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the other hand, it appeared that nobody actually knew how to operate them properly and the information was consistently out of date.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
