As the pressure builds on war critics to "acknowledge" the progress that's been made in Iraq, I imagine we'll see a few more reports like this one from The New York Times:
With American military successes outpacing political gains in Iraq, the Bush administration has lowered its expectation of quickly achieving major steps toward unifying the country, including passage of a long-stymied plan to share oil revenues and holding regional elections.
It's worth noting how fundamentally illogical the idea of "military successes outpacing political gains" is. The military is a branch of the American government. The government is run by politicians and political appointees. They frame objectives and policies designed to achieve those objectives. Subsidiary branches of the government then either do or don't made progress toward achieving those objectives. The stated goals of invading Iraq were to eliminate its nuclear weapons program, which failed because there was no such program, and to turn it into a shining beacon of democracy to inspire reformers throughout the region, which also failed since Iraq has instead become a scare story autocrats use to keep elites and middle class types unified behind the regime.
After several years of failure, a new military initiative was announced -- the "surge" -- and it's goal was to create an improvement in the security situation in Baghdad which (it was hypothesized) was the necessary precondition for a political resolution to Iraq's fundamental conflicts. The surge was tried, and American casualties went up and violence stayed at the same level and then violence declined and then US casualties decline and then it turned out that the surge had failed and the political situation was the same as it had been at the beginning.
And yet despite this failure, there are lots of happy faces in Washington. Why? Well it's not because despite the lack of "political progress" we've seen plenty of "military progress." Rather, it's because the "surge" helped achieve plenty of political objectives, just not the stated ones of the mission. It has, for example, caused Democratic Party elected officials to grow more timid in their rhetoric, which makes Republicans happy and also signals good news for Democratic Party hawks in their struggles with Democratic Party doves. What's more, insofar as one of the primary unstated political goals of the war has simply been to create a never-ending American military presence in Iraq, the "surge" has generated substantial progress toward that goal.
The American political system seems to operate as if spending on defense-related ventures doesn't come at a real cost. Propose a new domestic spending initiative, and people want to hear about your offsets. If you don't have offsets, you need new taxes. And you can't raise taxes. If you want to cut taxes, you can probably get away with it, but you'll face at least some political resistance. Defense spending, though, doesn't count -- it's completely shielded from scrutiny and we think nothing of tossing $10 billion here and $10 billion there until the end of time. Thus, if some gambit succeeds in making American casualty rates decline, something like Democrat Shawn Brimley's proposal that the next president "consider plateauing at a certain level at some future point in order to continue counter-terrorism and/or an advising mission" becomes much more viable.
In late 2005 and throughout 2006, it looked like we had a situation where the American mission in Iraq was going to become untenable. In early 2007, we were promised a "surge" whose purpose was to make the American mission in Iraq unnecessary. It was going to create a security environment conducive to the creation of a political settlement, thus allowing for the withdrawal of American troops. It didn't happen. And it's not clear that anyone ever believed it would happen. Instead, it's created a situation where it now once again looks -- as it did in 2003 and 2004 -- that we might be able to stay in Iraq forever. And, of course, if you don't consider financial costs to be costs, and don't consider small numbers of casualties to be costs, and don't believe in opportunity costs, and try not to worry to much about the risk of war with Iran, and don't mind the lack of benefits except to the egos of the war's supporters, then this looks like a pretty smart policy.
And, though I think its advocates are underestimating the odds that even their goalpost-shifting will fail, I'll concede at least that it very much might work.
Last night, I decided I should finally come to terms with the reality that 85 percent of the people I know in NYC live in Brooklyn at this point so off I went to a bar where, at least at a somewhat unfashionably early hour, they decided that playing Hole's Live Through This in its entirety would be a good idea:
At any rate, while this was going on it occurred to me that too much time spent in the mid-1990s listening to modern rock radio and watching MTV had utterly burned "Violet" and "Doll Parts" deep, deep, deep into my brain, that the rest of the album was totally unfamiliar. The non-single tracks have a less-produced, more riot grrl-y flavor. All of which seems like as good a time as any to link to the Melissa Auf der Maur blog.
This Mark Halperin op-ed is really stunning. I'm glad I've got a long car ride in my future this afternoon, because maybe it'll give me the opportunity to really process why and how this is happening. At a first glance, though, while it's certainly possible to join Robert Farley in slamming Halperin's preposterous notion of "underdog" (such that Bill Clinton in 1996 qualifies) and his goofy equivalence between Bill Clinton's tragic flaw (blowjob!) and George W. Bush's (massive death and destruction; torture; financial crises) or to join Alex Massie in noting the stunning chutzpah and hypocrisy of it all, it should be said that Halperin's fundamental point is correct.
His op-ed says that the media has been dominated by the presumption that campaign coverage should be focused primarily on making judgments about politicians' campaigning savvy, that the reason the media does this is an assumption that the skills it takes to run a savvy campaign are the skills that it takes to run the country well, and that these presumptions are false and should be abandoned.
Halperin is a little late to the party. And by "a little" I mean "a lot." Go read James Fallows' old article about why the media sucks. But, whatever, if Halperin wants to come over to the side of light, I think we should take him.
It looks as if we're failing in Afghanistan as well. Apparently, the terms of debate are essentially the same as those in Iraq. On the one hand, are people who say you only achieve "success" when you achieve your goals, whereas on the other hand are people who think something else:
This judgment reflects sharp differences between U.S. military and intelligence officials on where the Afghan war is headed. Intelligence analysts acknowledge the battlefield victories, but they highlight the Taliban's unchallenged expansion into new territory, an increase in opium poppy cultivation and the weakness of the government of President Hamid Karzai as signs that the war effort is deteriorating.
The contrasting views echo repeated internal disagreements over the Iraq war: While the military finds success in a virtually unbroken line of tactical achievements, intelligence officials worry about a looming strategic failure.
Not to belabor the point, but if the "tactical achievements" are leading to "strategic failure" then there's a need to rethink the tactics not just pound the table.
Of all the doughty warriors of the Anglosphere, Howard, his Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and their colleagues had the best rhetoric on the present war, and I often wished the Bush Administration had emulated their plain speaking.
A better one-sentence take on the Hawk Pundit view of the world could hardly be imagined. Howard and Downer aren't warriors, they're politicians. And they're not "steadfastly courageous" -- that's an attribute of actual warriors who do fighting. Indeed, Howard was also at pains to avoid Tony Blair's mistakes and not put much of anything actually on the line in Iraq. But like the doughty war pundits of yore, he offered solid rhetoric thus ensuring their spots in Valhalla.
I suppose I agree with what he's saying, and I certainly understand the logic of using former military officers as spokespeople on national security issues, but I'm really not sure General Ricardo Sanchez is the best front man for an Iraq-related PR drive. I'm just trying to think of what I'd be writing if the Republicans were putting this guy out front and center to be their spokesman. I think what Spencer Ackerman said back in October still applies.
By most accounts I've heard, Vladimir Putin and his cronies would have no problem retaining power in Russia even without this kind of banning of protests and arresting of protestors, but I guess the idea is to frighten people.
Gideon Rachman notes that the American Empire fad of 2002-2003 now seems well behind us but he's got some worries:
Some worry that a world without a dominant “imperial” power will be more dangerous. Who will ensure order? Who will keep the shipping lanes open and set the rules for the global financial system? The idea that all these things will be peacefully settled at the United Nations does not seem realistic.
I think it's worth trying to draw a few distinctions here. Most of all, the idea of the United States acting in an "imperial" manner, shouldn't be conflated with the United States acting through military force. The United States can engage in imperial, but non-military conduct. We could, for example, do our best to strangle the the economy of Cuba unless it adopts a form of government we approve of and return the property of the previous dictatorship's elite. But we can also act in a way that's military, but not imperial; stationing troops in West Germany to deter a Soviet invasion. Or we might act in response to acts of direct aggression perpetrated against the United States, as when the Taliban was working hand-in-glove with al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda was blowing up America's largest office towers and so we worked to help anti-Taliban Afghans overthrow the Taliban government.
Similarly, the idea of things being settled at the United Nations isn't the same as them being settled peacefully. One thing the United Nations can do is authorize the use of military force to eliminate a threat to world peace. Another thing the United Nations Charter does is recognize the inherent right of nations to engage in individual or collective self-defense.
The specter of imperialism raises its head pretty specifically when the United States proposes that we ought to be able to launch unilateral military strikes against countries that aren't attacking anyone else. Since the United States obviously doesn't endorse a general right of countries to engage in that sort of war-fighting (if India, say, decided to take advantage of political problems in Pakistan to invade or if Syria mounted a preventive attack on Israel's WMD facilities), we're envisioning not a world of American leadership, but a world of American domination. And that's what's not working for us.
It's worth being clear about this, because I think the general trajectory Rachman's argument takes is basically right. America will soon be experiencing a period of war-weariness where there'll be a general desire to "do less" in the world. But if one defines the alternative to the Bush/Cheney brand of imperial domination purely in terms of "doing less" then inevitably the time will come once again when it seems necessary and appropriate to "do something" and, indeed, it often is a good idea to do something. But America playing an active role in the world doesn't mean America seeking to dominate the world, and avoiding a quest for domination doesn't mean eschewing the use of military force in all circumstances — it means working through legitimate institutional mechanisms.
One thing that always occurs to me when these race/IQ blowups occur is that this issue is kind of in the neighborhood of a different point that doesn't merely recapitulate the race science of yore, does seem to me to have real policy implications, and is really well-supported by the data. This is the fact that IQ test results are meaningfully predictive of various indicators of success in the United States and the main factors that influence how people score on these tests all happen in childhood or earlier (in the fetal environment, in the genes, etc.).
This then becomes one of several available lines of argument that the image of the United States as a magical place where hard work always pays off and the rewards go to those willing to put in the effort is wrong. What's more, the imagine of the United States as a fallen version of that magical place — a country that could become magical if we just improved urban high schools or adopted a better student loan system — is also wrong. Better high schools and better student loan systems are things worth doing on their own terms, but absolutely nothing one can do changes the fact that where people end up is substantially out of their hands.
I think people recognize this in unusual cases like sports. Obviously, NFL players and NBA players put in a lot of hard work and effort to get where they are. But at the same time, lots of people could never possibly make it no matter how hard they tried. Brendan Haywood is seven feet tall and you're not. Justine Henin joined Tennis Club Ciney when she was six years old — which is more-or-less necessary to become a huge pro tennis star. And though it's considerably more subtle than something like being an extreme outlier on the height distribution or having been in intense training since when you had baby teeth, the evidence suggests that a similar pattern holds up throughout the range of human activities. Effort and discipline matter a lot. But so do things you have no control over, from pure contingency to genetic attributes to childhood conditions.
The mass market version of the case for laissez faire (sophisticated libertarians know this is wrong, but have other also wrong justifications for the same conclusion) more-or-less involves efforts to blame the victims of economic inequality for their fate, but it's just not true. Adults need to be held accountable for their decisions, but a lot of the key determinants — physical, mental, and otherwise — are totally outside of people's control.
As a prosecutor, he sought the conviction and execution of three black men whose murder confessions had been extracted by torture. The convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case of Brown v. Mississippi (1936) that banned the use of evidence obtained by torture. The transcript of the trial indicates Stennis was fully aware of the methods of interrogation, including flogging, used to gain confessions.
Having gained a reputation in the 1930s as the kind of guy who didn't mind torturing confessions out of black defendants, Stennis was a natural to succeed Bilbo in the Senate. There he signed the Southern Manifesto in support of school segregation, opposed the civil rights legislation of the 1950s, opposed the Civil Rights Act, opposed the Voting Rights Act, and broke with the Democratic Party in 1964 to support Barry Goldwater since Goldwater was a civil rights opponents. His colleague in the Senate during this period was James Eastland, who was prone to saying things like this in the mid-1950s:
The Southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the Reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination… Mr. President, it is the law of nature, it is the law of God, that every race has both the right and the duty to perpetuate itself. All free men have the right to associate exclusively with members of their own race, free from governmental interference, if they so desire.
When Stennis and Eastland eventually failed in their quest to uphold white supremacy, they didn't find themselves turned out of office by new biracial coalitions. Nor did they retire and fade quietly from the scene, embarrassed by their longtime record of support for apartheid and terrorist violence. Instead, both remained members in good standing of the Democratic Party, with Stennis re-elected in 1982, 1976, 1970, and 1964 before retiring in 1988 and Eastland re-elected in 1966 and 1972 in 1978.
And of course while noplace is ever quite like Mississippi, the basic pattern is fairly typical. All across the South, avowed white supremacist politicians tended to stick around well into the 1970s and 1980s under a kind of pact where they agreed to keep quiet about things like how segregation "the correct, self-evident truth" and others would agree to ignore their records. I think the "shocked, shocked" reaction that a lot of people seem to have to the idea that Ronald Reagan's consistent habit of taking the segregationist side on controversial issues might reflect some kind of racism needs to be put into this context. When Reagan was running for President in 1976 and 1980 there were tons of politicians with much worse records safely ensconced in the elite and the persistence of very conservative Democrats in important legislative leadership positions was the cornerstone of the era of bipartisan dealmaking whose demise is always being lamented. Things look very different from a perspective of thirty years later.
As everyone knows that the essence of sound political strategy is the development of a "Sister Souljah Moment" in which you pick a fight with a rapper, thus proving you're not one of those liberals, I thought I might suggest Project Pat's "Tell Tell Tell (Stop Snitchin')" as a good candidate:
As Jeremy Kahn wrote in the April Atlantic, this kind of thing is becoming a real impediment to efforts to create a safe environment for poor and working-class inner city neighborhoods:
Police and prosecutors have been contending with reluctant witnesses for decades. But according to law-enforcement experts, the problem is getting dramatically worse, and is reflected in falling arrest and conviction rates for violent crimes. In cities with populations between half a million (for example, Tucson) and a million (Detroit), the proportion of violent crimes cleared by an arrest dropped from about 45 percent in the late 1990s to less than 35 percent in 2005, according to the FBI. Conviction rates have similarly dropped. At the same time, crime has spiked. Murder rates have risen more or less steadily since 2000. Last December, the FBI voiced concern over a jump in violent crime, which in 2005 showed its biggest increase in more than a decade.
The reasons for witnesses’ reluctance appear to be changing and becoming more complex, with the police confronting a new cultural phenomenon: the spread of the gangland code of silence, or omerta, from organized crime to the population at large. Those who cooperate with the police are labeled “snitches” or “rats”—terms once applied only to jailhouse informants or criminals who turned state’s evidence, but now used for “civilian” witnesses as well. This is particularly true in the inner cities, where gangsta culture has been romanticized through rap music and other forms of entertainment, and where the motto “Stop snitching,” expounded in hip-hop lyrics and emblazoned on caps and T-shirts, has become a creed.
The Bush administration may not have succeeded in building a democratic government in Iraq, but it has succeeded in building a corrupt, brutal, and sectarian government that's willing to "offer the U.S. a long-term troop presence in Iraq and preferential treatment for American investments" as long as the United States promises to help secure Maliki's government against foreign and domestic threats. This should serve as a reminder that one reason US policy in Iraq keeps failing to produce a stable government, is that American policy objectives are in many ways incompatible with the goal of stability. An unstable Iraqi regime lacking in state capacity or legitimacy is going to be heavily dependent on the United States to maintain power and therefore more susceptible to American influence.
Brad DeLong takes me to task, noting that though "[t]he inheritance of inequality is strikingly large in America today," the inheritance of IQ has relatively little to do with it. Here's math:
If inherited genetically-based IQ were the source of the extra edge that the children of the rich get in our society, than we would expect a parent with 4 times average lifetime full-time earnings--say $200,000 a year--to have a kid with a lifetime average income of $51,500 instead of the average of $50,000. But it is not $51,500. It is $150,000.
True and important, and I didn't want to say otherwise.
What I wanted to inject into this is that while we can change people's childhood environments in a forward-looking way or look at adoption studies for research purposes, in practice most people aren't newborn babies and we're obviously not (and shouldn't!), in practice, going to reassign children to new families. Consequently, the precise degree to which things are inherited "genetically" versus "environmentally" is of limited relevance in thinking about how people deserve to be treated. If you allow a large degree of inequality to exist, then children will grow up in sharply unequal environments, and the people who grow up in those environments will suffer from lifelong disadvantages for reasons that are completely outside of their control.
Spencer Ackerman translates the White House's principles for perpetual occupation of Iraq out of the obfuscatorese:
A "democratic Iraq" here means the Shiite-led Iraqi government. The current political arrangement will receive U.S. military protection against coups or any other internal subversion. That's something the Iraqi government wants desperately: not only is it massively unpopular, even among Iraqi Shiites, but the increasing U.S.-Sunni security cooperation strikes the Shiite government -- with some justification -- as a recipe for a future coup.
I'll be interested to see what the Democratic hawks have to say about that. For a long time, they've been getting by with things like Shawn Brimley's formula that "The next President will need options beyond simply 'leave ASAP' and 'stay the course.'" This, though, relies on a strawman characterization of Bush's policies to generate the sense of separation from the administration. The question here isn't whether we should literally stay the course, the question is whether or not we should undertake an open-ended commitment to propping up whatever form of Iraqi government will agree to pay host to our military bases.
"Top military leaders" at the Pentagon are bending LA Times defense correspondent Julian Barnes' ear with all kinds of crazy nonsense. Some people think official military assessments of the situation in Iraq should reflect the full range of views held by senior officers, rather than the opinions of a single general. Others feel the President of the United States and the other civilian policymakers whose orders the generals follow ought to take responsibility for their own policy decisions.
One wonders why so many troops hate the troops. Must be phony soldiers. (Look! A MoveOn ad! How disgraceful!)
Here's Mike Huckabee with a much more banal ad than his earlier Chuck Norris episode:
Ambinder remarks that the faith appeals aren't subtle, but as he says in a follow-up I think there are several subtle appeals to anti-Mormon sentiment here. The "Christian Leader" text seems like an effort to appeal to the notion that Mormons (i.e., Mitt Romney) aren't Christians. Similarly, when he says "I don't have to wake up every day wondering 'what do I need to believe'" he's specifically taking aim at Multiple Choice Mitt. And, indeed, even the distinction between being influenced by faith (which Huckabee rejects) and being defined by it (which he embraces) seems aimed at Romney. Rudy Giuliani's politics are obviously pretty independent on his Catholic faith, since he doesn't agree with them on the issues where the Pope's on the right or on the issues where the Pope's on the left.
Romney, by contrast, has been trying to seize the mantle of faith, noting the shared political principles of Mormons and Evangelical Christians. But Romney can't run a candidacy defined by faith anywhere outside of Utah. I tend to think Andrew's been too quick at times to raise the alarm bells about "Christianism," but with this add Huckabee really does seem to me to be flirting with an argument like "you should vote for me because we have the same theology" rather than a more generic religion-infused moral appeal.
You'd think it wouldn't be possible to actually break new ground in the field of ridiculous anti-Clinton news coverage, but Josh Gerstein deserves some kind of medal for this piece taking a close look at her summer internship when she was in law school in 1971. The real gold comes on the second page where we learn that "The most eye-catching claim about Mrs. Clinton's time at the Treuhaft firm is that she attended a plea negotiation on behalf of armed Black Panthers who stormed into the California legislature on May 2, 1967 to protest a gun-control measure." One interesting thing about this claim is that it's false. The case in question was resolved in 1967, and Clinton worked for the firm in 1971. But one of the partners at the firm seems to have misremembered this, and felt that he drove with HRC to Sacramento for the hearing. Gerstein dedicates seven full paragraphs to this even though it's stupid bullshit and clearly not true anyway, before launching into a paragraph that begins "Regardless of whether Mrs. Clinton was on hand for the Panthers' legislature case ..."
The general lack of attention US policy has given to the huge numbers of refugees from the conflict in Iraq has attracted some notice. This New York Times article on pressure to fudge the numbers on the number of Iraqis returning home hints at perhaps one reason why the humanitarian hawks don't actually care about refugee well-being:
A United Nations survey released last week, of 110 Iraqi families leaving Syria, also seemed to dispute the contentions of officials in Iraq that people are returning primarily because they feel safer.
The survey found that 46 percent were leaving because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.
Failing to provide for refugees, in short, drives returns to Iraq which helps bolster bogus arguments about improving conditions and thus bolster support for the war. It's win-win, unless you're an Iraqi refugee or an American citizen. Meanwhile, the returnees are re-enforcing the patterns of ethnic cleansing that seem to have been the primary drivers behind the decline in violence:
Underscoring a widely held sense of hesitation, many of those who come back to Iraq do not return to their homes. Clambering off the bus on Sunday, a woman who gave her name as Um Dima, mother of Dima, said that friends were still warning her not to go back to her house in Dora, a violent neighborhood in south Baghdad. So for now, she said, she will move in with her parents in southern Iraq.
That seems like a smart move for Um Dima. Am I the only one who remembers, though, that back in the summer/fall of 2006 this sort of thing — massive refugee flows and ethnic cleansing — was allegedly the reason we couldn't leave Iraq? Withdrawal was supposed to have precisely the consequences that staying turned out to have, only staying has also impaired all kinds of other important American strategic objectives around the world.
How The Atlantichandles Arabic transliterations. Since I can barely spell in English, my odds of adhering to correct transliteration policies for foreign languages are pretty low.
Stevenson was a snob, and in many ways, not much of a liberal. He charmed intellectuals with his calls for a commitment to "cold-eyed humility" and a recognition that "our wisdom is imperfect and our capabilities ... limited." Though he might have been a classier fellow than General Eisenhower, bookwise -- an ironic egghead after their own hearts -- his politics were frequently indistinguishable from the plain-spoken military man. (When following his election loss, a woman tired to soothe his feelings by telling him that he had "educated the country," Stevenson replied: "Yes, but a lot of people flunked the exam." Stevenson's high opinion of his own intellect helped define in the public mind the "effete liberal" stereotype. Yet Stevenson was hardly less committed to the Cold War than Eisenhower, and though he opposed McCarthyism, he had no problem with dismissing teachers for being Party Members or using the Smith Act to prosecute others. In this regard, he epitomized the weak-kneed response of so many liberals to what was among the most significant threats to civil liberties in the history of the republic, and later, the cause of much disillusionment on the part of young leftists with their tut-tutting liberal elders. In keeping with his profile in cowardice, Stevenson also opposed both public housing and what he called "socialized medicine." He had little sympathy for much of the New Deal and a great deal of trouble making up his mind about the repeal of Taft-Hartley Act. Regarding the great moral and political and political issue for American liberals, civil rights, he was notably AWOL. (In this respect, he was less brave, and less liberal than the much-derided Truman.) Yes, the Kennedys treated Stevenson unconscionably, but Irving Howe aptly termed "Adlaism" to be "Ikeism ... with a touch of literacy and intelligence."
And there you have it, the Alterman Line on Adlai Stevenson. I don't have a real view on the subject, though I'll toss this out there as one more reason we shouldn't let our thinking about the 2008 primary be dominated by analogies to events fifty years ago.
Under the new design of The New Republic's website, the Spine -- TNR editor in chief Martin Peretz' blog on politics and culture -- is less visible than under the earlier design. As a result, I haven't been reading it as much lately. That's too bad, because I've been missing out on batshit insane smears against liberals like this:
I suspect that many Democrats are so deeply hostile to a forward foreign policy and their minds so deeply embedded in the notion that you can negotiate successfully with fanatics and tyrants that they wouldn't mind a prophylactic victory for the enemy. Which raises the question: is this enemy their enemy? I suspect not.
Classy. I know the next time The Weekly Standard starts making allegations about the treasonous motives of TNR editors I'll be leaping to the barricades in their defense. Meanwhile, TNR really ought to elevate the Spine's placement on their site. Since the magazine obviously respects Peretz' ideas and journalism enough to give him the editor-in-chief title, surely they should be trying to give his work as much prominence as possible and not stuffing it beneath the Plank and the Stump so as to suggest they're vaguely embarrassed to be associated with this sort of thing.
I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that "jihadism" is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, "…based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."
So because there are relatively few Muslims in the United States, Romney wouldn't consider a Muslim cabinet official? Meanwhile, before Madeleine Albright was Secretary of State, she was UN Ambassador. Her successor at the UN was Bill Richardson who went on to become Secretary of Energy. His successor was Richard Holbrooke who was widely viewed as a likely Secretary of State in a John Kerry administration and, again, is a very likely candidate for that job in a Hillary Clinton administration. John Negroponte had the job before becoming Director of National Intelligence. George HW Bush had the job before becoming CIA Director. But Romney's telling us that current UN Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is too Muslim to be so much as considered for a cabinet post? Really? How repugnant.
Isaac Chotiner's right, this David Samuels essay on the state of American Jewry sure is terrible. But it's also a very strange reading of The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and involves a bizarre attempt to turn Philip Roth into a Bush fan and Iraq War proponent, so it's worth reading in a grimly fascinating kind of way.
Josh Marshall takes a closer look at the GOP primary polling and decides the nomination is Mitt "No Muslims Need Apply" Romney's to lose: "Each of the three states, Romney has been gaining support consistently and fairly rapidly since the beginning of 2007. In two of the three states, Giuliani has been trending downward with a similar pace and consistency. The exception is New Hampshire where Rudy has trended down a bit but basically held his own."
It seems to me, though, that this basically all comes down to what happens in Iowa. In particular, it comes down to what happens with the remaining Fred Thompson supporters once they realize that their man is in third place and slipping. At the moment, Huckabee and Romney are both trending upwards, but Huckabee is gaining on Romney because he's trending upwards faster. If the bulk of Thompson's remaining supporters (a not inconsiderable slice of the electorate) decide that Huckabee is the southern white Christian dude for them, then Huckabee stands a decent chance of pulling off an upset and Romney's in big trouble. But if they decide that they need to do the pragmatic "Stop Rudy" thing and vote for Romney, then it really does seem like Mitt winds up sweeping the early primary table and Giuliani's in big trouble.
All of which is fairly conventional wisdom, but it's striking when you get down to it exactly how helpful the Huckabee Surge has been to Giuliani. This is particularly noteworthy because the two candidates represent basically opposite tendencies within the conservative movement. It wouldn't shock me if you saw maxed-out Giuliani donors cutting Huckabee checks. Certainly, I think it'd be a savvy play.
That policy asserts as an irrefutable fact that any racial discrepancies in college selection are a function of either college-imposed or societal racism. Once the left put the blank slate on the table, and actively supported racial discrimination as public policy as a consequence, they begged the question of whether they had the empirical data to back up their social engineering. Over to Will. Abolish affirmative action and these questions can and will become less salient. How about it?
So basically affirmative action proponents take the view that black people suffer from racial discrimination, thus leaving advocates of color blind admissions policies no choice but to argue for the genetic inferiority of black people? I'm not sure I see how that follows. Everybody agrees that African-Americans, on average, score lower on IQ tests than do white people. The question is whether we should see this gap as primarily driven by black people's allegedly inferior genetic stock, or by persistent economic and social inequities.
UPDATE: Incidentally, to restate the obvious, race science aimed at proving the innate intellectual inferiority of black people isn't something that originated in the 1970s and 80s as campaigners against affirmative action sought to bolster their arguments. Nor has it suddenly vanished in California and Texas where they got rid of affirmative action programs.
It's best to follow actual news stories on actual news sites, but I thought I should acknowledge the sad death of Redskins safety Sean Taylor after he was shot in Miami by an intruder.
Aside from that joke, I'm not sure what else I have to add to Chris Cillizza's coverage of the way Republican retirements are contributing to a very bleak GOP outlook for the midterms. On a similar, but slightly more serious note, maybe this is a reason Republicans should consider supporting tough ethics reform legislation. You'd probably see less eagerness to get out of congress if it were harder to shift into lucrative lobbying jobs.
Volunteers who were made to feel like top dogs, in contrast to those who were primed to recall situations of powerlessness, very quickly lost the capacity to see things from other people's perspectives. [...] Here may be another reason that the same candidates who are so exquisitely attuned to the views of others while they're desperately chasing votes become more blinkered once they're in office-and a reason that toughness can eclipse sensitivity in the front-runner in the race, regardless of gender. [...] The result, as the researchers observe, is a paradox: The very quality that often draws us to support leaders-their ability to see beyond themselves-is all too likely to fade once we've anointed them.
The paradox, though, goes away if you stop trying to find politicians who appear personally sympathetic to the plight of people in need and start trying to find politicians who are politically committed to a policy agenda that will help needy people. I have no idea whether or not there's a gap between the degree to which poverty makes John Edwards sad and the degree to which it makes Fred Thompson sad. The gap between Edwards' policy agenda and Thompson's, by contrast, is both clear and large.
Similarly, Mike Huckabee gives all indication of being a dramatically more caring human being than his GOP antagonists. He talks about the plight of the working class and seems to believe it. His record in office, though, shows a history of policies that are only very slightly heterodox. On the campaign trail, he's outlined two significant heterodox positions. One, on immigration, is something I'm pretty close to his policy views, but where his policy views are also those of the business community. His other big heterodox idea, a national retail sales tax, is stupid and incredibly regressive. And that's what you need to know.
The fact that the relevant sort of personality traits are malleable is another interesting indicator along these lines. Obtaining high political office is precisely the sort of thing that's likely to "change people" in various ways. Someone's degree of personal empathy just isn't a very good guide to anything about how they would govern.
There's a live webcast happening right now featuring Barack Obama and several of his key advisors on national security and foreign policy issues. I'm going to start watching imminently.
UPDATE: I think he's basically making the right points. It's not good enough to just have "experience" -- Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld had tons of experience -- you want people with experience making good judgments, and Hillary Clinton doesn't have that record on Iraq, and her team is weighted toward people who made the same judgment that she did on Iraq.
Romney fan Katherine Jean-Lopez steps up to the defense of Mitt Romney's "No Muslims Need Apply" cabinet policy:
After reading both Geraghty and Mike Allen it seems like he was responding to an Ijaz Muslim mandate idea. We no more NEED a Muslim than we NEED a Catholic or (dare I?) a Mormon in the Cabinet...is what I assume Romney was saying. The Cabinet should have people who are qualified for the agencies they're assigned to.
This is more reasonable, but it's not really consistent with Mansour Ijaz's account in which he says he asked Romney if he would "consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters." Romney's response was that, no, he wouldn't consider qualified American Muslims as candidates for those jobs which isn't at all the same as saying he was opposed to a specific Muslim set-aside. Indeed, Ijaz's account of Romney's answer makes it seem as if Romney has no problem in principle with the idea of a Muslim quota:
[B]ased on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration.
Romney just doesn't think there are enough American Muslims to justify a cabinet post.
As I said previously, though, we should make this more concrete. UN Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is exactly the sort of person who I'd expect to see on short lists for cabinet jobs in the next Republican administration. He's been loyal to the Bush administration, is respected by the establishment, is currently serving in an important subcabinet job, etc. Would Romney consider him? Based on Ijaz's account, the answer is no.
Frank Gaffney, Raving Lunatic, Influential Conservative Pundit
Annapolis, Maryland (pictured above) sure looks like a nice place. And whatever else you're going to say about George W. Bush, he certainly doesn't seem like the sort of person inclined to sell Israel down the river. But not according to Frank Gaffney, who's delivered what almost reads like a parody:
It is fitting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice chose the U.S. Naval Academy for the venue of today's so-called Mideast peace conference. The reputation of that extraordinary institution in Annapolis has been sullied in recent years by a succession of rapes of young women.
The punchline, however, is that this paragraph is calm and level-headed compared to the ones that follow, in which we learn that this regional conference is essentially the same as the Munich conference etc., etc., etc. Now you'd think that a person who likes to go around publishing crazy things would be a totally marginal figure. Not the kind of guy who would be a frequent guest on CNN and so forth. Especially since his group is essentially just a front for defense contractors and their lobbyists rather than even a proper think tank full of crazy people.
Photo by Flickr user Billtex48 used under a Creative Commons license
Brendan Nyhan notes the growing resemblance between Al Gore and character actor Chris Cooper. Could using Cooper as a stunt double have saved the 2000 campaign and thus spared the world all these troubles?
First, savvy consultants look at two numbers to project whether, if a particular election were held today, their candidate would win. One is the head to head -- and Mitt Romney still leads, narrowly, in Iowa polls. The second is intensity -- and here, Mike Huckabee's surge breaks over the walls that the Romney Iowa organization has spent so many months carefully building. Every consultant would rather be behind by five points in the head to head match ups and ahead by double digits in terms of the level of intensity.
Meanwhile, Rich Lowry notes others noting the Huckabee-Rudy nexus: "These pieces in Time and the New York Sun point out something that's been increasingly evident over the last few days: how nicely Rudy and Huck's strategies mesh."
In retrospect, it all sort of makes you wonder why social conservatives didn't just get behind Huckabee in the first place, rather than blessing Romney's preposterous conversion to religious right values and trying to drag Fred Thompson into the race. Sure, Huckabee's not well-liked by the economic hard-right, but cultural conservatives' objections to Giuliani didn't stop his backers from pushing him on the party. If Huckabee had just a modicum of money and institutional support, I think he'd be a formidable contender, but he's got neither.
At a press conference today, Mitt Romney denied having said that he would refuse to consider putting a qualified Muslim in his cabinet, but Greg Sargent says two witnesses are backing up Mansour Ijaz's version of events:
One of the witnesses, Irma Aguirre, a former finance director of the Nevada Republican Party who described herself as a registered Republican, says that she saw Romney's comments as "racist." She further paraphrased Romney as saying: "They're radical. There's no talking to them. There's no negotiating with them."
The other witness is "a self-described local registered Republican named George Harris." What's more, one needs to keep in mind when evaluating these things that none of these people, Ijaz included, has any obvious motive to lie. Indeed, the story seems to fit Romney's clumsy pandering approach to presidential politics pretty well.
It's hard to know what to make of the new that Hillary Clinton is telling people she'd like to appoint Colin Powell to do something or other related to improving America's standing in the world. Powell's obviously a knowledgeable, experienced guy and I suppose it would make sense for a new President to talk to him and get his perspective on things. Maybe even send the message that it's not just Democrats who think the country's taken a totally messed-up course over the past few years.
But then again, if Clinton's looking to assuage people's doubts about her foreign policy judgment, this seems like a terrible way to do it. A lot of Clinton's pro-invasion advisors are too obscure for most people to recognize. But Powell was the public face of the Iraq sales pitch. He's also a man who did have enough independence from his commander-in-chief to undermine her husbands efforts to bring gay equality to the military when Bull Clinton was president and Powell was in uniform. But as Secretary of State he raised some skeptical questions about the war, heard some answers, and then not only hopped on the bandwagon, but used his leverage as someone with a reputation for skepticism to make the sales pitch all the more effective.
Chad Ford's preview of the 2008 free agent class is subscriber-only, but there's no need to read it since the only part that matters is here: "But given current projections, only one team -- the Philadelphia 76ers -- will have enough money under the cap to spend on them. Even the Sixers won't have max room if (a) they have a large cap hold for a high first-round pick and (b) they decide to give Iguodala and Louis Williams, both restricted free agents, big deals this summer."
So, basically, nothing's going to happen. There are a bunch of stars who could opt out of contracts and sign elsewhere, but nobody can pay them, so they'll all get contract extensions instead.
Marc Ambinder flags a press account of Bill Clinton claiming to have been against the invasion of Iraq:
"Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning," said Clinton, "I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers." Clinton has long been critical of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and called it a "big mistake" as far back as November of 2005.
Marc notes that this is likely to muddy Hillary Clinton's message. Nor does it seem, um, accurate to me. Probably the best example of Bill's contemporaneous thinking on Iraq is his March 18, 2003 Guardian op-ed "Trust Tony's Judgment." Here, Clinton makes it clear that he sees Blair as having spent the past year navigating a wise middle course between regime change hawks in the US and die-hard anti-war types on the continent. Blair, with great finesse, had used threats of force to move the inspections ball down the road until we reached the point of mid-March. Clinton paid no note to the fact that the inspectors were on the ground saying there was no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program. Indeed, Clinton contributed to some extent to the smokescreen of war by clouding this issue, writing "Saddam has destroyed some missiles but beyond that he has done only what he thinks is necessary to keep the UN divided on the use of force. The really important issues relating to chemical and biological weapons remain unresolved."
Thus the central plank of the argument for war -- that it was necessary to invade in order to halt Saddam's advance nuclear weapons program -- was swept under the rug at just the point where it was becoming clear that this talking point was false. Clinton regret the outbreak of war, but put the blame for it squarely on the shoulders of France, Russia, and Germany, arguing that "if a majority of the security council had adopted the Blair approach, Saddam would have had no room for further evasion and he still might have disarmed without invasion and bloodshed. Now, it appears that force will be used to disarm and depose him." Clinton endorsed the view that Saddam's alleged WMD arsenal was a terrorism threat, "There is, too, as both Britain and America agree, some risk of Saddam using or transferring his weapons to terrorists." Then he concluded:
I wish that Russia and France had supported Blair's resolution. Then, Hans Blix and his inspectors would have been given more time and supprt for their work. But that's not where we are. Blair is in a position not of his own making, because Iraq and other nations were unwilling to follow the logic of 1441.
In the post-cold war world, America and Britain have been in tough positions before: in 1998, when others wanted to lift sanctions on Iraq and we said no; in 1999 when we went into Kosovo to stop ethnic cleansing. In each case, there were voices of dissent. But the British-American partnership and the progress of the world were preserved. Now in another difficult spot, Prime Minister Blair will have to do what he believes to be right. I trust him to do that and hope that Labor MPs and the British people will too.
What Blair believed was right was, of course, invading Iraq. Obviously, it's possible that Clinton wrote a March 18 op-ed urging blind faith in Tony Blair's leadership, then when Blair invaded Iraq a few days later was shocked to see him make such a mistake, but then decided he better not say anything about the wisdom of the invasion until years later, but it's not very plausible. For all intents and purposes, Clinton's public statements on the Iraq issue (like those of Colin Powell and Tony Blair) were part of the push to round up "moderate" support for the war. I remember this stuff. I was one of the millions of Americans who thought that, sure, George W. Bush must be a maniac but if Bill and Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright (and other Clinton-era officials like Ken Pollack) and Joe Biden and so on and so forth think it's a good idea, maybe I should have some more confidence. Obviously, that was a stupid, stupid mistake. But I find it really offensive that people who abused the trust of citizens who admired them by selling us on this mess now want to turn around and do it again by pretending that never happened.
I'd stopped reading Roger Cohen, but Marty Peretz's denunciations of Cohen's latest column made it sound . . . insightful! And, indeed, it's really good:
His best hope in Annapolis may be the Texas connection. If Bush gets behind Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister who attended the University of Texas, things may move. But he has to stick with him. [...] Fayyad is right. A return to the 1967 lines, plus or minus agreed swaps, is the only basis for a two-state accord. An Israeli settlement freeze is the first step to a Palestinian buy-in. A timetable is the anchor all the talking needs.
Meanwhile, if I read him correctly, Peretz's view is that Israel shouldn't reach an accommodation with the Palestinians, because the Palestinians might break the agreement: "Does he really want Israel to give up the West Bank on the wager that rockets will not be aimed at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as they are -- daily -- from Gaza onto Sderot?" A Palestinian who reads this kind of "pro-Israel" political commentary is going to have to reach the conclusion that there's no point in conducting talks with Israelis about a two-state solution. Their mentality is that the existence of any kind of Palestinian state is an intolerable threat, since such a state could be used as a launching pad for rockets. That Palestinian is going to reach the conclusion that the only possibility for his people to achieve their national aspirations is going to be through the destruction of Israel.
And through such logic, conflicts would never end. Among other things, Israel would still be threatened by a hostile Egypt at its door and vice-versa. But, really, no compromise and no diplomacy would ever be possible. In the real world, though, there's nobody to make peace with but your enemies. And there's nothing to be gained unless you're willing to at least not rule out in advance the possibility that negotiations might produce a mutually beneficial agreement.
Much work on political persuasion maintains that people are influenced by information that they believe and not by information that they don’t. By this view, false beliefs have no power if they are known to be false. This helps to explain frequent efforts to change voters’ attitudes by exposing them to relevant facts. But findings from social psychology suggest that this view requires modification: sometimes, false beliefs influence people’s attitudes even after they are understood to be false. In a trio of experiments, I demonstrate that the effect is present in people’s thinking about politics and amplified by party identification. I conclude by elaborating the consequences for theories of belief updating and strategic political communication.
In essence, if you hear that Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster murdered, this lowers your opinion of her. If you later find out that she did not, in fact, do this, your opinion improves. But not back up to its original level. And the effect is especially strong if you're a Republican (and conversely if the target of the smear is a Republican). In essence, the damage done by years of ludicrous anti-Clinton smears cannot be repaired even if everyone comes to know the truth and the same is true of the newer, but possibly more virulent, made up emails about Barack Obama being an America-hating Muslim.
Which gets at one of the less fortunate ambiguities of the past several years of progressive institution-building. One major goal of the institution-building impulse has been to more effectively counter the Republican Noise Machine. The honorable and decent way to do this, of course, is with counterpunching efforts that identity and aggressively push back against dishonest smears. Bullock's research indicates that while this sort of thing can be helpful, it still leaves you at a structural disadvantage. If 100 percent of the population hears your opponent's smears, and then later 100 percent of the population hears your debunking of the smear, you still find up at a disadvantage even if everyone finds the debunking convincing.
To be competitive in the smear wars, it seems, it's actually necessary to fight fire with fire and produce your own lies and distortions. That, however, doesn't make for a very good fundraising pitch especially since the best thing a fundraiser for a progressive cause can offer to a potential donor is typically a sense of enhanced self-righteousness (thus requiring an honorable purpose) rather than anything appealing to direct material interests.
Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf is stepping down from his post as head of the army, ready for a new civilian life as a . . . well, dictator. But a civilian dictator. General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani will take over as head of the military, and he's someone who's liked in American defense circles since he went to Fort Leavenworth, etc., and "has played a prominent role in cooperating with the United States in the fight against terrorism in Pakistan and is expected to continue that policy."
This sounds a bit like meet the old boss, same as the old boss, but wearing a slightly different uniform, but what do I know....
Peter Beinart pens a very smart analysis of why Barack Obama's had trouble gaining traction with his foreign policy critique of Hillary Clinton: His arguments about forward-looking Iraq policy make him look "like he's splitting hairs," the Senate resolution on Iran Clinton voted for "was rewritten to avoid any suggestion of military force," and most of all he "runs smack into America's strange indifference to the past. Recent American history is littered with candidates who were right about war and weren't rewarded at election time."
But Beinart misses another problem with Obama's strategy. When he tries to engage in an intra-party argument about foreign policy, people like Peter Beinart who've gone so far as to write a book about intra-Democratic disputes about foreign policy issues ignore what he's arguing in favor of making arguments about why his arguments aren't penetrating.
But that still leaves us with the question: Whether or not the voters care about a vote that happened five years ago, should they care? Not necessarily. But in combination with the fact that her posture toward Iran seems more aggressive, that she's less optimistic about the possibility of achieving a "grand bargain" through diplomacy, that her forward-looking Iraq policy seems more focused on a continuing military role, that she's been more cautious on America's nuclear arsenal, that she's attacked her primary opponents from the right on foreign policy issues, that seems to have a more hawkish cadre of advisors, and that has every incentive at the moment to minimize the appearance of a difference between her and Obama, I think all the evidence points in one direction: Obama would pursue a more restrained foreign policy, more inflected by the strains of realism and internationalism that have come to predominate among the dovish camp in American politics whereas Clinton would pursue a more militarily expansive one, more in line with the thinking of the establishmentarians who got us into war with Iraq and have since come to kinda sorta regret but don't really think they were wrong.
Can I say with 100 percent certainty what that'll amount to at the end of the day? No. Presidents have a habit of re-evaluating their foreign policy approach while in office. But it seems to me that the role of a journalist who's attuned to the small ins-and-outs of these debates is precisely to convey to readers things they might not otherwise pick up on, not to merely explain that people aren't picking up on stuff. And there's the rub, the differences in the positions Clinton and Obama have staked out have been subtle, but the differences keep lining up the same way.
Greg Sargent discovers a contemporaneous account of Mitt Romney swearing off the idea of putting a Muslim in his cabinet from before this issue became controversial and Romney started denying he'd ever said any such thing:
So when Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently addressed a group of a prominent local conservatives at a Las Vegas fundraiser, George lobbed the first question: “If you are elected President,” he asked, “will you include any Muslim members in your cabinet?”
In the seconds before former Massachusetts Governor Romney responded, you could have heard a pin drop.
His (admittedly, very smooth) answer in a nutshell? “Not likely.”
Now unfortunately we don't know what the exact terms of his "admittedly, very smooth" answer were from this account, but it's clear if you read on that people who think Muslim candidates should be considered weren't happy with his response.
And I'll note once again that for Romney this isn't a merely hypothetical consideration. I'm not sure that there are any Muslim Democrats who stand out as obviously choices for cabinet jobs (which isn't to say you couldn't find someone qualified, but there's not an obvious choice), but it's not at all the same on the Republican side. UN Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is a Muslim and he's serving the incumbent administration in a position that's traditionally been a waystation for people on their way up to cabinet appointments or agency chief jobs. It'd be really odd for a Republican administration to not consider him, and repugnant to not consider him because he's a Muslim and there aren't enough Muslims in the country to make them deserve a cabinet spot.
Sure there is, but with these guys, he knows so little about foreign policy he confuses terrorists cells and organizations with countries. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq before this war. Al-Qaeda became a Bush-fulfilling prophecy. It didn't exist until Bush went to war. Even our own intelligence community says that. But these guys buy into this silliness that if you don't fight them in Baghdad you're going to fight them in Boston. Give me a break.
I know my man Ezra Klein's been touting Biden as a potential Veep pick for his attack dogging skills, which seems like a pretty poor idea to me (one needs a VP who understands that the Presidential candidate is supposed to do the bulk of the talking...) but this is good stuff.
I'm heading off to the airport and I'm going to be gone for a few days in Amsterdam to participate in the Op zoek naar progressief Amerika conference put together by the Wiardi Beckman Stichting, a think tank affiliated with the Dutch Labor Party. Blogging will continue, but what with the time zones and all posts may pop up at weird times.
I read this Jonah Goldberg post that seemed to be complaining that liberals don't cite enough sacred texts that can then be debunked (and therefore gain an unfair advantage by keeping our true theological roots shrouded in mystery) with some puzzlement, so I was glad to see him eventually clarify that he thinks a handful of inane pranks can rectify the situation.
Sudhir Muralidhar proposes a striking new theory of the failure of the recent crop of anti-war films to bring in the bucks at the box office: The movies are no good.
MR. COOPER: If Roe v. Wade was returned, Congress passed a federal ban on all abortions, and it came to your desk, would you sign it? Yes or no.
MR. GIULIANI: I probably would not sign it. I would leave it to the states to make that decision. (Applause.) I think that that -- I think -- look, the problem with Roe against Wade is that it took the decision away from the state. If Roe against Wade -- if Roe against Wade were overturned because it was poorly decided, if the justices decide that, it would then go back to the states, and it would seem to me that that would be the answer. The answer is that each state would make a different decision.
I don't believe, in the circumstance that you asked before, that it should be criminalized. I think that would be a mistake, unless we're talking about partial-birth abortion or late-term abortion.
This manages to make even less sense than the general abortion federalism position. It's a state issue unless it's late-term? Why would that be? I suppose this is politically smart terrain for Rudy to stake out, but it's terribly incoherent on the merits.
The latest from Rasmussen has Huckabee ahead in Iowa, and post-debate polling shows that people think Huckabee won the debate. You've still got to assume that the front-loading of the primaries make it impossible for this guy to go anywhere, but he's gaining at an impressive pace.
The WaPo has a subset of its unsigned editorials where it comments on what it calls “the ideas primary.”
Five of the last seven Ideas Primary editorials have been on the Social Security ‘crisis.’ There have been 15 editorials in this series. One has been on global warming - the greatest crisis of our era - and two have been on our greatest domestic crisis, the lack of universal health care and the upcoming crisis in the Medicare trust fund.
Yes, but you see ... well ... er ... decades from now ... trust fund ... something.
I feel Megan's pain regaring the DC bagel situation. Then again, a good bagel is hard to find in almost every city. But sometimes you surprise yourself — I had a pretty good bagel shop in North Carolina one time. So when I stopped by a Dutch cafe looking for some breakfast while waiting for my hotel to let me check in and saw a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon on the menu, I thought I'd give it a shot. Turns out not to have been such a hot idea.
At any rate, Bodo's Bagels in Charlottesville makes a better bagel than anything I ever had in DC, so as far as I know that's the closest good bagel to the nation's capital.
Photo by Flickr user Two Stout Monks used under a Creative Commons license
It's possible that I know even less about the details of FISA legislation than Joe Klein does, so unlike him I've decided to let that issue primarily be covered by people who know what they're talking about. That said, it's clear to me from reading this post that his views on this subject aren't being driven by anything related to FISA at all. Rather, his point is:
Finally, if we can’t rebuild the non-toxic atmosphere of bipartisan cooperation that served the country through most of its history few, if any, of the reforms most Democrats favor will have any chance of passage, even with a Democratic President and Congress. We simply need to get past the cynicism and partisan mistrust cultivated by the Bush Administration.
This, however, conflates two slightly separate issues. One is the cynicism of the Bush administration. The constant lying and disregard for the law. We really do need to "get past" all that, but obviously such getting past can't be accomplish by the opposition party's bold acts of will. At a minimum, you would actually need to get rid of the cynical Bush administration personnel and have them replaced by other people.
More broadly, though, it's unfair to Bush to blame him for the lack of the sort of "bipartisan cooperation" we saw in the past, and it's equally unfair to blame Democrats for not reviving it. Bipartisan competition will tend to be rarer when the parties are ideologically coherent. And that's what we have right now -- almost every Democrat in congress is more liberal than almost every Republican. That makes bipartisan cooperation difficult. The roots of this polarization, however, are structural and not really lamentable. The old era of bipartisan cooperation was grounded in the parties having substantial ideological overlap and that, in turn, was a consequence of Jim Crow and the existence of a weird one-party state in the apartheid South where the one party was the Democrats even though the region was generally more conservative in ideological terms. That era's not going to come back and we shouldn't want it to come back, even if we deem certain aspects of its passing to be lamentable.
But most of all, we shouldn't urge the congress to take courses of action that are wrong on the merits out of a deluded sense that doing so might revive a past era of bipartisanship. The causes of these things are structural. And the structural set-up of a situation in which a bipartisan FISA compromise could be reached are pretty clear. You'd need a Democratic President. No Democratic President is going to be dogmatic about refusing to accept vast new executive powers. At the same time, given the nature of the political coalitions, a Democrat wouldn't be seeking to block compromise and thereby gain a wedge issue. Congressional Republicans will see their authoritarianism tempered by partisanship. But those circumstances don't exist, so a bipartisan solution looks unlikely. But acts of unilateral surrender don't end political polarization -- 12 Democrats voted for Bush's tax cuts in 2001, several Democrats voted for the 2003 Medicare bill, a whole bumper crop of Democrats voted for the war in 2002, etc. -- but the structural roots of partisan polarization remained in place.
Ben Smith at Politicobroke the story of how "Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records," but it took the more tabloid flavor of the New York Daily News to give us the image above. They also situate the scoop nicely:
It has been known since 2000 that then-Mayor Giuliani used his official, taxpayer-funded NYPD detail to escort him to weekend getaways at Nathan's Southampton condo as early as 1999, well before his marriage to Donna Hanover dissolved the following spring.
Back then, the Giuliani administration stonewalled reporters trying to nail down the costs for guarding the mayor during his Nathan liaison. The full tab remains a city secret.
But the documents obtained by the Politico.com Web site through Freedom of Information laws now show for the first time how Giuliani's administration seemed to scatter travel costs for security details during that time among obscure mayoral offices.
Looks like it's time to say "9/11!" some more. I'm sure it's relevant somehow. Speaking of which, in the construction of the Giuliani 9/11 mythos, part of what's gone missing is the large role that George W. Bush played in setting the stage for Rudy's heroics by so utterly failing to perform his head of state functions properly in a moment of crisis. That day people were really freaked out since, after all, nobody was quite sure what had happened and the President of the United States spent the bulk of the day running and hiding or something, and then that evening delivered a terrible speech. Under the circumstances, Giuliani's composed performance felt very reassuring. But it was only a big deal because Bush was so inept; a better response from him and there would have been no "America's Mayor."
Does anyone out there on the internets have any information about an old book called Kintu: A Congo Adventure by old-timey children's author Elizabeth Enright? Unlike her other books, this one seems to have vanished down the memory hole which, when combined with the title, makes one suspect it's incredibly racist or something. But is that true? Conventional research methods -- Google, Wikipedia, using Google to find Wikipedia pages -- don't reveal much.
This Daily News article on Hillary Clinton's hawkish advisors doesn't advance the ball very far, but it's good to see the issue bubbling into less-elite circles. It's also noteworthy for the fact that Lee Feinstein, the top foreign policy guy on the campaign staff and thus presumably in job for a second-tier nationals security post, has a very silly response to these complaints:
"A lot of Obama's advisers thought this was a stupid war in 2002, and a lot of Hillary's advisers thought it was a good idea in 2002," said one Democrat with a national security résumé. "That's the original sin which causes people to make some choices."
"The campaign's advisers reflect a broad spectrum of opinion within the Democratic Party," countered Clinton national security guru Lee Feinstein. "The candidate makes her own decisions about her foreign policy positions."
Uh huh. Of course she makes her own decisions. But that's the point -- she decided that invading Iraq was a good idea, and her team is mostly made up of people who agreed with her. The concern isn't that Dick Holbrooke and Feinstein are controlling her mind. The concern is that she's working with the people she's working with because their thinking reflects her own thinking. And advisors are worth taking a look at, because "experts" tend to lay their ideas out in the press in more detail than do politicians. Clinton, for example, just hasn't clearly said one way or another whether or not she believes unilateral preventive war is a good basis for non-proliferation policy. But she did authorize the use of force against Iraq, and several of the people working for her on a high level have taken clearer stands in favor of preventive war, so it's natural to refer to them in raising the issue.
Simply noting in response that Clinton makes her own decisions (of course she does!) doesn't dispel one's doubts that she's not being clear about these issues because her beliefs on these matters aren't things Democratic primary voters will agree with.
For today's nerd break, let's consider Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel, an excellent sci-fi novel sadly undermined by a failure to really grasp population density. The setting for the novel is a future version of earth in which the existence of advanced technology has failed to stem a decline in living standards (on the planet Earth, that is, the Spacers are better off than we are). The trouble is that the proposed population of Earth -- 8 billion -- is way to low to produce the effects Asimov is concerned with. Humanity, in this vision of the future, lives in giant, mostly underground mega-cities the better to leave the surface of the planet available for the exploitation of natural resources. As Wikipedia explains:
The eponymous "caves of steel" are vast city complexes covered by huge metal domes, capable of supporting tens of millions each. The New York City of that era, for example, encompasses present-day New York State, as well as large tracts of New Jersey.
But here's the thing. Present-day New York State encompasses 54,520 square miles and present-day New York City contains 27,000 people per square mile, so you'd be talking about 1.47 billion people in New York alone. And that's ignoring the "large tracts of New Jersey." What's more, that's Asimov's NYC has the same population density as present-day NYC. If instead you assume it contains Manhattan's 66,940 people per square mile, you could fit 3.652 billion people in New York State (again, we're ignoring the New Jersey Sectors). But Asimov suggests that the population density of his NYC should be even higher than that:
To be sure, something had existed in the same geographic area before then that had been called New York City. That primitive gathering of population had existed for three thousand years, not three hundred, but it hadn't been a City.
There were no Cities then. There were just huddles of dwelling places large and small, open to the air. They were something like the Spacers' Domes, only much different, of course. These huddles (the largest barely reached ten million in population and most never reached one million) were scattered all over Earth by the thousands. By modern standard, they had been completely inefficient, economicaly. [...]
For that matter, take the simple folly of endless duplication of kitchens and bathrooms as compared with the thoroughly efficient diners and shower rooms made possible by City culture.
People live in some pretty small apartments in Manhattan, but they haven't adopted collective kitchens. Nevertheless, even sticking with the Manhattan assumption, the single City contains over 1/6th of the world's population and it's not even the biggest City. Under the circumstances, it's very hard to imagine what could have compelled people to adopt the City revolution with hyper-density measures like collective kitchens. If the entire United States had the population density of an inner-ring suburb like Westchester County you could fit almost 8 billion within our borders.
I was looking at this latest iteration of efforts to use adjusted +/- statistics to evaluate NBA players, and it served as a reminder of how frustrating I find it that such a large proportion of efforts to apply quantitative tools to the analysis of basketball are dedicated to these searches for magic formulae to assess player quality. There are other, more interesting and probably more fruitful, lines of inquiry where quantitative skills could shed some light.
For example, there's a popular conception of a link between pace and defensive orientation -- specifically the idea that teams that choose to play at a fast pace are sacrificing something in the defense department. On the most naive level, that's simply because a high pace leads to more points being given up. But I think it's generally assumed that it holds up in efficiency terms as well. The 2006-2007 Phoenix Suns, for example, were first in offensive efficiency, third in pace, and fourteenth in defense. But is this really true? If you look at the data season-by-season is there a correlation between pace and defense? When pace changes leaguewide, does scoring efficiency also change? Then there are lots of interesting team level issues to ask. Intuitively, some teams' offenses are optimized for the fast-paced style and will function less efficiently during games that wind up being played at a slow pace. And vice versa also probably holds. But are there some teams who are making a mistake? Squads who score more efficiently when they play slower, but usually try to play fast?
I'm too lazy to actually conduct research into those questions, and I'm not even sure I know how to calculate a coefficient of correlation correctly these days, but I'd read someone who wanted to do it.
Back on Monday, though Ross saw no hope for the GOP in efforts to pick up black voters in 2008, he was fairly optimistic about their longer-term prospects, citing in particular this result from a recent Pew survey on racial attitudes:
A 53% majority of African Americans say that blacks who don't get ahead are mainly responsible for their situation, while just three-in-ten say discrimination is mainly to blame. As recently as the mid-1990s, black opinion on this question tilted in the opposite direction, with a majority of African Americans saying then that discrimination is the main reason for a lack of black progress.
It's intriguing, but also a somewhat ill-posed question in my view as it excludes a large middle ground of possibilities. I'd say, for example, that the legacy of discrimination as manifest in things like the large black-white hap in asset ownership plays a large role. What's more telling, I think, is the persistence of giant racial gaps in perception of the existence of racist discrimination. Pew asked if blacks face discrimination in the areas of employment, housing, college admissions, and day-to-day retail and you see a huge split between the number of blacks who feel there is "frequently" or "almost always" discrimination, and the number of whites who feel this way:
In short, though relatively few blacks see racist discrimination as "mainly responsible" for the condition of "blacks who don't get ahead," most African-Americans think African-Americans get discriminated against a lot. Adding the numbers up presents an even starker image:
Blacks see an America where there's pervasive discrimination. Most whites, by contrast, hardly see any discrimination at all. People who feel like they're the victims of frequent discrimination in many walks of life are going to be drawn toward
