Responding to the post below, Tony V comments: "So the only problem with this analysis, MY, is that HRC and her camp are among the worst practitioners of 'testosterone based foreign policy' in the Democratic Party." I don't think that's the problem with my analysis, that's the problem with Hillary Clinton's approach to foreign policy issues. At the same time, one of her great strengths in the primary is that precisely because she's a woman I think a lot of the dovish Democratic primary electorate doesn't really see the stances Clinton's adopted for what they are. It's ironic that the candidate in the race most committed to the politics of machismo is the woman, but most indications you get from the campaign is that they're committed to this political approach in part because she is a woman and so they think it's necessary to double-down on "toughness" to stay viable in a general election.
Went to the Wizards' home opener last night, and I have to say that the $50 million in taxpayer money did, in fact, buy some very nice scoreboards for the arena. On the other hand, it appeared that nobody actually knew how to operate them properly and the information was consistently out of date. Along the same lines, the Wizards seem to have completely forgotten how to play basketball. Or, more specifically, Gilbert Arenas seems to have forgotten how to play, since giving up 94 points is usually consistent with a Wizards win and Brendan Haywood stepped up with 10 points 16 rebounds 5 blocks and a solid shooting percentage. But Gilbert: ten points! Six turnovers! I'm beginning to worry that this may be a very long season....
Like most everyone in the blogosphere (but see Barnett Rubin for a counterexample) my knowledge of and understanding of Pakistani politics is rather limited. What's more, it's clear that people who are knowledgeable about Pakistan disagree on the key points. One school of thought holds that Musharraf is a key bulwark against Islamist extremists whose power we need to help shore up. Another school holds that Musharrafism is actually rotting away the social foundations of moderate Pakistan. As Joshua Hammer put it:
And while the military aims to do the opposite, it is slowly destabilizing Pakistan. Eight years of usurpation of power by Musharraf have weakened secular parties, corrupted the judiciary, and implanted army men in every facet of civilian life. Pakistan’s population is now doubling every 38 years, creating severe social pressures. If the political process remains stunted, the Islamists may continue to gather strength until the country reaches a tipping point. “We are not going to collapse if Musharraf goes tomorrow; Pakistan will go on, insha’allah,” I was told by Mohammed Enver Baig, a senator with the Pakistan People’s Party. “But the 2007 elections could be a turning point for all of us. If the elections are not fair, don’t be surprised if next time—after five years—you come and see me, I might have a long beard myself.”
My best guess would be that this latter line of assessment is closer to the truth. The real policy problem, however, is simply that it's hard to know. Very few Americans have the sort of language skills and life experience that puts them in a good position to really understand Pakistan, and of course the Pakistani most capable of influencing the American elite's understanding of the situation are interested parties — Musharraf himself, other security officials, Benazir Bhutto and her circle, etc. — whose ideas and information are of questionable probative value.
The deeper problem, I think, is not so much that our understanding of Pakistan isn't as good as it might be, but that the country has put itself in a position where there's widespread consensus that we need to be trying to micromanage political outcomes in Pakistan. Within that context, there's a lot of disagreement, but the general trend is still to try to analyze the situation and then frame a policy as the thing to do if you want to bet that the analysis at hand is the correct one. It seems to me, however, that understanding and micromanaging Pakistani politics isn't something the United States is likely to be good at. The knowledge gap is sufficiently severe that the more we wade into trying to manipulate events there, the more likely it becomes that in fact we are the ones being manipulated and I don't think there's any way around that.
Rather than strategies for micromanaging Pakistani politics more successfully, what we need are strategies that don't require successful micromanagement and that try to avoid betting too heavily on any particular group or individual or interpretation of internal Pakistani events. Whatever the shake-out of the current crisis, we need to be prepared to deal with the resulting power structure on issues that are important to the United States, but I don't think it'll serve our interests to be too closely identified with whoever that is or to have us trying to pick the "best" candidate or course of events. Sheryle Gay Stolberg and Helen Cooper write in this morning's New York Times that "For more than five months the United States has been trying to orchestrate a political transition in Pakistan that would manage to somehow keep Gen. Pervez Musharraf in power without making a mockery of President Bush’s promotion of democracy in the Muslim world." This time, though, one can hardly chalk up their failure to the usual Bushian bumbling. That, simply put, would have been a really hard thing to do. And, indeed, "on Saturday, those carefully laid plans fell apart spectacularly." But it probably would have been impossible to keep them together.
The problem's not in the failure, but in the setting of the goal. Or, rather, in the setting up of a grand strategy that gets us stuck in that vise. We need approaches that don't depend on our ability to successfully pick and choose who comes to power where since our efforts to do this seem to have a noticeable pattern of making things worse.
Evan Wallach writes in The Washington Post about the American government's history of prosecuting waterboarding as a war crime: "After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding." Meanwhile, during World War II our interrogators weren't torturing people. And yet we managed to win the war somehow, possibly because torture is not, in fact, a vital tool of effective statecraft nearly so much as it is an intimidation tactic beloved by sadists and authoritarians.
The Washington Post hails the Schumer/Feinstein decision to take a principled stand in favor of the proposition that if one Attorney-General breaks the law all his successors should do it too:
The halls of Congress are too often filled with cowardice and groupthink. So it is reassuring when not one but two lawmakers show the moral fortitude to defy party politics to take a stand on principle.
Democratic Sens. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) showed such courage Friday when they announced their support for attorney-general nominee Michael B. Mukasey. Both are members of the Judiciary Committee, which is scheduled to vote Tuesday on Mr. Mukasey's nomination. It is likely that their support salvaged Mr. Mukasey's nomination, imperiled because he would not state outright that the interrogation method known as waterboarding, or simulated drowning, is illegal. While we, like Mr. Schumer, Ms. Feinstein and others, would have wished for such an answer, supplying it would have put Mr. Mukasey in conflict with Justice Department memos that likely allow the technique -- memos that those who may have carried out or authorized waterboarding relied on for legal protection. Both Mr. Schumer and Ms. Feinstein cited Mr. Mukasey's intellect, his stellar qualifications and his reputation for being straightforward and independent as reasons to support his nomination.
The good news, I guess, is that this is consistent with the Post's steadfast advocacy of retroactive legal immunity for lawbreaking telecommunications firms. Basically, their point of view seems to be that since the Bush administration repealed the rule of law in such a sweeping manner during the years following 9/11 that any effort to restore legality and accountability would necessary involve putting some important people and corporations in legal difficulties, so we all need to just accept that we live in some kind of crazy plebiscitary dictatorship and hope that future elected officials behave themselves. After all, just because Mukasey won't say he'll follow laws against torture doesn't necessarily mean that he won't. Why not make hope the plan?
Kevin Drum has the nominations up for the all-time wingnuttiest blog post competition. In my view, Lee Siegel's "Origins of Blogofascism" is probably the worst work up there in large part because it doesn't even reflect any discernable point of view beyond Siegel's egomania and self-regard. It's not, however, the wingnuttiest post by any means. For wingnuttery, I think it's simply not possible to surpass Steven Den Beste, an internet figure people who've taken up blog reading just in the past two or three years may not be familiar with.
Kevin's chosen example of Den Bestism is "It's the Waiting that Wears" but I actually think Den Best outdid himself with "Suppose There Was Treachery" in which he contemplates the possibility of the United States going to war with France and Germany over the Iraq crisis: "It's evident that no matter how it developed it would be really, really bad. Even the best plausible case outcome would be a catastrophe." And, indeed, it would!
A pretty insightful Tom Friedman column notes that what we really need from India (and China) is for economic growth there to be paired with an effort to leapfrog the United States in terms of green development, with rising national income going into high-speed trains and clean, efficient mass transit infrastructure rather than into building the sort of vast network of highways, parking lots, gas stations, and car-dependent sprawl that we have.
In principle, this should be doable. Transitioning a place like the United States to a more green-friendly country is very challenging precisely because so many of us have so much invested already in high-carbon lifestyles. If India just puts sensible policies in place in terms of road and parking pricing, land use, and transit funding then Indians ought to be able to painlessly grow richer in an ecologically sustainable manner. After all, since right now Indians are mostly getting by without either cars or quality transit options, it's not a question of giving anything up. Obviously, though, nothing along these lines is going to happen unless the right countries — and especially the richest country of all — shows a determination to start moving away from our current model.
Despite President Bush's claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger "World War III," experts in and out of government say there's no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.
Seems like an important point! Nevertheless, Like Muhammed ElBarradei and the IAEA this McClatchey outfit would have a lot more credibility if it hadn't gotten Iraq so wrong. I'll put my faith in George W. Bush and The Weekly Standard instead.
It looks likely that the Writer's Guild of America, of which my father is a member, is probably going to go on strike tomorrow primarily over the studios' unwillingness to pay so-called "residuals" -- money that writers get when their shows or movies are shown on television or released on video -- in digital media. The union explains the issues here if you're interested.
Obviously, the entertainment unions are pretty small in terms of membership, but they're one of the best examples out there of the idea that working people can advance their interests through unions even outside of traditional "hard hat" or public sector industries.
Kevin Drum looks at some Andrew Gellman charts and concludes that while richer states are less religious than poorer ones, "Interestingly, there appears to be no correlation between income and religiosity within states."
But that's not really what this second chart says. Rather, as Gellman puts it "overall we see a positive correlation between income and religiosity in poor states and a negative correlation in rich states." Basically, if you live in a poor state, then the richer you are the more likely you are to go to church, whereas if you live in a rich state it's the reverse. I wonder to what extent that finding might just reflect a U-shaped distribution of church attendance with people in the middle more likely to be observant than those at either extreme. I also wonder how this would look if we used educational attainment instead of income.
I strongly agree with two of the points Ilan Goldenberg makes about the politics of foreign policy. He's right that "today Democrats have an opportunity to seize the national security mantle back from Republicans and potentially own the issue for the next generation" and he's right that it simply can't be fully seized except by actually winning an election and then having a Democratic president prove that progressive policies can deliver results. As Ilan says, "All the chest thumping and tough talk in the world is meaningless without a Democratic President who is successful on this issue."
I don't, however, think his interim solution of "more fear mongering" is all that sound. "Democratic fear mongering," he says "needs to focus on how scary it would be to have another Republican President and how much that could endanger all of us." There's room for some of that kind of thing, but fundamentally one thing I think Ted Nordhause and Michael Shellenberger get right (unfortunately their book, which says a lot of insightful things, is yoked to some pretty dubious policy ideas about climate change) is the idea that "resentment and apocalypse are weapons that can be used only to advance a politics of resentment and apocalypse." And, indeed, I think Ilan's example of LBJ's famous "Daisies" ad sort of makes the point -- Lyndon Johnson won the election, but while '64 set up great liberal advances on the domestic front it led to a fiasco in foreign policy terms. Similarly, the Democrats' somewhat demagogic campaign for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security just set the table for a much-more-demagogic and ultimately much-more-successful GOP counter-campaign.
At any rate, I have a whole book that'll be coming out about what kinds of mistakes I think Democrats have been making, but the main thought I'd leave you with for now is that you do need to return to the initial two points: Ultimately, the most helpful think would be for a progressive president to successfully implement progressive ideas under circumstances (unlike those of the Clinton administration) when the public is paying attention. That means dropping the assumption that liberal ideas won't fly politically and need to be kept hidden under layers of macho posturing and, instead, actually try to build progressive messaging around progressive ideas.
It's remarkable the extent to which you almost never see leading Democrats articulate commonplace notions like "starting a war with Iran would be a strategic disaster for the United States," "expending finite resources investigating people who there's no probable cause to suspect is probably a waste of time," "we should focus on fighting al-Qaeda rather than other Muslims who haven't attacked us," "invading Iraq was a huge mistake," "Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt founded the UN because a strong UN is good for America," "getting other countries to follow non-proliferation agreements is going to require us to follow them too," or "reviving the Israeli-Arab peace process would make ti easier for us to find Muslim allies." Now I'm not going to promise anyone that those exact phrases are ones it would be smart to use. But the ideas are important ones, and the real political professionals need to think about finding the best ways to express them.
More generally, I think progressive politicians -- but also progressives more generally -- need to make the point that good things can happen inforeign policy and will happen with smart leadership, it's not just a realm in which scary people do scary things and we try to stop them.
As Ed Kilgore observes "The one, and only one, truly bipartisan initiative Bush engaged in was the 'No Child Left Behind' initiative, based largely on prior moderate Democratic proposals, and relying heavily on support from Sen. Ted Kennedy and Rep. George Miller." This by way of looking at Peter Baker's Washington Post on the dim prospects for NCLB reauthorization during the current congress that correctly places the collapse of the coalition Bush, Kennedy, and Miller had put together (though not particularly the Bush/Kennedy/Miller partnership as such) due to defections to the right and to the left.
One flaw in the piece, however, is that it seems to me to suffer from the problem Paul Glastris identified as the media's tendency to attribute equal responsibility for rising polarization irrespective of the facts. Here, Baker correctly quotes Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling referring to the difficulty of making progress in "a toxic environment" that exists in Washington.
The specific problem here, however, isn't that the "environment" is toxic, it's that Bush is toxic -- he's been such a bad and unpopular president that many people believe anything he supports must be a plot to destroy the Republic and certainly nobody feels like sticking their neck out for such a heavily Bush-branded initiative especially under circumstances where failure to reauthorize the law doesn't actually lead to its elements vanishing. That's why many education people assume that while large elements of the NCLB framework will probably live on through the next education overhaul, the name "No Child Left Behind" is probably dead. NCLB, however, is just the current name for the more prosaic Elementary and Secondary Education Act and a new president not committed to the NCLB brand could just propose some modifications to the law (and everyone favors some kind of modifications), call it something else, and probably enjoy more success than Bush.
Over the course of Monday and Tuesday, Hillary Clinton is going to introduce her new energy plan -- "Powering America's Future: New Energy, New Jobs" -- with a few speeches and briefings.
Lacking any special insight, I assume she's going to put out a good plan. She has access to policy people who are, from a technocratic standpoint, as smart as any others out there and the dynamic of the race with two challengers running to her left mean that it would be a huge unforced error to release a plan that doesn't make the relevant groups happy. She has the incentive to produce a good plan, she has the people to write a good plan, and she's had the time to make a good plan, so I'm pretty sure a good plan will be the result. This is one respect in which the painfully long primary season has been a boon -- John Edwards' bold strokes have tended to set the tone, leading the other contenders to eventually put forward bolder, better ideas than they otherwise might. The result is all-but-guaranteed to be a general election nominee running on a solid platform of health care reform and carbon emissions curbs.
I worry, though, about the reverse dynamic kicking in on Iraq.
Ezra Klein recently reminded me of Fafblog's classic "Fafblog Interviews the Democratic Party" post which, in turn, was a reminder of how lame 2005-vintage Democratic thinking about Iraq was. Over time, though, that thinking improved, which is a good thing. Nevertheless, Iraq is a constantly changing situation and when in early 2007 Bush rejected the verdict of the American people and the Baker-Hamilton Commission, much of the previous wave of proposals became irrelevant to the future debate.
But unlike on other issues, neither Hillary Clinton nor any of her rivals could afford to wait before talking about their plans for Iraq. As a result, the frontrunner has a stated position on Iraq today that's really based on the year-old Baker-Hamilton proposals. Worse, because nobody wants to be seen as "flip-flopping" and because everyone knows you tack left during the primaries and then right during the general election, she's all-but-guaranteed to have a platform in October 2008 that was really designed for the circumstances of December 2006 and doesn't reflect either the evolving situation on the ground or the evolving thinking of policy people, including some of her own advisors. And, indeed, though Edwards and Obama have both staked out positions I like somewhat better than Clinton's, the same basic dynamic of stasis will, I think, apply with nobody wanting to recalibrate their statements on Iraq (lest such a recalibration spawn a thousand process stories) even though this is precisely the sort of issue where people need to be constantly re-evaluating their ideas to see if they still make sense in light of changes in the objective situation.
U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class David R. Quillen
I believe John Edwards is delivering a speech on Iran and "the lessons of Iraq" right now. I only have some excerpts from the speech, so I can't fully evaluate it, but this seems like an important point:
But there is a difference between doing everything in our power to keep America safe and a reckless, belligerent policy that actually makes us less safe. The preventive war doctrine was a stunning departure from the policy that had kept America safe during both world wars and during the Cold War. It is wrong on the merits, wrong on the morals, and wrong for America.
Good for Edwards. I've found it infuriating how little the leading Democrats seem inclined to engage with the key strategic elements of Bush's response to 9/11 and this is the biggest nail that needs hammering down. Bush replaced decades of non-proliferation policy, to say nothing of centuries of good sense and basic morality, to decide that unilateral preventive military action should be at the center of our approach to dealing with the world. This is nonsense. The United States has long got along fine without waging such wars, and our effort to wage one has been a disaster. And yet somehow Bush has managed to recenter the American political debate so that an idea that would have seemed shocking ten years ago -- waging aggressive unilateral warfare against countries that haven't attacked us or anyone else -- is now meekly accepted by all as a vital part of the toolkit.
I went to see the good-but-not-great American Gangster on Friday, and yesterday spent some time reading Marc Jacobson's 2000 New Yorkprofile of Frank Lucas (on which the film is based) and his more recent piece where he puts Lucas together with Nicky Barnes for a chit-chat. This all made me think of Oscar Wilde's remark upon witnessing the scene at Jesse James' house following his death: "The Americans certainly are great hero worshippers, and always take their heroes from the criminal element."
There seems to be something to that. But is it really different elsewhere? I'm not all that familiar with the popular culture of any other countries.
Since this question seems very hard for Democratic politicians to give a straightforward answer to, I thought I'd try to think about it myself. The problem with saying "yes" isn't just that it's unpopular, it's that it's unpopular because it sounds ridiculous. On some level, illegal immigrants shouldn't be allowed to get coffee at Starbucks. There's nothing that a person who's in the United States illegally can do inside the United States that is legal. If it's illegal for you to live in the United States, and it's illegal for you to work in the United States, then obviously it's illegal for you to drive to work in the United States which makes handing out driver's licenses to illegals seem preposterous.
On the other hand, back to the Starbucks. While it's not legal, as such, for illegal immigrants to be buying a latte at Starbucks, they also don't, in practice, need to pass a citizenship check or show a valid visa in order to do so. And, I think, rightly so. It would be incredibly inconvenient for everyone to need to present documentation before buying coffee. Coffee shops simply aren't a good locus for enforcement of immigration laws -- laws which ought to be enforced at the border, at airports, and at the workplace. The DMV seems to me to be closer to the Starbucks than to the airport in this regard. What, after all, does the policy of requiring verified legal residency before issuing a driver's license accomplish? It doesn't stop people from crossing the border or overstaying their visa. It doesn't stop illegal immigrants from driving. Surely nobody is showing up at the DMV, getting asked for proof of legal residency, and then breaking down and getting deported. Having lots of people driving around without licenses, meanwhile, seems to be a problem for road safety and law enforcement.
Which comes back to the point that immigration laws should be enforced at the points where it's likely to be effective -- at borders and airports (which I think we do a decent job of given the objective difficulty of the task) and at the workplace, where we do a shitty job. Insofar as it would be inhumane, impractical, or uneconomic to drive the millions of currently-in-the-country illegals out, creating a relatively simple path to citizenship for them seems like a good idea. Insofar as aggregate level of immigration ought to be higher than the current legally permitted ceiling, we ought to raise that ceiling. And insofar as we ought to enforce the law more rigorously, we ought to enforce it more rigorously at the appropriate places most of all in terms of creating strong legal incentives for employers to avoid hiring illegals (I've previously been drawn to Mark Kleiman's point that we could simply create incentives -- including a valid green card -- for illegals to rat out people who hire them) rather than mucking around with the DMV.
So to echo first Hillary Clinton and now John Edwards too it really is hard to give the question a simple answer!
To the layman's eye, Musharraf appears to be conducting a stunningly audacious bait-and-switch of employing a lot of rhetoric about Islamic extremism to justify a coup conducted agains the Supreme Court of Pakistan though there's no indication that the Supreme Court is some kind of hotbed of extremism. Indeed, unlike in some other countries (Egypt or Saudi Arabia, say) I don't believe Islamists are the main opponents of the regime at all. Indeed, Musharraf didn't stage his original coup against Islamic extremists, he staged it against Nawaz Sharif who'd come into conflict with the military because of his efforts to promote reconciliation with India.
Obviously, decent people follow the NBA, but for those of you who look forward to bowing down to our Canadian overlords once their vast freshwater reserves give them global hegemony, you might want to check out the most comprehensively curated hockey blogroll in the universe.
Over the weekend, I cited former hawkish warblogger Steven Den Beste as clearly the most wingnutty blogger of all time and expressed some concern that people who are relatively new to blogging might be unfamiliar with the Seven Den Beste Experience. And, indeed, it seems that some folks are out there who were previously unfamiliar with his work. Unfortunately, following links from my blog won't let you read his posts so you'll have to copy-and-paste URLs into your browser (http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/03/Itsthewaiting.shtml) if you want to avoid this fate:
At any rate, the main point I would make about SDB is that while he was never quite an MSM superstar on the order of Blog of the Year Powerline or something, SDB was taken rather seriously in conservative circles. He was writing opinion pieces for The Wall Street Journal and upon his retirement from political blogging he was feted as one of the "great shining lights" of the genre by his fellow wingnuts.
And what's he been doing since his retirement? Well, he has a new blog where he sneers at people who watch TV or go to the movies, preferring to focus on more substantive cultural commentary like "If you're looking for a fan service romp, apparently this year's choice was Umisho. It's a sports show about a girls' swim team. How can you go wrong?" According to Wikipedia "fan service" seems to be a term of art for "soft-core cartoon porn." Just remember that "Before Den Beste, it was extremely difficult to find well written and thought out pieces anywhere on the web . . . Den Beste was a master synthesizer." At any rate, click over here (or, rather, copy and paste this link: http://denbeste.nu/bestof.shtml) to get the "best of" SDB. It's a not-to-be-missed experience.
Isaac Chotiner flags a piece of -- I believe the correct term would be "deranged egomania" -- from Michael Gerson:
Well, I worked with some very other--you know, great writers, who worked with me on [the 9/20/01] speech, worked closely with the president and Karen Hughes. But we had one day to put that speech together. The president wanted--called in the morning, wanted a draft by 7:00 o`clock that night. And so it was, you know, fairly heroic to put together a speech of that scale.
Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to write long speeches in a single twelve hour stretch, it's . . . Speechman!
In the years after 9/11, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann worked at the highest levels of the Bush administration as Middle East policy experts for the National Security Council. Mann conducted secret negotiations with Iran. Leverett traveled with Colin Powell and advised Condoleezza Rice. They each played crucial roles in formulating policy for the region leading up to the war in Iraq. But when they left the White House, they left with a growing sense of alarm -- not only was the Bush administration headed straight for war with Iran, it had been set on this course for years. That was what people didn't realize. It was just like Iraq, when the White House was so eager for war it couldn't wait for the UN inspectors to leave. The steps have been many and steady and all in the same direction. And now things are getting much worse. We are getting closer and closer to the tripline, they say.
For further reading on what Richardson terms the "secret history of the impending war with Iran" I'd recommend Gareth Porter's "Burnt Offering". If you're interested in an account of why "War with Iran would be a catastrophe that would make us look back fondly on the minor inconvenience of being bogged down in Iraq" read Fallows.
Jon Rauch posts and discusses the above chart. One noteworthy thing about this is that unlike with a lot of stuff where you see the public's mild disgruntlement with Democrats outweighed by masssive hatred of Republicans, here you actually seem to be looking at more pro-Democrat sentiment than anti-Republican sentiment. By historical standards, the GOP has seen worse numbers, but the Democrats have rarely been more popular.
I'm sympathetic to the general point Atrios is making here, but I don't think it's right to say that "For some the 2006 election win was premature as the Democrats won without massively repositioning themselves, proving it was possible." The Democrats did, after all, reposition themselves pretty dramatically on the highest-profile political issue of the day: Iraq. They just repositioned themselves to the left and started offering a commitment to end the war rather than 2004-vintage promises to prosecute it more vigorously.
Apparently, the BBC has a BBC Pronunciation Unit dedicated to telling people how to pronounce things. Here's everyone's favorite Iranian president:
Today's pronunciation is Iranian President Mahmoud AHMADINEJAD (sometimes also spelt AHMADINEZHAD). Our recommendation is mah-MOOD ah-mad-in-uh-ZHAAD (-h is pronounced in 'Mahmoud' and in 'Ahmadinejad') based on the advice of the BBC Persian Monitoring team.
I'm one of those people who bangs his head against the wall at the press' extreme preference for horse-race political coverage rather than stories about the issues, so I feel extremely dumb for not having thought of this explanation before Andrew Gellman did: "My theory, at least for the general election, is that most of the voters have already decided who they're going to vote for--and even the ones who haven't decided are often more predictable than they realize." And of course on tap of that, the truest "swing" voters are precisely the ones least likely to be paying attention to political coverage in the media.
Guess who's behind the Bush administration's uncritical embrace of Musharraf? That's right: "Current and past U.S. officials tell me that Pakistan policy is essentially being run from Cheney's office. The vice president, they say, is close to Musharraf and refuses to brook any U.S. criticism of him." Also -- bonus incompetence!
The problem is exacerbated by a dramatic drop-off in U.S. expertise on Pakistan. Retired American officials say that, for the first time in U.S. history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State's policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney's office. Anne W. Patterson, the new U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, is an expert on Latin American "drugs and thugs"; Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, is a former department spokesman who served three tours in Hong Kong and China but never was posted in South Asia.
One point that I think it's sometimes easy to overlook is the extent to which a policy of imperialism somewhere or other is compatible with that country remaining nominally sovereign in many respects. You probably know, for example, that Vietnam used to be a French colony. You may not, however, realize what a glance at yesterday's edition of Robert Farley's "Deposed Monarch Blogging" will tell you, namely that Vietnam was technically under the control of the Nguyen dynasty whose scion Nguyen Phuc Anh was embroiled in conflict with Tay Son peasant rebellions when he "asked for and received support from France, which helped him unify Vietnam in 1802." Over the course of the nineteenth century the dependence of the Nguyen regime on French support led to a situation where "by the 20th century, the monarch was seen as little more than a French puppet" but the last emperor didn't actually abdicate the post until 1945 and even then the French tried to have him installed as Head of State in South Vietnam.
Similarly, the United States effectively controlled Cuban affairs through the Platt Amendment and Dominican affairs through the US-Dominican Treaty for Assistance in Governing. An important part of the psychology of the Middle East is that the monarchies in the region are all successors to Vietnam-style arrangements where noble families secured control of their patches of land thanks to military assistance from Western powers who then allowed the Sauds, Sabahs, Husseins, etc. to sub-contract as local monarchs and the continuing pro-American orientation of those regimes combined with American support for the regimes can be understood as the United States simply taking the place of the British Empire. Along the same lines, Nasser rose to power in Egypt after participating in a coup that deposed a similarly situated monarch, and the decision of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak to make peace with Israel, accept US foreign aid, and adopt a generally America-friendly foreign policy is open to criticism as moving backwards from the anti-colonial tradition of Nasser.
Needless to say, few Americans see things this way, but Americans aren't well-known for our deep understanding of the history of foreign countries. But once you understand this view of the region's history, you can see that from this context the idea of the United States coming in to overthrow Iraq's Baath regime (another country that, like Egypt, once had a semi-colonial monarchy before it was replaced with an anti-colonial dictatorship) and install a new one more sympathetic to American foreign policy goals in the name of democracy wasn't going to have much credibility.
As Ryan Avent notes, yesterday's football games were full of advertisements from Virginia legislature candidates, almost all Republicans, almost all heavily emphasizing the immigration issue. I assume these races, where other factors would seem to presage the continued blueing of Virginia, are going to play as a test case for the emerging notion that immigrant-bashing is the Great Republican Hope for 2008.
One irony here is that in my view one of the big problems with Washington DC is, indeed, that Northern Virginia has too many immigrants and I wish more of them would move to the city. There's tons of great, affordable ethnic restaurants of the sort that usually provide the spice of urban life but instead of being in the city, they're overwhelmingly located in Virginia strip malls like the legendary Eden Center in Falls Church. This is great for Tyler Cowen, Northern Virginia's premiere foodie, but it's not so great for me. So on some level, I kind of hope Virginia politicians do come up with some scheme to drive immigrants out of their precious suburbs thus paving the way for a Brave New World of delicious DC cuisine (but do try Thai X-ing in the District which is great, albeit a logistical nightmare).
It occurs to me that yesterday's post on the politics of foreign policy to some extent invites a reading as a "pundit's fallacy" type argument in which I'm saying that if only politicians adopted my policy preferences they'd be more successful. I don't actually believe that. There are plenty of things I think would be a good idea that would be hard to sell politically. Cutting the defense budget as proposed here, for example, is probably asking for a world of trouble. Similarly, a practical politician probably shouldn't talk about the "enduring legacy of imperialism" or whatever else.
Nevertheless, there's no sign that in August of 2000 the American people were crying out for a policy of routine torture, indefinite detention without trial, preventive war, and escalating hostilities with countries all around the world. Someone who started proposing that stuff would have been dismissed as a lunatic. What changed, obviously, was 9/11 happened. But even then there wasn't some immediate and obvious grassroots surge of belief in the idea that Baathist Iraq was linked to al-Qaeda through the mysterious ether of "Muslim totalitarianism" or that Iran is the locus of an "Islamofascist" movement that is the root cause of the attack.
Rather, 9/11 was a shock to the political system that created an opening for Bush and his allies to implement a number of policies along with a broad superstructure of ideas to support them. In the intervening years, however, Bush has become unpopular. And he hasn't become unpopular by coincidence, he's become unpopular largely because people don't like the consequences of the post-9/11 policies he's implemented. Under the circumstances, I think one ought to have a presumption that if there's some new bad idea that Bush implemented in the wake of 9/11 that it's probably possible to mount a persuasive argument against it. The trouble is that in the short-run, it's usually easy to just accept the existing super-structure of ideas and try to conduct politics from inside it. That, though, is hard to do effectively. It would be better to take a little time to explicitly spell out for people the notion that all this bad stuff in the world doesn't just keep happening by coincidence that, rather, it all falls out from wrongheaded big picture ideas that need to be replaced by the different big picture ideas of the American internationalist tradition.
It seems the story that Gisele is demanding payment in euros rather than dollars is false rather than, say, revealing of trouble in international currency markets. On the other hand, Jay-Z is unquestionably rolling with a fat stack of 500 euro bills here:
Rather than an exchange rate hedge, I think the point here is simply that the euro is available in larger cash denominations, which arguably makes it the superior currency for large-scale criminal enterprises. Perhaps bringing back the $500 bill could help pull the dollar out of its doldrums. Meanwhile, it seems that back in the day there was even a $100,000 bill:
The old very large denomination bills, it seems, were used by banks and the government for large transactions before it was possible to do electronic transactions.
Everything is Bad (or at least "Risky") for Democrats
As you may have heard, the prospect of catastrophic climate change is something that's been the subject of increasing concern over the past 10-15 years. Emerging from the fringes of public consciousness, the notion that carbon emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuel are playing a major role in causing temperatures to increase worldwide and that the continuation of this trend could have dire results for human and animal life around the planet has become a very mainstream notion recently. Indeed, forging a global compact to address this issue has become one of the very highest priorities of most of America's key allies in the rich world along with an extremely pressing concern for many developing nations. Indeed, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has decided to make climate change and the need to combat it the key issue of his tenure in office. On top of these urgent statements from allies and potential allies that the United States needs to get involved, our failure to take action to address this problem has become such an embarrassment that Osama bin Laden is making propaganda hay out of it.
Meanwhile, former Vice President Al Gore has recently won both an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to draw attention to the problem. These efforts, meanwhile, seem to be succeeding in ways that are reflected in the polls but also on the ground, as more and more companies seek environment-friendly branding and public relations, NBC Universal stages a "green" week, so on and so forth.
The leading candidates for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination have all responded to this public, diplomatic, and elite concern with fairly similar policies grounded in the scientific consensus that sharp reduction in US carbon emissions are necessary, and in the economics consensus that the most efficient way to achieve those reductions is by putting a price on carbon emissions -- either in the form of a tax, or in the form of an auction of tradeable emissions permits. The Republican Party, meanwhile, remains mired in half-measures that don't address the full of extent of the problem and don't even accomplish what they do accomplish in an efficient manner. And those are the good Republicans! Others, like the President of the United States of America and several of the leading contenders to replace him remain mired in denial about the extent or nature of the problem, and are so in hock to special interests in the coal and oil industries that they're unable to acknowledge that failing to adopt mandatory emission curbs will have some dramatic deleterious consequences.
The Washington Post's headline writers, under the time honored principled Everything is Bad News for Democrats, naturally decides to sum that situation up as "Climate is Risky Issue for Democrats". The article itself, I might add, is much better, with reporter Juliet Eilprin downplaying the horse race angle in favor of saying something about the policies at hand, quoting pollster Stan Greenberg's observation that "It's a huge issue. I've been stunned by this" before turning to the Dems-are-doomed theory, and quoting Newt Gingrich's view that "a candidate who's anti-environment and denies global warming gets killed in the suburbs."
Photo by Flickr user Chisvick used under a Creative Commons license
As I predicted this looks to me like a very solid climate change plan from the frontrunner, albeit marred by the expected flaws of overenthusiasm for biofuel and carbon sequestration subsidies. As with the health care plans, however, though Hillary Clinton was last out of the gate, it's at least as sound as anything else on offer. And perhaps more to the point, on domestic issues the "big three" have all actually staked out extremely similar -- and quite exciting -- positions on the major issues of the day.
Kevin Drum announces the winners of the "Golden Wingut Award" and I was sad to see that Steven Den Beste didn't make the final cut. Kevin observed, however, that "a blogger who retired three years ago probably never had a serious chance of cracking the top five" and so decided to present him with an honorary lifetime achievement award.
Meanwhile, I've been amused to spend some time over the past couple of days scrolling back through the annals of Den Beste-ism and hopefully familiarizing new people with the work of one of the foundational figures of right-wing blogging. A friend reminded me, for example, of den Beste's classic post explaining that "Anglo Women are an Endangered Species". The argument begins with the observation that "Some strange disease has converted nearly all [women] into female persons" and " a male person is not allowed to notice that there is any difference between a female person and a male person" because "in a working situation, committing such crimes as complimenting her on her looks, or even worse, asking her out on a date, can get him fired for sexual harassment."
At any rate, as ever with den Beste you really need to read the post yourself (the link will work) to get a sense of the sheer scale, but after lamenting the global dominance of castrating bitches female persons, he discovers that there's one place a man can still find a real woman in this day and age: the strip club. Specifically, lap dances. By the end, though, it also turns out that Latinas have this same stripperly/womanly characteristics that Den Beste prizes. And then he laments his inability to score: "In six years since I broke up with my last girlfriend, I haven't been on a single date. Not one. I've tried a few times to ask women out, but somehow I sent the wrong signals or I'm ugly or something; I got refused each time." Not that he's bitter, though. It's just that "I want to be a man, relating to women, not a male person relating to female persons. I'm tired of being castrated."
It's hard to win elections when you don't have candidates "The NRCC said in late September that it would have challengers emerge in five specific top-targeted districts within a few weeks, but so far only one of those races has a nationally recruited challenger officially in the race." I feel like people keep not paying enough attention to Republican recruiting and -- especially -- fundraising woes. How much experience to Republican operatives have in running underdog campaigns at a financial disadvantage? It can't be very much.
I have to say that I would find Anne Applebaum's criticism of American celebrities who say nice things about Hugo Chavez to Communist supporters of the Soviet Union were contemporary Venezuela to, um, resemble the USSR in some salient way. Applebaum writes that "Venezuela is easier to idealize than Iran and North Korea, the former's attitude toward women not being conducive to fashion models, the latter being downright hostile toward Hollywood." Another way of phrasing this would be that it's easier to adopt a non-indignant attitude toward the government of Venezuela because it is, in fact, a much better government than the ones they have in Iran and North Korea.
Similarly, surely the author of a book called Gulag is aware that the mass repression of the Gulag was a major aspect of the Soviet system and that it's absent from Venezuela. Meanwhile, has Applebaum written any columns condemning businessmen or politicians who travel to the capitals of America's friendly dictators in Cairo, Riyadh, Dubai, etc.? Shouldn't a person interested in Americans who help prop up authoritarian governments be trying to come up with something to say about Pakistan ?
Patricia Butenis, deputy chief of mission in Baghdad, explains that constantly being at risk of being blown up is something you get used to. Some feel this may not be the best recruiting pitch.
For months now I've been puzzling over the fact that none of the Republican candidates for president could possibly win the nomination. And then it struck me like a bolt of lightning: Brokered convention leads to Jeb Bush nomination.
I probably should say something about Ron Paul's tremendous financial successes. Mostly, I agree with what Ross says. I also think, though, that the Paul phenomenon and its limits helps highlight a structural problem in America. Ross observes:
When “extreme” figures manage to break through and succeed in this sytem, it’s usually because they aren’t really that extreme at all – see Newt Gingrich, for instance, a center-right futurist whom the press painted (with an assist from his own undisciplined mouth) as a fascist nutjob, or Howard Dean, a moderate liberal who was cast as the second coming of George McGovern because he opposed the Iraq War and acted, well, angry. Whereas Ron Paul actually is an extremist, insofar as he holds positions that are way, way outside the Beltway mainstream.
The trouble, though, is that on top of his out-of-the-mainstream views, Paul is also a huge weirdo who seems a bit crazy. Rebecca Traister made some similar points about Dennis Kucinich. The difficulty is that in a country as big as the United States, it's easy for a set of views to simultaneously be very unpopular and also be supported by millions of people, but out of those millions of people the folks who decide to enter electoral politics in order to take on a principled, "no compromise with the electorate" approach are going to be the eccentrics. More normal, well-adjusted people with extremist views are going to prefer to do something less frustrated and isolating with their lives.
As a result, views like Kucinich's social democracy and Paul's libertarianism wind up represented by eccentric politicians, which winds up making their views seem weirder than they deserve to be.
Photo by Flickr user Jayel Aheram used under a Creative Commons license.
Ambinder gives me some of my favorite kind of factoids -- things that constitute evidence for things I already believed. In today's edition, my pre-existing belief is that the race for the Democratic nomination is more open than people realize. The evidence is new polling out of New Hampshire which indicates that "a very large 71% of Democrats believe that Hillary Clinton will be their nominee regardless of their own preference . . . most New Hampshire Democrats say they haven't made up their minds . . . a large majority is leaving open the possibility that they could support someone than Clinton, most believe, in the back of their minds, that Clinton will win anyway."
To me, at any rate, this indicates that the results in Iowa will have a big impact on people's thinking. If Clinton loses there, which everyone agrees is very possible, then I think it hurts her aura of inevitability and you're left with the fact that most voters in the second state haven't yet made up their minds. As long as Iowa is in play, so is the nomination.
Chris Bowers made an interesting point the other day, observing that whites broke 60-40 in favor of George H.W. Bush in 1988 while they went a basically identical 58-41 in favor of George H.W. Bush in 2004 but despite these similar results among America's largest racial group the 2004 race was much closer than the 1988 one. Basically, with very little change in candidate performance within major demographic groups, you've nevertheless seen a transition from big blowouts to narrow races. And with the white Christian share of the electorate expected to keep falling, you can expect to see Republicans start to play at a disadvantage.
The broad story is, of course, well known but the very, very similar white vote shares are interesting given how much is generally thought to have changed politically from '88 to '04.
Nichola Tucker's put together a collection of The Atlantic's coverage of Pakistan, dating back to the country's origins in the 1940s. Way back in 1946, the magazine took the view that a "land of the pure" for the subcontinent's Muslims was a bad idea, arguing that the "two nations" theory of the sub-continent was nonsense since "The rice-eating Moslem mopla of Malabar has far more in common with his Hindu neighbors than he has with the wheat-eating Punjabi Moslem" and that under the circumstances "Only the most confused thinking could produce a two-nation theory in India, where there are dozens of distinct races and languages."
Personally, I barely know how to ride a bike and find the aesthetics of the whole bike-riding enterprise kind of abhorrent. Still, the fact remains that building a bike-friendly city like Portland is very good public policy in terms of public health and the environment, so it's nice to see that some people are also making money thanks to the way the city's early adoption of bike-friendly policies.
Good article from Justin Logan on N-Pod and the voracious demand for comparing foreign leaders to Hitler. Bonus pop culture reference: "It is unfortunate that Hitler seems to be the only historical analogy that Americans understand. (For many, the name Franz Ferdinand more readily conjures an indie rock band than a key figure at the center of one of history's great tragedies.)"
Kay Steiger is perturbed by the idea that Ron Paul was using Guy Fawkes Day as a fundraising gimmick: "Ron Paul is associating himself with a historical figure who spearheaded a plot to blow up the houses of Parliament -- by very definition, a terrorist. True, England was persecuting Catholics and Fawkes role was to fight back against a religiously intolerant government, but he was still a terrorist by definition."
There's some interpretive ambiguity here, though, since the idea of Guy Fawkes Day isn't to celebrate Fawkes but rather to celebrate the foiling of the plot and I think it was traditionally observed by getting drunk and beating up Catholics. That, however, would also be a weird association for Paul to be courting.
On the other hand, V for Vendetta appropriates Fawkes as a kind of libertarian icon and it would make sense for Paul to appropriate that, so on that level it makes sense. Also: He managed to raise a lot of money, which was the point of the exercise, so it definitely makes sense on that level.
We Have Ways of Making Your Support Our Predetermined Political Agenda
The thing about torture is that its main purpose, historically, has been to coerce confessions out of people. Why would the Bush administration want to do that? Well, maybe because they were looking for stuff like this: "Under torture after his rendition to Egypt, al Libi had provided a confession of how Saddam Hussein had been training al Qaeda in chemical weapons." Naturally, that information worked its way into Colin Powell's famous UN presentation. You remember, the one that only a traitor, a coward, or worse a Frenchman could fail to be convinced by. Equally naturally, it was false.
Sam Boyd tries to tangle with a Kirchickian web of nonsense which leads me to wonder how Jamie K. decides that an absurd argument like even though Ayan Hirsi Ali's main arguments are false, she's nonetheless unquestionably the greatest women's rights advocate of our time belongs on Jewcy's blog whereas something like even though Barack Obama favors gay rights and opposes slavery reparations it might be fun to pretend he has the reverse positions and condemn him for holding these views he doesn't actually hold belongs on the Commentary's blog.
Kevin Drum notes Robert Samuelson pointing out that recessions have benefits, too. Benefits like low wages:
Recessions also have often-overlooked benefits. They dampen inflation. In weak markets, companies can't easily raise prices or workers' wages. Similarly, recessions punish reckless financial speculation and poor corporate investments. Bad bets don't pay off. These disciplining effects contribute to the economy's long-term strength, but it seems coldhearted to say so because the initial impact is hurtful.
I sometimes complain that the Post should make Samuelson write something other than his endless bellyaching about the need for Social Security cuts, but that was just a polite way of saying I think they should fire him. This sort of thing isn't really what I was after. At any rate, Samuelson seems to be a party to what J.M. Keynes would have called the "liquidationist" view of such matters -- recession is the population getting its comeuppance for having been not-poor just a little while back:
It seems an extraordinary imbecility that this wonderful outburst of productive energy [over 1924-1929] should be the prelude to impoverishment and depression. Some austere and puritanical souls regard it both as an inevitable and a desirable nemesis on so much overexpansion, as they call it; a nemesis on man's speculative spirit. It would, they feel, be a victory for the mammon of unrighteousness if so much prosperity was not subsequently balanced by universal bankruptcy. We need, they say, what they politely call a 'prolonged liquidation' to put us right. The liquidation, they tell us, is not yet complete. But in time it will be. And when sufficient time has elapsed for the completion of the liquidation, all will be well with us again.
I do not take this view. I find the explanation of the current business losses, of the reduction in output, and of the unemployment which necessarily ensues on this not in the high level of investment which was proceeding up to the spring of 1929, but in the subsequent cessation of this investment. I see no hope of a recovery except in a revival of the high level of investment. And I do not understand how universal bankruptcy can do any good or bring us nearer to prosperity.
Note in particular that there's no particular reason to think a recession is necessary in order to prompt people to pull out of bad investments. If you've got money to invest, you want to invest it in the most lucrative way possible. If things are really booming, it may be possible to earn some profit with a really dumb scheme. But if things are really booming, then you could earn even more profit with a non-dumb scheme. In a bad recession, meanwhile, even perfectly reasonable schemes may go bad. Either way, smarter investments are always better-rewarded than bad ones; recessions seem bad because they're bad.
Photo by Flickr user Seansie used under a Creative Commonse license
The longer Musharraf stays in power the more Pakistan will look like Iran in 1979: an isolated and unpopular ruler hanging on to power only to inflame passions and bring together his Islamic and pro-democracy opposition into a dangerous alliance.
I keep veering between a sense that since this Pakistan business is one of the most important things going on right now I should write about it, and a sense that there's no reason for me to play fake Pakistan expert.
On the other hand, I do think this kind of talk from Nasr throws into sharp relief the nonsensical nature of the Bush administration's democracy-talk. If you want to create a reasonable interpretation of the "lack of democracy causes terrorism" theory then the one Nasr's bringing up here seems like by far the best candidate. You have your American-backed dictatorship, you have your popular anger at the dictatorship, and you have some of that anger being displaced onto the United States. Something like that certainly seems to have happened in Iran in the 1970s and it's a plausible account of at least some of what's going on in places like Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia today.
But even if you want to credit the Bush administration with a great deal of sincere belief in the desirability of spreading the blessings of democracy to Iraq, nothing they did ever addressed that dictatorship problem. Instead, democracy was always and everywhere seen as a tool to be used to displace troublesome regimes -- Iraq, Iran, Syria, the Palestinian Authority, North Korea. These weren't governments that were disfavored because they were undemocratic, they were targeted for democratization because they disfavored.
Now "reward your friends and punish your enemies" isn't a crazy approach to world affairs. But in this case it does run directly contrary to the entire theory of why democracy mattered. After all, you'd have to be a real idiot to turn into an anti-American radical because you didn't like Saddam Hussein or the Assads or the Mullahs in Iran. Opposition groups in those places you can expect to be friendly to America. It's in Egypt and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia that you need to worry. Those are the countries where lack of democracy can, in principle, lead to an anti-American backlash. But those are precisely the countries where Bush never did anything other than tinker around the edges always leaving it clear that incumbent regimes' red lines would be respected. That, though, is just backwards and stupid and has nothing to do with the nominal problem at hand.
Democrats pick up seats in the Virginia House and take control of the Virginia Senate. This, it seems, has some implications for redistricting after the 2010 census which, in light of the heavy GOP tilt of the current House delegation and the blue trend sweeping the state, ought to be a productive opportunity for Democrats. Meanwhile, I'd say this bodes particularly poorly for Republicans because it was hard to use Iraq or Bush's general unpopularity as issues in this election, but it was possible for Republicans to run on immigration, which appears to be their big idea this cycle. But it didn't work for them, and things like Bush and Iraq will be much more in play a year from now when people are running for federal office.
One of many things I don't really understand about Pakistan but that seems worth commenting on if only to point out, is that Benazir Bhutto's strong personal connections inside the West seem to be an important factor here. Bhutto, let's recall, wasn't driven from power by Musharraf's coup. Rather, she simply lost power to a rival political party led by Nawaz Sharif in a democratic manner. It was Sharif who Musharraf deposed.
Nevertheless, it's Bhutto who went to Oxford and Harvard, it's Bhutto who once made People's most beautiful people list, it's Bhutto who the Bush administration tried to push Musharraf into agreeing to share power with, it's Bhutto who pens op-eds forThe New York Times, and so on and so forth. These things are all interrelated and it should probably be kept in mind that an opposition leader's popularity among western elites whose institutions of higher education she attended and her popularity on the ground aren't necessarily the same thing.
I've made this argument in the past, but this old campaign poster for William McKinley's 1900 re-election campaign makes the point better than anything I could say. What you see here -- "the American flag has not been planted in foreign soil to acquire more territory but for HUMANITY'S SAKE" -- would be perfectly recognizable as a neoconservative slogan. And yet, it comes from the period we now think of as involving precisely the effort to plant the American flag to acquire more territory, specifically colonies in Puerto Rico and the Philippines plus informal empire elsewhere.
And there's the rub; the much-vaunted "idealism" of the neocons is nothing new. And, indeed, I don't even think we should view it -- or the rhetoric of a William McKlinley -- as necessarily insincere. Rather, it's an example of the boundless human capacity for self-justification and self-deception. If you decide that military domination is the policy you want, you'll swiftly find a way to convince yourself that military domination is best for the world. Kipling called it the white man's burden, the French called it la mission civilitrice, and it's all equally meaningless however you want to phrase it.
Rudy Giuliani may not be an acceptable nominee to many leaders on the religious right, but old-and-super-crazy warhorse Pat Robertson is ready to endorse him. Marc Ambinder explains why:
Both Giuliani and Robertson share an apocalyptic worldview about the clash with [radical] Islam; for Robertson, it is religious and based in biblical prophecy. For Giuliani, it is secular -- but given his 9/11 experiences, just as personal.
Via John Quiggin, here's Matthew Turner in February 2004: "More pertinent for this site perhaps is the exchange rates at which European gdp per capitas overtake those in the Great Republic. For the Europeans it's around euro 1 = $1.46, i.e. they are unlikely to get there anytime soon given we're currently at $1.26." As it happens, the Euro was trading at a bit over $1.46 when I checked a bit earlier.
Now, of course, this isn't actually considered the correct way to do these comparisons -- you're supposed to use the Purchasing Power Parities method which still shows us as richer -- but surely these exchange rates have some significance.
Ryan Avent points to a great New York Times article that does what newspaper stories so rarely do: really break down and explain an issue:
Carbon dioxide is what economists call an “externality,” something that imposes a cost on somebody other than the manufacturer. At some point, the thinking goes, Congress will force industries to pay those costs, either with a tax or a cap-and-trade system in which allowances will cost money. The consensus in the energy business is that lawmakers will come up with a charge that could start at $10 per metric ton or more. [...]
At $10 per metric ton, the impact is minimal. But at $50 a ton, for example, the cost of a kilowatt-hour produced by coal goes from about 5.7 cents to about 10 cents. Wind power currently isn’t competitive, according to the institute’s calculation, but it becomes competitive when carbon dioxide costs $25 a ton. [...]
At $20 or $30 a ton, the 1.9 pounds of carbon dioxide emitted in producing that kilowatt-hour costs 2 to 3 cents. That cuts into coal’s price advantage and — when coupled with progress in reducing the cost of solar power through manufacturing and economies of scale — gives solar power “a much larger chance to be relevant,” Mr. Gay said. Solar thermal systems, which use mirrors to concentrate sunlight to boil water, might benefit even sooner.
The trick, it turns out, is that the story ran in the Times's business section where they're trying to make sure an audience of interested parties gets the information they need. Were this to run as a "Washington" or "politics" story in the news section, it'd be all full of dueling quotes from political hacks, obfuscation, horse-race stuff, and pretty much anything other than an explanation of the impact of carbon pricing.
Several smart correspondents have made the point that one of the other oddities of western press coverage of Benazir Bhutto is that you tend not to hear about how she's a huge crook. Corruption in a middle-income country, of course, is nothing new and Pakistan in general is not a paragon of good governance. Still, the best of my knowledge Bhutto and her husband stand out as unusually corrupt by Pakistani standards, which is precisely how she wound up ejected from power.
The Bhuttos, naturally, claim that all of this is politically motivated, but if you look at John Burns' account from early 1998 when the investigations were going down you can see that it's grounded in some pretty solid evidence and involves lots of European banks and corporation that are hardly going to be under the control of her political rivals in Pakistan. And we're not talking small change here, either, this one scam seems to have netted tens of millions of dollars. Back in the late 1990s, she even had Swiss authorities looking to get her indicted which, again, seems like a beyond-the-ordinary level of corruption rather than domestic political gambits. That's not to deny that she has a real constituency in the country, but Pakistani politics shouldn't be reduced to Bhutto versus Musharraf as there's more forces in play than just that:
Sharif urged the West to abandon Musharraf but also ruled out teaming up with Benazir Bhutto, another key opposition leader, unless she cut off talks with Musharraf. Sharif told The Associated Press that Pakistan was heading deeper into chaos and his archenemy had outlived his usefulness in fighting terrorism.
I'm not sure what the takeaway is here, but it's worth keeping in mind.
Tim Lee complains that "The general point that violating the constitution is wrong even if it leads to results we like is a position that hardly anyone in mainstream politics takes seriously" and there follows some fulminating about liberals who are "perfectly willing to countenance tortured readings of the First Amendment in the name of 'campaign finance reform,' of the Second Amendment in the name of 'gun control,' and of the Fifth Amendment in the name of 'urban planning.'"
Color me unconvinced. It's easy for a libertarian who's convinced that a non-tortured reading of the constitution would enact libertarianism to assert that the country's vast non-libertarian majority ought to be less concerned about our policy preferences and more concerned about non-torture of the constitution. The reality, though, is that where the constitution is really ambiguity-free then people are happy to abide by provisions they don't approve of. I think, for example, that judicial terms should be long, but fixed, rather than lasting until death or retirement. It's clear enough, though, that that's not the law.
Meanwhile, had the US Constitution not been written by a small and unrepresentative minority of wealthy individuals working in the 18th century, it's possible that it would do something like guarantee a right to health care. Folks on the left would read that as a straightforward constitutional enactment of a universal health care system. More libertarian-minded people, though, could probably devise "tortured" readings of the provision indicating that "after all just go to an emergency room" plus the status quo is good enough:
Meanwhille, from where I sit it's Tim's reading of the Fifth Amendment that seems tortured to me -- why shouldn't urban planning count as a public use? But leaving that aside, I suppose it does take some torturing of the Second Amendment's text to explain why the "right to keep and bear arms" doesn't guarantee people's right to keep and bear, say, weaponized forms of the VX nerve agent but I'd rather offer a tortured reading of the amendment than have deadly neurotoxins sold at the corner store. Obviously, there are some constitutional provisions I think should be very strictly adhered to, but those are just the provisions that I think enact morally worthwhile principles of justice. Maintaining the rule of law requires us to show some fidelity to precedent and to efforts at textual exegesis but whether or not we're "getting the text right" as such pretty little bearing on the issue.
The real problem is simply that the constitution is too hard to amend so that when provisions become outdated or unworkable or produces ludicrous results (VX gas, again) it's unduly difficult to change things around. Meanwhile, undue reverence for the constitution prevents people from recognizing that a lot of the procedural aspects of the constitutional mechanism are clunky and absurd (see for example what happens if there's no majority in the electoral college, a lurking time-bomb that's bound to go off one of these days) and ought to be changed.
Readers are probably aware that I'm not exactly heartbroken over the apparent tightening of the Democratic primary race in the polls, but I agree with Chris Bowers that the main causal mechanism here appears to be a fundamentally unfair media narrative. I watched an extended discussion on MSNBC yesterday of a host and two guests (all women) berating Clinton for "playing the gender card," lambasting it as both a substantive outrage and a tactical blunder that called into question her ability to combat terrorism effectively. The closest thing to a defense of Clinton's unforgivable conduct we got was the notion that maybe her staff had played this card without her permission, but that also cast her leadership abilities into doubt. Strangest of all, throughout the segment viewers were never told what Clinton had actually done so there was no opportunity for anyone to make up their own mind as to whether the MSM-lambasting was justified.
As Chris says, even if you like the result here (and I do) it still reflects a kind of sickness in our political culture that hasn't served the country well in the recent past and seems unlikely to do so in the future.
I think David Ignatius' column on Pakistan today is pretty insightful. He makes the Iran analogy, and also makes the point that even with 20/20 hindsight it's really not clear how Jimmy Carter should have handled that situation. Similarly, "changing Pakistan is a job for Pakistanis, and history suggests that the more we meddle, the more likely we are to get things wrong."
The trouble, though, is that while it would be easy for us to not "meddle" if political protests started to rock Laos or Belarus, we're already eye-deep in Pakistan-related meddling in the form of our huge post-9/11 aid packages. To pull the aid carpet out from under Musharraf would be a kind of meddling. To continue the unconditional aid policy, however, is a different kind of meddling. And to continue the aid but attach more strings to it -- to make it clear that a violent crackdown on peaceful demonstrators would result in aid cuts, say -- would also constitute a kind of meddling. Similarly, if Pakistani officials ask American diplomats what they think about the situation and they don't say anything, that'll likely be read as a green light for harsh measures.
Basically, we're in a position where "don't meddle" doesn't mean anything. In the medium-term, what we need to do is shift our overall posture to one where we're doing less meddling in other countries' internal political problems (as Ignatius says, we don't seem very good at it) but we've meddled so much in Pakistan that there's no non-meddling option for the short-run.
Here's your chart of the day, courtesy of Senator Schumer, Rep. Maloney and the Joint Economic Committee. Sure does make you glad that Alan Greenspan was out urging everyone to get ARMs a few years back. No spike in defaults as a result or anything; certainly no kind of secondary fallout roiling financial markets and causing tons of people to lose their homes.
Barack Obama endorses the Sullivan Case for Obama, saying that he can deliver change in a way Hillary Clinton can't because she's stuck in the battles of the 1960s.
The overwhelming consensus is that people want fewer posts that just link to interesting things I've read on the internet, but Trita Parsi's article for The Nation outlining eight principles for thinking about Iran is too good not to link to.
Spencer Ackerman's been taking a look at how American aid gets delivered to Pakistan and it basically amounts to handing over billions of dollars of cash stuffed into garbage bags. More specifically, "the U.S. gives Musharraf's government about $200 million annually and his military $100 million monthly in the form of direct cash transfers." That's basically untraceable, unaccountable money. Over a billion a year goes direct to the Pakistani military in what CSIS's Rick Barton characterizes as "a sort of a handshake deal between militaries" in which we "we don't have a lot of record-keeping."
Ayesha Siddiqa, a well-known analyst in Islamabad and the author of Military Inc.: Inside the Pakistani Military Economy, says that the armed forces are major players in real estate, agribusiness, and several other industries. The empire includes banks, cable-TV companies, insurance agencies, sugar refineries, private security firms, schools, airlines, cargo services, and textile factories. The Fauji Foundation, for instance, is a “welfare trust” that is run by the defense ministry and spans 15 business enterprises. It provides cushy jobs for hundreds of retired officers (many retire in their late 40s), pays few taxes, and channels profits into a fund that is intended to benefit retired military personnel. And it is just one of several giant military-run foundations and companies that were set up decades ago and have grown steadily ever since.
The military’s intrusion into commerce is quite visible in Islamabad, if you know what to look for. The logos of the Fauji Foundation and other military-run conglomerates appear on trucks, boxes, and buildings throughout the city. As Hoodbhoy told me, “They own gas companies. They make fertilizer, cement, soap, bottled water. They even make cereals, so when I have breakfast, I can’t get away from them.”
Basically, this money could be going anywhere for any purpose -- it's just a kind of giant bribe to Pakistan's military and political elite (and in a military dictatorship it's not such a key distinction) not something that goes to support particular programs.
Since Rudy Giuliani is the unofficial candidate of America's Jewish hawks and Israel hardliners, I'm searching for signs of recognition from those quarters that his new best friend Pat Robertson seems to be a wild-eyed crackpot who believes that a conspiracy of Jewish Illuminati are behind most of the world's problems.
So far I'm seeing nothing. J-Pod at Commentary and Bill Kristol in The Weekly Standard both downplay the significance of the endorsement in electoral terms, which I think is their way of signalling disdain for Robertson, but hardly gets at the crux of the matter.
It seems that a hearty band of "blue dog" Democrats are doing their usual act of standing up for cultural traditionalists' role in the Democratic Party by doing the bidding of campaign contributors in the financial services industry. But is it really true that, as David Sirota argues, "we see the sheer corruption in this move by the Blue Dogs - because the foreclosure crisis is actually hitting such conservative rural districts harder than everywhere else."
I'm not so sure. As it happens, I have on my virtual desktop a county-by-county tally of foreclosures in the first three months of 2007. Stephanie Herseth, one of the people who signed the objectionable letter urging congress not to enact legislation to help people at risk of losing their home, represents South Dakota. By my calculation, there have been 214 foreclosures in this state of 780,000 people. That's tragic for the affected families, but it's a relatively low rate at the moment.
My look at the data thus far has been very cursory, but my preliminary conclusion would be that the hardest-hit areas are the high-growth fringes of vibrant metro areas. In Virginia, for example, Arlington County right next door to DC has a higher foreclosure rate than South Dakota. It's lower, however, than the rate in Fairfax County -- the further-out part of suburban Virginia. Fairfax's foreclosure rate, in turn, is lower than the rates in Loudon County and Prince William County -- the dread exurbs. The ring of counties around those two counties -- rural areas -- see the rate dropping again. Melissa Bean (who also signed the letter) is probably a better target for this criticism as she represents a big part of McHenry Country which seems to have a ton of foreclosures. I'm pretty sure that you'd best characterize her district as suburban/exurban (Wikipedia says "the northern suburbs of Chicago" rather than rural.
I found Sirota's post reading Matt Stoller who says "David Sirota shows, it is in rural conservative districts where the subprime mortgage issue is hurting people the most. Markos noted this as well, pointing to this LA Times story." Markos, however, didn't characterize the story that way, and rightly so since what it says is that Republicans "could suffer in fast-growing exurban counties, where the real estate market is worst."
At any rate, I agree with the main point that Blue Dogs are voting their donors rather than their districts here, but it's not empirically the case that rural areas have been the hardest hit here. This graphic mapping the financial cost of foreclosures from the JEC isn't 100 percent on point, but it is illustrative:
Roger Cohen deploys his mastery of geopolitics: "Given the nuclear-charged risks, the U.S. must stick with him and maintain aid for now, but with the insistence he move rapidly toward promised elections, restore an independent judiciary, work with Bhutto and get real about quashing the Taliban." But why would Musharraf do any of those things if he knows that our view is that given the nuclear-charges risks we must stick with him? Either we're going to continue granting Musharraf his direct cash transfers or else we're going to make aid conditional. Obviously, this is a difficult policy question. But Cohen's answer: keep giving him the money "but with the insistence" that he do some stuff is no answer at all.
In general, I'd say this is pretty typical of the sort of magical thinking that seems to have infested our foreign policy pundits. How many times have I read a column making an argument like "Iraq is all fucked up for reasons A, B, and C but given the price of failure we have no choice but to close our eyes and hope really hard that A, B, and C vanish for some reason"? It's really foolish, a way of trying to present oneself as wise and knowledgeable about difficult questions without putting anything out there that one can be held accountable for if things don't work out. "No, no," the pundit protests, "I said we needed a policy that works and had no costs this fiasco has nothing to do with me."
I got a tax refund check in the mail the other day then I don't think I actually should have gotten, and have been turning that over in my head a bit. I just want to make it clear, though, that I had no part in this business:
Two mid-level D.C. government employees used phony paperwork to collect more than $16 million from illegal tax refunds, avoiding detection for at least three years while issuing more than 40 checks cashed by friends and family members in on the scam, prosecutors said yesterday.
As John Hollinger points out, it's not just that Diesel's playing badly right now, it's that even if he gets back into shape and improves Miami needs him to be outstanding in a way he probably can't be anymore at his age: "But the Heat's championship hopes depend on Shaq being more than a 'nice' player. He's taking up $20 million a year on a team that refuses to pay luxury tax, so he pretty much needs to be a superstar. Those days appear long gone. Even if Shaq matches his second half numbers from last season, he's a borderline All-Star at best."
What's more, his contract goes through the 2009-2010 season when Miami will also apparently be paying Mark Blount $8 million so I think Dwayne Wade is probably looking at being out of contention for some time.
Photo by Flickr user SporTech used under a Creative Commons license
I'm trying to learn more about the situation in Pakistan and America's policies in the region, and I want to keep posting on this even as my overall knowledge-level remains a bit low. But here are some informative things I've been checking out:
If you like data about cities (and who doesn't?) you won't want to miss this page which has a bunch of it. Above, see the age distribution for Washington, DC. See the enormous spike of college-age people. Marvel at the large number of excess women in their twenties. Then find yourself wishing you could find those numbers broken down by race or some measure of socioeconomic status so we could tell if that's because male professionals are more likely to move to the suburbs or because poor black men are getting arrested and sent to jail.
Despite The Washington Post's belief that climate change is a risky issue for Democrats, Politico takes a look at some polling from Whit Ayres that shows exactly what you'd think -- being totally in hock to the fossil fuel industry at a time of growing concern about climate change is risky for Republicans. In particular, this is a problem:
Republicans are split in three camps: a small but vocal group who think global warming is basically a hoax (26 percent of GOP voters in the Ayres poll said it does not exist); a big group that includes GOP presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani who agree the Earth is warming but are reluctant to embrace plans opposed by business or viewed as burdensome government regulation; and a growing number who are pushing for specific, market-based solutions now.
The campaign to convince people that global warming is a hoax was a big asset for a while, but now it's a problem. The hardest-core members of the Republican base -- the same people pushing for a policy of perpetual war -- are true believers on this point, which makes it difficult for GOP politicians to push for action. That leaves would-be Republican presidents like Giuliani and Romney stuck with the nonsensical position that catastrophic climate change is on the way and we ought to do nothing about it, since proposing a solution would offend key corporate backers and also this largish bloc of voters who accept the hoax theory.
Those who know me know me that I have something of a soft spot for pandas. Hence, I really wish I'd been the one to pull the arduous assignment of reporting on the world's largest panda reserve, but they gave it to Fallows instead. At any rate, if you're a subscriber, you can read it. If you're not a subscriber, you should subscribe. Either way, you won't want to miss this narrated slideshow of pandas.
William Arkin catches George W. Bush musing again about World War III: "This is a country that has defied the IAEA -- in other words, didn't disclose all their program -- have said they want to destroy Israel. If you want to see World War III, you know, a way to do that is to attack Israel with a nuclear weapon. And so I said, now is the time to move."
Obviously, as we've had several occasions to note, Bush's efforts to portray his Iran stance as in line with the IAEA are wrong and dishonest. What's more, while it would obviously be a horrible turn of events for Israel to be subject to an Iranian nuclear attack, the response would be an Israeli counterattack and the destruction of Iran -- no World War III. And, more to the point, since the response would be an Israeli counterattack and the destruction of Iran, there's not going to be an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. The whole thing is ludicrous. But the Bush administration, by repeatedly talking as if the US and its allies have no ability to deter rogue states, is possibly opening the door to some kind of dangerous misunderstandings.
As Condoleezza Rice wrote before going insane "These regimes are living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them. Rather, the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence -- if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration."
It's not quite the much-rumored DC cocktail party circuit, but I did get to go to a "salon lunch" today with Dmitri Simes talking about Russia and he had a novel take on the continued uncertainty about what Vladimir Putin's going to do when his term of office as president ends. As Simes laid the situation out, Putin very much wants to hold on to ultimate authority. But he doesn't want to do so much damn work! And so there's no clear picture of what he's going to do because he hasn't decided yet; he's still working on devising a formula that will maximize his power while minimizing the day-to-day workload. Apparently, they took a look at constitutional monarchy and some consideration has been given to creating an entirely new post aside from President and Prime Minister, possibly called "Supreme Leader" like in Iran.
I think Ross is basically right about Michael Clayton and basically right about Into the Wild but I wouldn't join him in lumping the two together as films I liked "more than [they] deserved." The problems with Into the Wild are of an ethical or philosophical nature.
Jon Krakauer's book versionbook version of the story is already far too kind to Christopher McCandless and his antics and the film erred even further in that direction. But if you believe -- as Sean Penn seems to -- that McCandless' recklessness and cruelty toward his immediate family were, in fact, a noble spiritual journey worthy of celebration, then Penn's done a brilliant job of transforming the story into a film that sees what Penn sees. I feel like that's a bit of an irresponsible thing to do, but it's good filmmaking; a very good movie, just one promoting a weird and wrongheaded point of view.
Clayton, by contrast, I was super-enthusiastic about while watching and immediately after leaving the theater, but thinking back the preposterousness of the underlying plot seems like a big problem. It didn't bother me at the time, but I have a hard time believing it wouldn't bother me if I watched it again.
Kevin Drum remarks on the public's growing indifference to the question of how things are going in Iraq. Polls show an uptick in the number of people who think the war is going well, but CNN's polling indicates that more people than ever -- 68 percent -- say they oppose the war in Iraq.
I think this makes a lot of sense. It all comes down to what you think of the overall strategy. If you think, as I do, that the war is serving no strategic purpose except, perhaps, to present a continuing risk of a flare-up with Iran while antagonizing Arab public opinion then the war "going well" is, just like the war "going poorly," just another reason to leave. On the other hand, if you think that the war serves the vital strategic importance of projecting American power into the region and keeping other antagonists like Syria and Iran at bay, then the war going poorly would be a reason to redouble our efforts, but the war going well would also be a reason to redouble our efforts.
Reality on the ground does matter at some level, of course, but in a fundamental sense the question is still about strategy not about the exact state of play in such-and-such neighborhood in Baghdad. The original strategic purpose of the war was to eliminate an advanced nuclear weapons program that didn't exist. Today, the purpose is ... what? Mainly, it seems, to allow people who staked their reputations to this venture to avoid admitting that they made a horrible mistake.
Barack Obama has what seems like a pretty good idea for Pakistan, basically "continue funding for Pakistan in the Foreign Operations bill in the areas of counter-terrorism funding, public education, health, micro-enterprise development, humanitarian assistance, and democracy and rule of law programs" but suspend the large general support grants to the Pakistani military until such time as the conditions are set for free and fair elections and the Pakistani government comes up with a credible al-Qaeda plan.
Ilan Goldenberg likes this approach as well. Basically, you'd be pressure the Pakistani military to pressure Musharraf to get back on a path to civilian rule. As I say, seems like a decent idea for the short-term.
Marc Ambinder notes the head of the Iowa Christian Alliance bashing Rudy Giuliani: "We’re not going to beat Hillary Clinton with someone who has a record of agreement with her on abortion, gay marriage, illegal immigration and many other issues important to Iowa conservatives." And Garance Franke-Ruta has the head of Iowa Right-to-Life bashing Rudy Giuliani: "We certainly would not like Giuliani to win because he’s anti-life and he’s a sure loser for the Republican Party."
It's interesting to see the non-Robertson (less crazy?) elements of the religious right trying to take this electability argument by the horns. Almost all the Democrats I know think these people are wrong and Giuliani would be the strongest GOP nominee. It still seems to me, though, that Giuliani is pretty likely to prompt a spoiler candidacy, especially if he somehow manages to win with the 30-35 percent he's currently pulling in the polls.
I upgraded one of my machines to Leopard last night, and while it doesn't look like it's about to change my life it does have some cool features. And an annoying weird one. Namely, Apple has taken its somewhat weird and annoying "cover flow" feature from iTunes and brought it over to the Finder so now you can browse through your files and folders in the awkward, inefficient, can't-really-see-where-anything-is way. But why? Cover flow definitely does look cool on a television ad, but the crux of the matter is that actually using a computer is very different from sitting back and watching a scene unfold. Cover flow doesn't seem to me to work at all as a way to actually use your computer.
A late-October Quinnipiac University survey underscored this point. Nationally, it showed Clinton being edged out by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, 45% to 43%, within the margin of error. In red states, however, she ran behind him, 49% to 40%, and she trailed, 47% to 41%, in the purple ones. By comparison, Illinois Senator Barack Obama beat Giuliani by a single percentage point (43% to 42%) nationally but held that same margin in the purple states and came within 6 points (45% to 39%) in the red ones.
Isaac's afraid. I don't know what to think. If you think of "electability" as a pure dispositional property, then I think it's pretty clear Obama has more of it. It shows up in the early polls, in the pretty clear-cut fact that he's a more compelling public speaker, and in the anecdotal sense that he has an easier time of making people who disagree with him on important issues nonetheless decide they like and respect him (see, e.g., Andrew's Obama story for The Atlantic). This is an interesting and important fact about the election.
Still, one suspects that progressives primarily care about who's most likely to win the election and Obama's promising raw material is only part of the story. Some Democrats I speak to are very convinced that Hillary Clinton will be better both at taking punches from the right and at punching back. Certainly, most everyone (myself included) is impressed with the quality of the campaign she's run thus far. And this stuff counts. Nobody's so charismatic that opposition attacks will just bounce right off them. Now in DC people talk this stuff to death, and my basic take is that plausible arguments can be made both ways and the answer is just unknowable. An unsatisfying conclusion, perhaps, but good enough for a blog post.
Colin Kahl is a guy I'm pretty sure I'd never heard of until a week or so ago, but he's a real expert on Iraq and stability operations who seems to have emerged as a fairly influential backer in Democratic circles of commitments to a continued training mission in Iraq and other policies I tend to disagree with. Interestingly, the people I do tend to agree with all respect him a great deal (though they still don't agree) so Marc Lynch is hosting a guest post from Prof. Kahl laying out his views and I think there'll be responses later today from Lynch and others.
I would also put giant red flags all around any policies whose own advocates say things like "This could work in theory -- although the probabilities are difficult to assess and are probably not particularly high." That suggests to me that we're not actually disagreeing about the merits of the sort of scheme Kahl's putting forward. I think his plan won't work and he thinks his plan won't work. He counters that not trying is even less likely to work. That's true, but of course there are costs (and opportunity costs) to staying and trying. As I said yesterday, the question of regional strategy is incredibly important here. The implicit calculus behind Kahl's thinking is that though his plan probably won't work, if it did work the gains would be very large and the costs of attempting it are very small.
I don't really see things that way. In order to outline goals that we probably can't achieve but could achieve "in theory," the bar has been set sufficiently low that the benefits of success aren't especially high. Meanwhile, the costs of continued involvement in Iraq seem quite high. This is starting to get some traction in the campaign as John Edwards lays out a strategy I agree with and points to the fact that Clinton's policies will keep us stuck in an occupation dymaic. The Obama campaign hasn't been clear on several of the points of contention which frustrates Chris Bowers (and me) but it's worth saying that my reporting indicates this is likely more the result of genuine indecision than calculated ambiguity -- Obama is hearing arguments from both sides and isn't sure who he agrees with.
U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Julian Billma
Courtesy of Sam Boyd, I see the Financial Times reporting on Joe Lieberman's views. Apparently, the Wise One "argued that George W. Bush and the Republican presidential candidates remained truer than the Democratic party to its tradition of a 'moral, internationalist, liberal and hawkish' foreign policy that was established by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy."
This reduction of, say, FDR's understanding of foreign policy to the idea that he was "hawkish" is really insipid. It's true, of course, that FDR responded to the policy environment he faced in a "hawkish" manner but the situation, clearly, was entirely different. Similarly, I entirely agree that Democrats should continue to emulate the Truman-in-Korea (or Bush-in-Kuwait) model of being willing and able to deploy military forces in order to protect foreign countries from conquest. You'd have to be an idiot to draw from the FDR-Truman school of internationalism the simple lesson that a disposition to start wars is a good idea. After all, JFK was "hawkish," too, but Lieberman seems to forget that his act of hawkery in Vietnam turned out to be a huge fiasco, and his foreign policy triumph came during the Cuban Missile Crisis when he wisely rejected the counsels of the preventive war crowd and instead struck a pragmatic deal.
Obviously all-war all-the-time has long been Lieberman's signature contribution to Democratic Party thinking (like Bill Kristol on the other side) but the willingness of others to swallow the idea that the "internationalism" of the liberal tradition amounts simply to a disposition to kill foreigners is really insane. Bush and Lieberman are bloodthirsty they're not internationalists. They've founded no institutions, they've made America despised, they actively seek to undermine international law, and they've brought our relationships with allies -- the ones the real internationalists built -- to unprecedented new lows.
David Brooks takes the pushback against the idea that Ronald Regan pandered to racists in Philadelphia, Mississippi and winds up dramatically overplaying his hand. But first let me just note that the specific charge has always struck me as oddly irrelevant. Look at the election map from 1980:
This just wasn't a close election. The country's economy was performing poorly, Jimmy Carter's foreign policy was perceived (unfairly, I might add) as failing, and Carter was strongly disliked by his party's liberal base. Under the circumstances, he was almost certainly doomed. Carter's strategy, which actually worked pretty well given the unfavorable environment, was to try to paint Ronald Reagan as a dangerous extremist. Under the circumstances, whatever Reagan was or wasn't doing in Mississippi, it's just not plausible that coded appeals to segregationists was the foundation of his electoral success.
On the other hand -- and here's where Brooks overplays his hand -- the centrality of race and racism to American politics in general and to its unusually conservative cast in particular is really undeniable. This isn't really a partisan point at all. Obviously, electoral power is bound to swing back and forth between the parties no matter what. And it's actually a bit hard to find a particular election to point to and say "the Republicans won this one because of racism" (had Thurmond pulled enough votes from Truman in Virginia to throw the state to Dewey, that would be your candidate) because racial divisions systematically impact American politics in a way that both parties have always adjusted to.
For example, lots of people believe that it would be very morally wrong if we used progressive taxation to finance a system of high-quality health care for all Americans and don't ground this belief in racism at all. Still, it's empirically the case that the reason such a system wasn't enacted during the New Deal Era was that white supremacists who feared that federal involvement in health care would lead to integrated hospitals. More generally, the fact that the recipients of anti-poverty transfer payments are disproportionately minorities -- and even more disproportionately portrayed as such in the media -- plays a large role in casting them as "Other" and in reducing political sentiments of solidarity and the implementation of solidaristic policies.
Indeed, I think it's uncontroversial, even among right-wingers, to observe that the Nordic countries have such an egalitarian policy environment largely because they're so small and homogenous, imbuing their politics with a communitarian spirit that's largely absent from the US. Racial divisiveness' role in impeding social democratic policies in the United States is just the inverse of that.
Question: Do people have experience using iWork in general and Pages in particular? Are they any good? And more specifically, if I have to be able to open up MS Word files with track changes will that work in a tolerable manner?
It's been brought to my attention that Barack Obama's position on a training mission in Iraq is more clear than I'd thought. Here's Obama talking to Michael Gordon:
We’ve seen progress against AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq], but they are a resilient group and there’s the possibility that they might try to set up new bases. I think that we should have some strike capability. But that is a very narrow mission, that we get in the business of counter terrorism as opposed to counter insurgency and even on the training and logistics front, what I have said is, if we have not seen progress politically, then our training approach should be greatly circumscribed or eliminated.
I think that's exactly right. He goes on to say he does "not want us to be in the business of training and equipping factions or militias that are going to be turning on each other," but is willing to hold training and equipment out as a carrot for some kind of hypothetical post-reconciliation government. In short, Obama and Edwards both have the right policy on this and Clinton has the wrong one.
UPDATE: Armando in comments says he doesn't understand how Clinton's position differs from Edwards and Obama. The answer is that, as I understand it, Clinton still stands by her proposal to maintain residual forces in Iraq whose mission would unconditionally include "Training Iraqi security forces" and "Providing logistic support of Iraqi security forces." Clinton's plans echo CNAS's phased transition proposal whereas Obama and Edwards have evolved toward CAP's strategic reset proposal.
James Surowiecki notes that the performance bonuses for hedge fund managers have absurd results: "Fund managers get bonuses at the end of each year, and they keep those performance fees even if the fund eventually goes south. So if a billion-dollar hedge fund rises twenty per cent in its first year and falls twenty per cent in its second, its investors will have lost money, while the fund’s manager might earn forty million dollars in performance fees." Consequently, a strong incentive exists to take advantage of this quirk and of financial markets' general upward trajectory, by just investing the money in ways that generates more noise -- bigger up and down swings -- some of which can be translated into bonuses.
Tyler Cowen has more thoughts on this, conceding that the recent explosion of new investment schemes "has brought us new products" but "it all seems to be new mortgage products" whereas "the junk bond revolution of the 1980s involved some "excess" risk-taking, but I believe those risks were more closely connected to the real economy, and more likely to bring real economy benefits, than the recent spate of mortgage-related risks."
Photo by Flickr user Stoneflower used under a Creative Commonc license
Despite his undying hatred of celebrity-chef culture, Bourdain, still affiliated with French bistro chainlet Les Halles, has reached Emeril-like levels of popularity. Tickets to what was essentially a book-promo talk on Wednesday night sold for $28 a pop, and most of the 1,490 seats at Lisner Auditorium were full. Known best for Kitchen Confidential, his best-selling 2001 exposé on the knife-flinging, drug-addled subculture of restaurant kitchens, Bourdain now eats his way around the world for Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, his show on the Travel Channel. (A picture-heavy book based on the series was just released.)
He hates celebrity chef culture, but he's a chef who's written a best-selling book, has a cable television series, lectures to audiences of over a thousand, and sits down for magazine profiles in which he riffs on Nigella Lawson and the Barefoot Contessa. Plus: he appears on Top Chef. But he's managed to achieve all this despite his hatred for celebrity chef culture, a truly remarkable achievement!
It seems to me, though, that eight-five percent of celebrity profiles I read feature some line about how much the being-profiled celebrity loathes the limelight.
UPDATE: Look, I like Bourdain: Kitchen Confidential is a great fun book, I watch No Reservations sometimes and Top Chef always, etc., but we just shouldn't take his affected disdain for celebrity chefs all that seriously.
“You people are really nuts,” she told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”
That this quote came at the very end of the story rather than the beginning speaks volumes. There's just no shame. I think most campaign reporters would rather spend an hour being waterboarded than spend it trying to understand the important questions facing the country.
Americans don’t have a bad health system, say the apologists, they just have bad habits. Overeating and teenage sex, not the huge overhead of America’s private health insurance companies — the United States spends almost six times as much on health care administration as other advanced countries — are the source of our problems.
There’s a grain of truth to this claim: Bad habits may partially explain America’s low life expectancy. But the big question isn’t why we have lower life expectancy than Britain, Canada or France, it’s why we spend far more on health care without getting better results. And lifestyle isn’t the explanation: the most definitive estimates, such as those of the McKinsey Global Institute, say that diseases that are associated with obesity and other lifestyle-related problems play, at most, a minor role in high U.S. health care costs.
One might also note that insofar as Americans have less healthy lifestyles than we should -- which we certainly seem to -- that this, too, is a policy problem worth addressing, not just a factoid to wave around. One wouldn't want to go too far in terms of restricting liberty in the name of public healthy, but we certainly ought to take a closer look at the public health implications of our farm subsidies and land use policies (here both in terms of car accidents and the lost moderate exercise that comes from walking).
On top of all of that, however, is the point that giving people sound lifestyle advice and getting them to follow it is part of a good medical professional's job and part of the job of a good health care system would be to create a situation where people are getting their health status checked up and getting good advice about what they should be doing.
Photo by Flick user Derusha used under a Creative Commons license
Since Brian Katulis is right about everything, it's no surprise that his response to Colin Kahl is also spot on.
See also my response to Kahl and Eric Martin's response to Kahl. Plus my post on the importance of regional strategy. If you're wondering why it's worth spending so much time on one guy's guest post, the basic answer is that there's a lot of influential thinking along more-or-less Kahlian lines in the most hawkish Democratic circles and he seems much more willing than others to engage in this sort of forum.
So it seems that even though Mark Penn is CEO of Burson-Marsteller and Burson-Marsteller is handling the PR account for Aqua Dots -- the toy that's come into ill-repute for having an adhesive coating that turns into GHB, thus putting children into comas -- Penn has nothing to do with Aqua Dots. Much as he has nothing to do with Blackwater, another Burson-Marsteller client. And how he has nothing to do with Burson-Marsteller's union-busting practice. So what does he do? And how can a CEO be so uninvolved in so much of his own company's activities?
To follow up on yesterday's Vladimir Putin post, this Moscow Times article translates the idea in question as a proposal to create a new post of "National Leader" for Putin to fill, not "Supreme Leader" as I, following Dmitri Simes, had it. It bears mentioning that, when you think about it, if Putin is looking for a model of an authoritarian system that incorporates some pluralism and many democracy-like institutions, Iran is actually a pretty good example of a system that's lasted a good long while now as a neither-fish-now-fowl sort of thing. Late-PRI Mexico might also be a source of inspiration.
J.P. Green wants it known that whatever Ronald Reagan was or wasn't doing in Philadelphia, MS he did have a terrible record on race issues; as Sidney Blumenthal has written:
Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it "humiliating to the South"), and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," he said, "he has a right to do so." After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan travelled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: "I believe in states' rights".
As president, Reagan aligned his justice department on the side of segregation, supporting the fundamentalist Bob Jones University in its case seeking federal funds for institutions that discriminate on the basis of race. In 1983, when the supreme court decided against Bob Jones, Reagan, under fire from his right in the aftermath, gutted the Civil Rights Commission.
Indeed, though one of the only nice things one can say about George W. Bush is that he's made some kind of effort to detoxify the Republicans' image in minority communities, it's still the case that he's followed Ronald Reagan's lead in having the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department stop enforcing laws barring discrimination against racial minorities. We should probably understand that as part-and-parcel of the Bush administration's broad-based effort to stop enforcing all kinds of regulations that might burden business (indeed, as I pointed out once in a Cato Unbound essay, when libertarianism was actually tried in the form of the Goldwater campaign it turned out that the main constituency for it was among hard-core white supremacists) rather than racism as such.
Lack of attractiveness results in quite a few middle-aged, embittered women, women who are ready, willing, and able to declare war on men. They did not have a line of men vying for the right to support them and their life-choices, looked around for a convenient class of oppressor and learned in their Womyn's Studies that they were being oppressed by MEN all along!
9's and 10's among women generally do not NEED those artificially constructed entitlements and privileges for women - they have men willing and able to cater to their comforts and needs.
So…. don't get caught up in Ann Friendman's ovary-think, Glenn.
Also -- "Even if all feminists looked like a model their obnoxious, hate mongering will allow them the same dislike and distrust as the ugly male-haters get today." Heh. Indeed. These guys really need to read Steven Den Beste then they might realize that the only real (Anglo) women left are strippers (or something).
A correspondent directed my attention to the second page of Ann Scott Tyson's Washington Post article on counterterrorism in Pakistan and wondered how long it's going to be before we see a Weekly Standard article about proclaiming General Ashfaq Kiyani to be the Petraeus of Pakistan. There's certainly food for thought here:
Nevertheless, U.S. military officials said that Kiyani, Musharraf's possible replacement as head of the military, is supportive of the counterinsurgency plan in the tribal areas, which he visited within days of assuming his current post last month. Kiyani has also indicated an openness to having the Pakistani military focus on missions other than conventional operations aimed at the threat of India, which senior U.S. officers consider diminished. "He has a different view," said one senior military official. "I'd expect he will step up and be head of the army, and there will be some changes."
This reminds me that Americans -- from journalists to congressmen to senior miltiary officials -- ought to consider adopting a less personality-driven view of how the world works. The fact that a Pakistani general angling for the top spot in Pakistan's all-powerful military tells American military officials that he wants to concentrate less on the top priority of the Pakistani military and more on the top priority of the American military tells us only that General Kiyani understands how to tell people what they want to hear.
Meanwhile, it raises a good issue. When we think about Pakistan's security forces, we think about fighting al-Qaeda. When Pakistanis think about Pakistan's security forces, they think about fighting India. If we want Pakistan to spend less time worrying about India and more time worrying about al-Qaeda, we should be thinking about whether or not there's something we could do on the India front that would make it worth Pakistan's while to worry less about India and more about al-Qaeda.
In general, this is what's really gone awry with the heavily moralized post-9/11 climate in the United States. We spend tons of time worrying about whether or not this or that leader -- Musharraf, Putin, Mubarak, Arafat, Sharon, Khameini, Kim, whatever -- is or is not a "good man," a "moderate," a "man of peace," a "tyrant," a "terrorist," a "pygmy," whatever -- that there's little thought given to the idea that countries have interests, and the United States has interests, and the name of the game is to set priorities and let other countries have their way on their top priorities if they'll let us have our way on our top priorities.
Far be it from me to mock the typos of others, but this one in Mike Tomasky's great essay on Paul Krugman for The New York Review of Books brings a smile to this comic book fan's face:
Many liberals would name Paul Krug-man of The New York Times as perhaps the most consistent and courageous—and unapologetic—liberal partisan in American journalism. He has made his perspective on the Bush administration and the contemporary right, and on the need to see politics as a battle, manifestly clear in column after incendiary column.
Conservatives, being a superstitious and cowardly lot, naturally fear and loathe the Krug-Man and his powers of shrill, but the good people of Liberal City look to him as a friend and protector....
Ann Friedman notes that Rudy Giuliani doesn't only have the most male-dominated staff of any presidential candidate, he takes the prize for whitest campaign staff as well, clocking in at a striking 100 percent white. Phoenix Woman terms Team Rudy bad for diversity, but only Giuliani among the major contenders has child molesting priests and mobbed-up former police commissioners in his retinue. It's only diversity in the racial and gender senses that he's lacking.
Can't say that sitting in the stands for this disaster is making me super-optimistic about the nineteen home games left on my ticket package. Over the offseason I found myself becoming semi-convinced by the Dave Berri analysis that Gilbert Arenas was less central to the Wizards than was often assumed -- that he was being overrated and the non-"big three" teammates underestimated -- but now that we see Gilbert with a knee injury and the whole team looking awful, I'm provisionally back to the conventional wisdom.
Good times as John McCain and Mitt Romney attack Rudy Giuliani for his Bernard Kerik associations, only to prompt Randy Mastro to strike back for Team Rudy by calling Saint McCain's sainthood into question while pretending not to: "It’s no more fair to judge Rudy Giuliani on the basis of one issue than it is to judge John McCain on the Keating scandal." But Rich Lowry has the really rough stuff from Katie Levinson on Giuliani's behalf:
Let me get this straight – first, campaign finance crusader John McCain oversees a campaign that spiraled completely out of control and went bankrupt and now he wants a questionable $3 million loan? Doesn’t quite pass the smell test, does it?
Americans need someone in the White House who knows how to balance their own checkbook before they try to balance the federal government’s. They don’t need John McCain, they need Rudy Giuliani - who has actually balanced a budget and made a payroll.
Of course it was a payroll that included his good friend and former driver, the corrupt guy who kept getting promoted to head more-and-more important agencies until Rudy vouched for the guy and got him nominated, almost vetting-free, to be homeland security secretary. Levinson concludes:
Is this what desperation looks like? Bernie Kerik’s issues have been known since 2004 and John McCain still had glowing things to say about Rudy Giuliani and his leadership. What, exactly, changed today? Best as I can tell, it’s just John McCain’s pure desperation in the face of a failing and flailing campaign trumping his so-called straight talk. It is truly a shame that John McCain has chosen to stoop this low.”
I think when you start attacking the other campaigns for showing "desperation" -- like when Hillary Clinton gets mad that John Edwards has the temerity to point out that they disagree on the merits of some issues -- it mostly shows that you don't have a good answer. Rick Davis for John McCain counter-counter attacks:
Rudy Giuliani’s history with Bernie Kerik is a story of poor judgment. After being briefed on Kerik’s ties to organized crime, Giuliani named him chief of the New York Police Department. Without any further vetting, Giuliani asked him to join his security consulting firm. Despite obvious ethical problems, Giuliani went so far as to personally recommend Kerik for the top job at the Department of Homeland Security.
A president’s judgment matters and Rudy Giuliani has repeatedly placed personal loyalty over regard for the facts.
Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, and liberals everywhere are smiling.
UPDATE: Ambinder has more on the food-fight, including John McCain's mom lashing out against Mormons:
As far as the Salt Lake City thing, he's a Mormon and the Mormons of Salt Lake City had caused that scandal. And to clean that up, again, it's not a subject,'' Roberta McCain said. JohnMcCain quickly stepped in: ''The views of my mothers are not necessarily the views of mine.' ''Well, that's my view and you asked me,'' Roberta answered.
I'd actually been waiting quite some time to see an unambiguously bigoted bit of Mormom-bashing, I think we have a winner here. The idea seems to be that because Mitt Romney is a Mormon, and because the people who created the problems with the SLC Olypmpic bid are also Mormons, that Romney doesn't deserve credit for fixing things because in the Cosmic Balance of Mormonism it's all a wash. Or something.
Cato's Daniel Mitchell outlines his plan to return the United States to the levels of prosperity seen before the first world war:
The real issue is whether America would be a stronger and more prosperous nation if government was reduced to the levels envisioned by the Founding Fathers. America climbed from agricultural poverty to middle-class prosperity before the income tax was adopted, and federal government spending (with the exception of times of war) was a small percentage of GDP.
This seems like a bizarre way to argue. It's true, obviously, that the country was much more prosperous in 1912 than it had been in 1790, but it's grown far more prosperous still in the dread income tax era. Were the horse-and-buggy days really good enough for Mitchell? After all, without the need for paved roads we were able to keep the tax burden low, low, low. The near-total absence of useful medical technologies helped keep health care expenses low. And with the population ill-educated by contemporary standards and wage rates much lower than they are today, it was easy to run a school system on the cheap.
I think it's safe to say that I won't be voting for Joe Biden for President, but I think Transplanted Texan at MYDD will be and his post yesterday drew my attention to this fairly prescient Joe Biden speech from September 10, 2001 on foreign policy in which it was clear that the combination of hubris and fanaticism that have made the Bush administration so dangerous on so many fronts was already evident in some ways.
Also interesting here is the context. Basically, Biden was laying the groundwork for an upcoming series of congressional hearings that were aimed at debunking the administration's case for a national missile defense system. The basic argument Democrats were making was that rogue state ballistic missiles were a very hypothetical threat and a missile defense system was a very expensive hypothetical defense against it. The top priority, in Democrats' view, was to maintain good relations with Russia and China to maximize diplomatic leverage against North Korea (and to a lesser extent, the less acute problems of Iran and Iraq) and to focus on counterterrorism threats.
Condi Rice, meanwhile, was set to give a speech on 9/11 that was all about the need to meet the threats of "tomorrow" and accusing her blinkered, terrorism-and-nonproliferation-centric adversaries of living in the past. Naturally, Rice wasn't planning on mentioning terrorism at all and when subsequent events revealed the wrongheadedness of the basic worldview, instead of revising the worldview they responded to the terrorist attacks in crazy ways (invading Iraq, e.g.) that met their preconceptions about what was important rather than with policies that addressed the issue at hand in effective ways.
Rosa Brooks says abortion is passé, the right's new thing is torture: "Today, though, the GOP's interest in abortion appears greatly diminished. When President Bush nominated Michael B. Mukasey as attorney general, no one seemed clear about Mukasey's views on abortion -- and no one in the GOP seemed to care very much either." You can also look up the Ascent of Rudy in this regard.
Brother, Can You Spare a Suddenly Not-so-Valuable Dime?
Mark Weisbrot for CEPR makes the case for a cheaper dollar, arguing that when the Great and the Good like Bob Rubin and Hank Paulson argue for a "strong dollar" policy they're arguing the interests of firms like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup rather than those of the majority of Americans.
It provides an exceptionally simplistic and mechanical history of partisanship and foreign policy. Democrats were "good" from World War II until Vietnam, and Republicans tended to be "bad." Democrats were "bad" from Vietnam to the First Gulf War, and Republicans were "good." During the Clinton administration, and particularly with respect to the Kosovo intervention, Democrats were "good" and most Republicans (excepting Dole and McCain) were "bad," and that characterization remained true during the 2000 elections (Lieberman's running-mate Al Gore "good," the humility-in-foreign-policy Bush "bad"). Both parties were "good" from 9/11 through the Iraq War authorization, but once the war began, Republicans were "good" and Democrats turned "bad" (presumably including Al Gore, who was prematurely "bad" in opposing the war).
One illustration of how dimwitted this worldview is, is that in Liebermanland the "good" political party is pretty much always and everywhere the party that was in power at the time. That's because in the Joe Lieberman Handbook to Strategy, the test of your foreign policy acumen is just supporting wars. And, of course, presidents tend to only launch wars that they support. Thus at any given time, the incumbent will either be not starting a war (neutral) or else supporting his own policies (good) whereas the loudest opponents of his policies (bad) will be in the other party. The idea that there might be good and bad ways of using force, good or bad circumstances in which to use them, or heaven forbid other kinds of good policymaking (avoiding wars!) is just off the table.
Tim Lee makes the excellent point that the country already has some experience with the All Discretion to the Executive model of electronic surveillance that the GOP, the Blue Dog Caucus, The Washington Post and others seem so eager to implement:
Martin Luther King was the most famous of the dozens of anti-war activists, civil rights leaders, journalists, and other undesirables whose communications were bugged by the Johnson and Nixon administration. There's no evidence that the Bush administration has done anything like that. But if we eliminate meaningful judicial oversight of the executive branch's surveillance activities, there's every reason to think that a future administration will.
And of course the absence of evidence about abusive uses of the illegal surveillance program may say more about our general ignorance of the program than about the administration's probity. We know that the "rendition" program has been against innocent people and to extract false confessions designed to bolster bogus administration talking points about Iraq/al-Qaeda links, so there's plenty of reason to worry. But even if Bush has conducted his secret illegal surveillance in the most ethical possible way to conduct secret illegal surveillance, Tim's right to say that future administrations almost certainly won't. Nixon's gross abuses built on a platform of surveillance that grew slowly-but-surely over the decades across several different administrations.
Photo by Flickr user djbrady used under a Creative Commons license
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Heads in the Sand
