TV constantly in the press room. Meanwhile, all the journalists there seemed perpetually confused by what the event was all about, since lots of the "commitments" names at the meeting didn't really seem to be charitable in nature. I, of course, had read Jonathan Rauch's Atlantic cover story whose headlilne is "This is Not Charity" taken from something Ira Magaziner told him for the piece:
The climate initiative, in typical Magaziner style, has many moving parts, including technical assistance to cities, networks for sharing best practices, software to measure progress, financial support, and a full-time foundation staff member assigned to each city. But the make-or-break component is a plan to re-equilibrate the market for energy conservation. “What we’re doing is jump-starting— accelerating—market forces,” Magaziner told me.
Cities own public buildings: offices, schools, police stations, hospitals, fire stations. They set codes for private buildings. They buy and run fleets of vehicles: buses, garbage trucks, police cars, ambulances. They handle water and waste. No city by itself can make a deep dent in carbon emissions or reorganize a global market, but together cities can pool their demand for leading-edge conservation technologies, such as LEDs for traffic lights, systems that capture and burn garbage dumps’ waste methane (a potent greenhouse gas), and alternative-fuel engines for city vehicles. Predictable demand would let suppliers scale up their operations, bringing prices down and creating footholds for technologies on the cusp of commercialization.
That would be step one. Step two, in Magaziner’s vision, is to channel a Niagara of private capital into the effort. Energy-saving technologies typically cost more up front but less over time. “So what we’re going to be doing is setting up a financing mechanism,” he told me. The foundation would help cities borrow in the securities markets against future energy savings. “The whole thing is bankable,” Magaziner said. “It’s a commercial proposition. This is not charity. The whole concept of this is that the market itself over some period of time is going to deploy all these energy-saving things. The problem is it will happen slowly and gradually.” The foundation hopes to reduce decades to years, and years to months.
In short, some of the stuff there didn't seem like charity because it's not supposed to be charity, but I didn't see that explained anywhere. It was puzzling because everything about the operation seemed really slick and media-savvy. They just couldn't seem to communicate what it was they were actually doing.
Whatever Chris Bowers' state-by-state polling may show, can't we all agree that Rudy Giuliani is not going to beat Barack Obama in Massachusetts? Bush got 37 percent of the vote in Massachusetts in 2004 and, believe it or not, that was a huge improvement over the 33 percent he got in 2000, or the 28 percent Bob Dole got in 1996. What we're learning with that post of Chris' are two things: (1) is that Hillary Clinton is plenty electable, and (2) Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani are better known than Barack Obama and John Edwards. Nothing else.
It seems to me that Kevin Drum is missing the obvious as he puzzles over what Barack Obama could be claiming to represent when he says he represents "real change." The implication of the claim, obviously, is that while Republicans offer stasis and he offers "real change" his opponent, Hillary Clinton, must offer "fake change."
I think the relevant idea here isn't "an end to polarization" nearly so much as it is an end to what Obama has referred to as "the smallness of our politics." In this frame, partisanship isn't being contrasted to finer-grained efforts to find compromise nearly so much as it's being contrasted to the pursuit of broad thematic goals rather than politics as trench warfare in which the fighting is fierce but nothing ever happens.
On a symbolic level, this is clear enough. It would be fairly ridiculous for George H.W. Bush to be elected president in 1988, beaten by Bill Clinton in 1992, Clinton succeeded by Bush's son in 2000, and Bush the Younger succeeded by Clinton's wife in 2008. And yet this seems like a very probably outcome. It's as if the two rival claimants to the throne could just settle their feud by having Hillary Clinton marry George P. Bush and unite the warring clans.
What does the difference mean in practice? Obama's people speak of a distinction between transactional and transformational politics, with their guy in the latter camp. But, again, what's the upshot? Sometimes, it may mean that Clinton would be to Obama's left insofar as she seems more eager to uncritically embrace public sector unions as a vital element of her minimum winning coalition. Other times, it may mean that Clinton is to Obama's right insofar as she also seems more eager to uncritically court groups like AIPAC and CANF when framing her foreign policy. Less partisan in this sense doesn't necessarily mean more "centrist" it means bigger and broader. The incompetence dodge critique of the Bush foreign policy is a perfect example of a position that's partisan to the exclusion of ideology or substance, just a bare assertion that Democrats could make all the same ideas turn out to be good ideas.
The problem for Obama is that the Democratic nomination process -- and especially the Iowa Caucus -- is a very transactional endeavor. And Obama doesn't want to be the high-minded candidate who earns praise and then loses. And to his people, that means he needs to win Iowa, which means putting this message forth so quietly that one begins to wonder if one isn't simply imagining things.
It bears mentioning that things seem to have gone entirely to hell in Burma, with reports now coming out that the death toll in the crackdown has been higher than it initially appeared.
Watch as I link to Megan McArdle making a sensible case for a conventional -- and correct! -- liberal view: we should shift the balance of subsidy away from roads and toward mass transit. I even found the link via Brad DeLong.
Pollsters need to figure out ways to (a) test the Iraq issues actually facing Congress; (b) include in questions a few basic facts about troop withdrawals (i.e., that Bush is only talking about withdrawing "surged" troops) and funding levels (i.e., how much money buys what strategy); and (c) test some dynamic scenarios involding actions by Congress and reactions by Bush (i.e., a protracted funding fight).
Until that happens, new polls on Iraq will provide grist for spin, but not for any honest assessment of where the public is at present.
I don't think that's really right. Sometimes your measurements don't produce clear results because the measurement method isn't clear enough. Other times, though, they don't produce clear results because there's nothing to see clearly. Oftentimes in politics, I think politicians would like to believe that there's an extremely clear-cut median voter view about some difficult issue, because then they can all go adopt that view, and come what may they'll say they were doing what they had to do because of public opinion. But realistically if the public's answers to ABC's questions about Iraq are incoherent, that's probably because the key "swing" group of people actually has fuzzy, somewhat incoherent thoughts about Iraq.
Under the circumstances, what politicians ought to do is:
Figure out what they think is the correct Iraq policy.
Figure out what they think is the most persuasive way to sell that policy to the public.
Pray it works.
At the end of the day, I think a lot of politicians actually underrate the considerable virtue of adopting a position that's correct on the merits. If you think the merits through, then you'll have a principled basis for answering a variety of different questions and responding to different sorts of attacks. And, of course, the election happens over a year from now so if you say something that's correct, and time proves you correct, then you'll look prescient and be able to say you took a bold stance and have the courage to lead. Polling data's nice when there's clear and convincing evidence of firm public conviction about something, but I just don't see that on Iraq. The search for better polling mostly seems like an effort to evade the substantive responsibilities of political office.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton today announced that she is co-sponsoring legislation introduced by Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) that prohibits the use of funds for military operations against Iran without explicit Congressional authorization (S. 759).
The political instincts that led her to vote for Lieberman-Kyle remain troubling, but this is obviously a big step forward.
For all the um, I believe "assholes" is the technical term, in the street harassment thread here's Jean Kilbourne providing some feminist re-education on the subject of advertising's portrayal of women:
This comes via Ann Friedman. I might observe that for a humorless feminist, Kilbourne is pretty damn funny.
And so I offer three ways to interpret what's going on here: a) the Edwards campaign is irresponsibly punting on the question of being able to win a general election until it can get through the primary, despite stakes that couldn't be higher for the nation, and has private data that shows Clinton to be its major competitor (call that one the Markos theory); b) the Edwards campaign is making a short-term tactical mistake by ignoring the impending Obama threat while taking on Clinton; or c) Edwards is a person of principle who sees in the Obama campaign more of what he would like in the White House, and is going to go down in such a way as to try to take Clinton with him.
Usually these things are overdetermined. Can't the campaign be thinking some mix of all three of those things?
For $25 a day (or $175 a month for a 3 day/week commitment), you can drop into the space, use the wireless, meet with clients in the small glassed-in conference room, and, often, find folks to grab a drink with afterward. The feel is part dorm lounge, part ad agency and part cybercafe, and it's a hit.
Kay Steiger from whom I got the link seems to think this is a good idea. But why not just do what everyone I know in DC does when they need a neither-office-nor-home place to work and . . . go to a coffee shop (or "cybercafe")? If there isn't a good free wifi hotspot in your neighborhood, you could always just sign up for a T-Mobile account for $40 a month (or, even better, $360 a year) and go to your local Starbucks or Borders. Or get AT&T for $20 a month and use it at McDonalds or Barnes & Noble. Indeed, you could easily get both for less than $125 a month.
Photo by Flickr user dnorton used under a Creative Commons license
It's their democracy. So shut up, already. This Administration did considerable harm to democracy activists across the Middle East, as well as the folks who came out of the Orange and Rose Revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia with governing responsibilities, by seeming to take too much credit. This makes the locals look like puppets (see under: Iraq) instead of folks who are expressing indigenous forms of an indigenous desire for universal freedoms. Yes, I want to see this Administration speak loudly and clearly about repression in Burma -- but please, no more chest-thumping about what support we're giving whom. People who are showing that much determination and courage deserve not to be miscast as our puppets.
Obviously, though, this is one of those instances where Bush has been screwing up without "making mistakes" as such. He treats those foreign democracy activists who he chooses not to ignore as puppets, because whether or not it's actually the case that the activists in question or puppets, his only interest in them is as puppets. Bush doesn't believe in foreigners holding elections that produce the wrong results (see Palestine) and doesn't oppose coups when he thinks they might advance his policy agenda (see the pre-war hints that Turkey's military might want to step in) nor does he oppose hanging out with petty, cruel dictators of theocratic states when they support his geopolitical aims (Saudi Arabia is the famous case here, but see also Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, etc.).
It's true, of course, that when Bush sees a foreign state under the control of a regime he deems hostile, he approves of overthrowing it. And when the overthrowers are genuine democrats, he's fine with that, but he's also fine with sheltering the MEK or whatever else. Whether or not other people wind up looking like puppets or hundreds of thousands of deaths result (see, e.g., Iraq) isn't really a serious consideration.
Oh, good. Word on the street is that back in the CPA days they said "real men go to Teheran." Obviously, though, the really real hawks of the world are the China hawks. Like, it seems, Christopher Hitchens:
China also maintains territorial claims against India and Vietnam (and, of course, Taiwan) and is building a vast army, as well as a huge oceangoing navy, to back up these ambitions. It seems an eon ago, because it was before Sept. 11, 2001, but we should not forget what happened when an American aircraft was involved in a midair collision over Hainan island in the early days of this administration. The Chinese acted as if the accident was deliberate, impounded the plane and the crew for several days, and mounted mass demonstrations of hysterical chauvinism. Events in the Middle East have since obscured this menacing picture, but actually it is in that region that China's cynical statecraft is most obviously on display. If Beijing had had its way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power. Iran is being supplied with Chinese Silkworm missiles. Most horribly of all, China buys most of the oil of Sudan and in return provides the weaponry—and the diplomatic cover at the United Nations—for the cleansing of Darfur.
Robert Farley notes that Hitchens seems to have decided that now would be a good time to adopt full-on crazy neoconservative opinions. He also note spoints out that China has no real territorial claims against India (if anything, it's India who's making claims about China) and this business about a "huge oceangoing navy" is just made up. Obviously, in the scheme of things the Chinese Communist Party is not the most admirable crew on the planet. But on the other hand, the humanitarian benefits to locking the US and the PRC into a cycle of mutual paranoia and hostility are really nowhere to be seen.
I'm not really sure what to make of the Clinton campaign's apparent relationship with Matt Drudge. His site isn't merely an appendage of the conservative message machine, but it's mostly an appendage of the conservative message machine. I'd like to see a nominee who's approach to the right's domination of American political discourse is to challenge it, rather than try to cozy up to it.
You see much the same thing in Clinton's relationship with Rupert Murdoch. Sure, as long as she's seemingly ascendant and willing to court these people, they're happy to play nice. But when the chips are down -- when the right is, say, trying to get her removed from office on a flimsy pretext -- does she think Murdoch and Drudge are going to have her back? Where are they going to be when she has a tough legislative battle? When she's looking to elect friendly members of congress in the midterms? It all seems bafflingly self-centered and short-sighted to me.
I've mostly seen Robert Kaplan's article on PMCs for The Atlantic's website characterized as a defense of the contractors, and since I typically disagree with Kaplan about policy matters I wouldn't be surprised if that's how he intended it, but it's really a very non-polemical piece that basically just lays out how absolutely integral contractors have become to the defense establishment as it currently exists. Given that our main actual ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't going very well, I think this mostly supports the conclusion that building a heavily contractor-dependent military has been a mistake.
Barack Obama's call today for the United States to recommit itself to the goal of global nuclear abolition is an excellent move. In my view, nuclear proliferation policy is the most important issue facing the country, and Obama has not only now moved to the correct position, but shown enough interest in the topic to make this the element of today's foreign policy speech that he wanted to "preview" for the press.
That said, on this issue as on several others, John Edwards can pretty fairly argue that he was here first. I praised him for his Pace University counterterrorism speech about a month ago where he said:
As president, I will create a Global Nuclear Compact to strengthen the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would support peaceful nuclear programs, improve security for existing stocks of nuclear materials, and ensure more frequent verification that materials are not being diverted and facilities are not being misused. And I will lead an international effort to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
Even earlier, during the Q&A to a CFR speech in May Edwards said:
Well, let me say first, I think I would want to associate myself with the concepts that are conveyed by Kissinger, Sam Nunn and others in the op-ed piece. I thought it was very thoughtful. And I think essentially what they said if I remember -- I don't remember the precise language -- was that we should aspire to a nuclear-free world. I agree with that. Now, there are a lot of steps that have to go between here and there. Some of them are pretty obvious, which is America should not be building new nuclear weapons. And then I think America should be doing things like leading an international effort to close the holes in the NPT. There are clearly serious flaws in the NPT. And I think America, leading an international effort to reduce the supplies nuclear sense in the world -- all aimed at the general goal that's described in that piece that you just spoke about.
The op-ed in question can be read here, and that's essentially the policy Barack Obama is now endorsing as well (although, to be fair to Obama, he's also said good things on non-proliferation in the past).
Blackwater security contractors in Iraq have been involved in at least 195 "escalation of force" incidents since early 2005, including several previously unreported killings of Iraqi civilians, according to a new congressional account of State Department and company documents. [...]
Waxman and other critics have said the State Department, which has paid Blackwater nearly $1 billion for security work in Iraq, allowed the company to operate with impunity. "There is no evidence in the documents that the Committee has reviewed," a memorandum released by Democrats said, "that the State Department sought to restrain Blackwater's actions, raised concerns about the number of shooting incidents involving Blackwater or the company's high rate of shooting first, or detained Blackwater contractors for investigation."
You can read Waxman's full report (PDF) if you want all the gruesome details. Scott Horton chimes in:
Yesterday I sat in a conference room overlooking the Hudson River Valley in the United States Military Academy at West Point listening to an impressive array of military lawyers discuss the issues associated with the war on terror. One question kept asserting itself, even though it was missing from the formal agenda: “What are we going to do about the contractors?” As one retired JAG put it, “their conduct is dangerously undercutting the military’s performance of its counter-insurgency mission.”
Meanwhile, consider what a mockery the structural situation of the contractors makes of the notion that the mission in Iraq is primarily motivated by concern for Iraqi well-being. Why would you introduce into a country a largish group of heavily armed people who are licensed to operate with legal impunity? Well, I have no idea. It sounds like something you might wish on your worst enemies. It's certainly not something you'd do to help out.
With today's foreign policy speech, he's starting to hit harder, though still not naming names:
But it doesn't end there. Because the American people weren't just failed by a President – they were failed by much of Washington. By a media that too often reported spin instead of facts. By a foreign policy elite that largely boarded the bandwagon for war. And most of all by the majority of a Congress – a coequal branch of government – that voted to give the President the open-ended authority to wage war that he uses to this day. Let's be clear: without that vote, there would be no war.
Some seek to rewrite history. They argue that they weren't really voting for war, they were voting for inspectors, or for diplomacy. But the Congress, the Administration, the media, and the American people all understood what we were debating in the fall of 2002. This was a vote about whether or not to go to war. That's the truth as we all understood it then, and as we need to understand it now. And we need to ask those who voted for the war: how can you give the President a blank check and then act surprised when he cashes it?
I think we know who the "some" are here, and Obama's exactly right. He also starts trying to push this in a more forward-looking direction:
So there is a choice that has emerged in this campaign, one that the American people need to understand. They should ask themselves: who got the single most important foreign policy decision since the end of the Cold War right, and who got it wrong. This is not just a matter of debating the past. It's about who has the best judgment to make the critical decisions of the future. Because you might think that Washington would learn from Iraq. But we've seen in this campaign just how bent out of shape Washington gets when you challenge its assumptions.
When I said that as President I would lead direct diplomacy with our adversaries, I was called naïve and irresponsible. But how are we going to turn the page on the failed Bush-Cheney policy of not talking to our adversaries if we don't have a President who will lead that diplomacy?
To try to use my decoder ring for a minute here, one thing that's worth noting is that there's no such thing as a "Bush-Cheney policy" of refusing to engage in high-level diplomatic talks with Iran without preconditions. You could more accurately term that the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush Bipartisan Establishment Policy. He's saying that simply returning to the pre-Bush policies aren't going to resolve our problems with Iran, but that we need the sort of newer policies that he and his team of people -- people who had the courage and judgment to make the right call on Iraq, when the conventional wisdom and political pressure went the other way -- are prepared to implement.
Then comes the nuclear stuff, which, as I said earlier, I think is the most important thing int he world and where Obama has the right position.
James Verini has a very interesting nuanced profile of Fred Krupp, the controversial head of Environmental Defense, your neighborhood corporate-friendly environmental operation. Unfortunately, the article's only for subscribers, so you may need to rely on Dave Roberts' blog post instead:
You can probably guess my take. I value the person who moves a penny more than the person who talks about moving $100. Krupp has gotten lots of stuff done that otherwise wouldn't have gotten done. [...] The focus on motivations is a symptom of environmentalism's lamentable moralism on climate change. Krupp has moved a lot of pennies, so while I'm not going to put a poster of him up on my wall, I'm glad he's out there.
As I see it, it takes all kinds to change the world. As George Bernard Shaw said "all progress depends on the unreasonable man," but the specific way the progress tends to happen is that someone decides they want to step in and cut a deal with someone reasonable like Krupp. You need radicals and pragmatists alike for anything good to happen.
I went this morning to a discussion with Akiva Eldar, notorious anti-semiteHaaretz columnist and co-author of Lords of the Land, a new book (new in English, at any rate) about the Israeli settlements in the post-1967 era. He had a good line about the incompatibility of the settlement policy with the Zionist dream of a secure, democratic Jewish state, noting that commitment to the policy had made Israel "less Jewish, less democratic, and less secure."
Beyond that he had the striking observation that since Israel signed on to the "road map" and thereby committed to dismantling "unauthorized" settlement outposts (i.e., the ones that are illegal under Israeli law) only nine houses have been removed. Meanwhile, he said that while just two percent of the Occupied Territories are actually under settlement control, a much larger swathe of the West Bank is now off-limits to Arabs, either because it's been set aside for further settlement expansion or else because it's part of the network of no-Arabs-allowed roads that connect the settlements, etc.
On the flipside, he observed that the Balfour Declaration came in 1917, the UN plan for a Jewish state came in 1947, Sadat's visit to Israel came in 1977, so we're due for good news in 2007, possibly out of the peace conference scheduled to be held in November in Annapolis.
I know there's a certain sentiment out there that bad data is better than no data, but I'm not really sure why one would think that since a lot of the polling data available is quite bad. To get a flavor, consider (via Marc Ambinder), Mark Blumenthal pointing out the wildly varying notions of who's likely to show up in Iowa:
July we have seen 12 public polls released in Iowa by 9 different organizations, and each appears to define and sample the likely caucus-goer universe differently. To the extent that pollsters have revealed the details, their snapshots of the electorate are poles apart, to say nothing of the candidates that those voters support. A month ago, for example, I found the percentage of first-time caucus-goers reported on four different polls of Democrats varying from 3% to 43%, with Edwards doing worse (and Clinton better) as the percentage of newcomers increased.
So, okay, in the aggregate this data is better than no data. It tells us something real. Namely, that public opinion in Iowa is fairly closely divided and that the turnout volume will have a significant impact on the outcome and that the general shape of that outcome is that the more first-timers who show up, the better for Clinton and the worse for Edwards. So it would be good for the press to report results like that and, indeed, the particular branch of the press known as This Blog You're Reading Right Now will endeavor to report public opinion news in this manner -- i.e., an informative one.
It's striking, however, that most of the organizations who actually sponsor the polls clearly aren't especially interested in providing their readers with accurate information. Instead, their idea is that if they do a poll, that will generate proprietary information granting them an "exclusive" story on the poll's results. Thus the results of your firm's poll should be heavily covered and not placed into the wider context of other poll results and the vagaries of polling methodology.
Ezra Klein spoke up the other day in defense of dating coaches. He notes that he pays for guitar lessons:
I would like to learn to play guitar well. But it's nowhere near as central to my happiness as my lovelife. Yet I'm allowed -- even praised -- for seeking expert guidance there, but would be roundly shamed if I sought a dating coach.
I think the issue here is a sense that if you're looking to expend time and money on you ought to be working on the fundamentals. Like maybe you should spend that cash on a gym membership or some better clothes or reading some interesting books or learning to cook (or play the guitar!) or whatever else it is that might make you a more appealing dating prospect. It's true, of course, that in the real world better marketing often does work even in the absence of better fundamentals, but as an announced plan of action it sounds a bit disreputable.
One of the things that really surprised me when I started at The Atlantic was that the company was intending to provide full-text RSS feeds. The folks from upstairs explained why that was a smart economic decision, and since they were telling me what I wanted to hear I bought it. But now Felix Salmon also makes that case thus providing some independent confirmation.
I'm not sure this really counts as a veiled threat:
I mean, I guess the threat's a little veiled, but not really. I suppose the only question is whether Rep. Issa (R-CA) is trying to say that if Waxman went to Iraq Blackwater personnel would simply fail to protect him, thus leading to his death at insurgent hands, or if he means that Blackwater personnel might shoot him in the back. And a further question: If Blackwater personnel assigned to do security for a US Congressman did shoot him in the back, what's the legal remedy?
So I read Jonah Goldberg's column here and I'm left wondering, does he really think that American nationalism is insufficiently present in American television news? Like, sincerely believe that in a way that would make this a subject worth arguing about?
The situation is almost too depressing to think about, but here's a bunch of information on the subject from the National Security Network, including the point that refugees from Iraq are now almost 10 percent of Jordan's population, a situation that's not really sustainable and that certainly indicates they won't be able to accept many more refugees without things totally going to hell. Not only is the United States famously being extremely stingy with the number of refugees we accept into our borders, but we're doing essentially nothing to direct support the refugees in the region or the countries hosting them.
This is great. First we had New York Times articles scrutinizing Hillary Clinton's laugh, and now we have Washington Post articles about the existence of articles scrutinizing Clinton's laugh. And now, I suppose, I'm making it even worse by blogging about the meta-articles. But seriously, at some point doesn't this madness need to stop?
Later today, John Edwards is going to be speaking in Portsmouth where he will, among other things, say "We clearly need fundamental reform of our system for providing security contractors in Iraq and other places" and present a plan for doing so based on the classic five bullet-point model:
Establishing Strong Quality Control and Accountability Measures
Implementing a Formal Evaluation of the Role of Contractors
Removing Cronyism out of Security Contracts
Expanding Legal Oversight and Prosecutions
Reestablishing a Democratic Military
As best I understand this admittedly somewhat vague preview I've been given, this actually turns out to be a surprisingly measured policy -- a "mend it, don't end it" -- approach to the contractor abuse issue. That may well be correct, though it seems to me that part of mending it ought to be some actual reduction in the scale on which contractors are used. Maybe that's what "reestablishing a democratic military" means, though.
John Hollinger's Western Conference forecasts are up at the ESPN site. It's Insider-only content, but he's going with what I imagine will be the controversial idea that Houston will finish number one ahead of San Antonio and Dallas (numbers two and three respectively). His argument rests, in part, on the fact that last year's scoring differential predicted 57.4 wins as opposed to the 52 that the team actually got, so he sets that as the baseline. What's more, he says, "the addition of more players who can create their own shot is going to be a huge benefit to the offense, which was excruciating to watch last season." And, indeed, despite his reputation as a ball hog, Steve Francis was a pretty efficient scorer last season.
Stewart Taylor did a fantastic column making the case for a renewed commitment to a nuclear-free world, but you can't read it unless you're a National Journal subscriber and nobody can afford National Journal subscriptions, so I'll quote some key bits. First he goes on for a while about how nuclear proliferation is the biggest threat to our security, and the best way to stop it involves reducing our own arsenal and setting universal disarmament as a goal. Then he says:
This has not always been my view. I once hoped that we might stop nuclear proliferation cold by invading Iraq, deposing Saddam Hussein, and thus putting the fear of a similar fate into other dictators who might seek to threaten us with nuclear weapons. Indeed, to my regret, I argued in late 2002 that the only effective way to deter rogue regimes from going nuclear was to make a credible threat of pre-emptive military attack, and that the "threat will not be credible unless we can show now that we will attack if necessary to disarm or dethrone Saddam."
I, too, used to think this. And, obviously, Taylor and I were wrong. Crucially, though, we've actually learned something from the experience:
The nonproliferation treaty worked surprisingly well from the 1960s until recent years. This was no accident, explained Graham, who served Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush as an arms control expert, in a speech earlier this year [PDF]. "It was rooted in a carefully crafted central bargain. In exchange for a commitment from the non-nuclear weapon states ... not to acquire nuclear weapons and to submit to international safeguards to verify compliance with this commitment, the NPT nuclear weapon states ... undertook to engage in nuclear disarmament negotiations aimed at the ultimate elimination of their nuclear arsenals. [But] the nuclear weapon states have never really delivered on the disarmament part of this bargain, and in recent years it appears to have been largely abandoned."
In essence, to do the diplomatic work of rebuilding an international coalition against proliferation, the nuclear states are going to need to do our part. And as the biggest nuclear state, that means us. Noting that even Ronald Reagan used to adhere to the dream of global nuclear abolition:
But most in the administration and in Congress seem to have written off Reagan's vision as an impossible dream. This reflects a failure of imagination: The steps that we should take toward eventual abolition of nuclear weapons would also greatly reduce the risk of nuclear catastrophe even if the world never gets close to zero. Among those steps, the op-ed asserts, are steep, mutual cuts in the arsenals of all nuclear weapons states; elimination of forward-deployed, short-range nuclear weapons; the highest possible security for all stocks of nuclear weapons, plutonium, and highly enriched uranium around the world; a discontinuation of the use of fissile materials in civil commerce and research facilities; and a U.S.-Russian agreement to reduce the danger of accidental launch by increasing warning time.
All true. Alternatively, we could just listen to Norm Podhoretz and start a war with Iran.
I mentioned James Verini's New Republic profile of controversial market-oriented environmentalist Fred Krup yesterday, lamenting that it was a subscribers-only piece. Now, though, I have the secret link that'll let you read it.
Yes, the Blackwater fighters were in a tough spot, surrounded by what they knew was a hostile population; if they'd been guarding someone in New York when a bomb went off, they wouldn't have fired wildly into a crowd of American civilians. But since that hostile Iraqi population is crucial to our effort in Iraq — not to mention being the people we're supposedly in Iraq to help — maybe Blackwater and the State Department ought to be a little bit more careful about increasing their hostility.
And, yes, they should be more careful. But why not go further. How about not putting people in these situations? Instead of having tens of thousands of armed Americans living in a country surrounded by hostile civilians who they can ill-afford to alienate, what if those Americans just left the country and went elsewhere? We've been in Iraq for many years now, and we're well past the hearts and minds point where if we get our troops and mercenaries all on their best behavior we might win the Iraqis over.
Here's the AP's coverage of John Edwards' forthcoming policy proposals on contractors in Iraq. Sources in the campaign have been able to clear up some of the ambiguity associated with the very brief summary I wrote up this morning, and the intention, as I hopes, is to build not only enhanced accountability measures into the contracting process but to limit the scope of the military's reliance on contractors to scenarios where it's really necessary.
Robert Samuelson has a column about -- shocking, I know -- the need to cut entitlement spending in which he finally just decides to throw up his hands at the public's unwillingness to adopt his policy preferences and decides to go for the last refuge of the damned: The bipartisan commission. Even Samuelson knows his schtick is boring:
Let's review the problem (again). From 2000 to 2030, the 65-and-over population will roughly double, from 35 million to 72 million, or from about 12 percent of the population to nearly 20 percent. Spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- three big programs that serve the elderly -- already represents more than 40 percent of the federal budget. In 2006, these three programs cost $1.1 trillion, more than twice defense spending. Left on automatic pilot, these programs are plausibly projected to grow to about 75 percent of the present budget by 2030.
The response to this, too, is boring. But as usual, Samuelson is getting the scope of his analysis all wrong. The vast majority of the growth in spending on "Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid" comes from Medicare and Medicaid. And that growth is mostly driven by rising health care costs rather than by aging.
Population aging, meanwhile, insofar as it's a problem isn't merely a challenge for federal entitlement spending. Insofar as a lower ratio of productive workers to retired consumers is a problem for Social Security, it's also a problem for everything else since the basic shape of the issue is that society can only consume as much as gets produced.
A while back people were wondering if anyone would escape the Bush administration with his reputation enhanced by his record of service. The answer is: Christopher Hill, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, who was able to broker the reasonable North Korea deal finalized today as soon as Dick Cheney decided to let him make a serious effort.
The Washington Post's website has put together what's got to be the most comprehensive list of campaign foreign policy advisers anywhere. Hillary Clinton has what's clearly the most impressive list in terms of scope and quality of resumés. Barack Obama, as I believe I've said before, has the group of people I'm most likely to be in substantive agreement with. Judgment versus experience, so to speak.
On the Republican side, John McCain's list probably contains the greatest quantity of frightening crazy people. Rudy Giuliani's list, on the other hand, is completely untempered with the inclusion of any big-name non-crazy people, whereas McCain at least leavens the Kagan/Kristol/Woolsey axis with some Armitage/Eagleburger/Scowcroft counterweights. Basically, if McCain becomes president, we're probably doomed, but if Giuliani becomes president we're definitely doomed. Romney and Edwards are both a little short on big-name people, though I've warmed up to Edwards' foreign policy and his foreign policy team considerably over the past few months. Team Romney includes Dan Senor who you may remember as the CPA's top spokesman from the early days of the Bremer Raj in Iraq, and I find the idea of him back in a position of responsibility to be fairly disturbing.
Barack Obama's campaign is eager to point out that they've been hitting on the PMC issue for a while now, citing press releases as far back as September 20, plus this one, and this one, and this one too.
The Washington Wizards may not know how to play defense worth a damn, but they do have one asset in spades that other teams lack -- political magazine writers moonlighting as basketbloggers prepared to defend them from John Hollinger's smears -- so let me quote Chris Orr from The Plank on his prediction that the Wizards will go 33-49:
Hollinger comes to his cataclysmic conclusion by making incontrovertibly true observations (the Wizards play atrocious defense) and downright odd ones--e.g., suggesting Caron Butler is going to get worse because he just had "a career year at 27." First off, Butler has improved every year for the last three years, so this wasn't some kind of strange outlier. (Indeed, the "career year" was only marginally better than his previous year--18.41 PER to 17.11 PER, using Hollinger's own vaunted stat for overall performance.) As for the fact that his best year so far came at 27(!), I'm not even sure whether Hollinger thinks that's too old or too young; it seems to me a pretty typical place to have a (to date) career year.
The real question, however, is whether or not we can proclaim the Wizards to be the Association's bloggiest team. Agent Zero himself is a blogger. Dan Steinberg's DC Sports Bog for The Washington Post sets the pace for newspaper sports blogging. And, of course, the team has its following among the world's highly trained professional political pundits. Advantage: Wizardsphere.
Jonah Goldberg took the bait and responded with a bit more on nationalism. I want to say something substantive on the patriotism/nationalism distinction tomorrow. For now, though, let me just observe that if the best the right can come up with in terms of "why do liberals hate America fodder" is old tongue-in-cheek blogposts of mine about historical counterfactuals then I find that a bit sad. Why not just use the Steynmethod and use some pseudo-facts?
This week, though, I'm in the midst of my own nationalism moment as I try to bring my manuscript in according with Wiley-approved style. Mostly this involves fixing my charming typos, spelling errors, grammatical screw-ups, or habit of saying "key" seven times on every page. But. Every so often I'll write something like "four American troops were killed" or "American policy requires" or similar. And they, out of what I guess is deference to the delicate sensitivities of our friends south of the border, want that to be all "U.S. troops" and so forth. On this point, at least, I'd happily embrace linguistic unilateralism.
Photo by Flickr user Daveynin used under a Creative Commons license
Brendan Nyhan: "If you're not already, you need to read McClatchy's DC news reporting. It's the only place you'll find clear fact-checking like this analysis of the debate over the SCHIP bill that President Bush just vetoed." Indeed:
President Bush claims that the bipartisan bill to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program "would result in taking a program meant to help poor children and turning it into one that covers children in households with incomes up to $83,000 a year."
That's not true. [...]
The president also claims that the proposal would cause some families to drop private coverage and enroll their children in the cheaper SCHIP program.
That's true.
And so forth. It's fairly staggering that the very same president who's so restrained with his spending that he can't sign SCHIP expansion signed the 2003 Medicare reform bill.
Fred Kaplan makes excellent points about the Yeltsin-era roots of Vladimir Putin's power grabs. As he writes "So, by the time Putin was elected president in 2000, the vestiges of a democratic Russia had long vanished." This is the biggest flaw you see in American coverage of Putin-era Russia, a deep investment in this mythical era of Yeltsin and Democracy. Realistically, Yeltsin offered a Russia that was geopolitically weaker and therefore friendly to American foreign policy. It was also a Russia that was more open to western advice about how to run the country, and where the powers that be were more likely to have western friends.
What you never had, though, was any recognizable political democracy.
One of the odder notions to take hold in recent years is that AIPAC specifically, and the so-called "Israel lobby" more generally had absolutely nothing to do with the Iraq War, and that anyone who says otherwise is an anti-semite. As John Judis writes for The New Republic, however, this is just false:
At the time, a Senate staff person with a responsibility for foreign policy told me of AIPAC's lobbying. But I don't have to rely on my memory. AIPAC's lobbying wasn't widely reported because AIPAC didn't want Arab states, whose support the Bush administration was soliciting, to be able to tie Bush's plans to Israel, but it lobbied nonetheless. In September 2002, before Congress had begun considering the administration's proposal authorizing force with Iraq, Rebecca Needler, a spokeswoman for AIPAC, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, "If the president asks Congress to support action in Iraq, AIPAC would lobby members of Congress to support him." Then at an AIPAC meeting in New York in January 2003, before the war began, but after Congress had voted to authorize Bush to go to war, Howard Kohr, AIPAC's executive director, boasted of AIPAC's success in lobbying for the war. Reported the New York Sun, "According to Mr. Kohr, AIPAC's successes over the past year also include guaranteeing Israel's annual aid package and 'quietly' lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq."
And, obviously, other institutions of the hawkish "pro-Israel" establishment -- the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Saban Center, JINSA, The New York Sun, The New Republic, etc. -- all advocated strongly in favor of invasion. That's not to say that "the Jews caused the war" (I think Bush, Cheney, Blair, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc. had a little something to do with it) but it's still true.
Fred Thompson, who has way more experience pretending to be in the military than anyone else in politics, steps up to the plate in defense of calling anti-war troops "phony soldiers":
Congressional Democrats are trying to divert attention from insulting our military leader in Iraq and pandering to the loony left by attacking Rush Limbaugh. He is one of the strongest supporters of our troops, yet Democrats claim he is not being strong enough. I wonder who General Petraeus and his troops think is most supportive?
No away around it, but obviously congressional Democrats are trying to divert attention from the "Betrayus" controversy. This, though, just gets us back to the point that congressional Republicans were harping about that in order to . . . distract attention away from their steadfast support of the Bush administration's catastrophically failed policies in Iraq. In some sense, it probably all evens how.
I'm not sure I understand why Greg Mankiw thinks economists "don't understand tipping." When I was learning economics, I learned that people are utility-maximers and that whenever you see some behavior that doesn't seem explicable in purely financial terms that must be because people are deriving utility from the foregone financial advantage. Thus, as any economist could tell you, people tip because of the utility they derive from the tipping in much the way that economists can explain all aspects of human life.
Have I ever mentioned that philosophers tend to think that economics is vacuous? Which isn't to say that you shouldn't listen to economists. These days, they tend to know a lot of math, and math is a very useful thing.
With Pete Domenici set to retire, mightn't this be a good time for Bill Richardson to consider dropping out of the presidential race and running for Senate?
Everyone watches Top Chef, right? Well, if you don't, you should. Tonight, though, is probably a bad time to start since it's the finale of the season. But let's consider this an open thread for those who do watch the show. I'm rooting for Hung who, admittedly, is kind of jerk but in an awesome way.
Via Ilan Goldenberg, we see that Shiites don't like our new insurgency-arming plan: "The largest Shiite political coalition in Iraq demanded Tuesday that the U.S. military abandon its recruitment of Sunni tribesmen into the Iraqi police, saying some are members of 'armed terrorist groups' and are engaged in killing, kidnapping and extortion under the guise of fighting the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq."
I'm in no position to say exactly what the true facts of the matter are, and probably nobody in the United States is (which is, of course, part of the problem) but the existence of the controversy, rather than the merits of anyone's arguments, is the crux of the issue here. Absent political reconciliation, forming opportunistic alliances with disparate Iraqi groups just amounts to fueling the civil war. Iraq's government doesn't like our new Sunni allies, and our new Sunni allies don't like Iraq's government either. At this point, there's little or nothing we can do to make them work out their differences peacefully, but for the love of God we could at least stop pouring gasoline on the conflict.
As promises yesterday, a post on patriotism, nationalism, left and right. Now it's true that you have some people on the left -- and some people on the libertarian right -- who adhere to genuinely post-national cosmpolitan views, but I think that's pretty rare. I was going to go through a whole elaborate introduction of new conceptual distinctions to say what I think separates mainstream liberals from mainstream conservatives, but I actually think you can break it down with a pretty simple analogy.
There were two kinds of Knicks fans in New York when I was a kid. On the one hand, you had people who wanted the Knicks to win, who therefore found Michael Jordan's global fame somewhat annoying, who and who learned, watching Knicks game after Knicks game, to appreciate what there is to appreciate about grind-it-out defense-oriented physical basketball. On the other hand you had crazy people who would insist that Patrick Ewing was the best center in the game, that Michael Jordan only seemed good because he got superstar calls, and were, generally speaking, completely out of touch with reality. The attitude toward America that conservatives like to champion is like this latter batch of Knicks fans -- not people animated by a special concern for our fellow-citizens and a special appreciation for our country's virtues, but by a deep emotional investment in a certain kind of national hagiography and myth-making.
The sort of investment in national mythos oftentimes has little-to-no relationship to actual concern for the nation's citizens. Normally, a country's best interests are served by facing up to basic realities that nationalists mythic narratives -- the Turkish nationalist idea that there was no Armenian genocide, the Israeli nationalist myth that there's no such thing as a Palestinian, etc. -- are committed to denying. Patriotism, by contrast, is about trying to genuinely look out for the best interests of one's country. The "dissent is patriotic" business often plays as a dodge, sometimes because it is, but the basic point is that if you care about your country, you'll want your country to avoid making mistakes, not step blindly behind whatever happens to be going on. Most of all, it means you need to see the world as it is. The Wizards defense is bad. No actual Arabs believe that American efforts at military domination of the Persian Gulf region are driven by a desire to spread the blessings of liberal democracy.
At any rate, Anatol Lieven's not an American at all, so he's neither an American patriot nor an American nationalist of any sort, but his book America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism is very interesting on the subject.
Apropos yesterday's style guide discussion, The New York Observertook a look yesterday at The New York Sun style guide, including such pearls of wisdom as "Avoid the phrase 'Arab East Jerusalem'" and
West Bank and Gaza Strip. Territories under Israeli control from 1967 onward. 'The territories' is acceptable on second reference, as are Judea or Samaria for the Southern and Northern regions of the West Bank. Avoid the phrase 'occupied territories.'
Unfortunately, the Observer didn't excerpt the Sun's rationale for its habit of using the phrase "Palestinian Arabs" instead of "Palestinians."
Gershom Gorenberg notes the tension between Bill Clinton's stance on Jerusalem and Hillary Clinton's embrace of silly agitprop.
Now, of course, I don't think anyone really believes that she takes a different view of this question. The problem, though, is that while she thinks pandering in this kind of way to hardliner sentiment will help her get elected, it will also make it quite a bit harder to govern if she ever wants to get involved in peace process matters. This kind of rhetoric makes a difference.
Scott Shane, David Johnston, and James Risen for The New York Times make this one of those days where I regret reading my key blogs before my morning newspaper by reporting a big story "Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations"
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.
Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.
You'd like to think they'll feel ashamed, but I really doubt it.
Not least, as America bumped down to earth, “liberal” lost the mantle of political insult most foul. Its place was taken by the pervasive, glib “neocon.”
What’s a neocon? A liberal “mugged by reality,” Irving Kristol said. The reality in question, back then, was communism-as-evil, the centrality of military force, the indispensability of the American idea and much else. But that’s ancient history. The neocons are the guys who gave us the Iraq war.
They’re the guys who, in the words of leftist commentator and blogger Matthew Yglesias, “believe that America should coercively dominate the world through military force” and “believe in a dogmatic form of American exceptionalism” and “favor the creation of a U.S.-dominated ‘universal empire.’ ”
But the term, in these Walt-Mearsheimered days, often denotes more than that. Neocon, for many, has become shorthand for neocon-Zionist conspiracy, whatever that may be, although probably involving some combination of plans to exploit Iraqi oil, bomb Iran and apply U.S. power to Israel’s benefit.
I'm not sure if I'm meant to be included within the scope of those nameless Jew-haters who appear to be criticizing an ideological movement of the American right while actually criticizing a shadowy Zionist conspiracy, but if you're interested in the post from which Cohen drew those quotations, it's here and you'll see that neither Israel nor Zionism actually comes up. Rather, I was attempting a close reading of Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol's 1996 essay "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy" and trying to tease out the implications of its vision of "benevolent hegemony."
Paul Waldman in the American Prospectwrites about the absurd farce that is the Iowa caucus' wildly disproportionate influence in our American political system. Kevin Drum says that "What's really remarkable, though, is that Iowa has gotten more important over time, not less, even though everybody knows this is absurd."
I'll beat that. What's really, really remarkable is the source of Iowa's growing significance -- arbitrary diktat from the media. If campaign reporters covered Iowa in a manner proportionate to its objective significance -- the assignment of a tiny number of delegates by an unrepresentative electorate through an arbitrary and anti-democratic procedure -- then Iowa would barely matter at all. But the press, instead of doing that, treats us to this endless valorization of the alleged "authenticity" of Iowa as if the vast majority of Americans who don't live in all-white rural states are somehow fake.
Third Way did a bunch of polling (PDF) in support of their new messaging report on the subject. In one section, the questioner says "I am going to list goals for some legislation before Congress regarding abortion. On a scale of 0
to 10, please tell me how strongly you support that goal, with a zero meaning you do not support it at all, a five meaning you are neutral toward it, and a higher number meaning you support it." Here's a couple of results:
People, in short, are pretty evenly divided on the question of banning abortion in all but the rarest cases, with 45 percent of the population having a pretty positive take on this abortion-banning concept. But the public is horrified by the idea of enforcing such a ban with prison time. That's not contradictory, as such, maybe tons of people think abortion should be illegal but punished merely with a light fine. It doesn't, however, make very much sense given the importance of the competing issues in play.
The men's room on the seventh floor where my office is was closed for cleaning, so I thought I'd take the elevator down to three where there's free coffee and soda and more bathrooms. Bad idea! Wound up stuck in the elevator.
In an LA Times op-ed I note that even Bill Clinton thinks Bill Clinton should disclose who's donating to his foundation if Hillary Clinton becomes a sitting president. And he's right! But for all the same reasons, he should make the disclosures now before the election's over.
Via Dave Weigel who notes that "this ad is (I'm estimating) 4567 percent more effective than the 'Gays for Giuliani' ad, simply because it follows the rhythms and structure of a real campaign ad."
This is from the Log Cabin Republicans who do an excellent job of playing it straight and pretending they think this is a pro-Romney ad. I assume the idea is to help Rudy Giuliani through indirection, since openly advocating for Giuliani on the basis of his strong-for-a-republican gay rights record would be counterproductive.
I've had more time now to look through Wesley Clark's book, A Time to Lead. Mostly, it's a fairly well-written memoir (well ghost-written by Tom Carhart, I suppose) of Clark's interesting career over the decades. As you get closer to the end and Clark achieves positions of greater responsibility, it shades elegantly into more-and-more engagement with policy issues. One thing it does well is engage in the worthy process of trying to rediscover and reclaim what it was the Clinton administration's foreign policy record was all about. I worry sometimes that some veterans of that administration seem to have adopted a pretty limited perspective on their own work -- something like "Kosovo was good, so we must make sure the UN doesn't stop us from doing good stuff in the future" but Clark doesn't do that.
What we had done in practice was justify the idea that a robust military was essential in peacetime. We cpould use these military assets to build relationships, supplement or empower diplomacy, and head off impending conflict as well as to simply go to war. It was a much more actve form of deterrence than we had had before, and some were calling it peacetime engagement or preventive diplomacy.
This gets in the neighborhood of something that's often been lost in discussions over the past few years, namely that sound leadership of a major power isn't just about winning wars or supporting the "right" ones, but also about things like avoiding wars and creating circumstances where big dramatic blowups don't take place. It's hard for political leaders to get credit for disasters avoided, but that's really the most important thing to do.
Chris Hayes tries to take liberal hawks down a peg: "If the Hitchens and Cohen’s and Bermans of the world are so concerned with liberating the oppressed through American force, how come the long-suffering Burmese don’t make the cut?" The trouble with these hypocrisy arguments is that you never know who's going to take you up on it. Hitchens was gearing up for conflict with China just the other day.
Breaking news from Edward Pound at National Journal -- it seems HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson is under investigation by the FBI, a situation that a lot of Republicans are familiar with these days but that still surely counts as noteworthy.
It seems to me that with the publication of this James Dobson op-ed, Rudy Giuliani just got a lot less electable:
After two hours of deliberation, we voted on a resolution that can be summarized as follows: If neither of the two major political parties nominates an individual who pledges himself or herself to the sanctity of human life, we will join others in voting for a minor-party candidate. Those agreeing with the proposition were invited to stand. The result was almost unanimous.
It would be a big, big problem for Giuliani's general election campaign to have any of the major cultural conservative institutions backing a third party candidate. It's generally very difficult to win when you have a spoiler trying to take you down the way Ross Perot was gunning for H.W. Bush in '92 or Ralph Nader was taking aim at Gore in 2000.
William Hartung notes that the best deal the Bush administration could get out of the DPRK is worse than the situation they had when they came into office and decided the Agreed Framework was no good so they could just feel free to screw it up (Fred Kaplan's 2004 article on this fiasco is an eternal must-read). Still, making the deal was the right thing to do, albeit in a too-little, too-late kind of way. It's got Michael Hirsch asking why we can't apply the same tactics to Iran.
What the entertainment industry really needs to do, in my view, is create a new annual awards show for preposterous IP policy arguments. Jeff Zucker makes a strong bid in this morning's subscriber-only CongressDaily:
At the conference, NBC-Universal CEO Jeff Zucker said intellectual property theft presents a clear danger to consumer health and safety, and is the "new face of organized crime," he said.
Mark Goldberg links to the UN Foundation Insightsreport from several months ago on strengthening multilateral non-proliferation efforts which concluded that the sort of posture Barack Obama and John Edwards are talking about adopting could be extremely useful.
Another reason to expect Charlotte to improve is Morrison. He's either going to get better or he's not going to play, but there's no way he's going to soak up 2,000 minutes and be as abysmally bad as he was last season.
Really? Morrison seemed like a bad draft choice, but Charlotte picked him anyway. Then he played terribly but Charlotte kept playing him. Why should we just assume they'll get smart about this? What if they keep on doing what they've been doing?
Read Mike Tomasky on Roger Cohen and other whiners. I want to say more about the whole "when did you stop beating the Kosovar Albanians?" line of argument against people who were right about Iraq and its remarkable persistence. For now, though, let me at least register my Official Puzzlement about being labeled a "leftist." I'm not running around with Subcommander Marcos or even filling the blog with praise for Evo Morales . . . I think I have pretty banal liberal political opinions on most issues.
On foreign policy, in particular, I think more people should read John Ikenberry's After Victory (or, better yet, my book -- out in April and, I promise you, featuring more jokes) which really isn't much of a radical text. It's the Iraq hawks who are espousing extremist views on an unheard of scale.
Photo by Flickr user Lordrich used under a Creative Commons license
Sometimes I daydream about the moment when Apple will realize that it should reach a product placement deal with a prominent political blogger such as myself and give me a bunch of cool free stuff in exchange for me writing about it. But now along comes Gilbert Arenas, apparently ruining things, by making companies think you can't trust a blogger with an endorsement deal:
Adidas executives learned that day what an increasing number of marketers have found -- that pitchmen armed with a blog can be tricky. Blog posts are typically candid and breezy, not the kind of safe, stock answers that athletes are often advised to give in postgame interviews, says David Carter, executive director of the USC Sports Business Institute in Los Angeles.
My commitment to any potential sponsors is that in exchange for free stuff of a sufficiently high quality I will eschew both candor and breeziness. I, after all, am a professional blogger, not some basketball player moonlighting.
David Brooks offers a very Sullivan-esque column on the failings of the modern GOP, which he traces to the hardening of conservative ideology into a firm creed rather than a Burkean disposition:
To put it bluntly, over the past several years, the G.O.P. has made ideological choices that offend conservatism’s Burkean roots. This may seem like an airy-fairy thing that does nothing more than provoke a few dissenting columns from William F. Buckley, George F. Will and Andrew Sullivan. But suburban, Midwestern and many business voters are dispositional conservatives more than creedal conservatives. They care about order, prudence and balanced budgets more than transformational leadership and perpetual tax cuts. It is among these groups that G.O.P. support is collapsing.
Maybe. I feel, though, that it's easy to overestimate the depth of the crisis facing the Republican Party. They've implemented some policies that have not worked well, and so they've become unpopular and look set for significant losses in 2008. One could, however, easily imagine nothing in particular changing -- especially nothing as abstract as shifting he balance of credal and dispositional cosnservatism -- before they bounce back in 2010 or 2012. How many articles were written in 2005 about the "new Republican majority" and trying to explaining the pseudo-fact of how it came about.
I used to think this notion of how more grownups ought to live in big houses together the way young single people do was just a crazy idea of Ezra Klein's, but apparently Reihan Salam shares the mad vision:
Why not rent a ramshackle 5 bedroom house and fill it with a couple of couples and a couple of singles, all like-minded. Two members of the "mini-commune" could be the homemakers, preparing meals and creating a pleasant, nurturing environment. These could be people who work from home on a flexible basis or who take a particularly strong interest in the domestic arts. The others would be breadwinners. This could, of course, be a reciple for disaster. But consider the savings, in financial and environmental terms. And consider how full of life such a house would be relative to a sterile home that is empty most of the time.
As the proud resident of a ramshackle five bedroom house, I must concede that the idea has a certain appeal. On the other hand, part of its ramshackle nature was that when I moved in I was warned that small children shouldn't really spend time in the house thanks to the lead paint.
Paul Krugman says that while it may not be all downhill for me from here on out, I am looking at a long, slow descent into unhappiness: "I always check out what’s new in National Bureau of Economic Research working papers, and a new one, 'Is Well-being U-Shaped over the Life Cycle?', reports that among American men, happiness reaches a minimum at the age of 49, then rises." Krugman, 54, is cheered by the news but from the vantage point of 26 this is a pretty dire prediction.
And it gets worse. "The paper also shows that in the United States the well-being of successive birth-cohorts has gradually fallen through time," reports the abstract, "In Europe, newer birth-cohorts are happier."
Iraq, budget deficits, the looming insolvency of Social Security and Medicare, high health and energy costs, a national immigration mess — the next president will inherit these problems in January 2009. With Bush's popularity at an all time low and relations with the Democratic-led Congress acrimonious, he has little or no chance of pulling off a surprise victory in his time left.
"We're in a worse place than we were in 1999" before Bush became president, lamented Matthew Dowd, a former pollster and chief campaign strategist for Bush who has become disillusioned with his old boss.
Indeed. The only thing I would dispute is that the framing suggests that "solving problems" is one of the purposes of the Bush administration, and that the fact that the problems haven't been solved amounts to a failure of administration policy. The evidence, in my view, suggests that Bush and his top aides couldn't care less about national problems and whether or not they're solved. They spend a lot of time focused on things like setting themselves up for sweetheart jobs in the industries they used to regulate, evading legal consequences for war crimes, helping the rich get richer, etc.
I don't, honestly, actually expect that much in the way of idealism from our political leaders. But I have this sense that Bill Clinton and a critical mass of his main aides thought that, basically, their odds of getting re-elected would be higher if things were going well in the country. And then that the odds of Al Gore succeeding Clinton in office (which obviously would benefit them in certain ways) would be higher if things were going well in the country. So that while good policy and good politics weren't by any means the same thing, they were related things, and "will this be a huge disaster?" was the sort of thing people worried about.
Bush -- not to much. Having come in with a campaign that won despite our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity he's governed as if the merits of things are irrelevant to his interests and those of his friends.
It turns out it's not strictly true that there's no disclosure of who the donors to the William J. Clinton Foundation are. The Clinton Global Initiative, one of the Foundation's branches, posts a list of members and the "membership fee" is $15,000 a year. It's a pretty long list, and mostly either of people I haven't heard of and those I have heard of range from Brad Pitt to John Podesta and back. But also Denise Rich, Marc Rich's wife, who I would have thought the Clintons would be going out of their way not to associate with or at least take money from at this point.
Of course, this sort of thing is still a poor substitute for real disclosure of who the donors to the Foundation -- and to other presidential foundations like the one George W. Bush is putting together as we speak -- are and how much they're giving.
This was, despite being terrible in certain predictable ways (like how all of a sudden an FBI evidence response team is able to conduct awesome commando operations in unfamiliar terrain against a numerically superior force) also definitely had its artfully-done-thriller qualities. But politically . . . wtf was happening? For the vast majority of the movie, it seemed as if at last conservatives had gotten the right-wing war on terror movie they've been craving -- the one where awesome go-getter, ass-kicking agents of American hard power need to take down some terrorists and, even worse, pansy bureaucrats and state department types.
Then at the end it takes an ideological swerve so sharp only a professional driver on a closed course would dare attempt it all the way into the domain of outright moral equivalence. Baffling.
I was trying to think of something to say about George W. Bush's decision to veto S-CHIP expansion and reauthorization that would move beyond accusing him of callous lack of concern for the well-being of children, but there's not that much to say. Greg Mankiw on his blog posted a highbrow version of the case against expansion and it seems that, basically, George W. Bush hates children. Or, rather, I guess that the official Bad Aspects of this effort to help children is that the bill will, allegedly, also crowd some people out of private sector insurance.
This, though, is a good thing to do.
The bill would also raise cigarette taxes, which, again, is a good thing to do since higher cigarette taxes cause either more revenue (a good thing) or else less smoking (a good thing) or else some combination of these two good things. Even Megan McArdle who hates children enough to oppose this policy can't figure out why Bush would be so fanatically anti-child as to take big political risks on this of all subjects. It seems to me, though, that the displacing of private insurance has got to be the key issue for him, since we know from his 2003 stab at health care reform that Bush loves insurance companies.
Photo of cute child possibly doomed to substandard health care by heartless conservative policies by Flickr user Pankaj used under a Creative Commons license
Felix Salmon notes the curious case of the wireless telecom executive who, according to a spokesman, "was traveling and couldn't be reached." Methinks this staple of the PR field has become a bit obsolete.
Daniel Levy, not unpredictably, has what's to my mind the best take on The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy that I've seen yet. He does a great job of highlighting the very real flaws in the Walt-Mearsheimer argument without turning that into mere triangulation in the face of their more deranged critics. The problems Levy points to, in my view, stem basically from the limits of Walt and Mearsheimer's methodology.
Basically, as realists, I think they don't really "get" ideology and the extent to which the World War IV view of the world exists as a freestanding, transnational (most influential, clearly, in US and Israeli politics, but also with some sway in the UK and Australia and some of its leading proponents in the US are Canadian, etc.) view of things that's not "about" serving Israel's interests or America's interests or, indeed, anyone's interests -- it's just wrong.
According to David Paul Kuhn, "the most durable reality of American politics" is that "white men matter most." Dana Goldstein offers an excellent substantive rejoinder, but I'm always perplexed by this broader genre of analysis. The presumption often seems to be that Americans vote via some kind of demographic electoral college and thus we can argue about whether "white men" or "Hispanics" or "married women" or "independents" are the key to the election in much the same way that we can identify some states (Ohio, Florida) as big swing states, while others are either less important because small (New Hampshire, New Mexico) or else unimportant because non-swingy (New York, Texas).
Obviously, though, elections don't work like that. I imagine that only a very small number of black lesbians voted for Bush in 2004, but convincing one of them to vote Democratic in 2008 is exactly as valuable as it would be to convince any other Bush supporter -- white, green, red, blue, whatever -- to flip sides. The only relevant distinctions for these purposes have to do with which state someone lives in.
It is true, of course, that since most people are white people, white people "matter most" in some crude numerical sense. But men don't matter more than women on this score. And the bigger you build up your demographic group the more its "importance" comes at the expense of any kind of precision. Given that white men are something like 40 percent of the population, it's too big a group to target in a meaningful way.
Marc Ambinder reports: "Fed up with neocons, theocons and convict cons, a group of former aides to Ronald Reagan want to reanimate the Republican Party by reviving the organization that brought Reagan to power," namely Citizens for the Republic, which "was funded with seed money from Reagan's failed 1976 presidential bid and supported his political travels over the next several years."
The head of the outfit will be Craig Shirley so this post-midterms op-ed he wrote explaining his view of where the GOP went wrong, slamming "steel tariffs, prescription drug benefits, a League of Nations mentality, the growth of government and harebrained spending, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, the increasing regulation of political speech in the United States and endemic corruption."
And Rush Limbaugh — displaying the same style he exhibited in his recent claim that members of the military who oppose the Iraq war are “phony soldiers” and his later comparison of a wounded vet who criticized him for that remark to a suicide bomber — immediately accused Mr. Fox of faking it. “In this commercial, he is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He is moving all around and shaking. And it’s purely an act.” Heh-heh-heh.
That does seem to be the pattern. It seems that, to Rush, it's actually inconceivable that people could be in situations — suffering from disease, being used as pawns in the president's bizarre ego fantasies in Iraq — in which they are appealing to the public for assistance. Anyone doing that must be faking it.
Chris Bowers on House Progressive Caucus members Peter DeFazio and Tom Udall both choosing not to enter winnable Senate races: "We simply can't build a more progressive Senate if progressive caucus members keep passing up opportunities to run for higher office."
Tom Lee's post on a KCRW version of Feist's "I Feel It All" serves as an important reminder that despite the heavy airplay Apple is giving to that ad featuring "1234," that "1234" is not, in fact, the best track on the album:
So Roger Cohen wants us to be discerning enough to distinguish between the Roger Cohens of the world and neocons? "Neocon lite" to the rescue! I reiterate my view that this is the perfect term for stigmatizing Democrats whose influence deserves to wane.
My only concern with this is that it's not always clear to me that people from the Cohen school actually do have a "lite" version of neoconservative grandiosity, as opposed to one that's just slightly different. Let me quote a passage a co-wrote with Sam Rosenfeld that tried to popularize the phrase "neoconservatism with a human face"
Liberal hawks joined neoconservatives in taking advantage of the public's post–September 11 engagement with the world to unveil a comically promiscuous military agenda. The New Republic first argued that the Bush administration should have deployed more troops to Afghanistan, then proceeded to argue in favor of the war in Iraq, then criticized the administration for failing to send more of America's already overstretched forces to interventions in Liberia and Haiti, then urged action to halt genocide in Sudan, and now takes the view that the problem with Iraq is that hundreds of thousands of additional troops should have been sent there from the beginning. Though arguably imbued with loftier motives than its neoconservative variant (The Weekly Standard has variously argued for attacking Iran, Syria, and North Korea), TNR's stance is still knee-jerk hawkishness that is oblivious to the realities of the situation. It deserves to be tuned out in debates every bit as much as blanket pacifism does. Just as serious opponents of war must be prepared to countenance some wars under some circumstances, serious advocates of using force for humanitarian purposes must be willing to acknowledge some limits to what can and should be done.
We are not realists. Rather, we agree with Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, that coercive humanitarian intervention, while useful and important, “can be justified only in the face of ongoing or imminent genocide, or comparable mass slaughter or loss of life.” Avenging past slaughter, which certainly took place in Iraq years before the U.S. invasion, is not a good enough reason. Using force to build a pluralistic liberal democracy where none existed before could count as a moral justification for war if we had any sense of how to feasibly engage in such an endeavor, but the evidence from Iraq and elsewhere indicates that we do not. Liberal hawks convinced themselves that the war in their heads was a classic humanitarian intervention, but wishing doesn't make it so. Not merely in its execution, but on the plane of ideas as well, the humanitarian rationale for the war was, at best, neoconservatism with a human face. The confusion currently permeating the discourse only complicates efforts to construct a viable liberal foreign policy, and will continue to do so until it is checked.
That's what I've got. The point, either way, is that merely professing humanitarian motives does not a humanitarian operation make. Virtually everyone who's ever wanted to start a war anywhere for any reason in the modern world has professed idealistic motives. Maybe all those people even believed them -- who knows? -- but it doesn't make a difference. It's particularly instructive in this light to look at the rhetoric used to justify classical imperialism.
Meanwhile, reading this post I get the sense that James Kirchick has been making copies of copies of copies of old Roger Cohen columns or something:
To this, the leftist blog "Lawyers, Guns and Money" asks "Is there anything that Bill Kristol says that won't eventually find its way into Christopher Hitchens Mouth?" (which the always lovely Eric Alterman cites, Matthew Yglesias snarks, "Oh, good. Word on the street is that back in the CPA days they said 'real men go to Teheran.' Obviously, though, the really real hawks of the world are the China hawks."[...]
We've really come to the point now where, for the most widely read of liberal bloggers, the mere mention of human rights abuses in foreign countries is met with cries of "Warmonger!" or, even worse, "Neo-con!" Well, if talking about Iran's murdering of American troops in Iraq or China's support for the Burmese junta qualifies me as either of these epithets, I'd rather be a "neo-con warmonger" than adhere to the nihilism expressed by the likes of Matthew Yglesias and Eric Alterman.
Here, again, with the random deployment of the term "leftist." And, of course Kirchick would rather be a neoconservative warmonger than a liberal like me or Eric Alterman, that's because he's a neoconservative warmonger. Most annoyingly of all, we have the classic internet argumentative tactic "if I ignore the parts of my critics' writing where they made their substantive arguments, I can make it sound as if they don't have any substantive arguments!" But go back and read the Robert Farley post we were all linking to. Or read this longer Farley follow up.
Several of the things Hitchens said about China were false; others badly overblown. In general, the thrust of his argument seemed to be agreement with people like Bill Kristol that United States policy should be aimed at gearing up for conflict with China (presumably more a Cold War-style conflict than a hot one) which would, in my view, be a disaster for the interests of Americans and most of the people around the world. It's true, of course, that the PRC government is fairly harsh dictatorship, but I don't see the sort of demonization of China that Hitchens was engaged in as likely to lead to anything that's actually helpful to actual Chinese people. It is true, however, that Hitchens and Kirchick may just be engaged in vacuous posturing and senseless smearing of liberals that's completely divorced from any policy ideas or real thought about anything.
Johann Hari writes about France's destructive interventions in the Central African Republic and other parts of Africa. Andrew, apparently trying to shore-up his conservative credentials, observes that "If the US did anything like this, you wouldn't hear the last of it. But this is the first report I've read." Well, obviously US policy gets more coverage in the United States than does French policy, but it's really not as if we're inundated with coverage of American involvement in sub-Saharan Africa either.
Walter Pincus, for example, did an interesting May 28 Washington Post article about some potential problems with the idea of creating a new Africa Command but it ran on page A13 and I haven't seen whatever's happening there been the subject of intense journalist interest anymore than Ethiopia's US-backed invasion of Somalia has been. The truth is simply that things that happen in Africa that don't involve westerners getting killed (if French or American personnel started dying in large numbers as part of these intervention, we'd hear about that) don't get covered very much and a huge proportion of the coverage is dedicated to the situation in Darfur.
I was hoping to tease out a connection between this lapel pin idiocy and what I was saying about patriotism the other day. Honestly, though, I can't come up with anything. This business so clearly has nothing to do with any genuinely felt emotions about the country that I have no idea what to say. Matthew Duss breaks out some of the relevant Kundera-on-kitsch material:
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass. The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! The second tear makes kitsch kitsch.
In some ways, though, this even gives it all too much credence and sells short the level of sheer cynicism and stupidity running through the idea of having a controversy on this subject.
I agree with everyone who says that James Dobson's threat to back a third party if Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican nomination on a pro-choice platform is mostly intended as an intervention in the primary. Dobson wants Giuliani to lose the nomination. Alternatively, he wants Giuliani to win the nomination only after shifting his position. But I don't think Dobdon's bluffing. Scott Lemieux thinks he is:
If push came to shove, though -- granting that a pro-choice Republican winning would be a disaster for the forced pregnancy minority -- I'm pretty sure that Dobson will not be indifferent about whether Giuliani or Clinton makes at least the next four years of federal judicial appointments.
To me that's backwards. The pro-life movement is going to act to safeguard its interests as a movement. Judges don't really matter to that. But if a Republican winning the White House on a pro-choice platform would be a crushing blow to the movement's power. The best thing is for a pro-life Republican to win the White House. But for a pro-choice Republican to win is worse than for a pro-choice Democrat to win, because it would undermine the narrative that abortion criminalization is a winning electoral issue for conservative politicians. If Rudy gets the nomination as a pro-choicer, I think Dobson et. al. have no choice but to try to throw the race to the Democrats, in order to make the argument that Republicans can only win if they run pro-life campaigns.
Because I live in Washington, DC the idea of engaging in a little Nexis-fu to find a David Brooks column that utterly contradicts the one he published yesterday actually came up at a party. Looks like Henry Farrell's already done the work, noting Brooks' 2005 column on how Team Bush "have learned from centuries of conservative teaching – from Burke to Oakeshott to Hayek – to be skeptical of Sachsian grand plans." Henry remarks:
As Brooks-2007 tells us quite straightforwardly, the notion that George W. Bush and his administration are exemplars of Burkean prudence is an utter nonsense. I don’t think that there is any other reasonable explanation of Brooks’ reticence in 2005 (and indeed before and after) than a willingness to shut up for the cause. While it’s all very nice that he’s coming out and saying these things now, it would obviously have been rather more helpful if he had said it, say, back in 2004, when it might conceivably have helped make a difference.
Mostly true, but I think there's a problem here with portraying Brooks as some kind of evil puppetmaster manipulating the public by hiding Bush's un-Burkean side from view in 2005 (or 2004!) only to reveal it later in 2007. We know from polling data, after all, that there are millions of Americans who thought Bush was a good president in 2004 and 2005, but stopped thinking this over the course of 2005-2006. Brooks, it seems to me, probably just is one of those people. Now one can say to this, fairly, "why didn't he see it earlier?" and I think it's a good question and, indeed, probably a good topic for a column.
I don't see any particular reason to think that your average political commentator is especially discerning about this kind of thing (we're all professional writers, after all, not soothsayers) and, indeed, my general sense is that pundits are probably a lagging indicator of public opinion rather than a leading one. Tom Friedman, for example, only "officially" threw in the towel over Iraq long after the center of public opinion passed this point.
Fun With New Media (Okay, it's probably a bit dull)
I haven't actually watched this hour-long interview of Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer by Harry Kreisler that's apparently part of a series of "conversations with history" that UC Berkeley is doing, but I think it may be of interest to readers:
Kinda different from your normal YouTube fare I guess.
I hadn't realized that the 76ers acquired Reggie Evans last month. Obviously, for a team in desperate need of a power forward this becomes an any-port-in-a-storm kind of situation, but I think Evans is a pretty underrated player. Certainly, "a backup who's being forced to start" isn't how I'd describe a guy who had a league-leading 23 percent rebound rate last season. Obviously, five Reggie Evanses aren't going to get you anywhere, but he seems like an extremely useful player to me -- one who can really shine given the chance to start.
Photo by Flickr user thanasim25 used under a Creative Commons license
Blackwater's Iraq contracts mostly come via the State Department. The State Department, meanwhile, has an Inspector General, Howard Krongard, who's supposed to prevent any shenanigans. Or else, as Brian Beutler reports, he could just get up to his own shenanigans:
But Waxman's committee has long been investigating that very office, as well. Recently, seven people working for Krongard alleged that Krongard himself had, in Waxman's words, "interfered with on-going investigations in order to protect the State Department and the White House from political embarrassment." Two of those whistleblowers -- former Assistant Inspector General for Investigations John DeDona and his erstwhile deputy Ralph McNamara -- resigned specifically because of Krongard's meddling.
How did Krongard respond? Allegedly by threatening to terminate anybody else who dared speak with congressional investigators. Two of his employees -- special agents Ron Militana and Brian Rubendall -- have agreed to speak publicly anyway.
There's something breathtaking about the arrogance, corruption, and incompetence here. Bush has some basic reasons of self-interest to want the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to go well. And yet even that kind of motive seems to have no real pull, no ability to get the administration to take the job of governing seriously.
I believe I've mentioned before that I voted for Mitt Romney in 2002, and I retain a respect for the Mitt Romney who existed back then and even governed Massachusetts for a while before he got the idea of running for president into his head. But the new far-right Romney's the one who released this tax blueprint on Thursday. It has seven planks:
Make Bush's tax cuts permanent, a measure that mostly helps the rich.
Further reduce income tax rates across the board, a measure that mostly helps the rich.
"Any taxpayer with Adjusted Gross Income of under $200,000 would pay a tax rate of absolutely 0% on all of the income they earn from their savings, capital gains and dividends." Here's a change -- a proposal targeted at the unique needs of the upper middle class! It's not clear to me what's supposed to happen here if you go from earning $199,877 one year to earning $200,182 the next year: A giant tax hike?
Permanent elimination of the estate tax, deviating from the theme of measures that mostly help the rich by coming up with something that exclusively helps the rich.
Corporate tax rate cuts. Guess who this helps?
No increase in FICA. Since the only form of FICA increase that has any political support involves raising the FICA cap this, in practice, is yet another pro-rich-people measure.
"Governor Romney supports the full deductibility of qualified medical expenses," which, again, primarily benefits the rich.
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Heads in the Sand
