Open Source Journalism

Sifting the News

2010-03-17T15:05:00.001-07:00

a talk given at the Bedford Lyceum in Bedford, MA on March 14, 2010

Every now and then I set out to write one thing and something else entirely comes out. Well, the announcement for this talk says that I'm going to tell you how I do the Weekly Sift -- and I will say a few words about that. But every time I sat down to write that talk, I kept backing up to explain why I write the Sift. After a couple of tries, I finally gave in. I'll say a little about how, but this talk is mostly about why.

But first, what. The Weekly Sift is a blog I write. It's mainly about politics, occasionally venturing out into culture, religion, and other related subjects. It comes out Monday afternoons. I try to keep it down to about 3000 words -- just slightly longer than a sermon.

In a typical week I'll have two or three topics that I talk about in some detail, and then five or ten "short notes" that might just be a sentence or two, with a link to something I found interesting. The Sift is intended to be a secondary news source. Being weekly, I write it assuming that you already know whatever the currently hyped news stories are, and that you're probably sick of them. Occasionally I miss a week, but I've been doing it pretty consistently for about 2 1/2 years.

A lot of people ask how long it takes each week, and I never have a good answer. Originally, the Sift was just a way to get my week off to a productive start. All week I'd bookmark articles I found while browsing the Internet, and then Monday I'd sit down and explain why I liked them.

Then it started to grow. Now I collect bookmarks Tuesday through Thursday. By Friday I usually know what my main stories are going to be. Over the weekend I do my research and write them up, and then Monday I go through the bookmarks I haven't used to put the Short Notes together.

I don't know how to estimate how much time it takes, because it's not always clear when I'm Sifting and when I'm just wandering around the Internet or staring into space. But however I do the accounting, it has turned into a significant enough chunk of time to raise the question about why I do it.

I have my own version of "Think globally, act locally." I believe that the best way to change things is to start with a problem that you care about personally, then look at the Big Picture until you figure out what the scale of the problem really is. Then come back to your own scale and ask what you can do about it.

The personal problem that got the Sift started was that I didn't trust the news media any more. Amazingly often, when I did even the smallest amount of research into some big controversy, I'd discover that the original controversial events never happened at all, or happened in a very different context than was being reported.

Some of these things were trivial, like Al Gore never claimed to have invented the internet. Others were more serious, like the fact that Saddam didn't have WMDs and didn't conspire with Bin Laden. But again and again, I'd discover that the events we were all arguing about hadn't happened that way at all.

I don't mean that in a conspiracy theory sense. No covert organization was staging fake events or covering up real ones like in the spy movies. Most of the time stuff wasn't covered up at all. Everything was all right there on the internet -- the transcripts, the official reports, the court decisions, the bills in Congress -- everything you needed to see through the hype and the illusion, if you bothered to take the time to look it up and put it all together.

At one time, that was the job of the news media. But it didn't seem to be their job any more. It didn't seem to be anybody's job.

So, when I pulled back to look at the Big Picture, the problem I saw was this: The social contract between the public and the news media has broken down.

I'm going to have to take a long detour here, because the social contract has broken down so completely that it's hard to remember what the old contract was. So I want to flash back a few decades to what I like to call the Walter Cronkite Era.

Every day, Walter would end the CBS Evening News with his famous tagline: "And that's the way it is." To me, that sums up the old contract. For our part, we trusted Walter to tell us how things were. He was sometimes billed as "the most trusted man in America".

In return, he -- and the other news anchors of his era -- made a number of unstated commitments, which I would summarize in five points.

First, news broadcasts will be accurate. He tried to get it right, and CBS maintained a large staff of reporters to help him get it right.
Second, the news will be up to date. Not "That's the way it was" but "That's the way it is."
Third, the news will be complete. Not in the sense that Walter could tell you in a half hour everything that happened today, but in the sense that CBS News considered the whole world to be its beat. If it happened today and it was important, then it should be on the news.
Fourth, the news should be objective. The news should not be propaganda. Events should not be shoe-horned into a pre-existing point-of-view.
Finally, the news media would hold newsmakers accountable. Journalists are working for you, the public, and collectively they're strong enough to make the Powers-That-Be answer questions.

(Naturally, I'm not claiming that CBS or any other news organization always lived up to those commitments. On occasion they made mistakes, overlooked things, failed to ask the right questions, and developed an implicit point of view. What I'm claiming is that those were failings, not repudiations.)

We used to call the news media the Fourth Estate, a term you never hear any more. Their power was on a scale with the other estates: the Government, the Intelligentsia, and the People.Why were they so powerful? Supply and demand. In Walter's day, there were three networks, each producing a half-hour news program each day. Two wire services -- AP and UPI -- serviced all the newspapers. In essence, those five organizations occupied a narrow isthmus between newsmakers and the general public.

Also: the news didn't need to make money. News was part of the prestige of a network. Gunsmoke made money, so Cronkite didn't have to.

Walter retired in 1981. Since then the major networks have all been taken over by media conglomerates, and the news divisions are now expected to make as much money as they can. So budgets have been slashed and the money that is left is focused on superstars who can produce ratings.

But even more important: Today there are many news channels trying to fill 24-hours of programming each day. The internet has not only created an army of bloggers, it has made every little newspaper and radio station into a global distributor. The Bedford Minuteman is a global newspaper now. You can read it today in places where you could not have found a New York Times 30 years ago.

That has changed the supply-and-demand relationship on both sides. Journalists have to pander both to their sources and to the general public, because both can easily go elsewhere.

So how does that affect Cronkite's five commitments? Well, right off the bat we can eliminate the idea that a news organization can hold newsmakers accountable. There is no Fourth Estate any more. Powerful people answer the questions they want to answer, because if you try to ask them other questions, they can ignore you and still get their story out without you.

Look at Dick Cheney, for example. Cheney has had dozens of interviews in the last year, and they all go the same way: The interviewer brings up a difficult subject like Iraq or torture or whatever. Cheney makes a statement that is completely and obviously false. And then the interviewer moves on to the next subject. (His interview with CNN's John King set the pattern.)

Glenn Greenwald likes to say that we don't have reporters any more, we have stenographers. They write down what newsmakers say and publish it. Glenn casts that as a moral failing, and to some extent it is. But it also true that journalists don't have the power to do much else. If you make it difficult for a newsmaker to distribute his message, he'll ignore you and reach the public some other way. If you want to have a career in journalism, you have to pander to your sources.

Now let's talk about up-to-date and accurate. In the Cronkite Era, there was a daily news cycle. If a rumor popped up at 2 in the afternoon, Walter had until 6:30 to figure out whether it was true. He had a big staff of reporters to check it out, and those reporters all had sources who were competing for their attention.

Now, the news cycle is instantaneous. The rumor pops up at 2, and if you don't have it on the air by 2:01, you're behind. So when you see breaking news on TV these days, most of the time the reporter has no idea whether what he's telling you is true. There's no time and there's no budget and people don't have to answer questions unless they want to. In the Fort Hood shootings, for example, people went on the air with reports that there were multiple shooters, that a heroic female cop gunned down one of them, and that he died. All false.

So we can have up-to-date but only by giving up on accurate.

You would think that having 24 hours of broadcast time each day would make it easier to deliver on the commitment to completeness, but in fact it doesn't. Cronkite-era news organizations could cover every important event, because they had the power to impose their own definition of importance. Thirty years ago, watching the news or reading a major newspaper was a little like doing push-ups or drinking prune juice. You did it because it was good for you, because this was what you needed to know. If you weren't interested in some story that Walter considered important, well, you should be.

Today, with all the choices and the corporate need for profit and ratings, the news is whatever a lot of people will watch. Just as journalists have to pander to their sources, they also have to pander to the public. (Today it would seem incredibly arrogant for Katie Couric to tell us "the way it is". Who, we would wonder, told her she had that kind of power? Thirty years ago it didn't seem arrogant at all; we knew and accepted that Cronkite had that kind of power.) So the news is full of fluff and hype and outrage -- and if there's a coup somewhere in Africa, who really cares? Nobody has the budget to have an office out there, and who would watch anyway?

Finally, let's consider objective. Today we have philosophical problems with objectivity. The prevailing philosophical view today is that real objectivity is impossible. You can try to suppress the prejudices you know about, but some preconceptions are just the warp and woof of your thinking, and you can't get away from them.

So journalists today are a little like priests who don't believe in God. They're trying to live by a value that doesn't make sense to them any more. So, like priests who have lost their faith, journalists demonstrate their objectivity in dishonest and hypocritical ways. They have lost any real sense of objectivity and instead made a fetish of balance.

So, for example, we have the he-said/she-said story. Climate scientists say one thing about global warming; flacks hired by the oil industry say something else. On to the next story. Nancy Pelosi says that it's raining; John Boehner says that its sunny. On to the next story. God forbid a reporter should go outside and tell us whether or not he's getting wet. That would be picking a side. It wouldn't be balanced.

Or we have the false equivalence story. Several members of one party are ax murderers. But somebody from the other party got a parking ticket, so there is law-breaking on both sides. If I just reported the murders, or said that murder is more serious than a parking ticket, that would be picking a side. It wouldn't be balanced.

Finally, honest analysis from any political point of view has been replaced by dueling talking points. You have somebody like James Carville give Democratic talking points, balance him with somebody like Karl Rove giving Republican talking points, and on to the next story.

I'm going to go off on a bit of tangent-within-the-tangent here, because this is a phenomenon that nobody ever explains, and it has to do with budget cuts and commercialization.

The problem isn't that Rove is a Republican or Carville a Democrat. The problem is that they aren't commentators at all -- they're advertisers. A real commentator is working for the network that is working for you. But heavy hitters like Rove and Carville command big money for their insights -- more than the network wants to pay. So Carville and Rove don't go on TV for the money, they go on because the network has assembled an audience that they can sell their talking points to.

They're not working for you, they're working on you. That's why networks occasionally have these open-mike accidents, where a pundit has dutifully sold his talking points -- and then the camera goes off but the mike keeps recording, and he says something completely different. What he told you when the camera was running was not honest commentary. It was advertising.

So let's sum up what I see as the faults of current mainstream news coverage.

First, it's inaccurate; it jumps on rumors and fans them.
It's ineffective at getting newsmakers to answer the questions we need answers to.
It's lazy. It's easy to balance a story between two opposing sides, but it's work to figure out whether anything that they told you was true. Less and less often does anyone do that work.
It's repetitive. It got to be a joke around our house. Deb would say, "What's new?" and I'd say, "Michael Jackson is still dead."
It panders. Now that news organizations have to maximize profit, the news is whatever will get ratings.
And finally, it's dishonest. Advertisers are presented as commentators. People who are working for somebody else come on the air to work on you.

OK, that's a very long-winded description of the problem. Now, obviously one person is not going to solve that. And I'm not a billionaire or the president of a media corporation or the dean of a journalism school. So what can I, working on my small scale, do about this?

Obviously, I can't go out and replace Walter Cronkite or his organization. I can't be complete. I can't be up-to-the-second. If I call up the White House and demand answers, I'm probably not going to get any farther than you would. I have the same philosophical problems with objectivity that everyone else does. About the only one of Cronkite's commitments I can fill is that I can try to be accurate. And if I discover that I haven't been accurate, I can own up to it and try to fix my mistakes.

So I can't offer to uphold the old social contract between the public and the media. But what I can do, and what other bloggers like me can do, is offer a new contract.

The number one thing in that contract is honesty. Honesty is very different from objectivity or balance. Anyone who reads more than a few lines of the Sift knows that it's a liberal blog. I am a liberal myself, so when I try to make sense out of the world, I make sense in a liberal way.

But a blogger should be like the cobbler who wears his own shoes or the baker who eats his own bread. I'm trying to make sense of the world for myself. If I find some sense, I publish it on the Sift. I can't promise you that the story I tell you is "the way it is". But I can promise that the story I'm telling you is the same one I tell myself.

If you want balance, you don't need me to provide it, you can make it for yourself. If you read the Sift and then go read a conservative blog or a communist blog or an Islamic jihadist blog, that's wonderful. And if all of those people are making the same commitment to honesty, if they're telling you how the world really looks to a conservative or a communist or a jihadist -- then you're going to have a wonderful sense of perspective on the world.

Number two is verifiability. I'm not aiming to be the most trusted man in America. Quite the opposite, I want to burden your trust as little as I can. That's why I put so many links in my stories. I expect you to doubt me -- sometimes I even want you to doubt me -- so I link to the evidence that led me to believe what I just wrote.

That's particularly important when I'm telling you what public figures are saying, because so much of the mainstream media these days is an enormous game of Telephone. A public figure says something that gets paraphrased. Then the paraphrase gets paraphrased, and so on until the quote is nothing like what was originally said.

So when I quote somebody, I do my best to link to a video or a transcript -- preferably a complete one. So you can verify that I didn't make this quote up, and you can judge for yourself whether I took it out of context.

My third commitment is depth. If I take up a story at all, I will do that work the news media refuses to do: Look up the sources, make the connections, and find the context. If a story raises an obvious question, I'll try to answer that question.

OK, now let's get into what the talk was supposed to be about, the how. I think a lot of people who don't understand the blogging community imagine that I'm much smarter and more widely read than I really am. They see that one week the Sift has a story from the Charlotte Observer and another week there's something from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and they think that I must read, like, a hundred newspapers every day.

Not exactly. Most days I read the New York Times and buzz through the top headlines on Google News and CNN. But what really happens is that I'm plugged into a network of people. And among all of us, we probably do read a hundred newspapers every day. And if any one of us spots something interesting, it gets out.

The best place to keep track of these stories that other people are spotting is in the Recommended Diaries column of DailyKos. Thousands of people post the things they find interesting on Kos. And if fifty or a hundred Kos readers think what they found was interesting, it makes the recommended list. That's the only way I'm going to find something in the Sacramento Bee.

I pay regular attention to two other group blogs: Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post. And there are a handful of individual bloggers that I read just about every day: Glenn Greenwald, Matt Yglesias, Digby, and a few others.

I often link to something in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, or the Atlantic, but usually somebody else found it for me.

I also pay attention to a few specialist blogs; I don't read them every day, but I search through them if I want to understand a particular issue. Juan Cole is my Middle Eastern expert. Nate Silver analyzes polls for me. Scott Horton and Marcy Wheeler are my civil liberty lawyers. I found them the way you find specialists in any small town: Somebody you trust tells you about somebody else.

Sometimes Sift readers send me stuff, or they ask a question that leads to a Google query. And, like anybody else who browses the internet, I find a lot just by luck. A page I visit links to another that links to another, and eventually I find something good without knowing how I got there.

Finally, I want to back off of something I implied earlier: that I work for my readers rather than on them. On one scale that's true, but on another it isn't. I seldom state it in so many words, but there is one idea sitting in the background of just about every Sift article. It's part of my own faith, and you could say that I'm always working to sell this idea to my readers: The world is comprehensible. The stuff you need to understand to be a good citizen and play your role in a functioning democracy -- it's understandable.

Lots of people would like to convince you otherwise -- that the world is arcane and complicated and you should just give up on making sense out of it; that everybody lies and you can never sort out what's true and what isn't. But the underlying message of the Sift is that everything you need to understand the world is sitting in plain sight. If you're diligent and you take the time, you can put it together.

I Finally Understand John McCain

2008-06-14T08:07:00.000-07:00

Thursday John McCain came back to New Hampshire for the first time, I think, since the primary. I saw him in Nashua, in the gym at Daniel Webster College, along with maybe 450-500 other people.

I thought about writing up the event immediately as a news piece for Daily Kos, but it actually wasn't that newsy. Or maybe the newslessness was the news: Other than a few references to Obama, McCain is saying more-or-less the same stuff he was when he was running for the Republican nomination. (He even repeated a joke I'd heard before: Two prison inmates are standing in the chow line, and one says to the other, "You know, the food was a lot better here when you were governor.") Maybe that's an admirable consistency, or maybe it means he's still trying to pull the Republican Party together.

The thing worth writing about, I eventually decided, is that I think I finally get McCain. You see, the paradox of McCain is pretty simple: He has this strong general message that government spending is out of control, and that Congress needs a president strong enough to say NO to its wasteful ways, so that we can continue to cut taxes and yet return to fiscal responsibility. But when the audience asks him about any particular thing the government does, he promises to continue it or even do more of it: He wants to stay in Iraq as long as it takes, keep Social Security and Medicare strong, take care of veterans, make health care and college educations affordable, start a land-a-man-on-the-Moon-like program to make the United States independent of foreign oil, defend our borders against illegal immigration, and on and on and on. He rails against procedural stuff like Congressional earmarks, but never once does he say, "Here's an expensive government service that the American people are going to have to get along without."

And he does all this with great conviction, not with the discomfort he shows when he knows he's lying.

But you know what he does talk about? The Bridge to Nowhere -- the $300-400 million project to build a bridge to Gravina Island in Alaska. It was inserted into the 2005 Transportation Equity Act by Alaska's Republican Senator Ted Stevens, got a lot of bad press, and was canceled in 2007 by Alaska's governor. This never-built bridge is part of McCain's regular stump speech, and he mentioned it twice Thursday.

Kind of curious, don't you think, that a non-existent bridge deserves so much attention. By contrast, the actual bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis last summer doesn't come up at all.

I think I finally understand what's going on there. For McCain (as for most of us, I think), government is one of those notions like Life or Truth. It's just too big to think about directly. There was no multi-trillion-dollar government on the prehistoric savannas of Africa, so our brains didn't evolve a handle for one. Instead, each of us has one example (or maybe a handful of examples) that represent for us what government really means. Those examples are mostly unconscious, so if you ask somebody "What specific event sums up government for you?" they probably won't know what to say. But if you listen to them long enough, you'll start to hear it.

Take my Dad, for example. For him, government is the farm loan program that kept my grandfather from going bankrupt during the Depression, when Dad was just a boy. It was a loan, not a gift, and it eventually got paid off. But it kept the wolf from the door long enough for hard work and the natural fertility of the soil to perform its magic. (Dad still owns that farm -- he rents it to my cousin.) Dad knows deep down that when you have a run of bad luck, government can keep you in the game long enough for things to turn around. So when you talk about cutting government, he starts wondering who's going to have to go bust.

For Ronald Reagan, by contrast, government was the welfare queen who, he claimed, used multiple identities to bilk the government out of enough money to pay for her Cadillac. Government makes us suckers. It collects our money and then doesn't watch over it the way we would.

Do I need to point out that Dad's still a New Deal Democrat and Ronald Reagan was a Republican?

The same event can imprint government in many divergent ways. Take Hurricane Katrina. Some people for the rest of their lives will think of government as the helicopter that lifts you off your roof without waiting for proof of who you are or what you can afford. Others will think of government as the people who leave you to rot in the SuperDome because you're black or poor. Others will remember the thousands of trailers that sat empty in Arkansas because red tape prevented them from being moved to places where homeless people needed them.

And none of them will be wrong. All those things are part of what government is.

For John McCain, government is the Bridge to Nowhere. It's big and wasteful and if you just didn't do it hardly anybody would suffer. The actual Bridge to Nowhere, if it had been built, would have been about a hundredth of a percent of one year's federal spending.

If it symbolizes the whole government, though, then there must be trillions you could save. And when somebody asks, "What about the student loan that lets me go to college even though my hard-working parents can't afford to send me?" or "What about the VA hospital that gave me an artificial leg after I stepped on an IED outside of Mosul?" -- well, McCain didn't mean that government.

He meant the government that builds all those bridges to nowhere.

Pirate Treasure: Why oil and democracy don't mix

2008-05-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

In Wednesday's column, Thomas Friedman quotes Stanford professor Larry Diamond:

There are 23 countries in the world that derive at least 60 percent of their exports from oil and gas and not a single one is a real democracy.

Why should this be? Remember just before the Iraq invasion when neo-cons were assuring us that Iraq's oil wealth would be an advantage in its transition to democracy?

Understanding why it wasn't -- and won't be in the future -- tells us something important about democracy: You can settle your differences by voting only after your society has established an overwhelming consensus on all the issues worth killing and dying for.

One of those issues is the legitimacy of the property system: Who owns what? Why should I recognize that any particular bit of wealth is yours and not mine? The answer to that question hangs not only on the homogeneity of a country's culture, but on the kind of property that country has.

Legitimate Property vs. Pirate Treasure. Some kinds of property are easy to legitimize. If you kill the elk and drag it home, nobody's going to complain when the choicest cut goes to you. To give a more modern example, the Homestead Act was hardly legitimate in the eyes of the Native Americans whose land was being carved up, but among voting white citizens it made good sense: If you cleared the land, lived on it, and farmed it, it was obviously yours and not mine.

Wages paid voluntarily by an employer are legitimate: "The laborer is worthy of his hire," says the Bible. If you took the dangerous voyage to the other side of the world and brought back a shipload of Chinese silk -- that was your silk, not mine.

Laws are needed to regulate such property, but not to establish its legitimacy. The legitimacy of the property justifies the law, not the other way around.

Virtue can legitimize wealth. If we all benefit from people of great skill -- doctors, say, or inventors -- it's easy to justify them having more than the rest of us, at least up to a point. An ancient king who kept his country at peace, dispensed wise judgments, and avoided wasteful displays of luxury could own more than his subjects with little resentment. Similarly, if the owner of the local mill paid livable wages, cared about the safety of his workers, and donated generously to local charities, poorer neighbors might even defend his disproportionate wealth against those who proposed to divide it up.

But other kinds of wealth are like the buried treasure of long-dead pirates: They don't naturally and legitimately seem to belong to anyone. If you can find the pirate treasure and hang onto it long enough to spend it, it's yours. But if someone can take it from you, it's theirs.

Natural resource wealth is inherently suspect because, as the Bible puts it, "The Earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof." But the effort to find and extract the resource can legitimize its ownership. The gold of the 49ers was a little like the elk that a hunter dragged back to camp. But the diamonds of Cecil Rhodes -- pulled out of African land by African labor -- looks much more like pirate treasure.

Today, the wealth of the House of Saud is entirely pirate treasure. The oil was found by foreigners, can be pumped out of the ground at minimal expense, and is sold at a vast profit. What effort or virtue marks this profit as belonging to the al-Sauds? If I'm a lesser Saudi prince, or if I have a bloodline just as ancient and distinguished as the al-Sauds, or even if I'm just a Bedouin tribesman whose ancestors crisscrossed the sites of the oil wells for centuries -- why doesn't that wealth belong to me? The main reason, as far as I can see, is that the Saudi king has the guns to enforce his claim. If I had the guns, my claim would be every bit as legitimate.

Democracy and Consensus. If you believe, as President Bush apparently does, that the essence of democracy is to have a constitution and hold elections, then all this talk about the legitimacy of property has no bearing on whether or not a country will succeed as a democracy. But in the real world a democracy stands or falls on this question: After you have your constitutionally sanctioned election, why does the loser accept his loss?

Think about what happened in America after the 2000 election. More people voted for Gore than for Bush, but Bush became president. Many Gore supporters came out of that election believing that Bush won by refusing to count legally cast votes. Others believed that Bush's brother misused his position as governor of Florida to disenfranchise people who had a legal right to vote, and that those votes would have made Gore president. Still others believed that the Electoral College itself was illegitimate, and that Gore should have been president by virtue of winning the popular vote.

In many countries, that situation would have led to general strikes, riots, and maybe even civil war. In the United States, the Supreme Court's ruling ended the dispute. The decision was accepted even by those who believed that the Court was practicing politics rather than law. No strikes. No riots. No government-in-exile.

Conversely, Bush did not begin his administration as many rulers with weak claims do: by rounding up his opponents and having them shot. No newspapers were shut down. The Democrats were allowed to run candidates in subsequent elections. And Gore himself remained free and prospered greatly under the new administration.

We sometimes forget how remarkable this was.

Why did it happen? Or, more accurately, why did the civil war fail to happen? Fundamentally, the answer comes down to this: In America we have a broad consensus that covers all the issues worth getting yourself killed for. Losing an election doesn't mean that the rich suddenly become poor or the free become slaves. Bush defeating Gore didn't mean that Democrats would lose their land or be herded into camps or have to watch their daughters be raped by the victorious Republicans.

In some countries that is what an election means. And they don't stay democracies long, no matter what their constitutions say.

Democracy and Pirate Treasure. The great anarchist Emma Goldman said: "If voting could change the system, it would be against the law." That's an overstatement, but she was on to an important truth: Some things are too important to decide by vote. They're so important that the losers won't be able to accept their loss. They'll risk killing and being killed, because the alternative seems worse.

You can't, for example, vote on a genocide. If I lose, will my people voluntarily line up to be slaughtered? I certainly hope not. Our enemies may have proved that they outnumber us, but we'll grab our guns and take our chances in battle. Democracy is over.

Property may not seem as important as life, but history has shown again and again that people will die for it.

At the fringes, maybe not: A court may move your property line a few feet, and even if you think it's wrong, you're not going to take up arms. An election may change the tax rate on your income without sending you to the barricades. But the kind of change Goldman was talking about -- a fundamental redistribution of property and a redefinition of the meaning of property -- was going to be met with violence. Voting about it would never be enough.

The more consensus a society has about its property and wealth -- the more general agreement there is about who owns what and why -- the easier it will be for that country to become a democracy. But if a nation's wealth is predominantly pirate treasure whose ownership is defined and established only by force, then no set of documents can turn it into a democracy. Presidents and prime ministers will see no reason why that treasure shouldn't be theirs, and the people who have the treasure now will spend it on guns rather than surrender it to whoever got the most votes. Democracy will last until the rich lose an election -- or just fear losing an election -- and then it will be over.

Japan and Iraq. Whenever critics pointed out the hopelessness of establishing an Iraqi democracy by force, the neocons would point to Japan. On February 26, 2003, President Bush asserted:

There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken. The nation of Iraq -- with its proud heritage, abundant resources and skilled and educated people -- is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom.

Japan had no Western heritage and no democratic history. And yet after we defeated the Japanese in war, we could write a new constitution for them, and preside over the establishment of a democracy that has lasted half a century and seems likely to continue into the far future. Why couldn't we do the same in Iraq?

I wish I could make every neo-con read Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, which revolves around the search for a vast horde of gold that the Japanese hid in the Philippines during the war. (As in much of Stephenson's work, the true meaning of money and wealth is a constant background meditation.)

Near the end of the novel, two of its protagonists finally meet: the American computer hacker Randy Waterhouse and the elderly Japanese industrialist Goto Dengo. The best thing that ever happened to Japan, Dengo claims, was to lose all its gold. Real wealth, he says, is in the heads and hands of the people, in their intelligence and the work they do. He points to Tokyo: "Fifty years ago it was flames. Now it is lights! Do you understand?"

Democracy could take hold in Japan because it started with nothing. The wealth it built in the heads and hands of its people was easy to legitimize and hard to steal. But in Iraq, in much of the Middle East, and in failed post-colonial African democracies like mineral-rich Zimbabwe, the national wealth is buried in the ground and belongs as easily to one person as another.

Until this wealth is rooted in some consensus of legitimacy, it will be battled over. And an electoral victory will only herald a more violent struggle.

The Weekly Sift: Got Death?

2008-02-18T11:28:00.000-08:00

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression. -- Thomas Paine

I finally got around to changing the name of this series. I'm working on designing a blog for it. Stay tuned.

Fearmongering Finally Fails

I can only hope that a few of you are still alive to read this. You see, the Protect America Act expired at midnight Saturday, so America is now unprotected. The continued survival of our nation has become a matter of luck. In fact, the Heritage Foundation has a ticking clock on its web site so that future generations will know just how long it has been since we all died.

Or something like that.

A little background: The PAA amends the FISA law to increase the government's power to spy. It was passed in a big panicked rush right before the Congressional recess last August -- what might have happened otherwise is too horrible to contemplate -- but in a tiny gesture of sanity Congress included a six-month sunset clause, which just expired. The last month or so has seen the most bizarre parliamentary maneuvering. Bush and the Republicans in Congress have threatened vetoes, stalled, filibustered, blocked temporary extensions, and done whatever they could to recreate the situation of August, with Congress up against a hard deadline and no choice other than surrender to the terrorists or give Bush everything he wants -- including retroactive immunity for the telecom companies who broke an unspecified number of laws in helping the administration spy on American citizens.

The Senate caved, convincing me that Chris Dodd should be majority leader. But the House refused to be stampeded and adjourned for a week without taking action. This is probably just a meaningless gesture of rebellion before they give in too, but we've got to enjoy it while we can.

A lot of people are writing about this situation, so I'll link to them rather than reproduce their arguments. Scott Horton wrote before it was clear what the House would do. Glenn Greenwald summarizes the issues and skewers all the right-wing fear-mongering. The best case for telecom immunity comes not from the administration but from liberal blogger Kevin Drum.

The administration's arguments are only impressive if you believe that they would never abuse secrecy or lie to us about the things we aren't allowed to know. They make lots of assertions, but the supporting details are classified, so if they told us they'd have to shoot us. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell wrote in the Washington Post: "Under the Protect America Act, we obtained valuable insight and understanding, leading to the disruption of planned terrorist attacks. Expiration would lead to the loss of important tools our workforce relies on to discover the locations, intentions and capabilities of terrorists and other foreign intelligence targets abroad. Some critical operations ... would probably become impossible." The Balkinization blog characterizes McConnell's article as: "The fox requests immunity for its previous guarding of the chicken coop."

The White House put out a myth/fact sheet on the PAA, but again the "facts" are either uncheckable assertions or pure statements of opinion. And, as Brian Beutler points out, sometimes the "fact" is a non-sequitur, because the administration actually can't deny that the "myth" is true. One "fact" says: "Companies should not be held responsible for verifying the government's determination that requested assistance was necessary and lawful" -- which caused Dan Froomkin to wonder: "But isn't that the very definition of a police state: that companies should do whatever the government asks, even if they know it's illegal?"

And then there's this from President Bush himself:

The American people have got to know that what we did in the past gained information that prevented an attack. And for those who criticize what we did in the past, I ask them, which attack would they rather have not permitted — stopped?.Which attack on America did they — would they have said, well, you know, maybe it wasn't all that important that we stop those attacks.

So apparently there's a secret list of terrorist attacks that didn't happen. We can't look at the list, but Bush challenges us to pick which of these unknown non-happening events we would have wanted to happen. Because it would have failed not to happen if not for ... wait, I'm lost. The whole thing reminds me of this old joke: Auditors are interviewing a big-city mayor about all the relatives he has on the payroll and what they do. When they come to his mother, the mayor explains that she protects the city from tigers. One auditor objects: "But there are no tigers for thousands of miles." And the mayor says: "Don't thank me. Thank Mom."

Who Are They Really?

Back in 2000, the media presented us with two very clear images of the presidential candidates. George W. Bush was a regular guy who'd be fun to hang around with. Al Gore, on the other hand, was a pretentious bore -- preachy, self-important, and generally not somebody you'd want to spend any time with.

Looking back, those images seem pretty ridiculous. Bush is a fun guy if you don't mind him giving you a humiliating nickname like "Turd Blossom" and if you never hint that he might have made a mistake. He's so charming that all his campaign stops in 2004 had to be invitation-only events. Otherwise hard questions from voters might have evoked the Furious George that we saw in the first Bush-Kerry debate.

Gore, meanwhile, becomes more fascinating all the time. He starts companies. He makes movies. He turned around public opinion on global warming. Already in 2000, you might have read Earth in the Balance and seen a guy with wide-ranging curiosity who used his political status to see a lot of interesting things and talk to the smartest people in the world. I'd love to have a chance to sit down with Gore one-on-one.

The purpose of that history lesson is to wonder: Is the same thing happening now? Are lazy journalists fitting the facts into simplistic narratives that lack any foundation in reality? Yeah, I think they are. Let's take the remaining candidates one-by-one.

Obama. Here's the media narrative about Barack Obama: He's an inspiring speaker, but he lacks substance. His way with words is all fuzzy abstraction that masks his lack of detailed understanding.

The "inspiring speaker" part is true. But I saw him answer questions at a rally last summer, and his command of details is as good as anybody's. And if you chase the links on the issues page of Obama's web site, you'll find quite a bit of detailed policy commitment. His health care plan, for example, is a lot more specific than John McCain's -- even though McCain has been able to exploit the media narrative by saying: "To encourage a country with only rhetoric rather than sound and proven ideas ... is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude."

So Wednesday when Obama gave a speech in Janesville, Wisconsin specifically to outline his economic plan, it should have been a man-bites-dog moment, right? If you had the expertise and resources of, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post, think of the service you could offer your readers: You could examine his proposals in detail, get experts to assess whether they would help anybody, figure out what they'd cost, and so on. Readers aren't set up to do that kind of analysis for themselves -- and neither am I, to tell the truth (at least I provide the links) -- but you're a big news organization. It's right up your alley.

Well, maybe not. The Post sort of mentioned that Obama had made some economic proposals, but their article was totally focused on the political tactics behind the proposals: the up-coming Wisconsin primary, Clinton's advantage with working class voters, and on and on. If you want to know what Obama actually proposed, good luck to you. (Matt Yglesias took the Post to task here.) Ditto for the Times: They note that Obama is "adding detail to his oratory", but they treat "detail" as an ingredient, like salt. You don't need to know what the details are, just that he's adding them. And of course, you get a long tactical analysis about why he's adding details and what he hopes they'll do for him with certain kinds of voters.

Here's the upshot: Obama can spell out as much as he wants, but if the Times and the Post are sitting between him and the voters, nothing's going to get through. And even if you're a faithful reader of both the Post and the Times, when the guy in the next cubicle at work says: "That Obama -- he sounds good, but there's nothing there" you won't know enough to argue.

Clinton. In the musical 1776 John Adams doesn't want his personal unpopularity to sink the cause of independence. So he goes from one member of his committee to the next, looking for someone else to write the proposed Declaration. After several rebuffs, he approaches Robert Livingston.

ADAMS:
Mr. Livingston, maybe you should write it.
You have many friends, and you're a diplomat.

FRANKLIN: Oh, that word!

ADAMS:
Whereas if I'm the one to do it,
They'll run their quill pens through it.

CHORUS OF COMMITTEE:
He's obnoxious and disliked.
Did you know that?

LIVINGSTON: I hadn't heard.

Today, you'd have to be as diplomatic as Robert Livingston to claim you hadn't heard this about Hillary Clinton: She's unlikeable. She's cold and calculating and doesn't care about anything but power. Even her supporters don't like her. Women vote for her because she's a woman. Men support her because they have something to gain out of the Clintons' return to power, or because they're racists who don't like Obama, or because they're afraid she's going to win anyway so they want to get on her good side.

Now, I can't claim to have spent quality time with Hillary Clinton. But when I did see her in person at a New Hampshire Democratic Party dinner last March, I didn't find any support for the stereotype. She seemed quite likable to me, and I found one particular part of her message very moving: She talked about all the people who are invisible to the Bush administration, and she promised that as president she would see them.

I've talked to some of those older women who are Hillary's primary base of support. (My mom is one.) You know what? They like her. They don't just support her because she's a woman. They support her because they know the kind of crap a woman has to take to succeed in a man's field. Those women see Hillary sailing through the crap-storm with her head high, and they just admire the heck out of her.

McCain. Clinton supporters often claim that Hillary gets bad coverage because a strong woman threatens the manhood of male pundits like Chris Matthews. They're missing the bigger story: John McCain gets good coverage because he threatens the manhood of male pundits like Chris Matthews.

I feel something similar myself. Like most of the male talking heads on TV, I live in safety and comfort. My physical courage, my ability to think clearly when threatened, that whole Hemingway grace-under-pressure thing -- it's never really been tested. Given the chance, would I be a hero? Would I scream and faint like a little girl? Nobody knows, least of all me.

The intimidating thing about John McCain is that he's been tested and he passed. He knows. That gives him an alpha-dog aura that makes untested men want to follow him around like puppies. When he called on me during the question period at his town-hall meeting, I felt a little thrill that I normally don't. I felt honored. It's irrational, but very effective.

That's why McCain's media narrative is so positive: He's the straight talker. The maverick. The guy who says what he thinks and follows his conscience.

The truth -- and this really shouldn't be so controversial -- is that he's a politician. Not an outstandingly devious or dishonest one, but still a politician. When his target voters don't like one of his positions, he changes it or soft-pedals it or somehow makes it go away. Brave New Films put together a collection of his flip-flops. But you know, the striking thing about those waffles and self-contradictions is how ordinary they are. If not for the straight-talk myth, they wouldn't be noteworthy.

He's also not that much of a maverick. He has made a few independent noises over the past seven years, but when it comes time to vote he gets in line with all the other Republicans. This week he even backed down on his signature issue: torture. But again, that shouldn't shock anybody. There are no Republican mavericks. The breed is extinct.

The one downside of McCain's image -- his temper -- is also overblown. What strikes me about McCain's temper is that he gets over it. No campaign in recent memory was as nasty as the one Bush ran against McCain in South Carolina in 2000. But McCain has put it behind him. (A questioner took him to task for this at the town meeting I attended. McCain shot right back: The American people care about issues and getting things done; they don't want to hear about his ancient feuds.) He made up with Jerry Falwell. He even went back to Vietnam. Try to imagine George W. Bush doing anything similar. If you piss off W, you can go to Hell; he's done with you. McCain isn't like that.

The YouTube Election

When they get around to writing the history of YouTube's influence on politics, they'll start with the Jim Webb senate race in 2006. And then they'll say that it was a harbinger of the presidential election of 2008, when political viral video really came into its own.

Just look at all this stuff. Start with the inspirational music video made from Obama's "Yes We Can" speech. Then look at the parody about McCain. Then look at this other parody about McCain. (Weirdly, when I went there the page had a McCain advertisement.) And then check out the three commercials made by Brave New Films, where ordinary Americans call U.S. Customer Service to try to get the Iraq War charge taken off their monthly bill.

Those are just the beginning. This year will produce an amazing outpouring of political creativity, and overwhelmingly it will favor the Democrats. Why? Well, Erick Erickson, editor of the biggest and most influential conservative blog on the Internet, has it all figured out: Liberals have more free time. You see, conservatives "have families because we don't abort our kids, and we have jobs because we believe in capitalism."

That's got to be it, don't you think?

Short Notes

Michael Scheuer used to be the head of the CIA's Bin Laden group, and he still understands terrorist strategy better than any writer I know. In this article, he imagines what Bin Laden must be thinking now: "Thanks be to God, brothers, America is hemorrhaging money and ruining its military by trying to fight al-Qaeda's mujaheddin wherever they appear -- or, more accurately, wherever U.S. officials imagine they appear."

McCain's identification with the Surge may have worked this winter in Republican primaries, but next fall will be a different story. I was planning to write something on that theme, but now I don't have to -- Joe Conason did.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer connects the dots: The states tried to regulate against predatory mortgage lending, and the Bush administration stopped them. Remember that the next time somebody tells you that government regulations are bad for the economy.

One of the best news/comedy sites on the Internet is 23/6. This week Ian Gurvitz tried to imagine the reaction if Jesus came back and entered the presidential race. My favorite reaction came from McCain, who found "blessed are the peacemakers" in one of Jesus' old speeches and commented: "Sounds like a guy who's soft on defense, my friends, and I'm not sure this is who we need as commander-in-chief in these troubled times." And not all the barbs on 23/6 are aimed at Republicans. Check out Clinton Campaign to Replace Clinton.

Patrick Cockburn of the British newspaper The Independent gives an on-the-ground view of post-surge Baghdad. He compares it to Lebanon during the various lulls in its decades-long civil war "when everybody in Beirut rightly predicted that nothing was solved and the fighting would start again. In Iraq the fighting has never stopped, but the present equilibrium might go on for some time."

What Impressed Me This Week: Prosperity and Peace

2008-02-11T12:17:00.000-08:00

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts as are only injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. -- Thomas Jefferson

I'm back from my old hometown, Quincy Illinois, where I preached this non-political sermon at the Unitarian Church. It's great fun to go back to the town where you grew up and be the center of attention for a morning. It'd be even greater fun if I'd grown up Unitarian, but I'm not holding my breath for an invitation to preach at my old Lutheran church.

Mitt in 2012

If I had just shut up about my hunch that Romney would win Florida and make a race of it from there, my record of predicting the Republican campaign would have been perfect. I foresaw the rise and fall of Huckabee and was one of the first people to use the phrase "last man standing" about McCain. What can I say? I underestimated the stickiness of Huckabee's evangelical support and I overestimated the influence of right-wing talk radio.

So Romney is out. The thing to note about his early exit -- he still had a lot of support and could have hoped for a miracle -- is that he seems to be anticipating a McCain loss in November and his own re-emergence in 2012. Mythology plays a big role on the Right, and the story Romney is setting up to tell goes like this: He could have beaten McCain one-on-one, but Huckabee and the evangelicals refused to join his coalition. The result was that a false conservative (McCain) won the nomination and the party went down to defeat. The American people did not reject conservatism, just a false presentation of conservatism.

Romney backers are already making the parallel to Reagan's loss to Gerald Ford in 1976. The Washington Times reports a meeting between Mitt and 50 conservative leaders who want him to be "the face of conservatism, as Ronald Reagan became en route to his 1980 election win." So the people who are predicting that the Republicans will unite in the fall are missing an important piece of the story: They'll unite if they think McCain is going to win in November. But if he's going to lose anyway, conservatives would rather not tarnish the conservative brand name. They're already telling themselves that losing this year might be the best thing in the long run.

PolySci 101: Conventions and Delegates

On the Democratic side, my attempts to see the future have been so bad that I should just stop. My predictions about Clinton and Obama have not made anybody wiser or more insightful.

A better use of my effort might be to clarify some of the confusing points of the nominating process. The Democratic Convention will happen in Denver August 25-28. There will be (according to Wikipedia) 4049 delegates. Of those, 3253 are being selected in primaries and caucuses and will be pledged to vote for a particular candidate. The remaining 796 are "superdelegates" -- people who get to vote because they have some position in the party, i.e., senators and representatives, members of the state Democratic committees, and so on. The superdelegates can vote for whomever they want, and can change their minds right up until the last minute. Whoever gets a majority of the delegate votes -- at least 2025 -- will be the nominee.

In addition to the superdelegates, the Michigan and Florida delegations are up for grabs -- 384 delegates between them. The Democratic Party tried to stop the rush of states to have earlier and earlier primaries, but Michigan and Florida defied those rules and were punished by having their primary results discounted. So at the moment there are no plans to seat Michigan or Florida delegates at the convention. This was all announced ahead of time and the candidates had an informal agreement not to campaign in those primaries. But Clinton did not remove her name from the Florida ballot, so she won that primary by default. She also won the Michigan primary, where there was no campaign and it was basically about name recognition.

At this point nobody has a good idea what to do. Seating the Michigan and Florida delegates that were chosen in the primaries gives an undeserved boost to Clinton. Not seating any Michigan or Florida delegates is a good way to piss off two swing states. A do-over primary seems too difficult to pull off at this point. Choosing delegates by some method less open than a primary (say a caucus or a state convention) seems weird after a primary was actually held. Nobody expected a race so close that these delegates would matter, but that's seems to be where we're headed.

In talking to people here and there, I realize that there are a lot of misconceptions about parties and conventions. First, the Constitution says nothing about parties; the Founders knew about the Whigs and Tories in England and hoped we wouldn't have anything like that. Originally, the parties were just clubs of like-minded politicians; they'd get together in their conventions and do whatever they wanted. Because the parties have no constitutional status, the courts still refuse to get involved in any but the most egregious intra-party disputes. So once the convention gets going, for all practical purposes the convention delegates are the party. They can change their own rules and do whatever they want.

The idea that you as a voter should have a say in the party's nomination process is fairly new. As recently as 1960, the primaries were mostly just beauty contests; most states didn't have them and few delegates were at stake. In 1960, John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey ran in the primaries because they were the new guys and had to prove they had appeal beyond their home states. But Adlai Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson could ignore the primaries because they were already well known. Johnson finished second to Kennedy in delegates, and Stevenson was hoping to be chosen if Kennedy couldn't manage a first-ballot majority and the convention deadlocked. Theodore White's The Making of the President 1960 is a good reference.

In the days before television, conventions were real political battlegrounds, not the packaged media events of recent years. Delegates could change their minds and deals were brokered in "smoke-filled rooms." The 1920 Republican convention had to vote ten times before settling on Warren Harding, who had not been considered a serious candidate before the convention started. The last convention not to result in a first-ballot nomination was the Democratic convention of 1952: Adlai Stevenson was the second-place candidate on the first and second ballots, but came out with a majority on the third.

The best way to get a handle on what a "brokered convention" might be like is to go back and read the political novels of the 1960s, which I loved as a teen-ager: Convention by Fletcher Knebel is one. Capable of Honor -- the third novel in the Advise and Consent series by Allen Drury -- is another. I thought Convention was also made into a movie, but actually I was remembering The Best Man, with Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson as rival candidates.

The War Over a Word

One very interesting battle in the ongoing culture war is the struggle to control the word fascism. In an era of torture, secret prisons, warrantless wiretapping, and wars based on propaganda, you might expect it to be pretty clear who the fascists are. But in fact there's a fairly serious attempt on the right to co-opt the word for their own purposes.

The most visible new usage, of course, is Islamofascism, which basically means that you're Muslim and Dick Cheney doesn't like you. So, bin Laden wasn't an Islamofascist when he fought to throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan, but he is now that he wants the U.S. out of Afghanistan. The mullahs who run Iran are Islamofascists, but the members of the House of Saud aren't, even though Saudi society is more religiously strict and less westernized than Iranian society. Other than perhaps Syria, the Middle Eastern regimes closest to the classical fascism of Hitler and Mussolini are the military-dominated governments of Pakistan and Egypt, but they're U.S. allies, so they can't possibly be Islamofascists.

And then there's Liberal Fascism, a new book by the National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg. (Reviews here, here, and here. Interview with Goldberg here.) In the interview Goldberg defines fascism as:

a religious impulse that resides in all of us -- left, right, black, white, tall, short -- to seek unity in all things, to believe that we need to all work together to go past any of our disagreements and that the state needs to be, almost simply as a pragmatic matter, the pace-setter, the enforcer of this cult of unity. That is what I believe fascism is.

So when the government bans smoking in bars, that's fascism because it imposes uniform behavior on us. I don't think Goldberg comments on speed limits, but he does go on to equate the word holistic with totalitarian. I shouldn't trash a book I haven't read, but I doubt you'll be shocked to hear that this sounds like nonsense to me. I suspect the book is an intentional effort to make the word fascist meaningless and unusable, at precisely the time when we should be thinking seriously about it.

I was much more impressed with American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges. He's talking about the Dominionists, an apocalyptic core of the religious right that believes it has a mission to take over the United States government and from there the world. I'll have more to say about that thesis in some future post. (The main point of that future post: Because Dominionists are a small group embedded seamlessly in a much larger Christian community, we need to apply counter-insurgency principles in opposing them. An over-reaction against them creates collateral damage that builds their cause. That's what's so misguided about anti-religious screeds like Sam Harris' The End of Faith.)

One of the most insightful parts of Hedges' book is a reprinting of Umberto Eco's attempt to define fascism from 1995. For Eco, one of the key elements of fascism is a "cult of tradition." Mussolini worshiped Italy's Roman heritage -- the name fascism comes from the fasces, a ceremonial weapon carried by the attendants of the Roman consuls. Hitler wasn't fascinated by the consuls or the Caesars, but idealized the spirit of the German Volk. The cult of tradition gives fascism a local element that makes it look different everywhere it appears. (By contrast, Communism has an international identity that makes it easier to spot and oppose. As the Beatles sang, "If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.") An American fascism, then, wouldn't wave swastikas and quote Hitler, it would look back to some idealized American past.

Another Eco point (there are 14 of them) is that in fascism "the enemy" plays a symbolic role that is full of contradictions. Mostly notably, the enemy is both weak and strong. (For the religious right, liberals are wimpy and yet the liberal establishment is somehow all-powerful.) In view of how things are going in Iraq and Afghanistan, this observation looks prescient: "Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy."

What a Signing Statement Looks Like

When President Bush doesn't like something in a bill that Congress passes, he usually doesn't veto it. Instead, he attaches a signing statement saying that he reserves the right to do as he pleases. After all, he's the Decider -- how dare Congress pass "laws" that try to tell him what he can and can't do?

If you've ever wondered what a signing statement looks like, here's the one he attached to the 2008 Defense Authorization Bill. The whole statement is just two paragraphs, and the content is here:

Provisions of the Act, including sections 841, 846, 1079, and 1222, purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the President's ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as Commander in Chief. The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President.

Notice that the four sections in question just "purport" to impose requirements, and that the word "including" implies that President Bush may choose not to be bound by other sections of the bill that he doesn't bother to name.

So what's in those four sections? Fortunately the law itself is a matter of public record -- we haven't gone quite that far down the rabbit hole yet. But we're left to speculate just how those sections "inhibit" the President or in what circumstances he might "construe" them. Marty Lederman on Balkinization does this kind of speculation better than I can. The easiest one to understand is Section 1222, which forbids using any of the funds appropriated in the bill to build permanent bases in Iraq. So I guess that's the plan, whether Congress likes it or not.

Muslim, Not Islamic

Juan Cole has written a really excellent article explaining what is wrong with a lot of the right-wing rhetoric about Islam, and why it's going to cause resentment for years to come. One quick point he makes: Islamic and Muslim are not synonyms. Something is Islamic if it belongs to the religion of Islam, but Muslim if it has to do with the human beings who practice Islam. For example, Islamic art would be art considered sacred within Islam, while Muslim art is just art by Muslims. If some guy named Omar paints a Coke can, that's Muslim art -- not Islamic art.

Now consider how offensive the phrase Islamic terrorist is. Muslim terrorist is just descriptive: this guy is a terrorist and he's a Muslim. Islamic terrorist, on the other hand, contains an implication that Islam itself is a terrorist religion. Islamofascism implies that Islam is a fascist religion.

I've been trying to come up with a parallel. Here's the best I can do: Guy Fawkes was a Catholic terrorist in Protestant England during the reign of King James I. Catholics at the time were sometimes called "papists," which was derogatory but also descriptive. So "papist terrorist" would have been a hostile but basically accurate description of Fawkes. On the other hand, calling him a "papal terrorist" would have implied that he had the blessing of the Pope, and that the Pope himself was a terrorist. Catholics who had nothing to do with Fawkes might well have been offended.

Neoconservative rhetoric has long tried to have it both ways. On the one hand, shortly after 9/11 President Bush tried to be reassuring: "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace." In other words, we're just fighting a small band of terrorists, we're not in a clash of civilizations with the world's one billion Muslims. But over time administration rhetoric has shifted from terms like "war on terror" to target "Islamic extremists" and "Islamic fascists." The implication -- made explicit by allies outside the administration -- is that we are at war with one billion Muslims. I guarantee you that's how they hear it.

The reader-comments attached to Cole's article are illustrative. This one collects a bunch of context-free Koran quotes to "prove" that Islam is a terrorist religion -- as if you couldn't collect a similar list out of Bible. And Cole responds.

Short Notes

The mainstream media seems not to have noticed, but casualties in Iraq are creeping up again. The monthly low was 23 American deaths in December, down from 126 in May. But we had 40 American troops die in January and we're on pace for more than that in February. The "victory" that Bush and McCain talk about seems as far away as ever.

The new FISA bill is about to pass in the Senate. Telecom immunity is still in it. The House could take it out, but that hope seems dim. Here's the latest from Glenn Greenwald. Former terrorism czar Richard Clarke comments: "it is no surprise that in one of Bush's last acts of relevance, he once again played the fear card. While he has failed in spreading democracy, stemming global terrorism, and leaving the country better off than when he took power, he did achieve one thing: successfully perpetuating fear for political gain."

Our political system is not the only one where money is eroding trust. The Daily Mail estimates that Tony Blair has made ten million pounds (around $20 million) since leaving office, including an annual salary of more than two million pounds each for advising two financial firms: J.P. Morgan and Zurich. That must be some fabulous advice he's giving.

In one of his more outrageous moments, President Bush concluded his remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday by saying "Listen, the stakes in November are high. This is an important election. Prosperity and peace are in the balance." Yep, that's what the Bush years will be remembered for: prosperity and peace. It turns out I was not the only one to be reminded of the great Onion satire of Bush's inaugural address in 2001: "Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over." And so it was.

What Impressed Me This Week: 935 Lies

2008-01-28T11:42:00.000-08:00

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

No WIMTW next week; I'm on the road. But if you happen to be in Quincy, Illinois on Sunday, you can hear me preach at the Unitarian church. The text will show up on my religious blog sometime after I get home.

Let Me Count the Ways

In this quantitative age it seems like nothing is really real until it's been counted. Well, this week the deceptions that led to the invasion of Iraq became a little more real: The Center for Public Integrity released its tabulation of the lies told by top Bush administration officials to promote and justify the invasion of Iraq. They found 935 lies in the two years following 9/11. The lies are broken down by speaker and subject, and there's a precise little bar graph totaling them up month by month. (The graph has two peaks: September, 2002 as Congress was debating the resolution to authorize the war, and February, 2003 as the last feeble attempts at peace-making were being swatted aside.)

Now, the charge that Bush, Cheney & Associates lied us into the Iraq War is not new. There are at least three standard responses to it:

Outrage. I've seen Bill O'Reilly do this more than once. Merely saying out loud that Bush lied marks you as such a rabid partisan that you're not worth listening to. Somebody who plays the outrage card right never has to look at the evidence at all.
Complete Denial. There's no way to discuss the evidence without admitting that administration officials said a lot of things that turned out not to be true. But the complete deniers say that those were all honest mistakes; the real fault lies with the CIA, which was giving the White House bad intelligence. Complete deniers usually point to similar statements by Clinton officials, or by the Germans or the French. White House Press Secretary Dana Perino (starting at about the 3 minute mark in this video) said this about the "flaws" in the CPI study: "They only looked at members of the administration rather than looking at members of Congress or people around the world. Because as you remember, we were part of a broad coalition of countries that deposed a dictator based on a collective understanding of the intelligence."
Partial Denial. Pro-war pundits and bloggers sometimes admit that a certain amount of deception was at work, but say that the cheerleading for the invasion was merely "spin" -- the kind of deception that is routine in Washington, not nearly rising to the level of "lies." And they're this close to being right: Bush frequently implied false statements without actually saying them -- like all the times when he put "Saddam" and "9-11" in the same sentence without directly saying that they were linked. "I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks on America," Bush said on March 20, 2006. When you think about it, that was an unintentional confession. Honest people don't have to be "very careful" not to say something they know is false. But you do have to be "very careful" if you want to put a false idea into someone's head without actually saying it.

Outrage continues to work as well as it ever did, but neither kind of denial stands up when you look at the statements that the CPI is calling lies.

What the intelligence services were saying before the invasion boils down to this: Saddam had poison gas in the early 90s and used it against the Kurds. He claimed to have gotten rid of it, but no one could verify that claim. Iraqi defectors with an ax to grind against Saddam told stories about other weapons programs, but the CIA did not consider them reliable sources. (That didn't stop Colin Powell from quoting them to the UN, saying: "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.") Saddam supported Palestinian terrorists, but he and Al Qaeda had different objectives and we could find no reliable evidence of a working relationship between them. Stories of attempts to import material for a nuclear program popped up occasionally: Some of them had been shown to be false, like the report of a uranium buy in Niger. Others, like the aluminum tubes, were hotly debated within our intelligence community; some experts (who ultimately proved to be correct) argued that the tubes weren't suitable for a nuclear program and had other uses. There was no evidence whatever that Saddam was planning an attack against the United States.

Having read such reports, Vice President Cheney said this: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." That's not an honest mistake. That's not spin. Simply stated, there is no doubt that Vice President Cheney is a liar.

On June 11, 2002 Donald Rumsfeld said:

I was asked a question about Iraq announcing the day before that they do not have weapons of mass destruction, and they asked me what I thought about that. I said "That's a lie," and I may have said even that "That's a world-class lie."
Now that's true; it is a lie. They do have weapons of mass destruction. They've used chemical weapons on their people, they have had an aggressive program to develop nuclear weapons, and there is no question that they are developing biological weapons. Now why did I say that? I said that because it is true. The truth has a certain virtue, it seems to me.

A lot gets shoved under the rug when Bush-defenders point to the other people who believed that Saddam had WMDs. Many people believed he still had poison gas left over from the early 90s. But if that was the whole story, then time was on our side -- just keep him contained as his weapons get older and less reliable. (That was my position at the time of the invasion.) The case for an immediate invasion depended on further assertions: Saddam was making new and better WMDs, so we had to attack now before they came on line. (As Paul Wolfowitz said on May 25, 2002: "They [the Iraqis] are working on more [WMDs], and the longer we wait, the longer it takes, the more such weapons they'll have.") Or Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda, so we needed to act before his WMDs made it into their arsenal. Those further assertions were not supported by the intelligence, and most of the experts who believed in Saddam's left-over poison gas either didn't believe them or had serious doubts.

The coolest feature of the CPI's report is the searchable database of administration statements, false or otherwise. I searched the false statements for the phrase "no doubt" and got 17 hits. And that, I think, is the meta-lie of the whole propaganda campaign: that our intelligence about Iraq ever provided the kind of certainty our government should demand before it starts shooting people.

The FISA Debate Gets Confusing

I'm unable to find the exact quote, but I have dim memories of some 19th-century commodities trader comparing the gyrations of the wheat market to watching men wrestle under a blanket: You can tell that something is happening, but you can't tell what. Well, that's how I feel about this week's FISA maneuvering in the Senate.

Here's what I do know: In August Congress passed the Protect America Act (love those names), which amended FISA to increase the President's power to spy. I was at the YearlyKos convention when this happened, and it was widely perceived there as a betrayal by the Democrats in Congress. The Democrats did manage to put a six-month sunset on the bill and promised to undo the worst of it. Instead, six months later, we're looking at a bill that not only makes the August concessions permanent, but also includes amnesty for the telecom companies who helped the administration illegally spy on American citizens without a warrant. (If that characterization is unfair, then there's no need for amnesty.)

Last week, Harry Reid seemed to be doing everything he could to carry water for the administration while appearing not to. He brought the administration's version of bill to the floor rather than an alternative that didn't have the amnesty provision, under rules that made it hard to amend. It looked like another Democratic capitulation was inevitable.

And then on Thursday, the Republicans apparently upped the ante. They did some further maneuvering to impede the passage of the bill, presumably so that President Bush could use Congress' inaction as an issue in the State of the Union address tonight. The Democrats seem to have had a reaction of "How dare you refuse to accept our surrender?" It looks like they got annoyed. There's an important vote later this afternoon about sustaining Senator Dodd's filibuster. If there aren't 60 votes to close off debate, the Senate will be all but forced to pass another temporary extension that doesn't include amnesty.

President Bush has threatened to veto such an extension, but that's a little like the scene in Blazing Saddles where the sheriff faces down a mob by taking himself hostage. Bush has been telling us for months that we're all going to die if his spying powers are allowed to lapse. He'll look ridiculous if he vetoes them.

Anyway, that's as clear as I can make it. Glenn Greenwald has more detail. The best place to keep up with events on this issue is on the FireDogLake blog.

BTW: Glenn points out an important piece of the spin war on this issue: Republicans are trying to push the false idea that FISA itself is expiring on February 1. It isn't. Only the extensions to FISA that got made in August are expiring. So if you're listening to the news and you hear something about FISA expiring, you know that you're listening to a lazy reporter who'd rather push administration spin than look up the facts.

The Horse Race

Interesting times in the Democratic presidential race. Just when it looked like Hillary Clinton was inevitable again, Obama won South Carolina with a margin that is hard to ignore. I've heard a lot of coverage of Bill Clinton's remarks reminding us that "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice." And more than one Clinton supporter has told me that Bill stepped over the line there. The Sunday talk shows were all about the theory that Bill is hurting Hillary's campaign.

The Obama campaign has done a good job of building momentum since then with high-profile endorsements. As I write this, Ted Kennedy is endorsing Obama and appears willing to campaign extensively for him. In Sunday's New York Times, Caroline Kennedy gave Obama the highest praise she can bestow: A President Like My Father. And an endorsement that is very interesting to political wonks like me is apparently coming from Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius after she's done giving the Democratic response to the State of the Union. Sebelius is a fascinating character. She's made Kansas a two-party state again by taking advantage of the disillusionment of moderate Kansas Republicans. In both of her elections, she ran with a former Republican as her lieutenant governor -- two different ones.

Now, when it comes down to Obama vs. Clinton, I'm rooting for Obama. But we need to remember that all this sturm and drang is an artifact of the campaign. Before you vote, try to put all the who-did-what-to-who out of your mind and think about who you want to be president.

On the Republican side, it looks to me like Romney is going to catch McCain in Florida, and from there who knows? Huckabee had a chance to expand his appeal in a populist direction, but it hasn't worked: He's the evangelical candidate and nothing more. Giuliani has run maybe the worst campaign of modern times, so unless the McCain and Romney campaign planes collide in mid-air, it's over for him.

Studying the exit polls, I've concluded that Romney has re-assembled the voters who elected Bush. If you think Bush basically had the right policies, but you're looking for somebody to execute and communicate them better -- then you're for Romney. Among Republicans, that's probably a majority. But I think it will result in a Democratic landslide in November.

Short Notes

This story is just too good and too symbolic: President Bush has had a painting on his wall since his days as governor of Texas. It shows a rider on horseback galloping up a trail, with a couple other people in the background. Bush believed that this painting, called "A Charge to Keep," was based on a Charles Wesley hymn whose name is similar. He seemed to think the rider was a Methodist missionary in the old West. But in fact it is an illustration for a Saturday Evening Post story from 1916. It shows a horse thief escaping a lynch mob. That's about how I would like to see Bush leave Washington next January. I don't want the mob to catch him, but they should come really, really close.

The Mike Huckabee squirrel-frying story is silly, but for some reason it's irresistible. (Maybe this is how conservatives feel about John Edwards' hair.) In this clip, Slate Video examines whether it really is possible to fry a squirrel in a popcorn popper.

The recount of the New Hampshire primary vote found what most New Hampshirites expected: The count wasn't perfect, but it was so close that the mistakes didn't matter. There was no evidence of an intent to falsify the totals. But I'm glad Dennis Kucinich demanded and paid for the recount. Hand recounts of a few random precincts ought to be standard procedure for any machine-counted ballots.

If you had planned and promoted a disastrous war, and then got booted from your next job for giving lucrative favors to your lover, you might expect to be unemployed for a while. But that's because you're not part of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. After leaving the World Bank in disgrace in May, Paul Wolfowitz landed on his feet, taking a job with the conservative American Enterprise Institute on July 2. But that was just a place to wait for the dust to settle. This week he got a new position at the State Department, as head of the International Security Advisory Board, which reports to Condoleezza Rice. You don't have to be competent, you just have to be loyal. The VRWC will take care of you.

In order to fill the ranks, the Army has to keep lowering its standards for recruits. But counter-insurgency requires a smarter, more insightful soldier than ever before. Over on Slate, Fred Kaplan explains why something has to give.

You know how the public is supposed to be even more disgusted with Congress than with President Bush? It depends on what question you ask. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll asked: "Who do you want to see take the lead role in setting policy for the country: George W. Bush or the Congress?" Answer: Congress 62%, Bush 21%.

What Impressed Me This Week: Krugman's Conscience

2008-01-21T12:36:00.000-08:00

This week I finally deliver on my promise to review Paul Krugman's new book The Conscience of a Liberal. If you don't like mine, DHinMI also reviewed the book on DailyKos.

Paul Krugman's New Book

In a readable, 273-page book, Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman retells the political/economic history of the United States from the Gilded Age until today. He does it to make a point: The amount of economic inequality in America is largely a political decision, not a result of impersonal economic forces. America became a middle-class society fairly quickly in response to the New Deal, and inequality has grown back to Gilded Age proportions because of the conservative economic policies that have been dominant since Ronald Reagan.

It's easy to imagine two ways to make this argument: In a 900-page tome dense with economic jargon and mathematics, or in a breezy polemic that sounds plausible but has no connection to rigorous thought. Krugman does neither. I wish I had a comparison that would be meaningful to a wider group of people, but what Conscience reminds me of most is the kind of discussion that used to happen every spring in Bill James' Baseball Abstract. James revolutionized the way we look at baseball -- the recent Red Sox teams were largely built on his principles -- by testing baseball's folklore against its statistics. It turned out that a lot of the stuff that "everybody knows" was wrong. And instead of inspiring a wonky priesthood that could feel superior to the game, James made those ideas accessible to enough people to change the way baseball is actually played. (The reason you don't see as many sacrifice bunts as you used to, for example, is that in most situations a guy on second with one out is actually a little less likely to score than a guy on first with nobody out. Who knew?)

Today, our national conversation about economics is full of folklore: A rising tide lifts all boats. Tax cuts pay for themselves by encouraging growth. Free trade creates more jobs than it destroys. Regulation gums up the natural efficiency of the market. Government spending is wasteful. The current stress on the middle class is nobody's fault; it's due to impersonal forces like globalization and technology.

Is any of it true? It's hard for the ordinary person to say. Those statements sound plausible. There might be a universe that works that way. But does ours? If you challenge this received wisdom, you're met with just-so stories about clever entrepreneurs who create new industries or self-important bureaucrats who write rules no one can fulfill. The stories may even be true, but maybe there are other stories that would make the opposite point, if only you knew them.

Meanwhile, there's academic economics, full of complex statistics and mathematical models you can't manage without a computer. Does any of that analysis say anything that voters can understand and use? (It turns out that occasionally it does: Tax cuts don't pay for themselves. This has been modeled five ways from Sunday, and it just doesn't work. It's no accident that both the Reagan and the Bush tax cuts led to huge deficits, while the Clinton tax increase created a surplus.)

Paul Krugman is bridging this gap.

The story without the numbers. The overall story Krugman tells can be understood without any statistics: When America was founded, it (like all other western countries at the time) had a great deal of inequality. For the next century and a half, economic growth benefited the social classes more-or-less equally, so that while America as a whole got richer, the gap between rich and poor stayed roughly the same and the middle class remained small. This persisted right up to the Great Depression, when the working class got desperate enough to throw its political weight behind a truly radical program, the New Deal. The New Deal created the safety net of social security and unemployment insurance; established a minimum wage; made government the ally rather than the enemy of unions; used wartime economic controls to raise the pay of workers in general and especially the workers at the bottom; and raised taxes on the wealthy.

The result was something Krugman calls the Great Compression. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, inequality in America shrunk drastically. Median income increased spectacularly while the rich actually got poorer. Factory workers (like my Dad) could buy houses and send their children to college. America became a middle-class-dominated society.

Politically, this went hand-in-hand with a decrease in partisanship. From Eisenhower to Nixon, Republicans stopped trying to roll back the New Deal. Truman's Cold War foreign policy was carried forward by both parties, until it ultimately resulted in victory over the Soviet Union during the administration of Bush the First. While the gap between the parties didn't go away, there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. You couldn't guess how a congressman would vote just by looking at the R or D after his name.

The snake in this Garden of Eden is what Krugman calls "movement conservatism." Starting with Goldwater, movement conservatives rejected the bipartisan consensus and re-instated the project of undoing the New Deal. First they took over the Republican Party, and then the U. S. government. Taxes on the rich were slashed and government once again became the enemy of unions. Inflation was allowed to eat away the value of the minimum wage. Policies across the board were directed towards making the rich richer.

It worked. Today, inequality is back to Gilded Age levels and we are in what Krugman calls the Second Gilded Age.

Why? One interesting question is why this worked in either direction. Krugman provides two very insightful observations: First, the working class has an inborn fear of change, even change that promises to improve its lot. If you're just barely hanging on, you put more energy into worrying about things getting worse than into hoping for things to get better. So even though there have always been more poor voters than rich ones, prior to the Depression the poor were skeptical of progressive innovations like the minimum wage. If the bosses told you that a minimum wage would get you all fired, you believed them. But after World War II, the deed was done and a new status quo ruled, so the working class supported it.

Second, in five words Krugman sums up the political shift from Lyndon Johnson to Newt Gingrich: Southern whites started voting Republican. He's got the numbers to back that statement up, and it's pretty compelling. In what is probably the book's most controversial point, he sums up the reason for that change in one word: race.

As Krugman tells the story, southern whites had been Democrats since the Civil War, but in particular they signed on to the New Deal because they were poor compared to the rest of the country. The South benefited tremendously from New Deal spending, and comparatively few southerners made enough money to give them a serious tax headache. But the southern congressmen balked when Truman tried to complete the New Deal by instituting national health insurance, largely out of fear that they'd have to integrate their hospitals. Lyndon Johnson was right when he speculated, after passing the Voting Rights Act, that he had given the South to the Republicans for a generation.

I think Krugman oversimplifies here: southern whites differ from northern whites in more than just their racial views. (The difference in religious heritage -- New England Congregationalists and midwestern Lutherans versus Southern Baptists -- also plays a role.) But this much is inarguable: The conservative coalition relies on working-class whites voting against their economic interests for social or moral reasons. A lot of people who need government help to pay for health care will vote against that help if it means that their tiny pile of tax dollars might pay for somebody else's abortion.

Quantitative reasoning. What I've told you so far is nothing more than an alternative just-so story. It's plausible. If you're already a liberal, you'll buy it just because it supports your previously-established beliefs. But what if you're not? That's a big part of what's wrong with politics today: Our political discourse is a bunch of competing monologues rather than a conversation. Liberals tell stories about homeless veterans and kids who need liver transplants. Conservatives tell stories about small businesses being taxed or regulated out of existence. How do you pull it all together?

That's what numbers are for. I can tell a story where we bunted the runner over to second base and the next batter singled him in, or I can tell a story where somebody drew a walk instead of sacrificing and we went on to have a big inning. Both stories are true, but which one points us in the right direction? There's a correct answer to that question, but you need statistics to figure it out.

Krugman is brilliant at finding the right statistics, walking an ordinary person through an economic analysis, and sending you off to chase a reference at just the right point (the point at which most people are ready to give up anyway). On page 218, for example, is a table comparing the American health care system to Canada, France, Germany, and Britain. There are two columns of numbers: spending per capita and life expectancy. The United States spent $6102 per person on health care in 2004, while none of other countries spent more than $3165. The US life expectancy was 77.5 years, while none of the other countries had less than 78.5. (Numbers come from the World Health Organization.)

How hard is that to grasp? We spend almost twice as much money and we don't live as long. You can tell plenty of true stories about Americans whose lives were saved by state-of-the-art treatment or of foreigners who died, but statements like "America has the best health care system in the world" are simply false.

OK, but even then you have competing stories about why. Maybe the explanation is that Americans choose to live a less healthy lifestyle. We do, but that only accounts for about $100 of the $3000 cost difference. Maybe we're just hypochondriacs and waste our doctors' time. Nope, Americans go to the doctor about as often as people in the other countries. Maybe it's all our frivolous malpractice suits and the extra tests doctors have to run to protect themselves. It could be, but it isn't. The difference comes down to this: The public healthcare system in other advanced countries is just more efficient than the public/private hybrid we have in this country. We'd be much better off if we adopted, say, the French system -- which the W.H.O. rates #1.

Then you run into the horror stories about people in other countries who wait in long lines to get care. Are some of them true? Yes. Are they typical? No -- look at the numbers. Americans don't get their problems dealt with any more promptly than the French or the Germans.

Good, understandable quantitative reasoning is what sets this book apart from books by other progressive authors. The reality of growing inequality, when it happened, whether it preceded or followed political change -- Krugman acknowledges other plausible explanations and shows why he rejects them.

Dissecting the conservative movement. Krugman explains very clearly something I've been puzzled by for years: Why do Republican congressmen stay in line when the Republican leadership chooses some unpopular course?

The answer is that conservatives have built an institutional structure that turns conservatism into a career rather than a philosophy. If you're loyal, you'll be taken care of for life -- no matter what the voters say.

Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy. That is, there is an interlocking set of institutions ultimately answering to a small group of people that collectively reward loyalists and punish dissenters

Krugman contrasts two Republican senators defeated in 2006: loyal conservative Rick Santorum, whose landslide defeat was cushioned by immediately landing a cushy job as director of the "America's Enemies" project at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, and maverick Lincoln Chafee, whose loss was in large part engineered by a well-funded right-wing primary challenge, and who managed to find a one-year teaching position at Brown. Politicians get the message: It's better to stick with the party leadership than to represent your constituents.

An interesting tangent is to point out that the incompetence of the Bush administration isn't a coincidence. Loyalty-over-competence is a generic trait of the conservative movement. Mitt Romney is a much smarter and harder-working person than George Bush. But if he's elected he'll be appointing the same collection of ideologues whose main qualification is their loyalty. Brownies will continue to do a heckuva job.

The take-home message. The shrinking of the middle class was a political decision, not some unfortunate side-effect of impersonal market forces. We could fix it by reversing that political decision: make healthcare coverage universal, tax the rich, raise the minimum wage, and tilt the playing field back in the direction of unions.

This Week in the Huckabee Campaign

I'm not making this up. On MSNBC's Morning Joe show, Mike Huckabee told about frying squirrels in a popcorn popper back in his student days. And that led to this photoshopped image by DailyKos humorist Dood Abides.

I wish I were making this up: Huckabee advisor Jim Pinkerton thinks we should put a cop in front of every mosque in America. Or this quote from the candidate himself:

I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.

In case you haven't received a call from a Huckabee push poll, here's what they're like.

And finally, people are starting to go back and read Huckabee's writings and connect them to the Christian Dominionist movement. His 1997 book Character is the Issue contains this:

Ours will either be a worldview with humans at the center or with God at the center. Standards of right and wrong are either what we establish as human beings (standards which can be changed to suit us), or they are what God has set in motion since the creation of the world. … The winning worldview will dominate public policy, the laws we make, and every other detail of our existence.

Short Notes

If you've been wondering what's really behind all that crazy behavior from Britney Spears, Kung Fu Monkey has it all figured out: It's a spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold operation.

A few weeks ago I told you about the Washington Post spreading baseless rumors about Obama being a Muslim. Well, this week the Post's Richard Cohen wrote a column drawing some tenuous connection between Obama and Louis Farrakhan. It was roundly denounced as an attempt to scare Jewish voters away from Obama. The best debunking I found came from novelist Michael Chabon.

Steve Emerson, who Sean Hannity introduces as a "terrorism expert", tells the Fox News audience about a conspiracy of jihadists within the Pentagon. There are only so many ways to go paranoid, so the crazies tend to go into re-runs. Can't you just hear Joe McCarthy talking about Communists in the State Department?

Al Franken's former teacher wanted to help with his campaign for the Senate seat in Minnesota, so he had her make a campaign ad for him.

The Asia Times isn't buying the Pentagon's account of last week's incident in the Persian Gulf.

Glenn Greenwald keeps us up to date on the FISA bill. Reports of the death of telecom immunity were greatly exaggerated. More and more, Harry Reid is turning into the villain of this story.

What Impressed Me This Week: the Clinton Upset

2008-01-14T12:23:00.000-08:00

I met a lady who had traveled three times round the world in order to escape circumstances, but she always came to a world where there were still circumstances. -- Carl Jung

I don't know what hurt worse Wednesday morning: That Clinton-Obama-Edwards was the reverse of the order I was rooting for, or that my predictions were so embarrassingly wrong. In case you forgot: I thought the polls were underestimating the size of the Obama wave. Remember that the next time I predict something.

Last Tuesday Night

So Deb gets home from work and we walk over to a nearby school to vote. There's a Hillary hanger on our apartment door. We meet some Hillary people on the walk over. At the polling place, only Hillary people are waving signs.

We vote, and then decide we're going to walk over to Martha's, the brewpub on Main Street, with the idea that we're going to make a cheap if not very healthy dinner out of the half-price appetizers they serve until six. Turns out, that's where the Obama people are, having a pre-victory-party party. The guy sitting next to me at the bar is some kind of freelance political operative who tonight is a driver for Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter, the rep from New Hampshire's other congressional district. He claims to recognize my pseudonym (Pericles) on DailyKos, so we're best buddies. (Tip for political types everywhere: Don't try to bribe bloggers, just treat them like they're important. We respond like geeks who suddenly find themselves hanging with the cool kids.)

Deb spots HBO star Larry David over on the other side of the room. At some point I turn away from the TV above the bar and see Senator Dick Durbin standing over my shoulder, watching the returns come in just like me, except that I've got a seat. Other nearby people are on the phone. One says, "Manchester's going for Hillary. That can't be right."

Another local guy at the bar reports voting for Hillary, but he can't for the life of him figure out why. He seems genuinely puzzled, like the victim of a post-hypnotic suggestion. A female high school teacher steals my seat while I'm in the bathroom and winds up sitting between me and Deb. She keeps talking about "Chillary", a nickname she claims to have coined herself. I think she voted for Edwards.

The actual victory party -- assuming there's a victory, which is starting to look questionable -- is supposed to be at one of the Nashua high schools. But the rumor is that Obama is coming here at eight. Most polls closed at seven, so that should have allowed plenty of time for the networks to project him the winner. (McCain's victory is called by then, and that race was supposed to be close.) But Clinton's early 2-4% lead barely wavers as the returns keep coming in.

By nine, Obama still hasn't shown. My new best friend went outside to take a phone call and hasn't been seen since. Shea-Porter and Durbin might have vanished into puffs of smoke, if smoking hadn't been illegal in New Hampshire bars for a year now. Larry David is looking glum. I really shouldn't have drunk that last scotch ale somebody bought me, and if I hang around much longer I'm going to get glum too. Time to go home.

Did Hillary Really Win?

Yes. A bunch of blogs have speculated that the vote might have been hacked, and some unscrupulous newspapers have picked up the story, but it doesn't seem very likely. The big reasons to suspect fraud are (1) the surprise of Clinton's win; (2) that Clinton won in precincts counted by machine while Obama won in precincts counted by hand.

A couple of good analyses of the situation are here and here. The main points are:

Clinton's win was a big surprise based on the pre-election predictions of an Obama landslide, but the exit polls pointed to a much closer race.
New Hampshire votes on paper ballots, not on those awful touch-screen voting machines with no paper trail. "Machine counted" means that the paper ballots were tabulated by running them through optical scanning machines. The machines are made by Diebold and are known to be hackable, but they aren't networked. You'd have to hack them one by one.
Machine-counting happens in the cities, hand-counting mainly in the small towns. It's not really surprising that they might favor different candidates in a close race.

Anyway, the paper ballots are still around and Kucinich has asked for a recount -- not because he thinks he won, but because he wants to insure the credibility of the process. I'm glad he did, because I think the recount (by hand) will show that the counting was honest.

So What Did Happen?

There are two questions here: Why were the results different from the pre-election polls? And why were they different from the Iowa caucus results? The polling question is technical and I find it less interesting, so I'll point you to this reference. But what changed between Iowa and New Hampshire?

Let's start with facts and work back to explanations. The election results are the hardest facts, followed by the exit polling about who the voters were and why they voted the way they did.

Turnout. As in Iowa, there was a huge turnout advantage for the Democrats: 270,000-210,000. If this were one big primary, McCain would have finished third behind Clinton and Obama. (In Iowa, Republican winner Huckabee would have finished fourth.) The New York Times' Ron Klain sums up:

In the three decades since 1980, there have been four primary years when both the G.O.P. and the Democratic nominations were contested – 1988, 1992, 2000 and 2008. In all three of the previous elections, there were more votes cast in the Republican primaries than in the Democratic primaries. The G.O.P. margin was almost 40,000 votes in 1988 and almost 80,000 votes in 2000. So to see more votes cast in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary last night than in the state’s Republican one — not to mention 60,000 more votes — is almost as historic as seeing a one-two finish by a woman and an African-American.

This is part of a larger trend in New Hampshire. In 2006 we not only re-elected a Democratic governor with over 70% of the vote. We also put Democratic majorities in both houses of the legislature and turned over our entire Congressional delegation: We replaced our two Republican congressmen with two Democrats. We're a blue state now. Senator Sununu should be worried about November.

Clinton's edge. Clinton had a 2% margin over Obama, 39-37%, or about 7,500 votes. The only thing that makes this primary feel like a rejection of Obama is that expectations were so high going in. Edwards was third with 17%, which has to be a huge blow to him. There's going to be a lot of pressure for the non-Hillary vote to unite behind one candidate, which has to be Obama at this point.

According to the exit polls, Clinton got her margin over Obama from women (46-34%, a 12% margin), older voters (16% margin in the over-65 group), and the less well-off (15% margin among those with household income less than $50K).

Now let's compare to Iowa. Obama got 35% in Iowa and 37% in New Hampshire, so you're not looking at a voters-abandon-Obama story. And Clinton-plus-Edwards got 56% in New Hampshire versus 59% in Iowa. So the question to be answered is where Edwards' support went to Clinton.

The age factor also showed up in Iowa. According to the Iowa entrance polls, Obama had a 46% margin over Clinton in the under-30 age group, but Clinton had a 27% edge in the over-65 group. The interesting difference is that Edwards won the 45-64 age group in Iowa with 31%, but he got only 21% of the 50-64 group in New Hampshire. (I'm not playing tricks with the groupings; CNN is.) Obama got 30% of the 50-64 group in New Hampshire, almost the same as the 27% of 45-65-year-olds he got in Iowa. So one answer is: Middle-aged people shifted from Edwards to Clinton.

Obama narrowly won the under-$50K income group in Iowa (34-32% over Clinton). In New Hampshire he loses it (47-32%). The only notable difference in this group between Iowa and New Hampshire is that Clinton's support shoots up. It comes in dribs and drabs from all the other candidates.

Now let's look at gender. In both New Hampshire and Iowa, women were 57% of the electorate. (There's a corresponding male advantage among Republicans. It's not that women vote and men don't.) But Obama won the women's vote in Iowa 35-30% over Clinton. He lost it 46-34% in New Hampshire. His margin over Clinton among men was almost the same: 12% in Iowa and 11% in New Hampshire. Obama didn't lose female support; Clinton gained it. Edwards+Richardson is 30% of the female vote in Iowa, but only 18% in New Hampshire. Women shifted from Edwards and Richardson to Clinton.

The temptation is to lump the three factors together and imagine that middle-aged working-class women moved in one big lump from the non-Obama male candidates to Clinton. None of the polling data I can find is refined enough to say anything about that small a niche of the population, but let's imagine it. Why would they do that between Iowa and New Hampshire? And why would they poll differently on the weekend than they voted on Tuesday?

I'm not buying the Clinton-humanized-herself-by-crying explanation. I don't know why; maybe just because I haven't bothered to watch the video. But I remember several political conversations I've had with women over the last year. They'd claim to be undecided, but if anybody criticized Clinton they'd bristle as if they'd been criticized themselves. Here's what I think happened during the Clinton-bashing media orgy between Iowa and New Hampshire. At first those middle-aged working-class women got depressed, so when the pollsters called on Saturday they said they were undecided or that they weren't voting. And then somewhere around Monday night they got mad and decided to do something about it.

I have no idea whether such an effect would carry over into the next primaries.

Did I Do the Right Thing?

Last week, right before I voted for Edwards, I wrote: "I would like to live in an America where Kucinich is a viable candidate."

I expected to get comments on that, and I did. "Kucinich is viable if you vote for him," someone wrote. "Don’t let the media tell you who is viable. They have their own agenda."

I thought about that, and I wrote an answer so long I decided to make a separate post out of it. You can find it on my own blog or on DailyKos.

Short Notes

Remember the National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran had discontinued its nuclear weapons program? Newsweek claims that Bush is privately telling other world leaders that he doesn't believe it.

We're supposed to give amnesty to the telcom companies for spying on us because they're so patriotic. They are, that is, until the government doesn't pay its bill. Apparently the FBI fell behind on its payments due to some bookkeeping snafu, and the telephone companies cut off their wiretaps.

As the Democrats apparently realize and the Republicans don't, negative campaigning only works in a two-candidate race. Unfortunately, we seem to have arrived there now. TPM-TV pulls it together.

My nominee for the most wrong-headed article of the week is the NYT op-ed We Still Need the Big Guns by Air Force General Charles Dunlap. Dunlap is worried that we're learning the wrong lessons from our success in Iraq -- the whole "hearts and minds" thing. "Starry-eyed enthusiasts [of the new counter-insurgency manual] ... dismiss as passé killing or capturing insurgents." He worries that this attitude might lead to something truly awful: less money for new airplanes. Dunlap points out that success in Iraq has come the old-fashioned way: more troops, more bombs, killing and imprisoning more people. JesseLE on DailyKos asks the obvious follow-up question: "Why not just kill everybody?" This is a good time to plug one of the most popular things I ever wrote, Terrorist Strategy 101: a Quiz. It's from 2004 and I predict an attack that still hasn't happened, but otherwise it holds up very well.

Quoting a study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, The Financial Times says that the United States now has a higher rate of deaths due to treatable diseases than any other industrialized country. We've slipped behind medical powerhouses like Portugal. The authors note that the U.S. slide in the rankings "has coincided with an increase in the uninsured population." Jerome a Paris sharpens the point by comparing our death-due-to-treatable-disease rate to the world's best: "Each year 101,000 Americans die needlessly because they're not French."

The Supreme Court is getting set to rule on one of the centerpieces of the long-term Republican project to keep marginalized citizens from voting: the Indiana law that requires voters to have a picture ID. Slate covers the issue pretty well. This is one of many interesting legal cases covered by Christy Hardin-Smith in her "Between the Briefs" summary.

CNN pundit Paul Begala relates a ridiculous story about Fox News. After Iowa, they reported he was joining the Clinton campaign. It wasn't true, but OK, these things happen. So Begala called Fox reporter Major Garrett to deny the story. Instead of correcting the story, Garrett kept repeating it. He emailed Begala that "the sourcing is strong, very strong, or I wouldn't go with it." So somebody more authoritative than Begala himself was telling Garrett that Begala had taken a new job.

It would be interesting to hear a thoughtful conservative columnist's assessment of the Democratic turnout in Iowa and New Hampshire, which (as I described above) swamped Republican turnout. Is the sky falling on Republicans, or does some other explanation not point to a Democratic landslide in November? Here's David Brooks' thoughtful assessment: It didn't happen. His #1 Surprise of the New Hampshire primary was: "Republicans voted in nearly the same numbers as Democrats." That's why he gets the big bucks, I guess.

I disapprove of Democrats voting Republican to screw up the Michigan primary, but the Democrats for Romney spoof is hilarious.

Two Huckabee links: Huckabee telling MSNBC's Joe Scarborough that Fred Thompson needs some Metamucil. And Dave Sirota urging Huckabee to keep talking about class issues.

Last week I promised a review of Paul Krugman's new book Conscience of a Liberal. Another bad prediction: I didn't get it written in time. I'll try again next week.

Arguing With the Ghost of Eugene Debs

2008-01-14T12:18:00.000-08:00

It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it. – Eugene Debs

In my last pre-primary post – when I re-affirmed that I was voting for John Edwards -- I wrote: "I would like to live in an America in which Kucinich is a viable candidate." I knew I would hear about that, and I did. A Kucinich supporter reminded me of all the issues where Kucinich and I agree: single-payer health care, impeachment, leaving Iraq, no torture, civil liberties. "Kucinich is viable if you vote for him," his email said. "Don’t let the media tell you who is viable. They have their own agenda."

Now that New Hampshire is quiet again, I can think more calmly and clearly: Was he right?

The Pragmatic Ladder
Looking back, framing my decision as pragmatic compromise (Edwards) versus idealism (Kucinich) is too simple. Because I had a whole ladder of choices, each of which balanced pragmatism and idealism differently.

At the one extreme is Clinton, who I will happily vote for in November if it comes to that, but would rather not see nominated. I’ve searched my masculine heart for sexism and decided I’d feel the same way if Bill could run for a third term. The Clintons are skillful at managing problems as they come up, but they don’t change the agenda. I want a new national agenda.

Next comes Obama, who (if you believe the polls and pundits) is our best chance to get a nominee other than Clinton. On Tuesday, as the returns rolled in and it was clear how close Obama came to winning, I wondered if I had made a mistake by not compromising enough. But Obama’s inclusive conciliatory campaign rhetoric seems wrong-headed to me. The Republicans don’t compromise with us because they don’t respect us. And maybe they shouldn’t: We haven’t proved that we can take a principled stand and hold it to the bitter end.

Then Edwards, whose combative stance is the one we’re eventually going to have to come to if we’re not going to surrender this country to the super-rich and the theocrats. But his positions represent a compromise: His health plan could eventually lead to a single-payer system, but he doesn’t just take a stand and explain to the voters why single-payer is the way to go. And seriously defending the rule of law means impeaching Bush and sending a bunch of people to jail. Edwards isn’t willing to go there.

Then Kucinich, for the reaons I’ve already given. (And Dodd and Gravel, for different but similar reasons).

But it’s an illusion to imagine that the ladder stops here – that Kucinich represents uncompromising idealism. Because the truly uncompromising thing would have been to write in a vote for myself.

Nobody represents my views as well as I do. Nobody agrees with me 100%. Nobody would do exactly what I would do. There’s nobody I trust as much as I trust myself. In a campaign of ideals, a campaign that takes place entirely within my own head, without reference to polls or pundits or what anybody else thinks -- I win. Me for President.

It’s only when you recognize that last option that the real issue starts to take shape. Compromise isn’t some evil that needs to be banished from our electoral process. Compromise is one of the two great virtues that democracy is based on.

Courage and Compromise
Now let’s get theoretical. In order for a democracy to work, the people need to have two virtues: courage and compromise. Courage means standing up and saying what you believe, even if it’s unpopular or if someone is trying to intimidate you. Think Nelson Mandela. Think Martin Luther King and all the people marching over the Edmund Pettus bridge. As Pete Seeger sang: "I ain’t scared of your jail."

If nobody has that kind of courage, democracy doesn’t last. It doesn’t matter what your constitution or your laws say. Our constitution says that American citizens have a right to due process of law. But when President Bush declared Jose Padilla an enemy combatant and imprisoned him indefinitely, hardly anybody stood up for him. I could have taken a protest sign and tried to see how close to Padilla’s brig I could get before they arrested me, but I didn’t. If we’d all done that, if we’d made them lock us all up, something would have happened. Maybe those words in the Constitution would have meant something again.

But if you want to see the opposite problem, look at Iraq. Iraqis have a lot of courage – some to the point that they’re willing to blow themselves up for their beliefs. In their December, 2005 elections even voting required a certain amount of courage, yet they had a turnout that puts us to shame: 80%. If courage could make a democracy, Iraq really would be the shining model Bush promised.

The problem – and this was predictable from Day 1 – is that the Iraqis can’t put together a consensus to get anything done. Even the "winners" of the Iraqi elections (with 41% and 22% of the vote) were loose coalitions of parties that had to divvy up seats in Parliament until nobody had more than a handful. Those parties themselves seethe with internal distrust, and few voters trust any of them. So nothing happens. If nothing happens for long enough, people will give up on democracy and demand either (1) a dictator like Saddam or (2) a division of the country into units that do have majority coalitions.

Choosing the right leader or putting together the right program – something we keep trying to do for them from the outside – isn’t enough. Programs and leaders don’t make majority coalitions by themselves. People have to make them by compromising wisely.

Making the Trade-off
In order for democracy to work for you, you need to have the courage to stand up for your highest concerns even if no one agrees with you, and you need to compromise enough to find your way into a majority coalition. You usually can’t do both at the same time. So when do you do which?

The rule of thumb is pretty simple, and it works in small groups, in Congress, and in the electorate as a whole: Be courageous and idealistic early in the process and shift gradually towards pragmatism and compromise as the decision approaches.

That corporate-media-with-its-own-agenda my critic was writing about tries to get us to compromise too soon, before we’ve said what we wanted at all. Anything other than what the Powers-That-Be are ready to give us is impossible, and you’d do best to keep your powder dry and not ask. That’s the way it’s always been. American independence was impossible. Abolition of slavery was impossible. Old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, college scholarships – why even talk about such things?

The destructive thing about the cult-of-the-possible is that it’s self-fulfilling. People don’t want to "waste" their energy on impossible dreams, but some things are only impossible because nobody is willing to try them. People don’t speak out because they think they’d be alone, but maybe millions of people are silently having the same ideas. You don’t really know something’s impossible until you try.

But at some point people have tried and you do know – at least for this cycle. By the time I voted, Kucinich had argued hard for his program and I knew that he had gotten no delegates in Iowa. The entrance polls there gauged his support around 1-2%, and the pre-election polls in New Hampshire were similar. He wasn’t going to be elected in 2008 whether I voted for him or not.

The polls were also running against Edwards, but an Edwards victory and ultimate nomination was within the bounds of a reasonable upset. That’s where I decided to put the small weight of my vote.

As the Process Continues
If I had a vote in South Carolina or Nevada, I’m not sure what I’d do. Maybe I’d still hold out for Edwards, but I can also see the argument that it’s time to compromise a little further on Obama. And if Clinton is nominated, it will be time to compromise further yet. Because that’s the only way I can see my concerns making it into a majority coalition.

That, by the way, is why I respect Dennis Kucinich more than Ralph Nader. Kucinich in 2004 raised the liberal agenda in the primaries, argued hard for it, and supported Kerry in November. He was idealistic early in the process and pragmatic late. I expect him to do the same this year.

Nader, on the other hand, treated compromise as a vice. Whenever someone points out that the Nader voters could have made the difference and elected Gore rather than Bush, they raise a lot of sophistic arguments about Nader’s right to run and so on. Of course Nader had a right to run for president. We all have the right to run for president and we all could vote for ourselves. But that would show an Iraqi-like lack of the compromising virtue. It would be stupid.

The Long Run
Of course, you get to decide for yourself what time frame you’re working on, whether you’re playing for 2008 or for 2020 or whenever. A lot of Debs’ radical ideas eventually did make it into a majority coalition – in the New Deal. Maybe Nader’s ideas will too.

But if they do, I don’t think it will happen by slowly growing Kucinich's totals from 1% to 5% to a majority. Or by the Greens growing into a majority party. Instead, I think watered-down progressive ideas will make it into a Democratic administration, and they’ll work. And people will want more of them. I don’t know whether a President Obama or President Clinton can achieve national health insurance at all, let alone single-payer. But I think s/he will be able to get all the children insured. And it will work and people will like it. And then it will grow.

What Impressed Me This Week: In the Spotlight

2008-01-07T12:35:00.000-08:00

Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. -- Franklin Roosevelt

With the Iowa caucuses over, New Hampshire moves into the spotlight. Everything that has been building for months is coming to a peak: The phone rings constantly. We get about half a dozen glossy color brochures in the mail every day. I suppose it speaks well for the integrity of the American voting process that in spite of all the money being spent to persuade me, no one has offered me any of it directly. At least not yet.

What Happened in Iowa

Obama did exactly what his people said he would do: He inspired large numbers of new voters, especially young voters, to come out and participate. Iowans did not reject Clinton or Edwards, each of whom produced supporters in numbers that should have been enough to win. But Obama did better.

The turnout story means two things to me: First, it is huge news for Democrats looking ahead to November. Iowa is a swing state. It went for Bush in 2004 and for Gore in 2000 -- both times by less than 1%. But despite the fact that the Democratic caucus process was more cumbersome and time-consuming than the Republican process, they drew 239,000 participants to the Republicans' 116,000. If you lump the two parties together, Huckabee finished fourth behind Obama, Edwards, and Clinton.

Second, it means that Obama has to be on the ticket somewhere. If he doesn't win the nomination, he has to be the first choice for vice president. The Democrats absolutely cannot let the energy he has raised turn sour. I remember the conversations on DailyKos four years ago, as the first-time voters that Dean had inspired got discouraged by his defeat. As a group, young people tend to be skeptical of politics, and they easily lapse into an attitude of "I tried voting. It didn't work." It's fine if their candidate falls short, but it's a disaster if they come out feeling that the Democratic Party has rejected them.

Meanwhile, at the Center of the Universe

For months I've been keeping track of the candidates through the BirdDog Calendar of PriotiesNH. Sunday they listed 28 separate candidate appearances: three in Nashua, where I live, another three in the neighboring towns of Milford and Hollis, and seven just up the road in Manchester. I went to none of them. It's all gotten to be too much.

This year I failed in my goal of seeing all the candidates in person. I saw Clinton, Richardson, and Obama, Edwards twice, and Edwards' wife once. And I got to sit down one-on-one with Mike Gravel, which was a hoot even if he has no chance to win. I regret not seeing Dennis Kucinich and Chris Dodd, with whom I agree on most issues. I would like to live in an America where Kucinch is a viable candidate.

On the Republican side I saw Thompson and McCain, which was really about all I could stand. I confess to being curious about the people who go to Huckabee rallies. But Huckabee hasn't spent much time in New Hampshire, and for reasons I can't fathom he has mainly campaigned in the far north where no one lives. (I suspect he has the moose vote all wrapped up.) If I were younger I would absolutely go to a Giuliani rally, which would be like staying up late to watch a horror movie. (Check out Rudy's scary ad.) Afterwards, I'm sure I would have nightmares about torture and wars even bigger and more pointless than the ones we're fighting now. And Romney ... I've come to believe that the real Romney is the image you see on television. At rallies I'll bet they hand out green-and-red glasses to make him pop into three dimensions.

Why I'm Voting for the "Angry" Candidate. For months now I've been telling people I'm voting for Edwards, and most of them have looked puzzled. Usually they assume that I support the white guy because I think the country isn't ready to elect a woman or a black as president. Or maybe because I'm not ready.

Actually, that's not it. If Obama or Clinton get nominated, I think they'll do fine -- though I expect Obama's young supporters to be shocked by how nasty things get in the general election. (Remember the Harold Ford "call me" commercial from the 2006 Senate race in Tennessee? That kind of nasty.) But Hillary is tough and Obama will surprise people in the one-on-one debates the same way the too-young, too-inexperienced Jack Kennedy did.

I'm supporting Edwards because of something positive about Edwards: He's done the best job putting forward a progressive message and bringing substance to the campaign. Clinton and Obama were just spouting vague intentions about universal health care when Edwards put forward his plan, which they then had to try to match. And Edwards openly says that (if the government part of his plan outperforms the private-sector part, as it probably will) his plan could evolve into a single-payer plan, which is what makes the most sense. Other than Kucinich, I haven't heard anybody else say the words "single-payer".

That's typical. On issue after issue, Edwards has been the candidate forcing the others to offer more substance. But if you get your news from the mainstream media, you know only two things about Edwards: He got an expensive haircut, and he's the "angry" candidate.

"Angry" is the label they hung on Howard Dean four years ago, and I think they're going to apply it to anyone with a strong progressive message. I wonder what our pundit class would make of the candidate who said this about the big-money interests:

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me -- and I welcome their hatred.

That "angry" candidate was FDR in 1936. (Thanks to Paul Krugman for finding this example. I plan to review his book next week.) Roosevelt recognized something that often gets swept under the rug today: If you try to improve the lot of the general population, some very powerful people will fight you. Not because they have a different idea of how to improve the lot of the general population, but because their interest runs in the opposite direction.

So, for example, Exxon-Mobil has spent millions of dollars to obfuscate the global warming issue. Why? Because making the world a better place for Exxon-Mobil necessarily means making it a worse place for future generations. The Exxon-Mobil people understand this very clearly.

If the next administration gets serious about universal health care, drug and insurance companies will spend millions to obfuscate that issue, as they did in 1994. They will do this not because they have a better way to offer health care, but because their profits depend on restricting access to health care and making it as expensive as possible. They also understand this very clearly.

We need to understand it too. We need leaders who will tell us these things, and who will rally public support in favor of the public interest -- as Roosevelt did. But in the current climate, all you will hear about such leaders is that they are "angry".

What I Expect to Happen. I think Obama's going to win New Hampshire, probably by a wider margin than the polls predict. There's a psychological dynamic going on here that I don't think the major media understands: New Hampshire Democrats don't see why this process needs to go on any longer. We're generally happy with all the major Democratic candidates, and we're very tired of the campaign. We're looking for a way to end it as fast as possible.

I feel that pressure myself. When I picture an Obama landslide that convinces everyone that the nomination is wrapped up, I get this pleasant opiated feeling. When I picture Edwards or Clinton winning, I think: "This could go on for months." It's a wearying prospect. I intend to fight that feeling and vote for Edwards, but I expect a lot of people to give in to it -- especially people who have been supporting candidates with no chance to win like Richardson or Dodd or Kucinich.

On the Republican side things are completely different. Republicans are not ready for the process to be over, especially if it means nominating one of the current candidates. I heard Bill Kristol fantasizing on TV about a deadlocked convention that turned to Cheney. (Go, Bill! Democrats could take all 50 states in that scenario.) That's extreme, but I think it reflects a larger mood: Republicans have been hoping for a year that someone would ride over the hill and save them. Fred Thompson was supposed to do that. Maybe Newt Gingrich will. Or somebody. If the Republicans had an Al Gore, which they don't, they'd be begging him to run even at this late date. If Ahnold the Governator were native-born, there'd be a movement to draft him.

McCain has a small lead over Romney in the polls, and I expect it to stand up. But perversely, I believe McCain is being hurt by the media types who have been fawning over him lately. If New Hampshire Republicans think there is a chance they might start a juggernaut that will sweep McCain to the nomination, they'll get cold feet. They're not ready for that. Romney's negative ads aren't helping either McCain or Romney, so look for one of the minor candidates not to win, but to do much better than the polls predict, as a none-of-the-above vote. Ron Paul, maybe. (I'm rooting for Paul to finish ahead of Giuliani again.) Or maybe even Fred Thompson.

High Points of the Republican Debate

Here are some quotes from the transcript of Saturday's Republican debate. Rudy Giuliani on President Bush:

GIULIANI: The president set a whole different mindset. It was: Let's anticipate, let's see if we can prevent another attack. That led to Afghanistan, it led to Iraq, it's led to the Patriot Act, it's led to electronic surveillance, it's led to changing our intelligence services. All that is very, very good.

And there's no point asking whether Muslims or Arabs have any legitimate gripe with us:

GIULIANI: there's an Islamic, terrorism threat against us. It's an existential threat. It has nothing to do with our foreign policy. It has to do with their ideas, their theories, the things that they have done and the way they've perverted their religion into a hatred of us. And what's at stake are the things that are best about us: our freedom of religion, our freedom for women, our right to vote, our free economic system. Our foreign policy is irrelevant -- totally irrelevant.

When challenged by Ron Paul, Giuliani lumped together any terrorist act ever committed by Muslims against anyone, including the PLO's Munich Olympic massacre in 1972. Palestinian nationalism, jihadism ... it's all the same. And Huckabee agrees that there's no reason to try to remove the beam from our own eyes before going after the mote in the eyes of radical Muslims:

HUCKABEE: They are prompted by the fact they believe that they must establish a worldwide caliphate that has nothing to do with us other than we live and breathe and their intention is to destroy us.

Romney has learned the fine art of embedding evangelical Christian code words in his answers.

ROMNEY: I believe it's essential for America to stand for principles of an eternal nature.

Ron Paul undoes the New Deal:

PAUL: Free market economics is the truly compassionate system. If we care about the poor and want to help the poor, you have to have free markets. You can't have a welfare state in order to try to take care of people.

Giuliani, Thompson, and McCain all made some version of this statement: "America has the best health care system in the world." (In 2000, the World Health Organization ranked France first and us 37th.) And here's what Mitt Romney thinks is wrong:

ROMNEY: The reason health care isn't working like a market right now is you have 47 million people that are saying, "I'm not going to play. I'm just going to get free care paid for by everybody else."

And then McCain took a page out of John Edwards' book:

MCCAIN: How could pharmaceutical companies be able to cover up the cost to the point where nobody knows? Why shouldn't we be able to reimport drugs from Canada? It's because of the power of the pharmaceutical companies. We should have pharmaceutical companies competing to take care of our Medicare and Medicaid patients.
ROMNEY: OK, don't leave me. Don't send the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys.
MCCAIN: Well, they are.
ROMNEY: No, actually they're trying to create products to make us well and make us better, and they're doing the work of the free market.

God bless those benevolent pharmaceutical companies, Mitt. God bless us one and all.

Distractions

This week I have two non-political books to recommend. The first, Edmund and Rosemary Go To Hell by Bruce Eric Kaplan, is for adults but is written in the style of a kids' book, with Thurber-style line drawings and only a sentence or two on each page. It takes about ten minutes to read. Edmund and Rosemary are a middle-aged couple who come up with a novel explanation for why everything from cellphones to air travel is so annoying: They're in Hell. How they cope with this epiphany turns into a very sweet story.

The second, Gentlemen of the Road, is the latest novel from one of my favorite authors, Michael Chabon. Chabon is a serious writer -- he won a Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay -- who is not afraid to write in genres that are not considered serious. So Gentlemen is a medieval adventure set in the sort-of-Jewish silk-road kingdom of Khazaria. (Chabon claims his working title was "Jews With Swords.") You get the Arabian-Nights flavor of the book from its first sentence: "For numberless years a myna had astounded travelers to the caravansary with its ability to spew indecencies in ten languages, and before the fight broke out everyone assumed the old blue-tongued devil on its perch by the fireplace was the one who maligned the giant African with such foulness and verve."

Correction: Iowa Actually Has Immigrants

Tom Stites (who used to edit my stuff until he retired from UU World last June) points out that Iowa has more illegal immigrants than I implied last week. They come to work in the meat-packing plants, and I don't think my Illinois home town (which I used as a basis for comparison) has any of those. Iowa Public Television estimates that 55-85,000 non-citizens live in Iowa. (That's total non-citizens, not just illegal immigrants.) McClatchy Newspapers says: "Since 1990, the number of Hispanics in Iowa has increased from 32,647, which was then 1.2 percent of the state's population, to 112,987, or 3.8 percent of the current population of 2.9 million." (Again, including legal residents.) An article in the Communist newspaper Revolutionary Worker makes an interesting connection between the immigrants and union-busting by the meat-packers.

I was definitely too snarky about it last week, but I don't think this information alters my basic conclusion: I still believe illegal immigration is largely a scapegoat issue. The Iowa meat-packing problem would be most easily handled by cracking down on the packers, but the popular anger focuses on the immigrants. An MSNBC entrance poll from the Iowa caucuses says that 33% of Republicans named illegal immigration as the most important problem facing the United States. I continue to think that statistic requires a psychological explanation.

Short Notes

I'm getting very tired of hearing the media tell me that the Surge has worked. In Saturday's Democratic debate, ABC's Baghdad correspondent Terry McCarthy presented the Surge's success as a simple fact and moderator Charles Gibson challenged the candidates to admit that they'd been wrong about it. (The Republicans, by contrast, were asked questions like "What principles will you stand on?") In December, 23 American troops got killed, the lowest number since February, 2004, and down from 126 in May. When you put it that way, it looks great. But try putting it like this: What goal did we achieve in December that was worth the lives of 23 Americans? What is this entire war going to accomplish that is worth the life of one American?

On Fox News Frank Lunz seems to be pushing Romney. Lunz's "focus groups" are always more propaganda exercises than attempts to understand the public mood, but the one after Sunday's Republican debate was particularly striking. Remember, Lunz not only manages the discussion, he picks the participants.

TPM announced the Golden Duke Awards for 2007. And Tom Tomorrow finished his review of the year.

Several liberal heavy hitters have weighed in on the presidential race. DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas talked through the candidates and concluded that he's undecided. The DailyKos community continues to be solidly for Edwards. Michael Moore didn't formally endorse anyone, but his letter sure reads like an endorsement of Edwards. Bill Bradley endorsed Obama.

Bush is pushing for another unnecessary Constitutional crisis. Will Congressional Democrats ever meet the challenge?

The leaders of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission all but accused the Bush administration of obstruction of justice in regard to the now-destroyed CIA interrogation tapes. That was a one-day story that seems to have vanished from the national agenda. I almost forgot it myself.

Finally, I'm giving serious thought to making this weekly series its own blog and changing its name. Originally, I thought it would be almost entirely links to other articles, and that I'd write very little of it myself. But as I write more, the title makes it sound like what impressed me this week was me. My current favorite title is: The Weekly Skim.

What Impressed Me This Week: Waiting for Iowa

2007-12-31T12:51:00.000-08:00

As long as Property exists ... accumulations of it will be made. The snowball will grow as it rolls. -- John Adams

This is the Pigmobile, which PrioritiesNH.org uses to dramatize the size of the Pentagon budget. The Pentagon piggy bank is full of million-dollar bills, while the Education piggy bank has a coin going into it. The World Hunger & AIDS piggy has nothing going in.

I took this picture Sunday when the Pigmobile was parked on Main Street in Nashua. (For those of you familiar with Nashua, that's Martha's Exchange in the background.) The driver, Tracy, told me that the idea came from Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. She claims to have worked for a defense contractor and says that her son is a soldier. "I don't want to get a folded flag," she says, referring to the flag that covers a soldier's coffin.

Iowa

This week New Hampshire is taking a back seat to Iowa, where the caucuses will be held Thursday. (Our primary is the next Tuesday.) The Republican caucuses are not all that different from a primary, but the Democrats have special rules that would be charming if the fate of the Free World weren't riding on the outcome. CNN has a good explanation.

The big thing to understand is that there's a 15% threshold in each local Democratic caucus: If your candidate doesn't get at least 15% on the first ballot, you have to vote for somebody else on the second ballot. Since only Edwards, Obama, and Clinton are polling at least 15% across the state, a lot of Richardson, Kucinich, and Biden supporters are going to be making a second choice. With the polls too close to call, those second choices will be the deciding margin.

In the Democratic race nationally, I think it comes down to Hillary or not-Hillary, and I predict that not-Hillary will ultimately win. Obama and Edwards are competing for the mantle of not-Hillary, and Iowa is where that mantle will probably be won.

The conventional wisdom says that Edwards appeals to the regular caucus-goers, while Obama has a young following that may or may not show up. I'm rooting for Edwards. But if vast numbers of young people turned out to vote for Obama, that would be wonderful news for November. I'd have to tip my cap to him.

Scapegoating Illegal Immigrants

One of the hot issues among Republican presidential candidates is illegal immigration. So, for example, when Romney decided to strike back at Huckabee in Iowa and McCain in New Hampshire, that's the issue he focused on. Sunday, Newsday commented:

All three Republican frontrunners -- Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee -- have sharpened their stance on immigration in recent months. The topic dominated two recent Republican debates, and all three have launched television ads that tout their hard line.

For some reason this issue plays particularly well in places like Iowa. And that's got me puzzled. Because, well, there are no illegal immigrants in Iowa.

OK, that's probably an exaggeration. But I just got back from a post-Christmas family thing in Quincy, Illinois, where I grew up. It's the next town down the Mississippi from the Iowa riverport Keokuk, where I had my first legal beer on my 18th birthday. Quincy is a small city (40K) surrounded by farm land. So while it's not as cosmopolitan as Des Moines -- try not to think too hard about that -- Quincy should be fairly similar to a lot of places in Iowa: Dubuque, Burlington, Waterloo, and so on.

That's why the following observation is relevant: I didn't see a single Hispanic during my two-plus days in Quincy. I almost never do. No Hispanics pushing mops at the mall. No Hispanics making beds at my hotel. The old woman who set out our complimentary breakfast stuff every morning is white. I admit that there are a lot more Mexican restaurants in Quincy than there used to be. But in a town where Hardees advertises its "country burrito" -- whatever that might be -- you have to wonder how much of this food is being produced or consumed by actual Mexicans, legal or otherwise. If there are many illegals in Quincy, they must be coming from places like Estonia or Switzerland, because they look just like your basic white Midwesterners.

Think about that: For some reason, Iowa seems to be full of people ready to base their vote on the illegal immigration issue, despite the fact that they have never seen an illegal immigrant, or more than a handful of Hispanics that they might imagine are illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants have not taken their jobs, gotten their daughters pregnant, driven down their property values, eaten up their school budget, or harmed them in any way whatever. But they believe that getting rid of these pesky illegals -- wherever they are -- should be the top priority of the next president.

Keep thinking about it: At least 45 Iowans have died in Iraq. (You can find their names listed here.) Iowa CareGivers estimates that 189,360 working-age Iowans (about 1 in 7) lack health insurance. Iowa has all the standard rust-belt problems with losing manufacturing jobs and not being able to find in-state opportunities for their talented young people. (I never seriously considered staying in Quincy.) Iowans are losing their civil liberties and their national honor at the same rate as all other Americans. And yet what really bothers large numbers of Iowans, particularly Republicans, is that states and cities far away from them have an illegal immigrant problem.

And the problems they attribute to the illegal aliens are almost entirely imaginary. For example, Romney's anti-McCain ad waves the red flag that illegal immigrants are going get Social Security benefits, when the real cash flow runs in exactly the opposite direction: Illegals often use fake social security numbers and end up paying taxes that give them no claim on benefits. Far from sponging off the rest of us, they subsidize us from their tiny earnings. They pay sales tax and a variety of other taxes, but they are afraid to use many of the civic services that those taxes pay for. Bill O'Reilly will run with any immigrant crime story he can find, but other than the original crime of coming to America in the first place, illegal immigrants are some of the most law-abiding residents America has. They work hard, save their money, and do their best to stay out of trouble. The vast majority of them would make excellent American citizens. The real scandal is that we have an underclass of long-term workers who can't vote.

I'll tell you what I think is going on in Iowa and elsewhere: Working-class Republicans, the people who listen to Rush Limbaugh and watch Fox News and join the NRA, can see that something is seriously wrong in America today. But the problem can't be with the president they put in office or with the conservative philosophy they hold. The problem can't be that Republicans started the wrong wars or gave tax cuts to the wrong people or expected the free market to do things that free markets have never done in the entire history of the world. It's got to be somebody's fault. But since they and everybody they know are struggling as best they can, the fault must lie with somebody they can't see, somebody over the horizon.

Conservative political operatives have been doing their best to fan that flame. In 2004 and 2006 gay marriage was a similar scapegoat issue, and it similarly played best in places where gays are least visible. If you know any married gays -- I go to church in Massachusetts, so I do -- you realize immediately that their happiness does not injure you in any way. Watching a gay man carry his son to Sunday School has never once caused me to question the validity or value of my heterosexual marriage. Why would it?

Probably it was the same with the German Jews in the 1930s. If you knew any, they were just people. When you tried to trace a path from their activities to your own problems, you couldn't. But if you didn't know any ... then who could say what evil they might be up to? Rounding them up and putting them somewhere probably sounded like the safest course.

More and more, I'm coming to the conclusion that the rest of us can't just stand back and shake our heads. We've got to start yelling "scapegoat" loud and long. There are a few genuine issues about securing the border, but they are technical and boring and have nothing to do with the problems of average Americans. The emotional appeal of the illegal immigrant issue comes entirely from the scapegoat aspect. If Republican policies were not failing across the board, Republican candidates wouldn't have to talk about immigration at all.

Year in Review

I love lists and countdowns, so this is a good time of year for me. Here are some you might otherwise miss: Bill Mahr's list of the Dickheads of the Year. Slate's countdown of the Bush administration's ten dumbest legal arguments. Glenn Greenwald's favorite quotes of 2007. Salon's self-selected list of best stories.

A couple of DailyKos' best bloggers look ahead to 2008 economically and politically. Jerome a Paris predicts:

the obvious strategy of the rightwing noise machine will be to claim, against all evidence, that all is well until the end of the year and then, brutally, to switch to relentless coverage of all that's bad - all that's been bad, but suddenly needs urgent action NOW.

TPM provides a list of administration officials beset by scandal. And of course we're all waiting for TPM to announce the winners of the Golden Dukes, which will probably be out by the time you read this. If not, you can still hear the choices of TPM founder Josh Marshall. Like Josh, I'm rooting for Alberto Gonzales to win the coveted "Best Scandal" award.

Short Notes

If you had never heard of Benazir Bhutto until she was assassinated Thursday, don't be ashamed to admit it. Juan Cole catches you up on Pakistan's current situation in an article on Salon. Pakistan is a good example of how we've gotten into trouble in a lot of countries over the years. Cole summarizes:

Pakistan's population is, contrary to the impression of many pundits in the United States, mostly moderate and uninterested in the Taliban form of Islam. But if the United States and "democracy" become associated in their minds with military dictatorship, arbitrary dismissal of judges, and political instability, they may turn to other kinds of politics, far less favorable to the United States.

Something similar might have been written about Iran during the reign of the Shah. We never learn.

New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg has scheduled a meeting to promote "bipartisanship" and the formation of a "government of national unity". The mainstream Washington press corps loves this kind of talk, but Chris Bowers at Open Left exposes the emptiness of it all by presenting the very short list of things Democrats in Congress have blocked over the last five years.

It would be nice, for once, if [those] decrying polarization, the lack of bi-partisanship, and gridlock in Washington would actually provide specifics on what legislation their hated polarization, partisanship and gridlock is blocking. Of course, they won't actually do that, because blaming national problems on vague, undefined concepts like "polarization" and "gridlock" is much easier than actually analyzing the contemporary political scene in America.

Scarecrow on FireDogLake points out the obvious: Reporters covering the presidential campaign are trying to push the "It's starting to get nasty" theme, but in truth it's only getting nasty among the Republicans. "Compared to the Republican trench warfare, the Democrats are having a tea party."

Another FireDogLake column collects more of the wonderful fake interviews of British comedians Bird & Fortune.

I wish I could say this is a comedy routine: The New York Times is giving Bill Kristol a weekly column. Kristol was one of the leading voices for invading Iraq, and he learned nothing from that disaster. Today he is one of the leading voices for invading Iran. His appointment by the Times is the best demonstration I can give of the complete lack of accountability in the mainstream media. Media Matters has compiled a list of the known falsehoods Kristol has put forward. Somebody should make a similar list of false predictions. In fact, it would be much easier to compile the opposite list: Kristol predictions that were not 180 degrees wrong. It's short; it might be empty. When I was a kid, game shows had "celebrity contestants." People my age had no idea what these people were celebrated for. Eventually, they were famous for being game show contestants and nothing else. Today, political pundits are in the same situation. No one knows what any of these people did to deserve national attention. But they've got it, and so they keep it.

What Impressed Me This Week: New Hampshire Counts Down

2007-12-24T10:02:00.000-08:00

It is clearly easier for us to imagine ourselves living among better appliances than among better human beings. -- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Anybody who has been praying for a White Christmas in New England can stop now. We've gotten about two feet over the last week or so. If Sunday's rain had been snow, I'm not sure where the plows would have put it.

Fifteen Days To Go

It's weird to be in a state that has two countdowns running simultaneously: shopping days until Christmas and campaigning days until the primary. And like most New Hampshirites, I am ambivalent about both. There's so much to do before The Day, and I long for life to return to normal. At least Santa Claus isn't calling me three or four times a day.

But Santa isn't bringing celebrities to town either. I missed the Oprah & Obama show, but I did catch Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt doing a warm-up act for John Edwards a few miles from here. Foolishly, I figured I'd just link to the YouTube video, so I didn't bring a camera, a voice recorder, or even a notebook. But the video people at the Edwards campaign are too artistic to just set up a camera and feed the video to the Internet, so while there is a video with clips from the next night in Manchester, I can't show you The Best Stump Speech Going.

Actually, it's the second best. A few months ago I went to a stage production of All the King's Men, and Willie Stark had a better one. But the two speeches are similar, so if you rent the Sean Penn version on DVD, you'll get some idea of how Edwards sounds these days. Both men are trying to rally ordinary people to take the government back from the corporations who own it now. "Why don't we have universal health care today?" Edwards asks. (I'm pulling this quote from memory, so it may not be exact.) "Because of insurance companies and drug companies and their lobbyists in Washington."

Cynic that I am, I have to wonder if Edwards' anti-corporate rhetoric has something to do with the cold shoulder he gets from the corporate-owned media. Edwards' haircut has gotten much more coverage than his message. To watch TV or read newspapers these days, you'd think Clinton and Obama were the only Democratic candidates running. And yet, an Edwards win in Iowa is a distinct possibility. (The best horse-race summary for each party is at Open Left.) And since that would break the two-candidate media monopoly, he would get a bigger bump out of it than either Clinton or Obama. As we've seen with Huckabee and last time around with Kerry, things can happen quickly once they start happening.

This, by the way, is why the first primaries need to be in small states. In a big state, the corporations that own all the major media outlets could just freeze out anybody they don't like.

I Become a Gravel Delegate

Ultimately all these primaries are about electing delegates to the party conventions. Where do they come from? How do you get to be one?

I'm not sure how those questions get answered in the big campaigns where everything runs smoothly. But on December 1, Gravel campaign manager Elliott Jacobson sent an email asking if I wanted to be a Mike Gravel delegate. Each candidate needed to have a slate of delegates registered with the party by December 5, and the Gravel people were scrambling to get theirs together. I didn't notice the deadline until December 3, so I quickly had to go to the NH Democratic Party web site, download their delegate registration form, and race it to the post office (you can't email it) to get it in on time.

OK, I feel obligated to point out that it was unethical for me to do this. I had just written a column on Gravel for UU World -- arranging the interview was how I met Elliott -- and journalists should not be delegates for candidates they cover. Elliott shouldn't have asked me and I shouldn't have accepted. I know how I'd feel if I found out that a Washington Post reporter was, say, a Clinton delegate. (It would explain a lot, actually.)

But the temptation to see another part of the process from the inside was overwhelming, so I rationalized: The actual (as opposed to apparent) conflict of interest was minuscule. The column had been finished without any expectation of becoming a delegate. The odds of any of Gravel's delegates making it to the convention is vanishingly small. (He would need to get 15% of the vote and he's polling around 1%.) I haven't even taken the Edwards sticker off my car.

So I wrote an explanation to my editor, who put a disclosure notice at the end of my Gravel column. I've delayed blogging about this until the notice was posted.

I thought that was that. But around 9:30 one Saturday morning (December 15) I got a call from Elliott: The caucus of 2nd district Gravel delegates was happening that morning at 10 at Franklin Pierce University, about an hour's drive away. Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley had even sent me an announcement -- using exactly the same envelopes in which the NHDP sends their frequent pleas for money. It was sitting unopened in my stack of good-cause mail.

When you read Ray's letter, it's obvious that the delegate caucus process is designed for candidates for whom lots and lots of people want to be delegates. "Don't make the mistake of assuming that you can simply show up to the caucus and get elected. ... Most likely, everyone there was brought there to support someone. In order to be successful, you should reach out to your friends, family members, co-workers, and neighbors and bring them to caucus with you. In addition, you should produce signs, fliers, buttons or lapel stickers to promote your candidacy."

I found directions to Pierce on the internet, and hopped into the car. My wife was still in her pajamas. I didn't ask her to go.

Franklin Pierce University turns out to be a beautiful place. It sits across from Mount Monadnock on a small lake, which was frozen. Somebody was trying to ice-fish.

I arrived 45 minutes late. The local Gravel campaign leader and one other Pierce student were there. We chatted about a Gravel campaign video the other would-be delegate was planning to make for YouTube. Eventually two other folks showed up, at least one of whom was also a Pierce student. There were (if I remember right) seven delegate positions, and the rules say you have to be present to be elected. We had no signs, fliers, buttons, family members, or other campaign accessories. We skipped over the place on the agenda where the delegate wannabees give speeches, and went straight to the part where we all vote for each other. Our paper ballots were stuffed into a small cardboard box, which the guy from the campaign collected so that he could send the official vote tallies to party headquarters in Concord.

I didn't see the count, but I feel fairly certain I was elected. It's possible that (somewhere in my stack of good-cause mail) a notice from the New Hampshire Democratic Party has already arrived. I should look.

Now all I have to do is hope that Gravel gets at least 15% of the vote. Maybe I should take the Edwards sticker off my car. Or not.

Have You Heard of Nataline Sarkisyan?

I hadn't either, but her story is all over the liberal blogosphere. She's giving a human face to the health insurance problem. Not the problem of the 47 million uninsured, but the problem the rest of us have when we put ourselves at the mercy of profit-making insurance companies.

Nataline is (was) a 17-year-old who died while waiting for her family's insurance company (Cigna) to approve her liver transplant. (Well, that's not true, strictly speaking. The insurance company stalled, and then when the case became a public-relations problem they approved the treatment too late, hours before she died. Nataline was technically still alive when the approval went through.) Now, I don't know whether prompt treatment would have saved her or not, and I hate making policy by anecdote. But if the story of a pretty teen-age girl's death can break through the myths about our healthcare system, at least some good will come out of this.

One bit of rhetoric I've heard from several Republican presidential candidates is that you don't want your medical decisions made by government bureaucrats. Here's a quote from Rudy Giuliani's web site:

I believe we can reduce costs and improve the quality of care by ... empowering patients and their doctors, not government bureaucrats.

I don't want to pick on Rudy; you can find a similar quote from almost any Republican. They always contrast a government program with one where the power rests with patients and doctors. As if that were the choice.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Decisions today are made by insurance bureaucrats, and it would be a huge improvement to have them made by government bureaucrats. The government bureaucrat would be trying to balance the patient's interest against the public interest; the insurance bureaucrat is trying maximize his company's profits. I know which one I'd want making a life-or-death decision about me.

To bring that point home, Jerome a Paris on DailyKos tells about how the French healthcare system dealt with his 4-year-old son's brain tumor. Short version: They gave him world-class care and didn't ask for payment. And since public health and public schools are all part of the same government, the lingering handicaps from the brain tumor can be dealt with seamlessly through the school system.

My ex-college-roommate reported something similar from Australia. He has a handicapped son and spent one school year on sabbatical in Canberra. Even as a foreigner, his son's problems were handled seamlessly by the healthcare/school system. It was a major hit on their household to come back to America, where he and his wife had to push forms through the insurance bureaucracy and deal with school officials who didn't think healthcare was their problem.

As for empowering the doctors: Another Kossack, nyceve (a contraction of Eve from New York City, I think), passes on to us what a transplant surgeon wrote to her:

Insurers always qualify their denial letters with a sentence to the affect that the doctors must provide whatever care is necessary and that the payment is a separate issue. Insurers never deny CARE only the authorization for payment. To stall the actual delivery of care, insurers hold out an insincere promise to authorize payment if only the doctor provides more information. This leads the doctor on indefinitely, while insurers never says absolutely 'No' until the patient gives up or dies. ... If I do go ahead without approval, as I have on many occasions, the administrators in my hospital call me in to explain why so many of my patient's insurers are not paying and why am I performing surgery not approved by the insurer? No one rescues the patient and the family who face huge bills and bankruptcy.

Jerome concludes:

It's been tough enough to deal with a sick child; I simply do not want to imagine what it would have been like if I had to beg for care or to scurry around for money in addition. It's just inconceivable. And thus, I was happy to pay taxes before, and I'm really, really happy to pay taxes now to provide that level of care for those that really need it.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if Americans could take national pride in the care we give the sick? That's another part of the Edwards stump speech: "What if we asked Americans to be patriotic about something other than war?"

Short Notes

If you're not sick of Christmas music yet -- or maybe even moreso if you are -- you might enjoy this version of The 12 Days of Christmas by the a cappella group Straight No Chaser.

We got some good news on the FISA bill, which I reported last week was about to pass the Senate with the language giving the telcom companies amnesty for breaking the law and invading the privacy of their customers. Instead, Senator Dodd's parliamentary maneuvering made enough problems for Harry Reid that he delayed the bill until January. Senator Kennedy nailed the issue in this speech. Advocates of corporate lawlessness have racheted up the rhetoric by warning that the likes of ATT might be bankrupted if the rule of law prevails. (As if the outcome of our justice system were some random act of God rather than, say, the outcome of a justice system.) If you want to be aware of what you can do, sign up for action alerts at FireDogLake.

Tom Tomorrow begins his Year in Review.

If you thought conservative authors could not stoop any lower, you were wrong.

On the same theme, we finally get a clear-cut example of how oppressed conservatives are on campus and how biased administrators won't protect them from liberal brownshirts: A conservative organizer at Princeton was beaten in an attempt to intimidate him into shutting up. Except ... it turns out he staged the whole thing. And he did the same thing at prep school.

The blogger to watch as the whole CIA torture tapes story unfolds is emptywheel, a.k.a. Marcy Wheeler, author of Anatomy of Deceit. The thing Marcy does better than anybody is chronology: What can we figure out from when something happened? Why then? What was different from a day, a month, or a year before? What does that tell us about why it happened at all? It's hard to do this kind of analysis without veering off into tinfoil-hat territory, but Marcy manages. Her work is necessarily speculative, but it's very insightful.

David Corn goes back to look at a book Mike Huckabee wrote in 1998, as is disturbed by what he finds.

TPM summarizes the Sunday talk shows for you.

In general, I've been unimpressed by Obama's why-can't-we-all-get-along rhetoric. (When corporations are happy to profit over our dead bodies, or -- in the case of Blackwater -- over the dead bodies of innocent Iraqis, no, we can't get along.) But Mark Schmitt over at American Prospect has an interesting theory: It's "a tactic, a method of subverting the unified conservative power structure." I hope he's right.

Matthew Yglesias asks an interesting question: What do you do when the polls indicate that people want something that can't happen? For example, what if the people want to get out of Iraq quickly without losing? This is a situation, he says, where real leaders would be shaping public opinion, not just reacting to it.

The media is starting to see past the Surge-is-working stories. In July we have to start drawing down our troops, and what happens then? Is the country really in any better shape, any closer to a sustainable solution? The LA Times says maybe not.

Finally, the Concord Monitor makes an anti-endorsement: Mitt Romney for not-president. "If you followed only his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, you might imagine Romney as a pragmatic moderate with liberal positions on numerous social issues and an ability to work well with Democrats. If you followed only his campaign for president, you'd swear he was a red-meat conservative, pandering to the religious right, whatever the cost. Pay attention to both, and you're left to wonder if there's anything at all at his core."

What Impressed Me This Week: Religion in Politics

2007-12-17T11:04:00.000-08:00

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods. -- Seneca

Don't React. Check.

This week's cautionary tale begins with Pope Benedict's New Year message, which is already available at the Vatican web site.

Recent popes have a well-deserved reputation for being conservative on social issues like abortion, gay rights, and gender equality. But it's less well known that they've been quite liberal on economic, environmental, and military issues. (In 2005 I wrote this article analyzing the radical economic viewpoint of John Paul II, a subject I hope to return to. Short version: God created the Earth for everybody, not just for the people who own everything.)

So it was something of a shock -- a pleasant shock for anti-environmentalists and an unpleasant shock for the rest of us -- to find this headline in London's newspaper The Daily Mail: The Pope condemns climate-change prophets of doom.

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology. The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

In America, conservative bloggers jumped on the news and crowed about their high-profile new ally in the battle over global warming. At the Pirate's Cove blog, for example, Jebediah Murphy proclaims "The Pope Now a Climate Change Denier" and predicts "all them liberal climahysterics (also known as climahypocrites) are really going to hate the Pope and religion even more."

Right on cue, Pirate's Cove commenter Madmatt attacks the Pope: "This is a nazi, who is pro child molestor, and believes in an invisible man in the sky." If you're a devout Catholic reading this discussion -- or any of the others like it happening on other blogs -- you're undoubtedly offended by this. The popular frame about politics and religion -- religious people are conservative, liberals are against religion -- has been supported.

Except ... the whole discussion is based on nonsense. The Pope's message is about "the human family" as a metaphor for world peace. Of the 15 numbered paragraphs, only 7 and 8 are about the environment, and they express only the most unobjectionable principles. (That's what a good religious patriarch does: re-assert timeless truths and let the secular leaders fight over how they apply to the issue at hand.) Taken out of the conservative-spin context of the Daily Mail article, the parts they quote are pretty innocuous:

It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances.

This is only against the global-warming activists if you imagine (as the Daily Mail reporter clearly does) that the Pope is wagging his finger directly under their noses when he denounces "ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions." But nothing in the Pope's message indicates this. In fact, you can just as easily (more easily, I think) imagine the Pope wagging his finger under President Bush's nose when he says:

It is essential ... to choose the path of dialogue rather than the path of unilateral decisions.

So here's the moral of my story: When the media tells you that somebody said something surprising, don't react, check. Your first response shouldn't be: "How can he say that!" It should be: "Did he really say that?" Often the answer will be No.

Conservatives Rediscover Frankenstein's Monster

This week conservative pundits have been trying to re-assert the natural order in the Republican Party.

The GOP is basically a pyramid: Neocons and plutocrats are the narrow peak, and evangelicals are the broad base. Evangelicals are supposed to stuff envelopes and make phone calls and turn enough working class voters against their own economic interests to get neocons and plutocrats into positions of power. In return, neocons and plutocrats offer a lot of symbolic gestures: mainly futile proposals of constitutional amendments to outlaw abortion or reinstate prayer in public schools. And judges, of course. Republicans appoint pro-business and pro-executive-power judges who also happen to be pro-life. Pro-life is like chrome bumpers or tailfins: It keeps the yahoos happy without interfering with the way the car runs.

That's been the deal ever since Ronald Reagan, and it works fine as long as everyone remembers his place in the pyramid. This year it has broken down, and that's why the Huckabee phenomenon was so predictable. The Republicans were supposed to unite around an evangelically credible plutocrat like George Allen or Bill Frist. But those guys self-destructed early, leaving candidates like Giuliani and Romney, who have cobbled together conservative social-issue platforms that directly contradict their records.

That doesn't fly among evangelicals, who look for authenticity, not a checklist of issues. Ronald Reagan was a good enough actor to fake authenticity, and W has been content to express his authentic evangelical sentiments while letting Cheney run the government. So everyone has been happy. But Giuliani and Romney don't have evangelical authenticity and can't fake it. So when a real evangelical like Mike Huckabee started looking like a credible candidate, the base of the pyramid revolted. "We've been loyal to the Party," the evangelicals are saying. "Why can't one of us be at the top?"

Leadership castes tend to come unglued when the plebians start believing their lip service. It's hard to tell them: "All that stuff we've been saying about respecting you: You were supposed to take it in, not take it seriously." But that's been the underlying message this week. In "An Overdose of Public Piety" Charles Krauthammer denounced Romney's attempt to pander to the evangelicals:

Romney has been faulted for not throwing at least one bone of acknowledgment to nonbelievers in his big religion speech last week. But he couldn't, because the theme of the speech was that there is something special about having your values drawn from religious faith. Indeed, faith is politically indispensable. "Freedom requires religion," Romney declared, "just as religion requires freedom." But this is nonsense

National Review's pundit Lowry was wistful about the notion that evangelicals had "matured" away from social issues and into a proper neocon focus on the war on terror. (How demeaning is that?) And he cautions evangelical Republicans against "Huckacide":

The GOP’s social conservatism inarguably has been an enormous benefit to the party throughout the past 30 years, winning over conservative Democrats and lower-income voters who otherwise might not find the Republican limited-government message appealing. That said, nominating a Southern Baptist pastor running on his religiosity would be rather overdoing it.

David Frum also worries about "overdoing it":

Conservatives have drawn strength from populism. But you can overdo any good thing -- and I am beginning to think that on this one, we've zoomed the car into the red zone. ... How exactly is it elitist to expect a candidate for president to be immune to obvious flim-flam? Or to submit his ideas to criticism--and change them if they cannot stand up? And yet it also has to be admitted: Many of us on the conservative side have fed this monster.

Frum used to write speeches for President Bush, who of course is famous for submitting his ideas to criticism and changing them if they can't stand up.

Off -the-reservation conservative Andrew Sullivan reads Krauthammer and Lowry and asks:

Where, one wonders, have they been for the past decade? They have long pooh-poohed those of us who have been warning about this for a long time, while cozying up to Christianists for cynical or instrumental reasons. But now they want to draw the line. Alas, it's too late, I think, for Charles to urge an openness toward atheism or non-religion in a party remade on explicitly religious grounds by Bush and Rove.

And Sullivan, to his credit, states the religion-politics relationship exactly right:

It may well be that support for a piece of social policy emerges from religious reasons. But in a secular society, it is vital that when making the argument for your position in public, you do not deploy arguments that depend on or invoke religiously-revealed truths. The essential civic discipline in a pluralist democracy is to translate your religious convictions into moral arguments - arguments that can persuade and engage people of all faiths or none.

Massive Cave-in in Congress

Remember a month or so ago, when the Democrats in Congress were going to dig in their heels against the worst excesses of the Bush administration? "The days of free lunch are over," Charles Schumer asserted. And Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pledged there would be no Iraq funding bill this year without a withdrawal timetable.

Never mind.

In a string of setbacks last week, Democratic leaders in Congress yielded to Bush and his GOP allies on Iraqi war funding, tax and health policies, energy policy and spending decisions affecting billions of dollars throughout the government.

Also never mind about FISA. Reid's maneuvering in the Senate has all but guaranteed that Congress will pass a bill giving President Bush everything he wants, including amnesty for the phone companies that broke the law in order to cooperate with the government's law-breaking -- which we now learn started with a transition report the NSA wrote for the incoming Bush people in December, 2000, way before 9/11. (Glenn Greenwald does 'apoplectic' better than I do, so I'll leave the FISA issue to him.)

I guess giving-in is the spirit of Christmas. And Georgie has been such a good boy this year. Or something.

I'd love to be able to give you a better explanation. (And if you can explain it to me, please do.) Is it cowardice? Corruption? Some misguided notion of strategy? I'm totally at a loss.

Short Notes

Time lists the top ten editorial cartoons of the year. My favorite is #10.

The LA Times reports that Iraqi policewomen have been ordered to give up their weapons. Armed women -- it's just not proper. The article raises two questions: What is the life expectancy of an unarmed Iraqi policeperson, male or female? And without policewomen, who's going to search females to make sure they don't have bombs under those burkas?

TPM-TV reviews the high moments of saber-rattling before the National Intelligence Estimate said that Iran didn't have a nuclear weapons program.

Paul Krugman reads the latest economic reports so that you don't have to. He lifts the following statistics from a Congressional Budget Office report on taxes: During the opening years of the "Bush boom" (2003-2005 -- the most recent years for which the report has figures), the top 1% saw a 43.5% increase in their income. The bottom 20% got an increase of 2%. I'm hoping that this subject will be discussed by the ghosts who are scheduled to visit President Bush next Monday night.

Google has a plan to compete with Wikipedia. Rather than a community writing/editing process, articles will be written by individuals. Presumably the good articles will float to the top via some kind of community rating process.

After telling voters during his 2006 Senate campaign that he wanted to "elect a Democratic president in 2008," Joe Lieberman has endorsed John McCain. You've got to wonder how many votes Lieberman would have gotten if he'd told Connecticut the truth: That he would support an escalation of the war in Iraq and he'd endorse a Republican for president.

Being a member of the Senate Intelligence Commitee, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has been able to read the secret memos that elucidate the Bush administration's interpretation of the president's constitutional powers. He boils them down to this:

1. “I don’t have to follow my own rules, and I don’t have to tell you when I’m breaking them.”
2. “I get to determine what my own powers are.”
3. “The Department of Justice doesn’t tell me what the law is, I tell the Department of Justice what the law is.”

Maybe I should have gone with this quote instead:

When an ostrich buries its head in the sand as danger approaches, it very likely takes the happiest course. – Charles S. Peirce

What Impressed Me This Week: Republican Watch

2007-12-10T10:15:00.000-08:00

Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy. -- Thomas Paine

For some reason, I found myself focused on Republicans this week (plus Mike Gravel).

Presidential Candidates Up Close

The article based on my one-on-one interview with Mike Gravel is up on the UU World website. Gravel is a Unitarian Universalist, so I parlayed my status as an online columnist for UU World into an interview. It's the first time I've done something like that.

Interviewing Gravel is a hoot. He's willing to talk about anything you want and he's a great story-teller. You can get a little of that flavor by watching the panel discussion about the Pentagon Papers from the UU General Assembly last June. (Skip past the 2:30 of dead air at the beginning. Daniel Ellsberg comes on at the 10:50 mark and Gravel at 28:30.)

Saturday I saw John McCain in Nashua. My full account is here. One detail I left out of that article: When the question period ended, McCain started the hand-shaking aftermath by stepping off the platform in my direction, offering me his hand, and thanking me for my thoughtful question. (Naturally I had just turned off my recorder, so that little keepsake is lost.) That graciousness -- it wasn't a softball question -- is one reason why it's hard not to like McCain when you see him in person. I still disagree with a lot of what he says, and won't vote for him in January, but I like him. In 2000 I was mystified how Republicans could look at him and Bush and choose Bush. I'm still mystified.

Mitt is No JFK

It's hard to express just how disappointed I was in Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech Thursday. On October 15 I told you about an article by Steve Benen explaining why Mitt Romney could not have a "JFK moment" where he faced the Mormon issue directly. I summarized Benen's reasoning like this:

JFK defused the Catholic issue by embracing the separation of church and state. But the Republican base doesn't believe in the separation of church and state. So what's Mitt supposed to say to them?

Well, Romney answered that question. The way to paper over the differences between Romney's Mormonism and the evangelical Christianity of the Republican base is to unite believers against unbelievers. His speech is full of references to the villainous "some". As in:

The notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

Even a favorable review of the speech by conservative columnist David Brooks notes:

Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious.

That's not what JFK did. His speech was genuinely unifying and spoke to all Americans.

I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end--where all men and all churches are treated as equal--where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice

But in today's Republican Party it is rare for anyone to take a position that doesn't pit someone against someone else. Unbelievers, gays, illegal immigrants, liberals, Muslims, peaceniks, people on welfare -- there's always got to be a scapegoat.

Finally, I was disgusted by the way Romney cherry-picked his theology to pander to evangelicals. He hides behind noble sentiments to avoid discussing the less popular parts of Mormonism like this:

There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution.

But in the previous paragraph he said:

I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.

So a religious test is appropriate if Romney can pass it. Otherwise it violates the spirit of the Constitution.

Huckabee

I started telling you about Mike Huckabee in early September. And on October 22 I made this prediction:

Huckabee could break into the top tier. The Evangelical Republicans haven't warmed to Fred Thompson yet, they've never liked McCain, Romney's Mormonism and past pro-choice and pro-gay-rights positions bother them, and Giulani's current social-issue positions (plus his multiple marriages) make him the least acceptable of all. The thing keeping the Evangelicals away from Huckabee is that he looks like a loser. If that starts to change, it could change fast.

Well, the Huckabee Surge is upon us. A Newsweek poll has him ahead of Romney 39-17 among people like to attend the Iowa caucuses. He has moved into second place in national polls. (The Huckabee line is the pointing-straight-up green one in this graph.)

Up until now, playing nice with Huckabee was part of pandering to the evangelical base. The other Republicans knew the the evangelicals liked Huckabee but weren't going to vote for him because he wasn't a serious candidate. So it made sense to show respect and not be mean. It's similar to the way the Democrats treated Al Sharpton in 2004.

Now that he's a serious candidate, the gloves are off. The plutocratic wing of the Republican Party is not going to accept Huckabee, and they're the ones with the real power. The Club for Growth has put out this ad. And suddenly Wayne DuMond is becoming Huckabee's Willie Horton. Oh, and he's said wacky things about AIDS and he doesn't believe in evolution. None of that is new, but suddenly people have to take it seriously.

And then there are the liberals. Here's Stranahan's hilarious suggestion for a Huckabee attack video.

Anyway, I'll make my next Huckabee prediction: The attacks will work. There's a hard-core evangelical vote in the Republican primaries that will net him 20-25% in a lot of states, but that's going to be the ceiling. As other candidates start to fall by the wayside, that 20-25% will stop looking so formidable.

News I Haven't Assimilated Yet

In a shock to everybody, the administration released a summary of the National Estimate on Iran's nuclear program. It's not that long, you could read it easily. (The actual content on is on pages 6-8.) "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."

Suddenly, we're no longer headed for war with Iran. And dozens of other questions open up: Why was this NIE compiled? Why did the administration release it? Did President Bush know about this when he was threatening World War III? Speculation is everywhere; information is hard to find.

And coincidentally -- or not coincidentally, who knows? -- a scandal broke at the CIA. Tapes of some "harsh interrogations" were destroyed. (See TPM's collection of Sunday news show comments.)

And coincidentally -- or not -- a scandal broke in Congress. The top Congressional leaders, including Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller, were briefed about the CIA's interrogation techniques a long time ago. They knew and said nothing.

This is head-spinning stuff, and I'm sure we haven't heard the end of it yet. Instead of trying to make sense of it all, I'm going to recall the principle I want to uphold: the rule of law.

When something inexcusable comes out, the standard Republican tactic is not to defend, but to say "Democrats did it too." They seem to think we'll say, "Well, OK then." But this isn't about parties, it's about what America stands for. Torture is a war crime. Destroying evidence of torture is obstruction of justice. Keeping silent about it may be criminal conspiracy, and even if it isn't the voters should punish it politically. Everyone connected with torture needs to go down. Otherwise this country will never get back to being a force for good in the world.

Short Notes

Adam Klugman wants to start a campaign to rebrand the Democratic Party. Before you reject that idea, watch his video.

Marty Lederman at my favorite legal blog Balkinization recommends a working paper on the issues around FISA.

Nerdcore Rising's "Nerd of the Week" feature pays a visit to last summer's Yearly Kos convention. It's cute and informative, and if I studied each frame with a microscope I'd probably find myself somewhere.

It's just as bad as you think. Interrogators determined Murat Kurnaz was innocent in 2002. He finally got out of Guantanamo in 2006.

You know all those people who tell you that the troops and their families support the war and believe in the mission? Well, they're wrong.

TPM has put together a collage of all the TV ads of all the Republican presidential candidates. Enjoy.

Just in case you still need to fix that good mood you're in: Here's Cass Dillion and Billy Joel with Christmas in Fallujah.

McCain in Nashua: Last Man Standing?

2007-12-09T15:04:00.000-08:00

The last time I saw John McCain, he had just won the 2000 New Hampshire primary. My wife and I, to our own surprise and largely out of apathy with the Gore-Bradley race, had voted for him. As the returns started coming in and the magnitude of his upset of George W. Bush was becoming clear, I heard a CNN reporter sign off from the hotel where the victory party was starting. "That's just a few miles from here," I said. "We could go."

Nobody stopped us at the door and we shoe-horned ourselves into the crowd of people standing in the ballroom. Eventually McCain came out to make a victory announcement. I don't remember a word he said, just the buzz of hope and excitement in the room. Just a week or two before, the nomination of George II had been inevitable. And now it wasn't. Anything could happen.

That was a long time ago.

Saturday morning McCain was back in Nashua holding a town hall meeting. About 300 of us surrounded a square plywood platform six inches high and ten feet on a side. From my front-row seat, I kept worrying that McCain, older now and less steady, would back off the edge of the platform and fall. But he never did.

McCain is still a master of the town-hall format. He answers questions -- even hostile questions -- patiently and with empathy. ("Meeting adjourned," he announces in response to the first gotcha. The room erupts in laughter, and then he answers.) He tells corny jokes and at the same time manages to wink at you, as if the real joke is that you have to tell jokes to win the world's most serious job. He runs himself down, confessing to being fifth from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy, saying that his candidacy proves that "in America anything is possible." And yet no one in the room forgets that he is John McCain, and he has survived things that would have destroyed any mere mortal. It is an amazing balancing act, much better than answering questions from all sides without falling off a plywood platform.

McCain's campaign centers on character. The warm-up video starts with his POW experience, and is full of testimonials from people who have known him for a very long time, concluding with his mother -- a surprisingly youthful woman -- telling us how lucky this country would be to have Johnny as its president. (I doubt my mom would describe my virtues with nearly so much conviction.) The same themes sound again and again: country before self, volunteering for the hard job, refusing to take the easy way out.

He is at his best when he can translate those character themes directly into issues like "the challenge of radical Islamic extremism." The other Republicans (besides Ron Paul) are running on a lesser-evil platform: We have to be bad because our enemies are worse. Strength means abandoning airy-fairy ideals and cutting corners on morality. But to McCain, idealism is strength. "We won the Cold War not with a tank battle on the plains of Western Europe. We won the Cold War because we were able to prove that we and everything we stood for were far superior to the forces of communism and the evil represented by the Soviet Union. That’s the way we’re going to win this ideological struggle over the long run. And that’s why I will declare we will not torture anyone in our custody and I will close Guantanamo Bay."

I came to watch the audience as much as the candidate. During the Bush years I have grown increasingly alienated from Republicans and suspicious of their base. The televised Republican debates seem like Saturday Night Live skits, as the candidates compete to see who can be nastier to illegal immigrants and more vicious towards suspected terrorists. (Romney promises to double Guantanamo's prison, not close it. He doesn't say who he will put there.) What kind of freak show, I wondered, is a Republican rally these days?

Not much of one at all, if this was typical. True, we were overwhelmingly white -- one black was there to collect signatures for Health Care Voters and the other was part of a class field trip from Tufts. But in New Hampshire even Obama doesn't draw many more. One lunatic question -- about par for the course -- promoted some conspiracy theory about the UN. Democratic rallies have their own lunatics, and the questions are different but no better. At worst everyone else sounded like someone you could have a reasonable disagreement with. A question expressing "rage" about illegal immigration got only a smattering of applause. (The round of applause I started in response to the no-torture pledge was louder.) The hot-button social issues -- abortion, gay marriage -- were conspicuously absent. McCain didn't mention them and neither did we.

No candidate is more identified with the Iraq War than McCain. Up to now it has worked against him, but (at least among Republican voters) it may be turning in his favor. Saturday he told the story like this: "I believed like everybody else did that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and I believed that we could win a quick initial military victory." He admits Saddam did not have WMDs, but defends the decision to remove him from power. And we did "win a lightning-like initial victory." But he blames Donald Rumsfeld's few-boots-on-the-ground strategy for botching the promise of that success.

He portrays himself as a consistent critic of that strategy, and sees the Surge as his vindication. "I went over there and I saw that the Rumsfeld strategy was not only not working, but it was doomed to failure. And I came back and I gave speeches and I said we’ve got to stop this. We’ve got to change the strategy to one that can succeed. … After nearly four years of failure we finally got rid of Rumsfeld and we got a new strategy. ... Now we are succeeding in Iraq. ... I’m the only one of those running for the nomination of this party that said Rumsfeld would fail and what we needed to do, who stood up while [the other Republican candidates] were either quiet or supported other courses of action. I did that because I’ve had the background and experience to make the right judgment."

I have scruples about questioning candidates I have decided not to vote for. (I'm voting in the Democratic primary this year, probably for Edwards.) I consider myself a guest at their rallies, so I won't ask a question just to embarrass them. But I really wanted to know, so I pushed McCain on Iraq: "I understand why you don’t want to set a date to get all our troops out of Iraq. But all the hopeful things I hear about Iraq seem awfully vague. And I want to know: Are we still going to be losing people there ten years from now, twenty years from now? Are we still going to be spending $10 billion a month ten years from now, twenty years from now?”

And he answered: “No. I understand your skepticism/cynicism. Because for nearly four years we were told ‘mission accomplished', 'a few dead enders', 'the last throes', 'stuff happens’ -- I’m sure you remember all those – while things were going bad in Iraq.” He pointed to the recent drop in casualties and other improving statistics as evidence that the Surge is finally the right strategy. He predicted that within months ("I can't say exactly how many months") General Petraeus would announce that the situation had improved to the point where we could start drawing down troop levels. (He'd better. There aren't any more troops to send.) From there, McCain expects the Iraqi army to take up more and more of the burden until American casualties are essentially zero. He leaves open the possibility of a long-term American presence in Iraq, but thinks the American people will accept that if we aren't constantly losing people.

We'll see. That story can keep working through the primaries. But some further visible improvement will be necessary by November.

I was pleased to hear McCain take global warming seriously. In the 2000 campaign, he admits, "I didn't know anything about climate change." But he credits Senate committee hearings with making him realize "there is an overwhelming body of scientific opinion that climate change is real and that it can have devastating effects on our planet. ... We’ve got to develop green technologies. We’ve got to go back to nuclear power. We have to emphasize wind and solar. We also have to practice conservation. … We should be able to develop a battery that will take a car 200 miles. We should go to ethanol – all kinds of ethanol. Not just corn-based, but sugar-cane-based and other biofuels. We can do it if we give it the priority it deserves. My friends, green technologies are good." He insists that nuclear power is safe, and points to the French, who get 80% of their power from nuclear plants. “They’re closer to their Kyoto goals than any other country.”

When a woman holding an infant asked what a McCain administration had to offer her children, he answered: "A cleaner planet. A government that they can trust in. A safety net system that will be there for them of Social Security and Medicare, and a nation that is a beacon of hope and liberty and freedom and a shining city on a hill."

McCain's status as the early Republican front-runner is long gone. He's in single digits in Iowa and in the teens in New Hampshire. And it's getting late to turn things around. But the Republicans have been playing whack-a-mole with their candidates lately. Scandal is draining Giulani's always luke-warm support. Romney has never had much of a national following, and his Iowa-based strategy seems to be failing. Thompson never caught fire. Huckabee is the surging candidate, but the party's plutocrat wing has no more stomach for him than the evangelicals have for Giuliani. The plutocrats' knives are out now, and we'll see over the next few weeks whether Huckabee can fend them off.

McCain may yet be the last man standing. Evangelicals prefer him to Giuliani. Plutocrats will take him over Huckabee. And I keep waiting for Republicans to notice that only McCain can deliver the full anti-Hillary message. Romney can't make the case that she's phony and calculating, because who is more phony and calculating than Romney? Giuliani can't point to the Clinton scandals, because the Clintons are a model family next to the Giulianis. Huckabee can't fear-monger about terrorism, because Hillary's security credentials are better than his. If Republicans want to deploy the complete Clinton Attack Armada, they need McCain.

Years ago, McCain's electability was undeniable. His candidacy would have drawn overwhelming support from moderates and even from a few liberals willing to choose character over ideology. But like Colin Powell and Tony Blair, John McCain co-signed for Bush's war and has been left holding the debt. If he's going to make it to the White House now, he's going to need a lot of help from Baghdad. The news has to be good from now to November.

That would take a ridiculous run of luck, both for McCain and for America's war effort. I wouldn't bet on it, but I think he would. "I'm the luckiest guy I've ever known," he says on the campaign video. "I've never known anyone as fortunate as I am."

What Impressed Me This Week: Why Bloggers Resent Journalists

2007-12-03T10:13:00.000-08:00

Only the supremely wise and the abysmally ignorant do not change. -- Confucius

Mainstream Media: Not Liberal, Not Objective

It's an article of faith among right-wingers that the mainstream media has a left-wing bias. And it's an article of faith among mainstream journalists that bloggers (left and right alike) criticize them because they're objective. We're partisan, they're not, so we don't like them.

If only. This week gave us examples of liberals getting slammed in two egregiously bad articles by once-proud journalistic institutions: The Washington Post and Time Magazine.

On the front page of Thursday's Post was Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him. You really should click the link and read the story, because it's hard to capture in a few quotes just how bad it is. The article contains no actual news. Instead, it passes on the unfounded rumor that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim, lets people from the Obama camp deny it, and gives poll results to indicate how bad it would be for Obama if people believed the rumor. (No wonder he denies it.) If you hadn't heard the rumor before, the Post makes sure you know it now. And if you had heard it, the Post tells you nothing new. (CBS then compounded the problem by quoting the Post in an Obama Dogged By Muslim Rumors article.)

Not only doesn't the Post article add anything new to the story, it doesn't even summarize what is already known: Back in January, CNN sent someone to the "madrassa" school that Obama is supposed to have attended when he was growing up in Indonesia, and they discovered that it isn't a madrassa at all. In other words, rather than just spread gossip CNN did some actual investigating, disproved one of the rumor's main checkable details, and said so. Ten months ago.

Here's what would have been front-page news: The Post might have figured out who has been spreading this smear and traced a connection to some other campaign. Or, on the other hand, they might have uncovered some fact to give the rumor credence. Maybe they could have caught Obama on a prayer rug facing Mecca or fasting during Ramadan or something. Either way, it would be journalism. But it also would be work, and who wants to do that? Not The Washington Post. No wonder Columbia Journalism Review concluded:

This pathetic story has no place on the front page—or any page—of a paper like the Post. If a worse campaign-related story comes out this year, we don’t want to see it.

And then The Post dug in its heels and refused to admit it did anything wrong: The real problem is blogger outrage, not anything the Post did. (Their cartoonist Tom Toles, though, seems to get the point.)

The same pattern of laziness compounded by stubbornness showed up at Time. And again, it all goes to the disadvantage of Democrats. In a column titled Tone Deaf Democrats Time's columnist Joe Klein used the House's version of the proposed FISA bill as an example of how the Democrats in Congress were being "foolishly partisan" and letting civil liberties get in the way of defending the country. (The link is to the "corrected" version of the column, not the version that went out in the print magazine.) The Democrats' bill, Klein said "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court," which in effect "would give [foreign] terrorists the same legal protections as Americans."

Only one small problem: Klein didn't read the bill. His impression of what it said came from Republican Congressman Pete Hoekstra, and Klein repeated the Republican spin as fact without checking. Glenn Greenwald, who writes every day rather than doing weekly columns, checked. The bill actually says the exact opposite. In English.

Sec. 105A. (a) Foreign to Foreign Communications- (1) IN GENERAL - Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, a court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information

OK, that's bad, but we all make mistakes. Klein then produced a series of pathetic responses on Time's Swampland blog. First he tried to claim he was really right (without mentioning Glenn or anyone else who said he was wrong or what exactly the criticism was). Then he said the bill could be interpreted a lot of different ways. Then he said it didn't matter, because the bill would never become law anyway. And then he said -- and this is not out of context -- "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." That would be work, I suppose, and work gets in the way of a superstar journalist lifestyle.

Time as an institution did no better. Eventually Time acknowledged Klein had made a mistake, but the mistake (which has been fixed in the "corrected" online column) is that Klein should have balanced the Republican spin with a Democratic denial, making the whole thing a he-said/she-said article. (Kind of like the Post's Obama-Muslim piece.) This apparently is what Time believes journalism is: You write down what people tell you. "Balanced" journalism is writing down what people on both sides tell you. (And balance is the key thing: That's why Time balances a "liberal" columnist like Klein with conservatives like Charles Krauthammer.)

Just to balance this report, I should point out that some people believe in a thing called "reality," and even think that reporters should check people's statements against this "reality" before reporting them. But I have neither the time nor the philosophical background to figure out if they're right.

This story has been banging around in the blogosphere all week. Glenn writes about it in a bunch of articles. My favorite is here. Kos chimes in here. Just about every major liberal blogger commented on it somewhere. Satirist Jon Smith draws the appropriate conclusions in Journalism 101. His second rule of journalism is: "There are two sides to every story and a journalist must give both sides equal weight even if he or she knows one side is completely false."

So anyway, that's what the "liberal" and "objective" media has been up to this week. Mainstream journalists never seem to catch on to the real reason bloggers don't like them. It's not ideological, it's personal: Many bloggers have comparatively few readers and work very hard for them. So when journalists with millions of readers are incredibly lazy, it stirs up resentment.

America's Changing Image in the World

I guess you can't go fascist and expect no one to notice. That's the lesson I draw from the following two stories.

Thursday, a Canadian court invalidated a three-year-old agreement between Canada and the US about how refugees are handled. To make a long story short: If you're a refugee from country X who shows up in Chicago and then later claims asylum in Montreal, the Canadians will send your asylum case back to Chicago. And vice versa.

The judge threw that agreement out because he ruled that the US is no longer a safe country to return refugees to. The agreement, he claims, is predicated on prior treaties like the Convention Against Torture, which the US is violating. We say we're not violating it, of course, but we're not fooling anybody. The judge noted the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who we kidnapped while he was changing planes in New York and sent to Syria to be tortured. He turned out to be innocent.

Meanwhile, according to Sunday's Times of London, the US government has argued before a Court of Appeals in the UK that we have the right to kidnap British citizens wanted for crimes in the US. Naturally, we'll follow the formal extradition procedures if it suits our purpose and we're feeling nice that week. But because this came up during the extradition hearing of a businessman wanted for bank fraud and tax evasion -- not terrorism -- the Times predicts that this American claim "will alarm the British business community." The article has comments attached to it. Apparently the Times' readers, perhaps under the illusion that they are citizens of a sovereign nation, are ticked.

Sex and the Married Mayor

It's hard to know how to feel about Rudy Giuliani's week. In general I hate sex scandals, because I don't think a person's sex life tells you much about how they'll govern. (You'd think the Clinton/Bush comparison would have laid that argument to rest for good, but apparently not.) A bunch of this isn't new: We already knew Giuliani was having an affair with his current wife while he was still married to his previous wife. And the city was responsible for Giuliani's security when he left town, even for personal reasons. What we're left with is a scandal about accounting: Legitimate security expenses were hidden in odd parts of the city budget, presumably to cover up the affair. If there weren't a sex story in here, nobody would care.

A secondary part of the story is the NYPD providing personal services to Giuliani's mistress (now wife), including walking her dog. Again, as long as he doesn't claim to be the family-values candidate, it doesn't bother me that he had a mistress. But the sense of entitlement here is worrisome. One big problem with the Bush administration is that no one can tell the difference between government employees and political operatives. If Giuliani thinks it's appropriate for the NYPD to be walking dogs for friends of the mayor, that's not likely to change. But again I have to admit that sex is what gives the story legs. If the NYPD were walking dogs for Giuliani's mother, no one would care.

On the other hand, a lot about Giuliani is legitimately disturbing, and it doesn't get much coverage. His actual record around 9-11 was pretty dismal. He cut a good figure on TV, but a lot of firefighters died because the city had screwed up buying their radios. (Apparently the firefighters' radios didn't pick up the order to evacuate the World Trade Center. The police radios did, and they got out.) And the reason he looked so dashing wandering the streets issuing commands was that he had over-ruled the experts who told him not to build his emergency command post inside the WTC. That mistake left him nowhere to go after the towers collapsed.

Finally, Giuliani has all of Bush's character flaws: He surrounds himself with yes-men who maintain his bubble. He never admits a mistake. He gets angry when people question him. He believes in secrecy and executive power rather than consensus building.

So I'm happy to see Giuliani have a bad week, and I'm not going to cry for him if this messes up his candidacy. But when are we going to grow up about sex? (OK, OK, it makes for great humor. Here's Tom Tomorrow's take. And TPM's fake Giuliani ad.)

Short Notes

Speaking of sex, the Idaho Stateman has new evidence that Senator Larry Craig is gay. Color me shocked. (Craig pledges to keep working for the people of Idaho despite these "baseless" accusations. Presumably he thinks a gay senator would be incapacitated in some way.) Given that lying and hypocrisy aren't against the law and the guy's term runs out next year, can't we just agree to ignore him until he goes away?

The Giuliani thing brings this question to mind: How many people in America receive round-the-clock police protection? In view of the occasional assassination attempts, I reluctantly accept the idea that the President has to live in a security bubble. But how many people are we talking about? Governors? The mayor of New York? The mayor's wife and mistress? Are all these people really in danger? (Attention murderers and kidnappers: Mayor Bloomberg's girlfriend isn't protected.)

On the Washington Post/Newsweek "On Faith" site, Eboo Patel makes an important distinction: The really significant "faith divide" isn't between believers and unbelievers, it's between pluralists and totalitarians. "Pluralists are people who want to build societies where people from different backgrounds live in equal dignity and mutual loyalty. Totalitarians are people who want only their group to dominate and everyone else to suffocate."

Rolling Stone has a great article called "How America Lost the War on Drugs". It's a fairly long and detailed history, but it comes down to this: The heart of America's illegal drug problem is that Americans want to take illegal drugs. You can't solve that problem with troops in Columbia or ships in the Caribbean or a big fence along the Mexican border. You can't even solve it by locking up drug dealers in this country, because it's a demand problem, not a supply problem. As long as Americans demand drugs, the market will supply them. (You'd think that would be obvious to free-market conservatives, wouldn't you?) So we've spent about half a trillion dollars and have nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, the focus on "winning" a "war" keeps us from doing simple things that would lessen the problem and mitigate the violence associated with it.

If you want a humorous-but-accurate introduction to the current financial mess and its causes, listen to this fake interview of a London investment banker by the British comedy team Bird and Fortune. It reminds me of some of the interview routines Peter Cook and Dudley Moore did many years ago.

The National Republican Congressional Committee put out a request for amateur attacks ads against the Democratic Congress (with prizes no less), and got five entries -- one of which is a Democratic parody of a Republican attack ad. (It's pretty good.) Bottom-up creativity just doesn't seem to be a workable model on the Right. I wonder why.

What Impressed Me This Week: Bush on Musharraf

2007-11-26T10:56:00.000-08:00

Quote of the Week: Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on. -- Winston Churchill

True Believers in Democracy

In the transcript of the divorce proceedings between President Bush and Reality, a few lines stand out. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. ... Bring them on. ... I'm a uniter, not a divider. ... Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. ... We found the weapons of mass destruction. ..." and several others. Perhaps you have your own favorite.

Well, there's a new one to add to the list. Last Tuesday, when ABC News asked Bush about US ally General Musharraf, the Pakistani military dictator who recently completed his second coup, the President said, "He hasn't crossed the line. ... I think he truly is somebody who believes in democracy."

In watching the rest of the interview, I was pleased to hear President Bush answer questions about our own elections as if they are really going to happen and will result in a new president taking office. Because Bush "truly is somebody who believes in democracy" too.

Ground-Level Views of Iraq

In Iraq it is important to keep track of both the high-level view of statistics -- deaths, oil production, electricity and so on -- and the low-level accounts of what life is like and what individual people are thinking. Recently there have been some really excellent ground-level views.

In The New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson talks to people on various sides of the Sunni/Shia divide and gives an interesting view of what's been going on since the Surge started. He cites the violence-reduction statistics and gives due respect to the successes of the new tactics. But he's skeptical about where things can go from here. His conversation with an Anbar-Sunni tribal leader (exactly the folks who are supposed to be making the Surge work) is not encouraging:

Zaidan said that Anbar’s Sunni tribes no longer had any need to exact blood vengeance on U.S. forces. “We’ve already taken our revenge,” he said. “We’re the ones who’ve made them crawl on their stomachs, and now we’re the ones to pick them up.” He added, “Once Anbar is settled, we must take control of Baghdad, and we will.” There would have to be a lot more fighting before the capital was taken back from the Shiites, he said. “The Anbaris will take charge of the purge. What the whole world failed to do in Anbar, we have done overnight. Baghdad will be a lot easier.”

Zaidan predicts that the Americans will provoke an intra-Shia civil war between the Arab Shia and the Persian Shia (who side with Iran). The Sunnis will fight on the American/Arab-Shia side, and will win.

Anderson tells an amazing story about two Shiites working with the Americans, who he calls Karim and Amar. They are using their American connections to help them take revenge against members of the Shiite Mahdi Army, who killed Amar's brother. Amar plans to kill a hundred men, and he delivers souvenir body parts of his victims to his mother, who approves.

Jared Polis is a Democratic congressional candidate from Colorado. He took a Thanksgiving trip to Iraq and has been blogging about it. Because he's just a candidate and not an actual congressman, Polis is traveling as a private citizen, the same way you would if you decided to go visit Baghdad. His accounts include a lot of nitty-gritty details and remarkably little spin for a politician: You have to change planes in Amman. The descent into Baghdad isn't as bad as everybody says. Power failures at Baghdad Airport happen often enough that everybody just goes on with what they're doing. The road from the airport to the Green Zone is a lot safer than it used to be. A lot of jobs are done by mercenary soldiers, many from Latin America, and so on.

He visits a mercenary compound and finds that the food there is much better than you can get at the Al Rashid Hotel. And then there's this:

The first question here is always "who are you with?" rather than "where are you from?" The contractors hold their corporate identity above their national identity. Indeed, they come from many nations and the common corporate culture bonds them and allows them to work together for their mutual benefit. It is eerily reminiscent of the post-nation state futures depicted in dystopian corporatocracy science fiction or anime.

Anyway, you can read all his blog entries. He talks to members of parliament, people who work for NGOs, and anybody else he runs across.

The best way to understand how far we are from due process of law in Iraq is to follow a single case, and the easiest case to follow is that of Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi who became a photographer for Associated Press. Hussein has been detained since April, 2006, and AP has been trying to get the military to either charge him with something or let him go ever since. Maybe he's in league with the terrorists, or maybe the Pentagon didn't like the way his photographs kept contradicting their propaganda. Who knows?

Even with a powerful news organization on his side, Hussein has been held without charges for more than a year and a half. Finally last week the Pentagon announced plans to file charges, but of course they won't say what day the hearing will be held, what the charges will be, or what evidence they plan to introduce. Hussein's lawyer will get a call at 6:30 on the morning of the hearing, and will show up prepared to defend his client against something-or-other. If Hussein is acquitted, they still don't have to set him free.

The Washington Post let AP's CEO comment here. Follow further developments on AP's web site.

Thousands of other Iraqis being held without charges. Most of them don't have an American corporation looking out for their rights.

Anatomy of Deceit

Marcy Wheeler's recent book Anatomy of Deceit is a quick read, and it's interesting for a number of reasons.

It pulls together a lot of the details of the Bush administration's outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame and ties it in with the overall marketing of the Iraq War. This is a story that has been spun to death, so it's worthwhile to see it all laid out end-to-end. In particular, when you look at the whole story over the long term, it's obvious that the Iraq War was the result of intentional deception, not accidentally bad intelligence.
Precisely because the mainstream media has done such a bad job of presenting this story and has allowed the administration to spin it any way it wants, the Plame case is an instructive example of the incestuous relationship between news organizations and the government that they're supposed to be keeping honest.
In particular, the Plame case shows how the First Amendment has been turned inside-out. Reporters need to be able to protect the identities of anonymous sources so that whistle-blowers within the government can expose wrong-doing without fear of retaliation. But in the Plame case, powerful wrong-doers within the government used the press to anonymously destroy the career of a whistle-blower's wife. By protecting the identities of their anonymous sources inside the administration, reporters were enabling precisely the kind of retaliation that source-protection is designed to prevent.
By focusing on the legal issues of who could be indicted and convicted, the press totally missed the moral side of this story: Valerie Plame was a covert CIA agent working on WMD proliferation -- precisely the issue that the Iraq War was supposed to be about. When her husband Joe Wilson started exposing the intentional deceit behind the war, the administration retaliated by blowing her cover and destroying her career forever. According to cable talk-show host Chris Matthews, Karl Rove told him that the Wilsons "were trying to screw the White House so the White House was going to screw them back." Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald concluded that he could not prove beyond reasonable doubt that Rove committed a crime. But is this really the moral level we want our government to operate on?
Wheeler is a blogger, not a traditional journalist. (She blogs under the name "emptywheel" on The Next Hurrah.) The coverage of the Plame case is a clear counter-example to the claim traditional journalists often make: That blogging is all about partisan ranting and not reporting. But in the Plame case journalists were part of the problem and wanted to sweep it all under the rug. Most of the real reporting was done by bloggers like Wheeler. That continued to be true through the Scooter Libby case, where Wheeler was part of a group that live-blogged the trial.
Wheeler is also a counter-example to the stereotype that bloggers are all men. And she works closely with another counter-example: Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake.

The book ends while Libby is still on trial, so it doesn't comment on the get-out-of-jail-free card President Bush gave him. So I will: We watched obstruction of justice happen in broad daylight and the major media treated it like it wasn't a big deal. Scooter committed perjury to keep an investigation from reaching the Vice President and/or the President. (What other theory makes sense? That he committed perjury for the hell of it?) And in return the president commuted his sentence. Quid pro quo.

The president's power to pardon is in the Constitution, so Libby's commutation can't be undone by either Congress or the courts. But a pardon in return for false testimony is obstruction of justice, and the only way to call a president to account for such crimes is impeachment. (It's worth pointing out that getting a job interview for a White House intern isn't illegal, but one of the impeachment counts against President Clinton was that he did so in exchange for Monica Lewinsky's false testimony in the Paula Jones case. It's an exact analog, except that the Bush case -- being about war rather than sex -- is obviously more serious.)

This is a god-awful precedent to have on the record. How we will ever get the executive branch back under constitutional control if the president can tell his people to commit crimes and promise them pardons if anything goes wrong? This isn't a partisan issue. Unless the Republicans are planning to hold onto the White House with a Musharraf-like coup, they need to start thinking about how a Democratic president will use the legal and political precedents that Bush has set. If they were smart and patriotic they would give bipartisan support to Kucinich's impeachment resolutions and save the Republic a lot of future trouble.

Satirized For Your Protection

Two of the best satirist bloggers are Dood Abides, DailyKos' resident master of Photoshop, and Jesus' General, who is more macho than is humanly possible. ("An 11 on the manly scale of absolute gender.")

A couple of the Dood's latest are Fred Thompson raising campaign funds by becoming the new Mr. Whipple for Charmin, and Bush waterboarding the National Turkey prior to its annual pardon. Each story is accompanied by an almost-convincing photo. The black hood on the turkey is a wonderful detail.

Meanwhile, the General writes to Time-Warner CEO Richard Parsons about the pressure he feels from being the only viewer of right-wing commentator Glenn Beck's show on CNN: "What if I had to use the restroom? Would some ambitious underling take advantage of the situation and cancel the program while no one -- and I mean that literally -- no one was watching?"

Another post has the General writing to Andrew Schlafly of the Conservapedia (the right-wing answer to the hopelessly biased Wikipedia) about the ten most popular articles on his site, nine of which are about homosexuality. The General is not surprised by this: "After all [homosexuality] is second only to the War on Christmas in terms of the danger it poses to this great nation. True patriots like ourselves must think about homosexuality every second of the day. It can be grueling, especially considering all the different kinds of homosexual sex there are to think about." The General goes on to offer Schlafly his own system for organizing his homosexual thoughts -- er, I mean, his thoughts about homosexuality.

And the General responds to the Pentagon's attempt to get wounded veterans to return their signing bonuses with this poster.

Short Notes

Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria points out a disturbing fact: Tourism is booming everywhere but in the United States. Why? Because we hassle foreigners. And it's not just Arabs or Muslims. Tourism from Japan is way down, and even from the UK. Think about that: White English-speaking people with a strong currency don't want to come here.

The mainstream press continues to discover Mike Huckabee. If he wins in Iowa, which the polls say is a possibility now, anything could happen. New Hampshire is one of the most secular states in the union -- the original settlers came here to get away from the Puritans in Massachusetts -- so an evangelical minister like Huckabee is not going to win the NH primary. But an Iowa loss would knock down Romney, who is leading in the NH polls, so you might well wind up with four or five guys all getting around 20% here. Then what happens? Meanwhile FireDogLake is past the who-is-Huckabee stage and is examining what he stands for and why you don't really want him to be president.

Continuing the evangelical theme, David Antoon takes a scary look at what has become of his alma mater, the Air Force Academy, and connects it with a larger pattern of evangelical activism in the military and in private armies like Blackwater: "The citizen-soldier military dictated by our founding fathers has been replaced with professional and mercenary right-wing Christian crusaders." In a related article, Mother Jones profiles Mikey Weinstein, another Air Force Academy graduate and former Air Force JAG, who started the Military Religious Freedom Foundation to fight exactly the problem Antoon is describing.

The Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity and Race has put out a report on the effects of an Indiana law requiring would-be voters to present a photo ID. And guess what? The people most likely to have such IDs are middle-aged white high-income voters -- who also turn out to be the target voters of the GOP. Kevin Drum opines that maybe Indiana's Republicans already knew this when they pushed for the law. And southwest Florida's News-Press finds similar results from a Republican-backed Florida law making it harder to register to vote: "More than 14,000 initially rejected — three-quarters of them minorities — didn't make it through that last set of hoops. Blacks were 6 1/2 times more likely than whites to be rejected at that step. Hispanics were more than 7 times more likely to be failed."

In honor of Thanksgiving, TPM put together "Testimony We Give Thanks For," a medley of the most embarrassing moments in Congressional hearings this year.

DailyKos' Bill in Portland responds to Karl Rove's remarks about the overall crudeness of liberal bloggers by prototyping a cuss-and-trade system, where all profane insults have to be balanced by offsetting polite comments.

Here's how you get signatures to put propositions on the ballot in California.

Recent developments in your right to privacy: The feds can use your cell phone to track you without showing probable cause.

TPM puts together video clips to contrast the fantasies about Fred Thompson's candidacy with the reality.

Next Week: Vacation

2007-11-12T13:13:00.001-08:00

What Impressed Me This Week will not appear on November 19. Look for it again on November 26.

What Impressed Me This Week: Challenges to Democracy

2007-11-12T12:07:00.000-08:00

How Not to Fix the Electoral College

Apparently the ballot initiative to give the Republican presidential candidate 20 or more of California's 55 electoral votes is back on track. In late September it looked like its promoters were giving up, but new money appeared at the end of October, and we should find out this month whether enough signatures have been collected to get the initiative onto the ballot in June.

Background: Currently, in every state but two, all the state's electoral votes go to the candidate who wins the popular vote in that state. In Nebraska and Maine (9 combined electoral votes), two votes go to the winner of the state, and one vote goes to the winner of the popular vote in each congressional district. Conceivably, a candidate who loses statewide could still pick up one electoral vote in Maine and two in Nebraska, though I don't remember it ever happening.

The proposal in question would convert California to the Nebraska/Maine system. Since California has become a very reliable blue state (Kerry won 54-44 in 2004), the most likely result is that the Republican candidate would get 20-plus electoral votes from California rather than none. That's equivalent to the Republicans winning a reliably blue state like Illinois.

What makes this initiative tricky is that it sounds good on the surface, but ends up working against the value it claims to promote. In any state that makes this change, electoral vote totals will more closely resemble the popular vote totals. Isn't that good?

Not exactly. The problem, of course, is that if you do it in California but nowhere else, you get the exact opposite result nationally: You significantly increase the likelihood that a Democrat might win the popular vote (as Gore did in 2000) but a Republican would take office. If the backers of this proposition actually wanted to fix the Electoral College, they'd borrow a trick the National Popular Vote Bill: That bill (in which each state that passes it promises to give its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote) only takes effect when it has been passed by enough states to represent an Electoral College majority. Fortunately, a recent poll indicates that the California proposition is unlikely to pass.

It's worth considering the general principle at work here, because it shows up often and is hard to capture in a simple slogan: It's the difference between random error and bias. Picture a football game whose referees make random errors that don't consistently favor either team. It would be better if they didn't make errors at all, but it would be worse if some infallible machine fixed all the mistakes that went against one team, while letting the bad calls against the other team stand. Such a machine would decrease the number of errors, but increase the bias. Imagine how hard it would be to argue against the machine: In each case where it intervenes, it does the right thing. But overall it transforms a flawed-but-fair system into an unfair system.

In politics the principle shows up in this form: Processes originally designed to do good things are applied in a biased way, and end up invoking the rhetoric of fairness to increase unfairness. So, for example, the Bush administration has changed the mission of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department so that it focuses on discrimination against already-powerful Christian groups rather than power-starved groups like blacks or the poor, or unpopular religions like Islam that face much more serious discrimination issues than Christianity does. The rhetoric of economic fairness is unleashed against the Estate Tax, which oppresses billionaire heirs and heiresses. When affirmative action causes a poor black student to get into college over better-qualified whites, you'll hear about it. But when Yale's legacy program admits a white aristocrat like George W. Bush over better-qualified minority candidates, you won't. Try to imagine a district attorney's attempt to railroad some black kids provoking the same outrage as the Duke lacrosse case. In short, our yearning for fairness is being invoked to fix any situation that unfairly handicaps the powerful.

I Know You're Sick of Hearing About Torture, But ...

The Senate approved Mike Mukasey as the new attorney general, without getting a clear answer to the question of whether he signs on to the Bush administration's bizarre and self-serving redefinition of the word torture. (Don't you long for the good old days, when it was outrageous for Clinton to redefine sex to exclude oral sex? It was another world.)

Glenn Greenwald points out the ridiculous behavior of Senate Democrats. Enough of them opposed Mukasey to sustain a fillibuster, but they didn't bother. Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein voted for Mukasey, although Schumer admitted that Mukasy was "wrong on torture -- dead wrong." I'll let Glenn react to that:

Marvel at that phrase: "wrong on torture." Six years ago, there wasn't even any such thing as being "wrong on torture," because "torture" wasn't something we debated. It would have been incoherent to have heard: "Well, he's dead wrong on torture, but . . . " Now, "torture" is not only something we openly debate, but it's something we do. And the fact that someone is on the wrong side of the "torture debate" doesn't prevent them from becoming the Attorney General of the United States. It's just one issue, like any other issue -- the capital gains tax, employer mandates for health care, the water bill -- and just because someone is "dead wrong" on one little issue (torture) hardly disqualifies them from High Beltway Office.

Here's something else to marvel at: Newsweek's On Faith page asked religious leaders the question "Can the use of torture ever be justified?" It wasn't unanimous. Former Nixon henchman Charles Colson is a religious leader now, having given his life to Jesus while in prison for his crimes. He finds "circumstances for an exception" to the moral obligation not to torture other human beings: "If a competent authority honestly believed that this was the only way to get information that might save the lives of thousands, I believe he would be justified."

Strangely, Colson finds no similar wiggle room for stem cell research. Competence and honesty and saving thousands doesn't justify anything here, because the issue is absolutely black and white:

Our greatest service as Christians is to do what we best do, that is, raise transcendent moral arguments. To sacrifice one person for the good of many can never be justified. Evil often masquerades as good; the worst atrocities are performed in the name of humanitarian causes. And we must press the logic of the utilitarian argument to its ultimate conclusion: Sacrificing one to benefit all soon makes all vulnerable.

I wonder what Colson thinks about using a bogus religious conversion to regain a platform for pushing your political ideas. Is there a transcendent moral argument against such a thing, or might there be circumstances for an exception?

Matthew Yglesias gives an example of a pattern I noted last month: Torture may not be good at getting people to tell you the truth, but if your goal is to get a false confession you can use to support your policies, it works great. On Balkinization, Marty Lederman tells a similar story about forcing a false confession, and then goes on to make an interesting legal point: In this case the FBI managed to get the court to seal not just the evidence of the case, but the accusations made by the plaintiff. "This is, I think, an ominous development -- the increasingly common notion that the government can insist that no one be permitted to publicly disclose what they know about how the government itself investigates crimes and terrorism, and how it treats those suspected of wrongdoing."

Keith Olbermann does one of his only-slightly-over-the-top "special comments" on torture here.

TPM Muckracker collects the video highlights of House committee hearings on torture. The best part starts around the 1 minute mark, with the testimony of an actual interrogator, Colonel Steve Kleinman.

Pakistan and Us

General Musharraf is now promising elections in January, which (apparently) makes everything all right.

This, in my view, is another example of the neo-conservative perversion of the idea of Democracy -- similar to what we have seen in Iraq. The traditional American ideal of "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" is completely foreign to the neo-conservative mind. Instead, elections are a totemic ritual by which you sprinkle the fairy-dust of Democracy onto your regime. So it doesn't matter if government secrecy prevents citizens from casting an informed vote, whether a free press examines the government's claims or just repeats them, whether anybody can check that your voting machines actually work, or even if the whole campaign takes place during a "state of emergency" in which journalists, lawyers, candidates, or anybody else can be jailed at the Leader's whim. As long as votes are cast and a winner is announced, you have a Democracy.

Scarecrow on Firedoglake makes the connection between Musharraf's policies in Pakistan and Bush's in America:

Nothing General Musharraf is doing to Pakistan is morally different from what Bush and Cheney have been doing, piece by piece, to America’s democratic principles and institutions. At best, we are dealing with matters of degree but not of kind. ... The Administration has worked tirelessly to convince Americans to believe they must give up their democratic values to fight terrorism, but from 9/11 forward, Bush has gotten it backwards. Instead, we have to give up our fear of terrorism to preserve our democratic values. Protect the Constitution and the rule of law, defend democratic values and institutions here, and provide an inspiration and support for those who struggle for them elsewhere.

Short Notes

If you're feeling too optimistic and need to do something to bring yourself down, read economist Joseph Stiglitz's "The Economic Consequences of George W. Bush" in the current Vanity Fair. Here's the gist, as I get it: At the end of the Clinton administration America faced economic challenges, but we had a budget surplus and a number of other resources that we could have brought to bear on those challenges. Well, by now we've pissed all those resources away on an insane war and on throwing a big tax-cut party for the rich. Our crumbling levies and bridges and dams (the ones that survive) are seven years older -- eight by the time the next president takes office. We're still not educating our children for the 21st century. We're losing our edge in basic research. But we've run up a huge debt already, so what can we do? Have a nice day, everybody.

A hoaxer announced a non-existent paper in a non-existent journal, claiming that global warming is a natural phenomenon unrelated to human activity. Just as naturally, the anti-global-warming folks jumped to promote it, including Rush Limbaugh -- because a transparently fake scientist who agrees with you is far more convincing than the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community.

On the blog Political Animal, Kevin Drum has been searching for the worst blog posts of all time. After consulting with his readers, he presents the five finalists for the Golden Wingnut Award. The winner is John Hinderaker of the blog Power Line, who wrote on July 28, 2005: "It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile." Congratulations, John. You must be very proud.

I'm not for Ron Paul, but if you want to understand the people who are, watch this video.

Even some conservatives are starting to catch on. George Will writes: "Republicans, supposed defenders of limited government, actually are enablers of an unlimited presidency. Their belief in strict construction of the Constitution evaporates, and they become, in behavior if not in thought, adherents of the woolly idea of a 'living Constitution.' They endorse, by their passivity, the idea that new threats justify ignoring the Framers' text and logic about shared responsibility for war-making."

What Impressed Me This Week: Was I Wrong About the Surge?

2007-11-05T11:50:00.000-08:00

It's been an eventful week: Pakistan suspended it's constitution, the October casualty numbers came in even lower than September, and the legality of waterboarding was a big issue at the confirmation hearings for Attorney-General-to-be Mukasey.

Did the Surge Work?

I have been a consistent skeptic about the Surge. More troops means more targets means more casualties -- that's how I thought it out, and until recently that's how it went: 1164 coalition troops died during the 12 months ending in August 2007, making it the bloodiest year of the war. Then 69 troops died in September and only 40 in October. To get a lower two-month total you have to go back to February-March of 2006. Iraqi civilian casualties also appear to be down. What does it mean?

I've been slow to jump to any conclusions. On the one hand, I pride myself on belonging to the reality-based community -- when the facts change, my ideas have to change, and when my predictions don't pan out I have to re-examine the logic behind them. On the other hand, this administration has fooled me before by using short-term trends to dismiss long-term problems. In the winter of 2001-2002, when the Taliban government fell so quickly and (apparently) easily in Afghanistan, without the millions of civilian casualties that some on the Left had been predicting, I started giving the Bush people the benefit of the doubt. I dismissed the early rumors about Guantanamo. I tried hard to believe the claims that the Iraq invasion would be similarly easy and quick and clean. I took the administration position in a number of online arguments that I'd happily deny if not for the existence of archives. It wasn't until late in the summer of 2002 -- sooner, apparently, than Democratic senators like Clinton and Edwards and Kerry -- that I started to realize I'd been had.

So I've been cautious. I started telling you about the new data in the last week of September, but I haven't been drawing any firm conclusions. Partly that's because I see myself as a middleman in the interpretation business. I write this column for intelligent people who don't have the time or inclination to sift through as much of the online information as I do. (If my fellow news junkies like it too, that's fine.) But I'm not a universal expert, so in any individual field I rely on people that I trust in the same way that I hope my readers will learn to trust me. And my suppliers haven't been coming through lately, so my stock of explanations has been dwindling.

Until this week. One of the people I trust for military matters is Phillip Carter of the blog Intel Dump. He attributes the recent good news to a convergence of many factors. One is the Surge. In an article in Slate, Carter observes: "Where we have sufficient troops to control the ground, violence is down. ... But where we don't have sufficient troops ... violence remains high." But even the increased number of American troops is far short of what would be necessary to control the whole country. (A friend in the military tells me that current counter-insurgency doctrine estimates the number of troops needed at about three times what we have in Iraq now.) So our troops have to try to influence and catalyze events on the ground, not control them. That's what happened in Anbar: a political opportunity presented itself, and we took advantage of it. The Sunni tribes did the heavy lifting, but a more-visible American presence played a role.

In Baghdad, though, "the most persuasive explanation for the good news is that the Shiites have won." In other words, the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad is more-or-less over, so the sectarian violence has faded. This observation fits with my lone data point, which is that the Iraqi blogger Riverbend and her family left Baghdad for Damascus a few months ago. In her latest report, Riverbend quotes an estimate that 1.5 million Iraqis are in Syria now, and reports "Walking down the streets of Damascus, you can hear the Iraqi accent everywhere." A big chunk of those folks are probably, like Riverbend, Sunnis from Baghdad.

One other important thing happened, apparently by coincidence: After an embarrassing clash between Shia factions in the holy city of Karbala at the end of August, Shia militia leader Muqtada al Sadr declared a six-month moratorium on military activities so that he could reorganize and presumably purge some of the loose cannons in his organization.

The longer-term picture has Carter worried. To the extent that the lull is due to the Surge, what will happen next summer, when we can't sustain this troop level any more? To the extent that it's due to ethnic cleansing, do we really want to extend that policy to the entire country? What happens when al-Sadr is done reorganizing? And after the Anbar Sunnis have dealt with Al Qaeda Iraq, will they start singing the Muslim equivalent of Kumbaya, or will they turn their new American weapons against the Shia central government, or against us?

The original idea of the Surge was to create a temporary calm during which the Iraqi factions could work out their differences and create a lasting peace. The calm is happening (despite my expectations), but the peace is still nowhere in sight. The question we have to ask is: What larger success story is the Surge supposed to be part of? I don't think it's the kind of success the American people are looking for, one where we get to declare victory at some point in the foreseeable future and bring our troops home. Instead, it's a more imperial version of success: Our troops have become more important than ever in the maintenance of order in Iraq, and maybe we can hope to pacify the country completely over the next ten or twenty years.

To sum up: We've been bleeding slower the last two months. Fewer dead Americans. Fewer dead Iraqis. Those are good things. But don't get carried away and think that everything is on track now. The Bush policy for Iraq has multiple layers of wrongness in it, and improving one layer doesn't mean that everything is going to be OK. I still want our troops home as fast as we can safely bring them out.

Pakistan: Pop Goes the Constitution

One reason the rest of the world doesn't believe all the American pro-democracy rhetoric is that we support military dictators like General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. Since his first coup in 1999, Musharraf has allowed some of the trappings of democracy and the rule of law to re-appear. But Saturday he announced that he was suspending the Constitution and going back to one-man rule. Since 9/11, he has been one of our main allies in the War on Terror (at least on paper), and we've been content to let him restore democracy at his own pace. We've also been content, for reasons that escape me, to tolerate the Taliban and Al Qaeda having sanctuaries in Pakistan near the Afghan border.

OK, it makes no sense for me to try to compete with the major networks in covering a breaking story like this. But I will point you towards an information source you probably won't hear on ABC: Barnett Rubin of New York University, who is blogging the crisis from Islamabad via Juan Cole's Global Affairs. You can also look at the translated text of Musharraf's announcement -- and the video, if Urdu makes sense to you.

Rubin makes the following scary point: Musharraf's announcement echoes a lot of themes that you hear from the Bush administration. In particular, he claims to be declaring a state of emergency in order to protect Pakistan from terrorism and judicial activism -- as if those were comparable menaces. "Judicial activism" in this case means trying to hold the government accountable to the rule of law.

Rubin finds a similar linkage between judges and terrorists in the March 2005 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America: “Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.” Scott Horton of Harper's comments: "In other words, turning to courts for the enforcement of legal rights, appeals to international tribunals, and terrorism are seen as the elements of a single consistent enemy strategy."

Musharraf takes a page from the Bush/Cheney media guide:

Let us look at law enforcement agencies. In my view, they are demoralized - especially in Islamabad. They have given up hope. Why? Because their officers are being punished ... Ten officers - including two Inspector Generals - are suspended or convicted. And so, we have a demoralized force with low morale, afraid to take any action.

The rule of law, in other words, emboldens the terrorists.

The Borowitz Report comments via the following satirical news article: President Bush flies to Islamabad to advise Musharraf on the best ways to eliminate democracy. Describing Musharraf's announcement suspending the Pakistani constitution as a "beginner's mistake," Bush tells Musharraf "you've got to be crafty about these things."

TPM Josh Marshall interviewed Dr. Rubin at some length. One thing Rubin points out is that all the bogus stuff the Bush administration said about Iraq is actually true about Pakistan: Bin Laden is there, and they have nuclear weapons.

Waterboarding: It's Torture

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee tried and failed to get Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey to say that waterboarding is torture. Apparently this is not enough to keep the Senate from approving his nomination, but at least it pushed the media into explaining what waterboarding is. Sunday a former military lawyer wrote Waterboarding Used to Be a Crime in the Washington Post. It's worth a read.

On the Balkinization blog, Sandy Levinson looks at one particularly insidious corruption of the public debate: People (like Rudy Giuliani) using ticking-time-bomb fantasies to claim that water-boarding is not torture, when in fact they are arguing that torture is justified. If you find yourself in such a conversation with a co-worker or relative or friend, don't let them fudge things this way. If they want to defend torture, they should defend torture, not claim that something isn't torture because we need to do it.

I watched a fair and balanced panel of torture advocates on Fox News this week, all of whom talked in ticking-time-bomb terms. This is one of those cases where even entering into the discussion is a mistake. Once you start doing a cost/benefit analysis of torture, discussing how much torture you'd be willing to do for how much information, you've abandoned the idea that there's a moral principle here. I am reminded of an old joke: A rich old man chats up a pretty young woman at a party and asks if she'd sleep with him for a million dollars. She blushes and admits that yes, she probably would. Then he asks whether she'd sleep with him for five dollars, and she's insulted. "What kind of woman do you think I am?" she asks. And he answers: "We've already established that. Now we're just dickering over the price."

What To Read When You're Sick

I had a cold this week, with just enough of a fever to make any serious reading futile. So rather than tell you about a political or military or historical book, I'll give my recommendation for what to read the next time you're sick: Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman.

There's an old joke about old jokes: A group of people -- inmates, sailors on a long voyage, old guys who have been hanging around in the same bar forever, it varies from one telling to the next -- have been repeating the same jokes so often that they've all been written down and numbered. Rather than tell the joke, you just have to stand up and announce the number. (The punch line is that the new guy announces a number and nobody laughs. "That joke's hard to tell right," his friend explains.)

Well, maybe twenty years ago somebody -- probably Alan Moore, but I'm not completely sure -- realized that superhero stories had reached the same point. There are only so many viable powers and weaknesses, so many ways to explain where the powers come from, so many ways that the hero and the villain can relate to each other, and so on. You don't really even have to tell the story any more, you can just indicate which story this is. Now, as a writer you can fight this truth and struggle for any small innovation -- what would chartreuse kryptonite do? -- or you can run with it and have a lot of fun. If you just let the archetypes be archetypes and don't bother to innovate, the standard superhero universe becomes a rich and easily invoked background on which you can paint whatever you want.

In comic books, the best versions of this kind of story-telling are Kurt Busiek's Astro City and Alan Moore's Top Ten. Well, Soon I Will Be Invincible brings this style to novels. The book doesn't contain any character you've heard of, and yet everyone in it is extremely familiar. So, one of the two narrators is afflicted with Malign Hypercognition Disorder -- he's a evil genius. Most of his life has been spent on a series of nearly-successful attempts to take over the world. The other is a young woman who suffered a catastrophic accident and had most of her body parts replaced with super-powered machinery. She is the newest and most insecure member of the Champions, the world's greatest team of heroes. Don't you almost know them already?

That's the point. Everything happens inside a dense web of archetypal plots and relationships you already know. So the narrators can give you all kinds of backstory in just a couple of lines. For example, Doctor Impossible (the evil genius) concludes the story about how he met his ex-girlfriend (at a failed attempt to organize a team of super-villains) with this: "So the Legion never materialized as such, although a few of the robots later came back as the Machine Intelligence Coalition, which I guess still has its asteroid somewhere." That covers a lot of ground for one sentence, but how much more detail do you really need? It's Situation #47.

Short Notes

Max Blumenthal continues to attend right-wing conventions so that you don't have to. Check out his video Theocracy Now, in which he covers the Values Voters Summit in late October.

The week's best graphic comes from Daily Kos blogger Dreaminonempty, who assembles state-by-state polls on President Bush's approval rating and comes to the conclusion (now that Bush approval in Utah has fallen below 50%) that there are no red states.

Faking the news is harder than it looks. Slate V ran a competition for the best amateur news parodies, and the top five are here. They're fun, but the Daily Show has nothing to worry about.

Washington Monthly did a long article about Giuliani's Cheney-like view of executive power.

Studs Terkel explains why the telephone companies shouldn't get amnesty for their participation in warrantless wiretapping.

What Impressed Me This Week: Separation of Powers

2007-10-29T12:08:00.000-07:00

New England is currently suffering the shock of two Red Sox championships in four years. It's forcing us to re-evaluate who we are as a region. And the Patriots and Boston College aren't helping: How can we stay lovable when we're pounding people 52-7?

Congress and the President

The DailyKos blogger FWIW has done us all a service by summarizing large chunks of the notes James Madison took during the debates at the constitutional convention in The Founding Fathers Intended. There's no better antidote to the "unitary executive" nonsense than to look at what the Founders actually said.

Here's one simple way to see which branch of government the Founders thought they were making the most powerful: They decided not to divide the executive power among three officials, but split the legislative branch into two houses. A single legislature would concentrate too much power, but a single executive would not. A good satire of where we've gotten instead is also on DailyKos: White House Continues To Deny The Existence of Congress.

Mike Gravel

I forgot to mention it last week, but right after I finished writing WIMTW two weeks ago, I got to sit down for nearly two hours with Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel. (OK, he's not Hillary or Barack, but I'm not exactly Walter Cronkite either.) No handlers, no negotiated question list, just him and me sitting in a living room in Manchester drinking cans of Diet Coke. The interview was for the magazine UU World, because Gravel is a Unitarian Universalist. So mostly I'm not blogging about it until I've written the article for the magazine. But I did get an answer to a question I've heard some of you ask: Why is this guy running?

Here's why: Gravel's passion for nearly two decades now has been something he calls the National Initiative, his proposal to allow voters to pass federals laws without going through the usual legislative process. Californians in particular always roll their eyes at this proposal, because they know what a mess the initiative process is in their state. But Gravel has put a lot of thought into avoiding the problems of the state initiative processes, and as I watch Congress do nothing to stop the Iraq War in spite of massive public opposition, I have a hard time arguing with Gravel's claim that "Representative government is broken." Is this the right fix? I'm not sure, but I'm willing to give it a look. Good or bad, publicizing the National Initiative was Gravel's original motive to run for president. "If I don't run," the 77-year-old Gravel recalls saying to himself, "if I don't do something unusual, I won't live to see it."

Interviewing Gravel is a hoot. In most candidate interviews, the interviewer has to work to knock the candidate off his talking points. With Gravel you have to keep him from wandering off to something else entirely. One radio interviewer didn't, and the two of them wound up discussing The Sopranos.

Gravel hasn't collected much money from contributors yet, but New Hampshire resident Gregory Chase recently started his own million-dollar pro-Gravel advertising campaign. He's also offering a $25,000 prize to the Gravel video that gets the most views on YouTube. A couple candidates for the prize are this and this.

Mercenaries and the Private Sector

Several people have written the same basic idea: the Blackwater mercenaries are the epitome of the conservative effort to privatize government, and liberals ought to make them the symbol of conservatism in general. Journeyman does the best job of laying it out: In the same way that conservatives have for decades tried to turn every issue into "freedom versus socialism" or "freedom versus big government", liberals should frame every issue as responsible government versus the mercenary ideal.

The Edwards campaign appears to get this. Saturday one of my friends held a house party for Elizabeth Edwards, and I got to ask her about John's stand on Blackwater and other mercenary armies. She immediately segued into a larger discussion of privatization: "The hiring of private contractors is something that this administration was dedicated to when they came in, and they've done it in every department. And beginning with the Department of Defense, those job functions need to be taken back. ... Government jobs, particularly in sensitive areas like this, cannot be done by private business. They have to be done by government with government accountability. When we start farming them out, what we do is lose the capability to do them ourselves." And she tied it straight to corruption, emphasizing that Blackwater's founder is a major Bush donor and then generalizing to privatization in general: "We need to regain the skills in order to do it in house, so there are not proper government activities that are profit centers for businesses that are contributors to campaigns."

The New Republic's John Chait identifies a bit of conservative framing he calls "entitlement hysteria." It works like this: You lump together the projected problems of Social Security with the much more serious problems of Medicare to get an Entitlement Crisis. Then you ignore Medicare and focus on the dire necessity of doing something about Social Security right away. Chait neglects the final step in constructing the frame: You claim that privatizing Social Security is the only way out, and thereby create vast new profit centers for your campaign contributors in the financial industries.

Another Committed Politician

Another interesting bit of framing comes from Rosa Brooks' column in the L. A. Times: Straightjacket Bush. Brooks argues that impeachment is the wrong model for thinking about getting rid of President Bush -- we ought to be thinking about commitment instead. Brooks quotes the pertinent D. C. law: If a "court or jury finds that [a] person is mentally ill and . . . is likely to injure himself or other persons if allowed to remain at liberty, the court may order his hospitalization." Brooks proposes that the likelihood of Bush starting a delusional war against Iran qualifies.

Now, I'm pretty sure this is a joke. But I'm having a hard time explaining why it's a joke. Is there any doubt that Bush and Cheney will injure other persons if allowed to remain at liberty? Why is Brooks' proposal a joke, but the drumbeating for war with Iran isn't? Why didn't we all react like this: "Those Bush and Cheney guys, they crack me up. You never know what they're going to say. They're not talking about ending this war, they're talking -- get this -- about starting another one. What a bunch of kidders!"

Short Notes

One of the great things about the blogs is that you get stories of how policies affect real people. Lillygirl describes her 81-year-old dad's arrest at JFK airport: "We are safer now. ... You can't say this wasn't another body blow to the terrorists." Gizmo59 writes about a small-scale act of civil disobedience in My Friend Katie Goes to Jail.

FEMA has come up with a new way to control the message: Hold a fake news conference where your people pose as reporters and ask all the questions. Why didn't anybody think of this before?

I continue to collect explanations of the falling casualties in Iraq. One of the more interesting theories goes like this: Casualties are down because we're in the process of ending one war to start another. We have, in essence, switched sides in the civil war between the Sunni and the Shia. So we're no longer losing large numbers of troops in the Sunni-dominated areas like Anbar, while our losses against the Shia will take a while to ramp up.

Don Rumsfeld is getting the Pinochet treatment: Rumsfeld's presence in France caused a consortium of human rights groups to file suit asking the French government to detain him. The argument is that France, as a signer of the Convention Against Torture, has an obligation to try Rumsfeld for war crimes. Most likely this is going nowhere, but I think efforts like this are going to get more and more serious as time goes on. Like Chile's recently deceased tyrant Augusto Pinochet, who was once arrested in Britain because of a Spanish indictment for crimes against humanity, top Bush officials (including Bush himself) are going to have to be careful where they travel after they leave office.

Mike Huckabee has gotten popular enough that the Wall Street Journal thinks it's necessary to denounce him.

Ex-Army Captain and Iraq veteran Phillip Carter (who runs the blog Intel Dump), asks why we can't renounce waterboarding.

It's long but it's important: This weekend's New York Times Magazine published The Evangelical Crackup, an article describing how a new generation of evangelical pastors is telling the Republican Party that they can still be friends, but they need to start seeing other people. They're noticing that Christianity has more political significance than just anti-abortion and anti-gay-rights, and they're starting to pay attention to a few liberal issues like the environment and poverty. Scriptural religion is a mixed bag, but you have to give it this: No matter how long people ignore the Sermon on the Mount, it stays in the book. Sooner or later somebody's bound to run across it again and ask: "Why aren't we doing anything about this?"

What Impressed Me This Week: Telcom Immunity

2007-10-22T13:34:00.000-07:00

The Corruption Angle on Telcom Immunity

I've been pointing to you to Glenn Greenwald's coverage of the warrantless spying issue because he's been presenting it from an angle I never hear in the corporate-owned press: corruption. But Glenn can be a little verbose on the topic, so I thought I'd shrink the Telcom Immunity issue down to a few excerpts. First, a summary:

AT&T's customers sued them for violating their privacy in violation of long-standing federal laws and for violating their Fourth Amendment rights. Even with the most expensive armies of lawyers possible, AT&T and other telecoms are losing in a court of law. The federal judge presiding over the case ruled against them -- ruled that the law is so clear they could not possibly have believed that what they did was legal -- and most observers, having heard the Oral Argument on appeal, predicted that they will lose in the Court of Appeals, too. So AT&T and other telecoms went to Washington and -- led by Bush 41 Attorney General (and now Verizon General Counsel) William Barr, and in cooperation with their former colleague, Mike McConnell -- began paying former government officials to whom they give money, such as Jay Rockefeller, to pass a law declaring them the victors in these lawsuits and be relieved of all liability -- all based on assertions that a court of law has already rejected. They are literally buying a judicial victory in Congress

The main argument for retroactive immunity was put forward by the Washington Post like this: By cooperating with the administration's illegal spying program "the telecommunications providers seem to us to have been acting as patriotic corporate citizens in a difficult and uncharted environment." But Glenn notes in a different post that the telcoms are being paid very well to be "good corporate citizens" or collaborators or whatever.

It is a never-ending carousel of multi-billion dollar transactions -- pursuant to which enormous sums of taxpayer money are transferred to these telecoms in exchange for the telecoms serving as obedient divisions of the Government, giving them unfettered access to all of the data and content of the communications of American citizens.

And this issue is more than just about a few mega-corporations. It's also about closing the only remaining loophole in the cover-up of the whole program.

Congress has no intention of investigating any of this, and even if they wanted to -- which they don't -- their subpoenas would simply be ignored and they would do nothing about it. Congress has spent the last six years shutting its eyes towards all of this, except when the White House demanded that it be legalized.
These private lawsuits -- brought by heroic privacy and civil liberties groups -- are the only real mechanism left for discovering what the telecoms and our Government have been jointly doing when it comes to spying on our communications, maintaining surveillance data bases of our actions, and violating a whole litany of long-standing federal laws designed to protect the confidentiality of citizens' communications. A law that gives amnesty to telecoms would mean that those lawsuits are stopped in their tracks, and we would likely never find out -- at least not for a long, long time -- the extent of this oversight-less surveillance by our government on Americans, nor would we be able to obtain a judicial ruling as to its illegality.

It's the overall precedent that bothers me. The administration asked the phone companies to break the law. They did, and now Congress is about to immunize them from any consequences. So what's going to happen the next time a president asks a corporation to break the law? What if a president wants an accounting company to fudge some books for a major contributor like Enron? What if a president wants Blackwater to assassinate somebody, like maybe a political rival? The company depends on the government for billions in contracts. There's a history of granting immunity afterwards. Why would they say no?

Poll Trends: Watch Huckabee

This was the week the mainstream media started to notice Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. (I wrote about him seven weeks ago.) Some new poll results have put him the radar screen. The USA Today/Gallup poll that came out Monday the 15th lists Republican horserace numbers in two-week intervals going back to the beginning of this year. The race is amazingly static except for one thing: Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul have broken away from the other lower-tier candidates. Neither of them polled higher than 1% until June, but now Huckabee is at 6% and Paul at 5%. Put together, they have more supporters than Romney at 10%.

TPM reports that a Rasmussen poll of Iowa Republicans has Huckabee third at 18%, trailing Romney at 25% and Thompson at 19%. Then there was the straw poll from the Values Voters Summit: Romney is fractions of a percent ahead of Huckabee, with both at 27-point-something percent. Ron Paul is third at 15%, Thompson fourth, with McCain and Giuliani put together managing slightly over 3%.

It's questionable how large a constituency the Values Voters group represents, but results like these make it harder and harder to treat Huckabee and Paul as fringe candidates. Paul's positions (get out of Iraq and stop illegal spying on Americans) aren't popular among Republicans as a whole, though he still has some room to rise before he hits that ceiling. But Huckabee could break into the top tier. The Evangelical Republicans haven't warmed to Fred Thompson yet, they've never liked McCain, Romney's Mormonism and past pro-choice and pro-gay-rights positions bother them, and Giulani's current social-issue positions (plus his multiple marriages) make him the least acceptable of all. The thing keeping the Evangelicals away from Huckabee is that he looks like a loser. If that starts to change, it could change fast. David Brooks thinks it will.

Iraq: What's Happening?

In September, General Petraeus' statistics showing violence headed down in Iraq looked cooked. Now more intuitively comprehensible statistics are showing something similar. The average daily death rate for American troops in Iraq is 1.36 for the first three weeks of October, down from 4.23 in May and lower than it has been since March 2006.

There are different theories about why this is happening. General Petraeus' is that the Surge is working. Certainly a decline in violence in Anbar Province (after our alliance with the local Sunni tribes) is part of the picture. But Newsweek raises the question of why violence from Iran-supported Shiite militias is also down. Firedoglake points to a post at the Group News Blog making this claim: Violence in Baghdad, where the Surge is centered, is up, but violence in the rest of the country is down.

This information shows a trend up in the Baghdad region and shows that Iraq does not devolve into civil war when the US pulls out. Does not let al Qaeda take over in their absence. In fact the complete opposite, the local security forces quickly run to ground AQI and end them. It seems once the US forces leave the area the score settling and inter-tribal violence ends. Life seems cheap with tanks and machine guns on every corner. Remove those visual and physical reminders and people work out their differences with something other than a pistol and a power-drill.

But Juan Cole isn't buying it, at least not yet.

I don't agree with the authors' conclusion that a US withdrawal would lead to social peace, since I believe that the low intensity war is only low intensity because the US military imposes limits on intensity. If the US forces weren't there, the local forces would fight their various wars to a conclusion or a stalemate.

Quick Notes

One candidate for the Most Important Story You're Not Paying Attention To is the spread of antibiotic-resistant diseases. Wednesday's Washington Post called attention to resistant strains of staph, which apparently are more common than previously thought. Some day this issue will suddenly vault into the public eye and become a panic.

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert is making noises about running for president. This could be the most significant comedic campaign since Pat Paulsen in 1968.

On DailyKos, Broken Skull gives a first-hand account of life with Iraq-induced post-traumatic-stress disorder. And Bonddad, who usually blogs about financial issues, lets out his real feelings about the lack of fortitude in the Democratic congressional leadership. And Chris Floyd (guest-blogging for Glenn Greenwald) pretty much agrees.

TPM assembles Sunday talk-show discussion of war against Iran.

This Week: Fall and Frost

2007-10-15T09:06:00.000-07:00

In New Hampshire in mid-October, politics, the Patriots, and even the Red Sox end up taking a back seat to Fall. I saw this particular stand of trees in North Conway this weekend. Peak colors should make it as far south as my home in Nashua sometime this week.

Graeme Frost: Shooting the Messenger

A lot of the buzz on the blogs this week had to do with Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old who delivered the Democrats' radio address on September 29. Frost was in a car accident, has major medical bills, and is fortunate that his family was covered by Maryland's S-CHIP program, which provides health insurance to children whose families are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. Democrats in Congress passed a bill expanding S-CHIP to cover more children, and President Bush vetoed it. A veto-override vote is pending, but isn't expected to succeed.

Well, it should have surprised no one that the right-wing attack machine went into high gear to try to discredit Frost and his family. Led by Michelle Malkin, a right-wing blogger and frequent talking-head guest on Fox News, the machine tried to show that the Frosts were well-off people who (if not exactly defrauding the government) were squeezing through loop-holes to get help they neither need nor deserve. A lot of half-truths were trumpeted loudly, and liberal bloggers did a good job of exposing the exaggerations -- to the point that even The Wall Street Journal had to concede that the Frosts are "the sort of family that a modest Schip is supposed to help." In other words: They have medium-low income but aren't destitute, and thanks to S-CHIP they didn't have to lose their home and spend themselves into destitution before getting aid.

A lot of people have expressed amazement that the Right would attack a 12-year-old boy, but these are exactly the kind of situations that draw their most vicious fire: Recall Ann Coulter going after the Jersey Girls, four 9/11 widows who publicly protested the Bush administration's stonewalling of the 9/11 investigation.

There are two patterns at work here: First, when attacked the Right always counter-attacks rather than defending its policies. Remember all the nasty false things that were said about Terry Schiavo's husband, or the smears against the people trapped in the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina? The whole Valerie Plame mess happened because the administration wanted to attack Joe Wilson rather than answer his charge that they fear-mongered Saddam's alleged nuclear program after they knew better. In this case, if they can divert the public into debating the Frosts' finances rather than Bush's veto of a plan that takes care of sick and injured kids, they've succeeded.

But the more specific pattern is this: Right-wing mythology insists that government programs don't help anyone. So when conservatives cut taxes for the rich and benefits for everyone else, they don't see it as robbing the poor to give to the rich. They think of it as a win-win situation: The rich get more money and the rest of us aren't being screwed up by the government's attempts to help us. If you confront them with incontrovertible evidence that this myth isn't true, that government programs really do help people and that cutting those programs victimizes people, they go berserk, like most folks do when their denial is exposed. That's what happened here.

One more piece of the attack on the Frosts deserves attention: The point that the Frosts are better off than millions of Americans, so S-CHIP forces waitresses and grocery-baggers to pay for the health insurance of people richer than themselves. Isn't it amazing how the Right wrings its hands when the government transfers money from the working poor to the working slightly-less-poor, but not when money is transfered straight to the rich? When the subject is tax cuts, it's as if only the rich pay taxes. But when they talk about benefits, suddenly all the government's money is coming from the working poor.

The American people understand quite well what's going on with programs like S-CHIP: We pool our tax money so that people can get help when they have bad luck. Sometimes that means that the government helps people better off than we are. If some of the people who were rescued off rooftops in New Orleans are richer than me, I'm OK with that. I just want to know that the helicopters will be there for me too.

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine

I won't do a full-scale book review of The Shock Doctrine because a number of people already have, including SusanG over on DailyKos. The important thing about this book is its scope: It ties together a long string of events over the last half-century, from Pinochet's CIA-supported coup in Chile in the Seventies to the current situations in Iraq and New Orleans. Too often the Left analyzes each new situation from scratch, while the Right has ready-made narratives it can plug the new details into. This book is an attempt to fix that problem.

The villain of the book is economist Milton Friedman and the free-market-worshiping movement he popularized. In Friedman's rhetoric (which you can still hear from President Bush) freedom, democracy, and unfettered capitalism are one indivisible whole. Klein's point is that the people of almost every country actually don't want unfettered capitalism, so Friedman economics has almost always wound up in a bundle with coups, dictatorships, death squads, and torture -- not freedom and democracy.

A second point is that the Friedmanians have been looking to remake society from a blank sheet of paper, and so have been callous about the destruction of what already exists. (Don Rumsfeld's nonchalance about the looting of Baghdad is just the most egregious manifestation of a more general attitude.) This has evolved into a complex Klein calls "disaster capitalism," in which any disaster -- whether a natural disaster like Katrina or the Asian tsunami or a manmade one like the invasion of Iraq -- is an opportunity for multinational corporations to come in and remake society from a blank sheet. The paradigm here is Sri Lanka, where the Asian tsunami was used to clear away fishing villages that can now be replaced by four-star beach hotels. Aid that American donors gave to help the tsunami victims has actually wound up financing their relocation to more-or-less permanent refugee camps.

A point I wish Klein had stressed more: The blank-sheet-of-paper fantasy was the grand illusion of the 20th century. Communism, Nazism, and the other major tragedies of the 20th century all revolved around the vision that you could build paradise if you could just bulldoze everything and start over. The only two groups that still have this illusion are the neo-conservatives and Al Qaeda.

Other Random Stuff

Comedian Andy Borowitz reports that the Supreme Court is awarding Al Gore's Nobel Prize to President Bush. And Paul Krugman discusses Gore Derangement Syndrome, that strange apoplexy that overtakes conservatives when they are forced to think about Al Gore.

Over at Talking Points Memo, Steve Benen explains why Mitt Romney will not have a "JFK moment" when he confronts head-on the doubts of those who wonder whether a Mormon should be president. It's simple: JFK defused the Catholic issue by embracing the separation of church and state. But the Republican base doesn't believe in the separation of church and state. So what's Mitt supposed to say to them?

If you haven't seen it already, Saturday Night Live's spoof of Fred Thompson is a hoot.

Here's the link I should have given you last week in my article about torture. It's from Balkinization, my favorite blog about the law. (The blog's founder Jack Balkin is a professor of constitutional law at Yale.) In this article, David Luban explains what is probably in the secret memos justifying torture. He does the common-sense thing: Looks at legal arguments the administration has already made in public and pieces them together into a justification of torture. His conclusion is that the memos define their terms in such a way that "nothing [the government] does to obtain terrorist information counts as cruel, inhuman, or degrading." In other words, there are no limits.

Over on Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley concludes that the recent Israeli attack on what was apparently a Syrian nuclear facility means that the Non-Proliferation Treaty is dead. Instead of an international system that attempts to control the spread of nuclear weapons while encouraging the peaceful development of nuclear energy, we now have "a de facto arrangement in which states that the US approves of are allowed to have nuclear power, while states we dislike get airstrikes."

A subject I haven't discussed nearly enough is the attempt to get Congress to immunize the telecom companies against lawsuits resulting from their conspiring with the Bush administration to tap Americans' phones illegally. Fortunately, Glenn Greenwald has this issue covered. The precedent here would be awful. When the president asks you to break the law, you should say no. It's that simple. Anything that undermines that principle is sending us down the road to being a banana republic.

What Impressed Me This Week: Torture and Response

2007-10-08T13:41:00.000-07:00

The discussion that drew my attention this week started with Thursday's New York Times article revealing that the Bush administration had secretly OK'd the use of torture even as it was publicly declaring torture "abhorrent."

Coincidentally, I told you the beginning of the story last week in my review of Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency. John Yoo worked for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, a powerful group that interprets the laws for the executive branch. Shortly after 9/11, he wrote a series of secret memos saying, in a nutshell, that during wartime the president's constitutional power as commander in chief trumps everything else -- treaties, laws, the Bill of Rights, everything. When Goldsmith took over the OLC, he thought this point of view was a serious mistake and tried to rein things in.

After Goldsmith left the administration and Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General, Gonzales appointed Steven Bradbury head of the OLC. Bradbury wrote a memo providing (according to the Times) "explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures."

A few months later Congress passed the McCain Amendment, which banned "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment of prisoners. Bradbury issued another memo (secret even from Senator Jay Rockefeller, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee) assuring the CIA that none of the previously authorized interrogation techniques violated this standard.

The Administration Response

As soon as the article appeared, the Bush administration went into damage control mode. The President himself weighs in here. And Press Secretary Dana Perino fended off the White House press corps here and here. The message, repeated over and over, is: "We don't torture." The justification for this statement, however, is more than a little Orwellian. It is true that the United States does not torture, because the word torture is defined by Office of Legal Counsel, which has declared that what we are doing isn't torture.

No one in the administration is willing to repeat the OLC's definition of torture in public, or to say what we do or don't do in order to avoid torturing someone. But they are willing to say -- and to say again and yet a third time -- that we do not torture.

Reaction From Bloggers

On the blogs I heard a surprising amount of consensus in reacting to the Times' article: Discovering that the Bush administration lies to us and breaks American laws and treaties is not new. The question is what we're going to do about it.

The strongest words came from Andrew Sullivan, who blogs for theatlantic.com and was once a fairly reliable Bush supporter. (He's still a reliable denouncer of all-things-Clinton and still calls himself a conservative.) But he's come around on Iraq and on torture, and has the zeal of a convert.

There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes. We know this because the law is very clear when you don't have war criminals like AEI's John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power. We know this because the very same techniques - hypothermia, long-time standing, beating - and even the very same term "enhanced interrogation techniques" - "verschaerfte Vernehmung" in the original German - were once prosecuted by American forces as war crimes. The perpetrators were the Gestapo. The penalty was death. You can verify the history here.

We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?

And he followed up in his next post with:

When conservatives subvert the rule of law ... to enable torture, and when only one man gets to decide who gets detained and tortured, they are no longer conservatives. They are fascists. And they need not just to be defeated; they need to be repudiated.

What I Think

My own prediction is that Sullivan's view will be the view of history. Bush's old age will be a lot like Pinochet's. He'll have to be careful where he travels for fear of being extradicted to someplace that will try him for war crimes.

Watching the ongoing debate, I wish more people would point out just how cowardly the policy on torture is. We are telling the world that Americans are so afraid to die that we will toss all moral principles overboard if we think it will make us safer. That position is not worthy of a great nation.

I also wish people would stop pushing the torture-doesn't-work line. Whether or not something works depends on what the job is. If the job is to get a captured terrorist to tell us where the ticking bomb is, the expert consensus is that it doesn't work. But if the job is to generate false testimony, history shows clearly that torture is the ideal tool: Try to imagine Stalin's show trials or the medieval witch hunts getting anywhere without torture. So if you're running a government in which you occasionally need to generate false testimony in order to push the country into wars that have no legitimate justification, then torture works.

When Bushies Negotiate

Several years ago I was talking to a 9-year-old girl at a party. She was by herself, she explained, because the other kids didn't want to play with her. The other kids seemed nice enough to me, so I asked how she knew they didn't want to play with her. She presented what she saw as totally convincing evidence: "I told them what to do and they didn't do it."

I'm often reminded of that girl when I listen to the Bush administration. They want to play with the other kids. They'd love to have a united bipartisan Congress rather than polarized strife. They'd love to reach an agreement with Iran rather than launch an attack. They tried to get the French and Germans on board before invading Iraq. They even tried to negotiate with Saddam before bringing down his government and hanging him. And when interrogating a suspected terrorist they "start with the least harsh methods first" before resorting to torture. But negotiated solutions never seem to happen because the other kids -- Democrats, Iranians, Iraqis, detainees, our Western allies, everybody -- just don't want to play with the Bush administration.

They told the other kids what to do, and the kids didn't do it.

Across the board it's always the same pattern: The Bush people view themselves as reasonable because they give their opponents a chance to surrender rather than going straight into hostilities. They tell people what to do, and if those people don't do it, well then, peaceful techniques clearly aren't going to work. Time to bring in the cruise missiles and the waterboards and the accusations that Democrats want the terrorists to win. The Bushies don't want to get tough, but their opponents won't surrender peacefully, so what other choice do they have?

Random Stuff I Ran Across Somehow

When I was a kid, TV talkshow host Jack Paar would occasionally show tapes of black comedians performing before black nightclub audiences. Strange as that sounds today, in the Sixties it was a step forward in racial understanding. Well, I found this YouTube tape of an Iranian-American comedian Maz Jobrani performing for an audience that appears to be made up largely of Americans of various Middle-Eastern ethnicities. It's all part of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, which still has a couple of dates, including October 19 in Fremont, CA.

I'm late to this story, but back in September Public Radio International ran a piece on how American and Muslim fundamentalists are working together to fight the theory of evolution in Turkey. Creationism, intelligent design -- you know the drill. I didn't think I could be against Christian/Muslim cooperation, but I guess that was naive of me.

A brigade from the Minnesota National Guard deployed for 22 months, a tour that took them to Iraq and was extended by the Surge. What brought them home? Apparently if they'd been deployed one day longer they'd have qualified for additional educational benefits. Channel 6 from Minneapolis has the story.

DailyKos blogger Puck Goodfellow gives us a glimpse of life in the lower class in My Morning Recertifying For Food Stamps.

I'm going to have more to say about Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine in some future post. Right now I'll just say that it's an important book. You can watch John Cusack interview the author here.

Republican Congressman Darrell Issa warns Democrat Henry Waxman on the downside of investigating Blackwater: If he the investigation takes him to Iraq, a Blackwater team will be his bodyguards. Subtle, don't you think?

What Impressed Me This Week

2007-10-01T11:15:00.000-07:00

October in New Hampshire really is quite lovely. The leaves are only starting to turn, and just enough of the heat has gone that long walks without a jacket are perfectly comfortable. It's still a couple of weeks before things become stunningly beautiful, but days like this deserve appreciation for their own virtues.

Iran Speculation

The most important question about the Bush administration's remaining 15 months in office is: Will they attack Iran? No one who knows is posting their ideas on the Internet, but it's hard not to try to read the tea leaves. Sometimes it seems like everyone who has a friend working for the administration is putting forward a theory based on their inside information.

I don't have any friends telling me inside information about the administration's plans for Iran. But it's interesting how many different articles fit into the following frame: Dick Cheney favors an attack of some sort on Iran, but the Joint Chiefs are dead set against it. President Bush is siding with the generals, which is why we haven't attacked yet. But Cheney, possibly with the help of Cheney-like operators inside the Israeli government, hopes to engineer an incident that will change Bush's mind.

I offer not one solid fact to back that story up. I am posting it the way I might post my speculations about the upcoming season of Heroes. It's a narrative that hangs together and fits my general impressions of the major characters.

Iraq

Finally I have found a statistic out of Iraq that strikes me as genuine good news: For the first time since November, 2006, fewer coalition troops died in Iraq last month than in the same month of the previous year. There were 66 coalition troop deaths in September, 2007 versus 72 in September, 2006. I'll report next month on whether that's a fluke or a trend.

Eliminating the Middle Man

I'm a late-comer to this story, but I'm guessing I'm not the only person who missed it when Wired covered it back in May. Hasan Elahi is a Bangladeshi-American art professor at Rutgers. He travels about 70,000 miles a year, so his name shows up on lists in a lot of FBI offices. After being detained at the Detroit airport in 2002, Elahi started worrying about the possibility that some mistake or misunderstanding could land him in Guantanamo, where it might take years for him to get a hearing.

At some point he realized that the real threat wasn't surveillance, it was bad surveillance: What if somebody at the FBI put together three or four random facts that made him look suspicious? Figuring that if you want anything done right you should do it yourself, Elahi started spying on himself and posting his reports to a website. He carries a GPS tracker that uploads his location (he's in Buffalo today), and he also uploads photographs of meals he eats, receipts for things he buys, urinals he's used, and whatever else he imagines the government might be curious about.

If you had a TMI-reaction to the urinals, that's the point. His sinister strategy is to so totally over-produce information about himself that all information about him becomes worthless. "It's economics," he says, "I flood the market."

Books I: Winter in Kabul

If Ann Jones weren't such a fabulous writer, there would be no hope of anybody finishing her book Winter in Kabul. It's dismal and depressing and does a brilliant job of capturing the dysfunctionality both of Afghan culture and of every Western attempt to "help" the Afghans, including her own. If you've ever thought: "It's simple, we should just ..." put that thought aside and read this book.

For me, Winter in Kabul was like a bad love affair: It made me miserable, but I couldn't stop reading it. Jones went to Kabul in 2002, as soon as the city became (sort of) safe. She wasn't part of any organization, and she went at her own expense to see if she could help. Her plan was to train high school English teachers, many of whom were women who hadn't been allowed to teach (or maybe even to leave their homes) during the Taliban era. For the next two and a half years, she (sort of) did that. She also tried to help with an effort to improve a prison for women, and to teach Afghans about the rights that their constitution claims they have.

But nothing goes according to plan, and along the way you meet some fascinating characters, like one nameless man who gives Jones a ride back to her hotel. In a matter-of-fact tone he explains the momentum that civil war picks up after thirty years: "We all killed people, you see. Someone's father, sister, daughter, brother. So we are all subject to revenge. We cannot put down our arms because we are all guilty."

And there are scenes like this one in 2003, when Jones and a news-starved colleague finally power up the generator and get the satellite TV working.

Fox News went on describing a mission accomplished in a place they called Afghanistan, a country utterly unlike the one in which we lived. One night, as we sat in the dark to save generator power for the TV set, we heard some no-name right-wing think-tank prowar neocon talking head explain that America could speedily repair any incidental damage to Iraq's infrastructure, just as it had done in Afghanistan. Security, water, electricity -- all those things Kabulis had learned to live without -- he said had been restored in Kabul "in no time." Even in the dim glow of the TV, I could see that Helen was weeping. "Please can we go back to the BBC?" she said, and we never watched Fox News again.

For another view of the "success" in Afghanistan, see this video by Lara Logan.

Books II: Dead Certain and The Terror Presidency

Three weeks ago I told you about Charlie Savage's book Takeover, which lays out the Bush administration's unprecedented expansion of executive power. A good companion to that book is The Terror Presidency by Jack Goldsmith. Goldsmith gives the inside view of many of the same events portrayed from the outside by Savage. Goldsmith (now a Harvard Law School professor) was the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from October, 2003 to June, 2004.

The OLC is probably the most powerful organization that the average American hasn't heard of. If you work in the executive branch of the US government -- say for the CIA or the FBI -- and you want to know what the law says you can or can't do, you ask the OLC. They do in advance what the Supreme Court does in retrospect. Their rulings govern whose phone you can tap, who you can torture, and who you can kill. If the president wants to know whether he can invade a country without Congressional authorization, he asks the OLC. Sounds important, doesn't it?

Goldsmith's account is significant partly because of what he can report first hand, but also because of who he is. He's a conservative legal scholar who is not by any stretch of the imagination a Bush-hating liberal. He believes the terrorist threat is real. He thinks the executive branch needs unprecedented powers to deal with that threat. But he profoundly disagrees with the way that the Bush administration has claimed those powers.

When Goldsmith took the OLC job, he discovered that he was now responsible for the work of his predecessors, particularly John Yoo, author of the now-infamous "torture memo" that justified extreme interrogation techniques. A series of highly classified OLC rulings seemed to Goldsmith to be too broad and sloppily reasoned. He spent the bulk of his months at OLC replacing these rulings with narrower, more specific rulings that left less room for abuse. He was fought every step of the way by David Addington, legal counsel for Vice President Cheney.

The book contains a lot of presidential history. In particular, Goldsmith contrasts Bush with two other presidents who sought expanded power at a time of crisis: Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But Lincoln and Roosevelt saw this situation as a political problem: how to build a consensus of support for their new powers. Bush sees things differently.

The Bush adminstration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action, and legalistic defense. This approach largely eschews politics: the need to explain, to justify, to convince, to get people on board, to compromise.

He describes the administration's approach to the FISA law against domestic wiretaps like this:

After 9/11 they dealt with FISA the way they dealt with other laws they didn't like: they blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so that no one could question the legal basis for the operations. ... Before I arrived in OLC, not even NSA lawyers were allowed to see the Justice Department's legal analysis of what the NSA was doing.

Goldsmith sees this strategy as ultimately self-defeating. Rather than building consensus, the administration has created resistance inside the federal bureaucracy, in the courts, in the Congress, and in the general population. In the long run, Goldsmith believes, the presidency will be more constrained and less powerful because it has created an atmosphere of distrust.

I reviewed a third Bush book, Dead Certain by Robert Draper, on my blog a few days ago. This is a different kind of inside look at the Bush administration, and gives more insight into Bush's personality than any other book I've seen.

In Case You Missed It

It's really easy for a news item to get distorted when it agrees with something "everybody knows". For example, everybody knows that marriages don't last like they used to, so when new statistics from the Census Bureau seemed to show that less than half of the marriages in 1975-79 had made it to their 25th anniversary, it made headlines. But not so fast, say Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. It turns out that the data was from mid-2004, so not all the 1979 couples had been given a chance to celebrate their 25th. When the complete results came in, 53% of the couples had made it. Stevenson and Wolfers' examination of the data leads to this conclusion: "The facts are that divorce is down, and today’s marriages are more stable than they have been in decades."

The entry of ex-Governor Jeanne Shaheen into the race probably makes the Democratic senate nomination in New Hampshire a foregone conclusion, but Democrats need to find some way to take advantage of the talents of lesser-known candidate Jay Buckey. Buckey is a professor of medicine at Dartmouth who flew on the space shuttle, and things just sound obvious when he explains them. Check out this video on health care.

I love a great graphic. Bill O'Reilly, currently trying to escape from the consequences of his own idiotic racial stereotyping, claimed that his remarks were taken out of context. So to put things in context, Gawker.com assembled a pie-chart of all the ways O'Reilly has referred to black people over the years. It speaks for itself.

On the Balkinization blog, Paul Finkelman compares President Bush's use of the Blackwater mercenaries to Britain's use of Hessian mercenaries in the Revolutionary War. "Sadly, the more he sanctions the use of mercenaries, hired guns, and armed cowboys on helicopters, the more our Third President George begins to look like our nation's first enemy, George the Third." More on Blackwater here and here.

Capital Eye notes that soldiers are contributing more to Democrats than they used to. In past election cycles, political contributions from members of the military run about 80/20 in favor of the Republicans. This time around, it's 60/40 -- still Republican, but much less so. And the Republican presidential candidate receiving the most money from the military is the only one against the war: Ron Paul.

Satire is alive and well on DailyKos. Hunter parodies bad partisanship in "The Obvious Greatness of My Presidential Candidate." And Carnacki explains some recent votes in Congress with this scoop: "Breaking: Dems WANT to Lose in 2008."

If the situation in Burma (also known as Myanmar) hasn't made it onto your radar screen yet, this article will catch you up. Burma is among the most corrupt countries on Earth, but as long as their oil flows freely no one cares.

Finally, over a period of years Thomas Friedman has written so many columns claiming that "the next six months" would be crucial in Iraq that six months became known as a Friedman Unit (FU). Well, Sunday he changed his tune and announced that "9/11 is Over". He writes:

9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.

How's that for a 2008 slogan: "Time to get things right again."

Dead Certain: Reading Bush's Character

2007-09-25T07:20:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Robert Draper's book Dead Certain: the Presidency of George W. Bush. The book has been out for several weeks already and has already been reviewed in many places -- here and here , for example, and Draper has been interviewed here and here and here -- so I'm not pretending that I'm writing breaking news.

The reason to read this book is to get insight in to George Bush's character, not to find startling new behind-the-scenes information. There was a flap in the press about Draper quoting Bush as not remembering how the Iraqi Army got disbanded -- one of the most important blunders of the occupation -- but that kind of stuff is exceptional. What you get instead is the steady drip-drip-drip of Bush's reactions to events and the reactions of the people around him. If you consider Bush and his people bad company, you will not enjoy this book. (It's hard enough for me to relive the 2000 and 2004 campaigns through the eyes of Gore or Kerry. To see it from the Republican side was like scraping my fingernails on a blackboard.) But the accumulation of detail gives Bush a three-dimensionality that I haven't seen anywhere else.

So you can read the book and form your own impressions -- my conclusions don't always match Draper's, so yours probably won't match either his or mine. But here's the main stuff I gleaned about Bush's character:

He wants to do big things, but he doesn't want to work hard or sweat the details. I'm reminded of the song "Extraordinary" from the Broadway musical Pippin.

Give me my chance
And give me my wings
But don't make me think about everyday things.
It's so secondary
For someone who is very
Extraordinary
Like me.

I remember feeling that way myself when I was about 12. (That's the point in Pippin as well. It's a coming-to-maturity play, and Pippin sings "Extraordinary" near the beginning.) I wanted to be a baseball pitcher. Now, if you're serious about that ambition, the first thing you need to work on is control of your pitches. So you need to find a pitching motion that seems natural and practice it until it's robotic. But at 12 I would much rather imagine on one pitch that I was Juan Marichal and do his high leg kick, while on the next pitch I'd be Kent Tekulve and do his submarine delivery. I would have thrown left-handed like Koufax if I could have managed it.

That's Bush in a nutshell. Not the variation, but the unwillingness to sacrifice fantasy to boring work. He doesn't want to "play smallball" as he puts it. He doesn't want to learn about Sunni and Shia, or why the Kurds don't get along with the Turkmen. He wants to be Churchill. He wants to be Truman. Let's just hope he doesn't decide to be Caesar.

If that sounds like I'm saying Bush in immature, well, yeah. His life is full of 12-year-old-boy concerns: How to prove his independence from his father, for example, or shaping his day around when he's going to ride his bike.

He thinks that a leader's job is to project certainty and confidence. Meanwhile his aides, the ones he's supposed to be inspiring with his certainty and confidence, think that their job is to protect him from harsh criticism and bad news that might disturb his confidence and thereby prevent him from leading.

That's what creates the weird dreamworld aspect of the Bush presidency. There's a mutual projection going on. Bush has projected his need to be perfect onto the troops and the other people he tries to lead. It's not for himself that he refuses to admit any mistakes. They need to believe he's perfect. How can he ask the troops to risk their lives for his policy if they can see that he's not sure it's the right thing to do? The people around him, meanwhile, don't look at the bad news because the president doesn't want to hear it and needs to be protected from it. And they know he won't dig it out on his own. That's how the administration could bungle Katrina so badly. The rest of us could just turn on our TVs and see the anarchy. But it took days for that information to penetrate the bubble around President Bush.

None of these people believe they're being self-serving when they put forward some nonsense like "we're kicking ass" in Iraq. Bush thinks it's his job to say stuff like that, and his people think it's their job to enable him to do it with conviction.

Bush's compassion is a free-spinning gear. It turns, but it's not connected to anything. Liberals often look at Bush's policies and speculate that he doesn't feel compassion, that he's totally self-absorbed and can't grasp that people are being hurt. It's more subtle than that. Draper's book is full of stories of his visits to wounded Iraq veterans in the hospital and his conversations with families of dead soldiers. He has strong emotional reactions to those visits. (So much so that sometimes the vets and the families seem to feel like they need to buck him up, not the other way around.) He admits to crying a lot. But somehow he never comes out of those visits thinking "I have to find a way to stop this." The emotion is an end in itself. The only action it leads to is Bush crying.

This pattern didn't start with Iraq. "Compassionate conservatism" has been that way from the beginning. In the old, bad, uncompassionate conservatism, the rich are rich, the poor are poor, and that's just dandy. If the poor had any talent or gumption, they'd be rich. But they don't, so they stay poor and it's their own damn fault. In the new compassionate conservatism, on the other hand, the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, but the rich occasionally think about the poor and feel moved by their plight.

Folks who don't get this dynamic, like David Kuo, feel betrayed by what they see as a lack of follow-up or even as hypocrisy. That's because they started with the misconception that compassion is supposed to motivate you to help people. But the point of compassionate conservatism is to be therapeutic for the conservatives themselves, not for the objects of their compassion. The point is to break the icejam in the conservative heart and let those emotions flow. It's a healthier way to live.

And George W. Bush is nothing if not healthy. He regularly outruns or outbikes the young agents that the Secret Service handpicks to keep up with him. He doesn't drink any more. He watches his weight. He gets to bed by nine, no matter what kind of crisis might be popping somewhere.

He might live to a hundred. Maybe longer. Maybe instead of thinking that he's Churchill, he'll start thinking he's Methuselah and plan to live to be 969. He'll surround himself with people who tell him he can do it. And when he starts failing at 105, he won't admit it. Not because he's afraid of dying, of course, but because it would be too hard for his people to face.

What Impressed Me This Week: Questioning Ahmadinejad

2007-09-24T10:57:00.000-07:00

Say His Name Fast Three Times

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in New York to address the UN this week, so Iran has been on a lot of people's minds. 60 Minutes interviewed Ahmadinejad: see the transcript and video on their web site. It's amazing to me what a hostile interview CBS' Scott Pelley does. Again and again, he repeats Bush administration talking points to Ahmadinejad as if they were the consensus views of the American people, and demands yes-or-no responses to them.

The first set of questions is about Ahmadinejad's plan to visit Ground Zero in New York, which apparently is not going to be allowed. Bear in mind that Iran is Shia and Al Qaeda is Sunni, so they have no affection for each other. Also that the Iranian government made all the appropriate gestures of condolence after 9/11.

PELLEY: Sir, what were you thinking? The World Trade Center site is the most sensitive place in the American heart, and you must have known that visiting there would be insulting to many, many Americans.

AHMADINEJAD: Why should it be insulting?

PELLEY: Well, sir, you're the head of government of an Islamist state that the United States government says is a major exporter of terrorism around the world.

AHMADINEJAD: Well, I wouldn't say that what the American government says is the prerequisite here. Something happened there which led to other events. Many innocent people were killed there. Some of those people were American citizens obviously. We obviously are very much against any terrorist action and any killing. And also we are very much against any plots to sow the seeds of discord among nations. Usually you go to these sites to pay your respects. And also to perhaps air your views about the root causes of such incidents. I think that when I do that, I will be paying, as I said earlier, my respect to the American nation.

PELLEY: But the American people, sir, believe that your country is a terrorist nation, exporting terrorism in the world. You must have known that visiting the World Trade Center site would infuriate many Americans, as if to be mocking the American people.

AHMADINEJAD: Well, I'm amazed. How can you speak for the whole of the American nation?

It goes on like that. Go look.

While I'm on the subject, I think we screwed up by not letting him go to Ground Zero. If we show him every hospitality and he insults us, he looks bad. But if we show him disrespect because we're afraid to be insulted, we look bad. We should not put a country like Iran in a position to lecture us about free speech and freedom of expression.

Juan Cole's take on Ahmadinejad and the American government is on Salon.

The Best Graph of The Week

Until recently, Paul Krugman's excellent column was behind the firewall at the New York Times web site, so only subscribers could see it. (Brilliant marketing: We're going to assemble a great roster of columnists and then make sure they're seen by as few people as possible.) Now it's not only available, but Paul also has a blog "The Conscience of a Liberal" on the Times site. He kicked off his blog by posting a graph that is the proverbial picture-worth-a-thousand-words: The percentage of America's national income that has gone to the top 10%, from 1917 to the present. It's a simple concept, and it clearly makes the point that America used to be a much more egalitarian society than it is today.

Now There's a Word For...

... when people scan through blog comments looking for crazy stuff they can quote to characterize the other side as wackos. It's called nutpicking. Keven Drum identified the phenomenon in August, 2006 and had a contest to name it, but it has taken me this long to notice. Drum's Law goes like this:

If you're forced to rely on random blog commenters to make a point about the prevalence of some form or another of disagreeable behavior, you've pretty much made exactly the opposite point.

In other words, a movement is characterized by its leaders and by people who have public followings. If you can't demonstrate some wacko point of view by quoting them, it can't be very widespread or significant.

Republican Watch

Speaking of leaders whose statements might characterize a movement, Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani proposed expanding NATO to include Israel, which (as Matthew Yglesias puts it ) commits "the United States to the armed defense of the borders of a country that lacks internationally recognized borders." Glenn Greenwald calls it "the single most extremist policy of any major presidential candidate." Strange that John Edwards' haircut got so much more attention than this.

At the Values Voters Presidential Debate last Monday (I missed it too), the Grand Avenue Church of God choir sang, "Why Should God Bless America?" to the tune (naturally) of "God Bless America". People For the American Way has the lyrics and video on their web site. If you doubt for a second that there's a pro-conservative bias in American news coverage, try to imagine what would happen if a liberal group did the same thing: strung together a litany of America's failure to embody liberal values and perverted a patriotic classic to challenge America's worthiness. The outcry would last for weeks, like the bleating about the Move-On General Betray Us ad.

American Prospect editor Garance Franke-Ruta blogged a female point of view on Chris Matthews strange claim that Fred Thompson is sexy. The post ends by placing Tom Brady's Sports Illustrated cover next to a CNN picture of Thompson. "Any questions?"

I'm really starting to like the video they do over at TPM. Last Monday they examined John McCain's appearance on Meet the Press and spliced in video of the events that McCain was mischaracterizing. Why can't the TV news networks do stuff like this?

There's Still a War in Iraq

The Washington Post observes that the administration's plan to get the troop levels back to pre-Surge levels by July are not very solid. Quoting the White House's Stephen Hadley:

"What General Petraeus talked about was not a timetable, it was an expectation that if progress on security continues, he will be able to make some adjustments and drawdowns," Hadley said at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. Reductions, he said "will depend on the conditions on the ground," among which is "whether the Iraqi security forces will be able to take responsibility for more of the door-to-door population security."

So if violence spikes back up, or if the Iraqi security forces don't live up to the administrations' expectations, all bets are off. But that couldn't happen, could it?

That's why the argument about whether the Surge has been working is so important. If General Petraeus' evidence of progress is smoke and mirrors, then the planned troop withdrawals (minimal as they are) are smoke and mirrors too. And over at Democracy Arsenal, Ilan Goldenberg can't make General Petraeus' numbers play nicely with a report that the Pentagon just delivered to Congress.

The New York Times wrote about Iraq's internal refugees. Interesting point here: The refugees are not necessarily sorting themselves out along sectarian lines. Sometimes they're just going to neighborhoods that have more reliable electricity.

I need more time to figure out what's going on with the Blackwater security contractors in Iraq. I do know this much: One reason the number of American troops in Iraq looks as low as it does is that we also employ a lot of private contractors. A bunch of them are cooks and drivers and so forth (who make many times what a soldier makes -- that's the efficiency of the free market at work), but some of them are mercenaries who carry guns and do things like protect our diplomats. That's Blackwater and a few other companies.

It's not at all clear what law, if any, applies to these folks. If they were our soldiers, they'd be subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And if they were Iraqis, they'd be subject to Iraqi law. But Blackwater exists in a legal gray area. So if they did indeed shoot up a bunch of Iraqis for no good reason, they may get away with it.

Brave New Films provides this jazzy video about Blackwater. The only thing I have to add is that my friend in the Marines tells me that the real soldiers hate these guys. They make a lot of money, they're accountable to nobody, if they get fed up they can go home, and when they get into trouble the real soldiers have to come and rescue them. The nastiness in Fallujah, you may remember, started with insurgents killing four Blackwater guys.

So I guess I can add one more item to the list of words I never thought I'd associate with America: torture, secret prison, pre-emptive invasion, and now mercenaries.

Want to Know. Want to Know.

Check out the Strokeland Superband's music video Colin Powell, which asks the musical question: "When will Colin Powell write his tell-all book?" I can't say I've ever had to rhyme "harsh interrogation".

What Impressed Me This Week: Iraq Week

2007-09-17T09:15:00.000-07:00

This week was Iraq Week. Petraeus testified, everybody in the world commented, and then President Bush gave a speech magnanimously accepting the recommendations that he had hand-picked General Petraeus to make. This Mike Luckovich cartoon pretty much captures it.

Real People in Harm's Way

Much of the debate has been about whether or not General Petraeus cooked the books in the statistics he used to claim that the Surge is working. (I think he did.) But one reason we focus so much on statistics is that so many Americans have no direct connection either to our troops or to the Iraqis. As Philip Carter says on Intel Dump: "The burden of today's war is heavy, but it is not wide." We don't know the people who are dying, and the financial burden of the war is being passed on to our grandchildren -- who cares about them? -- so we talk about numbers. And some of us make callous comments like this. (Me? I have one friend and no close relatives in the military. My friend is stateside right now. And my taxes are lower than they were at the beginning of the war.)

A couple of the things I ran across this week at least reminded me of the real people in harm's way. First, a few weeks ago I linked to a New York Times op-ed written by seven soldiers in Iraq. It was called "The War as We Saw It" and it gave a profoundly less optimistic view than General Petraeus. Well, two of those guys are dead. Their unit was close to finishing its 15-month rotation, but they didn't make it.

Second, for years a young woman from Baghdad has written a blog called Baghdad Burning under the pseudonym Riverbend. She is a wonderful writer and observer. A lot of us in the blogosphere feel like we know her, even though we wouldn't recognize her in person. In some ways it's been as good (and as bad) as having a friend right there on the ground in Baghdad telling us how things look from the civilian point of view. Whenever there was a long gap between posts, the Internet would buzz with worry: Was Riverbend OK? If she died, how would we know?

Well, recently we got the good/bad news that Riverbend and her family have escaped to Syria. They're Sunnis, and they had been living in one of those walled-up neighborhoods that are either fortresses or gulags, depending on your point of view. They're safe now, but Riverbend has no idea whether she'll ever see her relatives and friends again, or if Baghdad will ever be safe to visit. The story of her escape is emotional and well worth reading. If you've never heard of Riverbend before, read a few pieces from the Baghdad Burning archives to get acquainted. Try this one or go back to 2003. (The earlier you go, the less bitter she sounds.)

Her story puts a personal face on the statistic that something like 4 million Iraqis are now refugees -- about half in Syria or Jordan or Iran and the other half somewhere inside Iraq. (I imagine that a lot of Baghdad Sunnis and Shia are now living with relatives in their tribal homelands.) That's from a pre-war population of about 27 million. Do the math; it's horrifying. It puts a different slant on Petraeus' testimony that some previously violent Baghdad neighborhoods are now "quiet". It also gives the strongest possible rebuke to the administration's frequently repeated claim that 50 million Iraqis and Afghanis "are free now" -- and to the rhetoric about bringing "freedom" to Iran. The Iraqis are so free now that hundreds of thousands of them -- not wild-eyed Islamist extremists, but educated westernized young women like Riverbend -- would rather leave everything they've ever known and live under dictatorship in Syria. Think hard about that.

And if you want a young woman's view of life in Iran, pick up the book Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni. My favorite Afghan book is a little out of date now, but Come Back to Afghanistan is a good read. Both books succeed in making their countries more three-dimensional to us distant Americans.

Creative Responses

If you'd rather laugh than cry about the whole Surge hoopla, check out this video that reviews the Surge as if it were a movie. ("What's up with that Iran subplot?" a woman-on-the-street asks, and her date responds: "They're just setting up a sequel.") Or this video that advertises the Surge like a product. (The Surge-as-detergent segment has a fast-talking disclaimer: "Appearance of cleanliness may simply mask the foul stench of corruption.")

And if you'd rather just be distracted, watch this video of what a bench-clearing brawl looks like on the baseball fields of South Korea. But don't ask me to explain what they're doing.

About That Speech

Fred Kaplan did a good job taking Bush's speech apart on Slate. Kaplan's key point:

Let's be clear one more time about this claim: The surge of five extra combat brigades (bringing the total from 15 to 20) started in January. Their 15-month tours of duty will begin to expire next April. The Army and Marines have no combat units ready to replace them. The service chiefs refuse to extend the tours any further. The president refuses to mobilize the reserves any further. And so, the surge will be over by next July. This has been understood from the outset. It is the result of simple arithmetic, not of anyone's decision, much less some putative success.

Philip Carter (an Iraq war veteran who writes the blog Intel Dump ) called the speech "an effort to put lipstick, mascara, and a pound or two of pancake makeup on a really ugly pig."

James Fallows of The Atlantic, who has been in Asia for some while now, wrote a column giving what he calls the man from Mars view of Bush's speech and the responses to it. About John Edwards, who bought TV time to answer Bush with this statement, Fallows comments: "How long has John Edwards been sounding like this? Wow!"

Other Voices

David Enders at In These Times explains Why Iraq Is Getting Worse. He writes this from Najaf, where the civil war is not between Sunni and Shia, but between different factions of Shia. If you're watching Fox News, you might as well watch Al Jazeera too. Here's what they're saying. (Is it just me, or do they sound more reasonable?) One issue I didn't hear in General Petraeus testimony: the cholera epidemic in northern Iraq. George Packer has an article in The New Yorker asking the questions that we really ought to be focusing on: How are we going to pull out of Iraq? What will happen when we do? Post Global, which seems to be a joint effort of the Washington Post and Newsweek, identifies the following mid-range trend: the Iraq War is responsible for a major decline in the United States' ability to lead the world.

Greenspan Jumps From the Sinking Ship

This week former Federal Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan joined the long list of conservatives who now claim they never really supported what President Bush was doing. Paul Krugman points out that this is all nonsense: Like all the other ship-jumpers, Greenspan supported Bush when it counted, back when he was cutting taxes for the rich and ignoring the deficit.

In retrospect, Mr. Greenspan’s moral collapse in 2001 was a portent. It foreshadowed the way many people in the foreign policy community would put their critical faculties on hold and support the invasion of Iraq, despite ample evidence that it was a really bad idea. And like enthusiastic war supporters who have started describing themselves as war critics now that the Iraq venture has gone wrong, Mr. Greenspan has started portraying himself as a critic of administration fiscal irresponsibility now that President Bush has become deeply unpopular and Democrats control Congress.

Glenn Greenwald was already compiling a list of dishonest ship-jumpers back in June. Add Alan to the list. Can no one on the Right just say: "I was wrong"?

Gonzales Replacement

Today it has been announced that Judge Michael Mukasey will be nominated to be the new attorney general. Lest you imagine that the liberal blogosphere is knee-jerk anti-Bush, Glenn Greenwald supports Mukasey.

What Impressed Me This Week: Waiting for Petraeus

2007-09-10T10:24:00.000-07:00

It seems almost silly to comment on a week that ends just as General Petraeus is giving his long-awaited testimony, doesn't it? But it's not like we can't guess what he's going to say. People spent the whole week guessing, and they mostly agreed with each other: Petraeus would say we'd made military progress since the Surge started, but that the political situation of the Iraqi government hadn't improved. He'd ask for more time.

Surge Statistics

The big debate all week has been whether the Surge has reduced violence in Baghdad or anywhere else. Josh Marshall over at TPM has been all over this issue. Basically the story is that the Pentagon's numbers differ from those compiled by AP, the GAO, the Iraqi government, or pretty much anybody. And how they get those numbers is classified. Josh sums it up:

In other words, it's not just a matter of getting the numbers from Petraeus and his staff and deciding whether you believe them or not. They won't even tell us what the numbers are -- let alone how they came up with them. All they'll say is that they're very good. Or in some cases that there's X percentage drop over the course of the surge. Or an isolated number here or there. But actual hard numbers? Going back over the last couple years? For some reason we're not allowed to see those.

The low point in the week was the article by Michael Gordon in Saturday's New York Times. For those who don't remember, Gordon is a former co-author of Judith Miller, the Times reporter who wrote all those false stories about Saddam's WMDs in the lead-up to the invasion. Well, Gordon is at it again, reporting the Pentagon's spin on the Surge as if it were the only word on the subject. Josh takes it apart here.

Several bloggers discussed the "moving goalposts" of the Surge. The best job was by Tim Grieve at Salon's War Room blog. He goes back to the statements President Bush made when he introduced the Surge, and traces the story from there:

for a lesson in setting goal posts when it's politically necessary and then moving them when the ball falls short, watch how the White House first embraced the idea of "benchmarks" as a test for the "surge" and then tore them down once it became clear that they wouldn't be met.

In a second excellent post, Grieve explains the maneuver by which the administration makes sure that it's never the right time to criticize them.

The pattern is now clear: Demand that everyone else withhold judgment on Iraq until some new assessment arrives, announce that you're doing whatever you want to do no matter what, declare the ensuing debate to be too late, and then start the whole process over again six or nine months down the road by demanding that everyone withhold judgment again.

What's Going On in Anbar?

Beyond the hype, I found a couple good on-the-ground articles about what's going on in Anbar province. Over at the Small Wars Journal there's an article by Dave Kilcullen, the Australian who is one of the top theorists about counter-insurgency. I disagree with his support of the Surge, but I thought his article was interesting anyway. He gets down into the dynamics of the relationship between Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni tribes.

A second interesting article is The Myth of AQI by Andrew Tilghman at Washington Monthly. He looks at the question: How big a deal is Al Qaeda in Iraq? Are they as big as we're being told? Have they done all the things they've been given credit for? He examines the pressures inside our military to interpret any ambiguous incident as the work of AQI.

Looking Back at Gore's Press Coverge

Vanity Fair takes a look back at how the press covered Al Gore when he was running for president in 2000. They review how innocent statements turned into "I invented the Internet" and a bunch of other bogus stories that got woven together into a serious character flaw.

This is an important story, and not just because Gore might run for something again someday. (I don't think he will. I believe Al is happy with the life he has now, and he's not going to screw it all up by becoming a candidate again.) We need to understand how the distortion process works, so that we can spot it when it happens again in 2008. Because it will.

Don't Vote Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes

This week I took advantage of my God-given right as a New Hampshirite to see presidential candidates close up. I wrote about Fred Thompson in a separate post. And I got another look at John Edwards on Friday.

Bush Books

A bunch of new books about the administration have come out recently. I'm going to tell you about them over the next few weeks. This week I read Charlie Savage's Takeover: the Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. Savage is the Boston Globe reporter who got a Pulitzer Prize for drawing attention to the signing statements President Bush has been attaching to bills the Congress passes, and to how those statements differ from those of previous presidents.

Nothing in Takeover seemed new to me, which actually speaks well for Savage. I hate it that Bob Woodward keeps writing in the Washington Post but saves the good stuff for his books. Savage apparently has been telling us what he knows all along.

What's valuable in Takeover is to see the whole story laid out end-to-end. In the presence of such an all-pervasive propaganda machine, subjects often come up surrounded by one apparent set of facts, which later turn out to be false. It's hard to keep track of what was true when. So, for example, when we first heard about Guantanamo, we were assured that the people being kept there were "the worst of the worst" and far too dangerous to put through any ordinary system of justice. Much later we found out that we had paid bounties to our Afghan allies for Taliban members, and that a lot of people they sold us were probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The story looks completely different when the facts are put in order from the beginning and you don't have unlearn a set of lies.

Savage's book does a good job of documenting the precise difference between this administration and previous ones. I've heard conservatives claim that Bush is doing nothing that other presidents didn't do, and that the buzz about it is all partisan politics. When you see the whole story in one book, that's a hard position to maintain. It's more accurate to say that the Bush administration combed history for the worst excesses of all previous administrations, and looked for ways to extend those precedents.

I also got a much better appreciation of the power of lawyers in the executive branch, especially the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, which interprets the laws for the rest of the executive branch. If they're willing to say that up is down and black is white, and if they can keep the resulting issues out of the courts by invoking secrecy or through some other method, then anything can happen. If the OLC wrote a secret memo saying that the government can shoot you, and if the administration convinced the courts that producing any evidence about your shooting would violate the state secrets privilege, well then you could be shot and that would be the end of it. Do you understand now? That's how an innocent man like Maher Arar could be tortured and not even get an apology from the U.S. government.

Savage makes it clear that expanding executive power has been Cheney's agenda for 30 years. What he never says is why. And I don't know why either. Is it just power for power's sake? Or does an imperial presidency serve some worthy purpose in Cheney's mind? I have no idea.

Other Bush books in the queue: The Terror Presidency by Jack Goldsmith, who used to work for the Bush administration in the aforementioned OLC. And Dead Certain by Robert Draper, who I mentioned last week.

Online Humor

Every watch Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central? in his segment "The Word," a text box constantly runs counterpoint to what he's saying. It's a great gimmick, but why just apply it to Colbert's parody of Bill O'Reilly? Why not do it to Bill himself? That's the idea behind Stalking Points Memo over at the News Corpse web site. They take some clips of O'Reilly's "Talking Points" and run their own text box next to it, just like Colbert's.