“I guess saying goodbye wasn’t enough.” – Butters Stotch
“What else do I have to do?” – Eric Cartman
“Well, well you know preacher says that before your soul can be at peace sometimes you have to atone for something bad you did.” – Butters Stotch
“Atone?” – Eric Cartman
“Did you ever do anything really bad?” – Butters Stotch
“Not really.” – Eric Cartman
The last few days have seen some limited but nevertheless remarkable progress in the ongoing effort to expose and rectify some of our government’s 2001-2009 illegality. Not only did we learn that they started breaking the law almost immediately after the 2001 attacks, but that it went beyond merely illegally wiretapping American citizens. (What were they doing? My money’s on massive, indiscriminate e-mail surveillance. Remember these people actually announced something called the “Total Information Awareness” program.) As if that weren’t enough, the orders to break all sorts of laws, including those about informing a few members of Congress about what the CIA is up to, came from Bush the Younger or Dick Cheney himself.
Now comes word from Harper’s Scott Horton (via yet another excellent Glenn Greenwald post) that Eric Holder, our hitherto very quiet Attorney General, may be taking the prestige of his department seriously:
A major consideration for Holder, my sources told me, was the Justice Department reputation for independence—badly tarnished during the Bush administration and perhaps set to face further embarrassments as the U.S. attorneys scandal probes—by Congress and by a special prosecutor—finish up.
In the days after Obama’s speech at the CIA, both Axelrod and Emanuel insisted that the White House had made the decision that there would be no prosecutions. According to reliable sources, that incensed Holder, who felt that the remarks had compromised the integrity both of the White House and Justice Department by suggesting that political advisers made the call on who would or would not be criminally investigated.
The piece is worth reading in its entirety, but perhaps the important development here is that the Justice Department is remembering that it’s supposed to be separate from politics. Barack Obama has short term political reasons for wanting the lawbreaking of the previous Administration to disappear down the memory hole. But Eric Holder isn’t supposed to care about that. All he’s supposed to care about are prosecuting crimes; and, while many of the doubtlessly horrifying facts of just what Bush, Cheney, et al did when nobody was looking remain concealed, there is no longer any serious dispute about whether or not laws (lots of ‘em) were broken.
Obama’s look-forward-not-backward approach has always been long term inoperable for the simple reason that the laws about torture, surveillance and all the rest were so openly disregarded. There is simply too much evidence already public to keep things under the rug. Holder’s got to know that whitewashing the crimes committed over the last eight years makes any effort to rebuild his department’s disintegrated reputation impossible. If he’s serious about that rebuilding then he’s got no choice but to investigate seriously.
Oh, and that lying to Congress thing? It turns out they don’t like that, even if you are doing it under direct orders from the President or Vice-President. Now there’s probably going to be another Congressional investigation. Further disturbing disclosures are almost inevitable, either as a direct result of investigation or from work done by bloggers and journalists. Sooner or later this thing is going to come to a head; health care, energy and the economy be damned.
“There’s a line in Othello about a drinker, ‘Now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast.’ That pretty well covers it.” – Barney Gumble
In “East of Eden” John Steinbeck wrote:
A war comes always to someone else. In Salinas we were aware that the United States was the greatest and most powerful nation in the world. Every American was a rifleman by birth, and one American was worth ten or twenty foreigners in a fight.
Pershing’s expedition into Mexico after Villa had exploded one of our myths for a little while. We had truly believed that Mexicans can’t shoot straight and besides were lazy and stupid. When our own Troop C came wearily back from the border they said that none of this was true. Mexicans could shoot straight, goddam it! And Villa’s horsemen had outridden and outlasted our town boys. The two evenings a month of training had not toughened them very much. And last, the Mexicans seemed to have outthought and outambushed Black Jack Pershing. When the Mexicans were joined by their ally, dysentery, it was godawful. Some of our boys didn’t really feel good again for years.
Somehow we didn’t connect Germans with Mexicans. We went right back to our myths. One American was as good as twenty Germans. This being true, we had only to act in a stern manner to bring the Kaiser to heel. He wouldn’t dare interfere with our trade—but he did. He wouldn’t stick out his neck and sink our ships—and he did. It was stupid, but he did, and so there was nothing for it but to fight him.
The illusion Steinbeck so expertly described lives on today. We still believe that our troops are tougher and better than any other fighting men on the planet. We’ve since added to it by deluding ourselves about our technology, believing that it increases our innate superiority. In short, then as now, we believe ourselves to be masters of war.
In the early 1960s Robert McNamara believed that very same thing. He might have blanched at putting it quite that way, but he did believe it. He believed that with the proper application of mathematics, logic and technology even a thing so fundamentally chaotic and unpredictable as war could be tamed. That earnestly misguided hubris was at least partially responsible for the deaths of millions of people. We most often mourn the 58,000 Americans killed because they are our closest kin. But many times that number died on the receiving end of American arms and American actions in Southeast Asia. And even that ghastly butcher’s bill doesn’t account for the unknowable number who never fully recovered and the lives that were shattered both here in America and over there. By the end of the 1960s McNamara knew how foolish he’d been; he spent the rest of his life, which ended on Monday, dealing with it.
He was an ambivalent figure, as manycommentators have tried to articulate since his death: an indisputably nice, intelligent and well meaning man, who nevertheless was up to his eyeballs in blood. Contemplating his monstrous actions in the 1960s, and, for those of a certain age, remembering them, isn’t an easy exercise, especially in light of the fact that McNamara himself later called the war a mistake and more or less admitted that he was a war criminal.
Part of what makes McNamara so frustrating is that there is so little to be learned from him. We’ve known since the time of the Greeks that hubris can be fatal and that it comes in new disguises and with different trappings each time. That his mistakes, if not his methodology, have been repeated so recently in Iraq (and possibly Afghanistan) makes it all the more maddening. While he was still alive we ignored every mistake he made and crashed into two wars where we have only the barest of understandings of what we’re doing and who we’re fighting.
The fundamental foolishness that blinded McNamara, that belief that the very nature of who we are as Americans can make wars clean and winnable, lives on to this day. It seems unlikely that we’ll ever get an honest, albeit late, mea culpa from the architects of our more recent wars. So we’ll have to make do by remembering McNamara’s.
“What is this place?” – Bart Simpson
“The refuge of the damned.” – Indian Nerd
“A place where we can work on our extra credit assignments without fear of reprisal.” – Martin Prince
There is an old newsroom proverb: journalism is the first draft of history. It’s only partly true (and even that only some of the time), but it makes journalists feel good about themselves and lends a sheen of importance to a job that often amounts to little more than mobile clerical work. This is particularly true when it comes to the stenography that often passes for political campaign journalism: Step 1: Get press pass, Step 2: follow candidate around, Step 3: write down what candidate says, Step 4: write down what people other than candidate say, Step 5: complain, Step 6: file story, Step 7: eat and drink on someone else’s dime, repeat.
The formula for this type of coverage was laid down almost forty years ago in Timothy Crouse’s now classic “The Boys on the Bus”, his account of the pack of reporters on the 1972 presidential campaign trail. A more recent example is Alexandra Pelosi’s “Journeys with George”, her documentary about Bush the Younger’s 2000 campaign. The issues and the proper nouns changed somewhat from ’72 to ’00, but the style of campaign coverage (see preceding paragraph) largely did not.
Now we have Eric Boehlert’s new book, “Bloggers on the Bus”. He’s quite intentionally cribbed his title from Crouse and it’s a fitting choice because Boehlert, like Crouse before him, is explaining a new group of politically influential people to a general audience. The lefty bloggers Boehlert profiles will never have the kind of influence that the boys on Crouse’s bus once did, but nobody’s going to have that again. Instead, Boehlert documents how these people, variously referred to here and elsewhere as the “progressive blogosphere” or the “netroots”, carved out their own slice of the influence pie.
“Bloggers on the Bus” begins with left wing bloggers successful 2007 effort to force the Nevada Democratic Party to drop its plans for a primary debate on Fox News. It keeps going from there. Here we see the bloggers humiliate Chris Matthews (aka Tweety) for being a misogynist weirdo, here they hound Barack Obama over his reversal on FISA, here they own the Valerie Plame story in way that should shame regular journalists, and on and on.
Along the way Boehlert pens short, suspense novel-like, profiles of the people behind these various dustups. So we can see how the world looked to the guy who made the Hillary 1984 video, what motivated him and what he’s like in real life. These little profiles add context, but also make the various on-line sensations more human and relatable. It’s one thing to know that the woman who captured Obama’s famous “bitter” remarks was traveling on her own dime, it’s another to see it from her point of view, to try and understand how bewildering it was to suddenly become one of the most talked about people in the country.
Of course, “Bloggers on the Bus” can only chronicle some of the events of the blogs and the Great Blue Waves of ’06 and ’08. Tellingly, if you Google “Bloggers on the Bus” to find the book’s official website (which is surprisingly thin) the third link is to a Time article of the same title from February 2007. It was written in the middle of the minor on-line contretemps that broke out when the John Edwards campaign hired Pandagon’s Amanda Marcotte to be their official blogger. Long story (very) short: Bill Donohue, a conservative Catholic notorious for clutching his pearls and fainting at even the mildest criticism of his beloved Church, raised a big stink about some things Marcotte had previously written. The whole thing ended a couple of days later when Marcotte and the Edwards campaign agreed to part ways. The Edwards campaign folded up about a year later (and thanks to Edwards’ fickle pickle never had a chance anyway), Marcotte continues her excellent blogging over at Pandagon and Donohue remains a narcissistic asshole.
None of this is mentioned in Boehlert’s book and that’s not so much a criticism as it is an unavoidable reality. Even though he limited his subject matter to popular lefty blogs and significant ways they interacted with the campaigns there is still far too much material for any book to wrap itself around. This denies the book a coherent narrative, but that’s not a flaw, it’s a reflection of the subject material. There is no one thing called the “blogosphere” or even “blogs”. However useful those terms are as shorthand, they are grotesquely inaccurate catchalls.
Crouse covered less than a bus full of people, Boehlert has to contend with thousands of bloggers and their legions of faceless commenters. He dedicates an entire chapter to the great Hillary vs Barack Blog War of 2008 but he’s assigned himself an impossible task. Boehlert knows his subject and writes a decent summary, but how can any summary of what was essentially a months long conversation between tens of thousands of people be anything but the most basic of outlines?
Not to be too glib, but in this case the medium isn’t the message so much as the message is the medium. Political blogging, in everything from loner sites like this one to great big communities like Daily Kos, arose in no small part because people felt ill served by what they were already reading and seeing. The mere existence of all these sites is a devastating critique the world Crouse described. The specifics, which Boehlert does such an excellent job of describing, almost don’t matter.
Which is not to say that “Bloggers on the Bus” isn’t worth reading. Quite the opposite, it’s a great primer for anyone who wants to try and understand the way the political conversation in this country is conducted. But even with its narrow focus it’s a hopelessly incomplete portrait that can never take its place along side “Boys on the Bus” due simply to the nature of its subject. It’s not so much a first draft of history as it is a snapshot, a portrait of a time on the internet that has already passed and will never come again (some of the touchstone pieces the book cites, like the video that publicized John Hagee’s Hitler sermon, are no longer available). It’s a neat book and an enjoyable read, but it can’t do anything more than show someone a little bit of how things work on-line. To get the full effect all you can do is open a browser and start clicking.
“I’m going to keep this Mary Worth phone right here. Her stern but sensible face will remind me never to do anything so stupid again.” – Bart Simpson
There is a sickening déjà vu to President Obama’s plans for the prisoners that were bequeathed to him by his short sighted predecessor. On Friday the Washington Postran a story, quoting three anonymous “senior government officials”, that related the headaches the Obama team has had trying to close the prison at Guantanamo. Specifically, there was this:
Three months into the Justice Department’s reviews, several officials involved said they have found themselves agreeing with conclusions reached years earlier by the Bush administration: As many as 90 detainees cannot be charged or released.
The strange legal world in which those 90 men find themselves is yet another of the political traps that Barack Obama and company knowingly walked into in January. The government is convinced, rightly or wrongly, that these men are threats. But they do not feel that they can adequately demonstrate that to a judge or a jury. It’s the same problem Bush the Younger created for himself when he built the Guantanamo prison seven years ago. He futzed and fiddled and was able to fend off the courts until his term expired. Obama doesn’t have the same option.
Unfortunately one of the solutions he’s come up with, one he’s apparently thinking very seriously about, is the same dumb shit that caused the mess in the first place:
Under one White House draft that was being discussed this month, according to administration officials, detainees would be imprisoned at a military facility on U.S. soil, but their ongoing detention would be subject to annual presidential review. U.S. citizens would not be held in the system.
Now, as Glenn Greenwald rightly points out, this is only a trial balloon article. It isn’t the plan yet. And let’s hope it doesn’t end up being the plan because not only is it a base abandonment of longstanding American ideals but it’s also all but doomed to failure. Indefinite detention is fundamentally an Executive power play and if the far more vicious Bush Administration was unable to pull it off, what chance does Obama have?
Does he have the stomach for the gut wrenching realities to which these policies inevitably lead? After he’s given a few inches to the Terror Warriors, will he be able to stop them from taking a few miles? And, is he prepared to hang his subordinates out to dry on the Hill in the face of angry and embarrassing questions from other Democrats? Those are troubling questions because when it comes time to pay the political price for this, and that time will come, the people he’s pleasing now will not have his back.
I’ve said before that I think Obama’s capitulation to national security wackaloons is a cynical ploy designed to keep things like torture, Guantanamo and the like off the front page while he works on his domestic agenda; I stand by that reasoning. I don’t like it, but I’m not the guy with the responsibility and they undoubtedly have a better understanding of the political landscape than I do. But the Obama Administration is playing with fire here and, even worse, they’re being very cavalier about it. Bush the Younger, Dick Cheney and the rest of their criminal gang did these things too. But they, at least in part, did them because they sincerely believe the macho bullshit about “they hate us for our freedoms”. When push came to shove they were always willing to push back harder because they were ideologues. The further they slipped down the moral slope the more progress they thought they were making.
But Obama isn’t an ideologue, at least, not that we can tell; I’m just not sure if he realizes the depth of the shit bog he’s eagerly wading into. There was some hope in that Post article though:
Two officials involved in a Justice Department review of possible prosecutions said the administration is strongly considering criminal charges in federal court for Khalid Sheik Mohammed and three other detainees accused of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Putting Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other men directly involved with the 2001 attacks in a federal courtroom in New York City would be a tremendously important step, for the rule of law and for America’s reputation abroad. But the others cannot be squirreled away indefinitely, there are too many journalists, too many bloggers, too many watchers. You can call it “prolonged detention” if you want to, but those are men with names and faces and in this day and age they cannot simply be made to disappear. The Bush Administration tried that already, and look what happened to them.
Note: I doubt I’m the first person to make this analogy, but I can’t think of where else, if anywhere, I’ve seen it..
Crowded out by the death of Michael Jackson and the ensuing debate about his greatness and his weirdness was the House’s razor thin passage of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill on Friday. The vote in the House, where the Democrats are supposed to be firmly in charge, was a mere 219-212, with eight Republicans voting “Yes” and forty-four Democrats voting “No”. Reading about the great lengths (via) the House Democrats needed just to pass this thing in the lower chamber (they pulled a Kennedy out of rehab!) one wonders what will come of it in the Senate. Doubts abound, apparently, as this morning’s New York Times contained an article relating the climate change bill to a similar (and spectacularly failed) effort in 1993. For the sake of historical optimism though, a better analogy might be 1957.
In 1957 Congress passed, and then President Eisenhower signed, the first post-Reconstruction attempt to ensure blacks the right to vote. In order to get the bill through the Senate, where the South had routinely been able to kill previous attempts, almost all of its provisions were stripped away. The only thing left was a guarantee of the right to vote, and even that proved so toothless and unenforceable that by 1960 black voter registration in the South had either been static or had actually gone down. The 1957 Civil Rights Act was, to say the least, rather ineffective. But it passed; and in doing so it irrevocably moved the conversation about an issue which, to that time, Congress had studiously ignored.
During and after the 1957 bill’s passage civil rights advocates were split on whether or not to endorse it. It was a transparently weak piece of legislation and the fear, echoed today by environmental groups about Waxman-Markey, was that this token was all they would get. But 1957 wasn’t the last time a Civil Rights bill was passed. Indeed, as the culture of repression in the South rolled right along and the voting rolls remained lily-white the need for further federal intervention became self evident.
The problem itself was not seriously addressed by the 1957 bill, but its passage meant that the great stumbling block of outright denial had been removed from the path of later efforts. After 1957 it was no longer a question of whether or not Congress would do anything, but instead a question of what Congress would do. Lyndon Johnson shepherded the bill through the Senate and, never one to miss a sex analogy, promoted it to skeptical supporters by saying, “Once you break the virginity it’ll be easier next time.”
Now, no historical parallel is perfect. Climate change, for example, has a largely theoretical constituency whereas civil rights was about millions of minority Americans. And the negative effects of legalized repression (civil unrest and murderers going free) were far more tangible than higher global temperatures. But there are a number of striking similarities, the sharpest of which is the nearly identical conservative position of, “Problem? What problem?”
Then as now there was no real conservative alternative position. They simply wanted to ignore the problem and more or less hope that it would go away on its own. It wasn’t a realistic position in 1957 and it isn’t one in 2009, but that didn’t stop a great many people from holding fast to it.
By was of illustration, watch this video from TPM of Republican id Michele Bachmann:
She’s citing rather lofty concepts like “tyranny” and “liberty”. During his famous one man, 24-hour filibuster of the 1957 civil rights bill Strom Thurmond read the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and George Washington’s Farewell Address. Thurmond saw civil rights legislation the same way that Bachmann sees energy legislation: as a liberal government power grab. We are quite literally killing ourselves with our current energy policies (or lack thereof) the same way that organized and institutionalized racism was quite literally killing black Americans. But the denialist mindset doesn’t see a problem that desperately needs to be addressed, it just sees another item to be crammed into its existing intellectual framework, hence, the “tyranny” talk.
That denialist position is still remarkably potent; witness the forty-four Democrats who voted against the bill. But the passage of a climate bill – any bill – will do serious damage to head-in-the-sand climate thinking. So while the Waxman-Markley bill isn’t going to stave off climate change all by itself, and may not even be strong enough to significantly reduce our CO2 emission rate, it’s still incredibly important because it will permanently take the shine off of the only argument conservatives have so far made: denial. Bachmann and her allies aren’t warning that the bill won’t halt global warming, they’re arguing that global warming doesn’texist and that this bill is just a waste of money that will hurt the economy. But when the economic horror show doesn’t happen they’ll have lost the only argument that they’ve made.
If anything climate related gets to the President’s desk this year it will probably be even weaker than what passed the House on Friday. In 1957 as now it is the Senate where legislation, good and bad, is often altered. It may even prove utterly toothless. But it will do tremendous damage to anyone hiding behind denial and it will establish Congress as an active player in the climate debate. It may not be a pleasing or pretty first step, but it is a step in a direction Congress has never gone before, and that counts as very real progress.
End Note – Memo to Harry Reid – While flipping through Robert Caro’s hyper detailed “Master of the Senate”desperately trying to remember where the original “virginity” line was I came across this priceless quote from LBJ himself as recounted by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.:
“Look at Americans for Democratic Action,” Johnson said. They regard me as a southern reactionary, but they love Cliff Case. Have you ever compared my voting record with Cliff Case’s? I [Schlesinger] said, ‘No, I hadn’t,’ whereupon he opened his drawer and pulled out a comparison of his voting record . . . on fifteen issues. On each one he had voted for the liberal side and Case for the conservative side. ‘And yet they look on me as some kind of ignorant southern bigot.’ He added that maybe he was showing undue sensitivity to liberal criticism. ‘But what a sad day it will be for the Democratic Party when its Senate leader is not sensitive to liberal criticism.’”
“People, this is an issue that we as a town are strong enough to ignore.” – Mayor Quimby
Buried on page A6 of my New York Times this morning was the latest account of mass death from American drone aircraft in Pakistan. The toll currently stands at 60, at least some of which are certainly civilians. On Monday a story about our tough new policy on airstrike restrictions made the front page. That story, part of the ‘President Obama is bringing change to Afghanistan’ genre, has gotten a lot more play recently and the relative placement of these two stories is just the latest small example. (While there are editorial deadline issues at play here, the details of the current attack are still murky, this isn’t an isolated incident.) The Afghan War in general, and our airstrikes in particular, have been a consistently under- or unreported. As of this writing the word “Pakistan” does not appear on the home page of CNN or MSNBC. Fox News has a link to an AP story at the bottom of its homepage (it’s the very last story in the World section). The airstrike story isn’t anywhere near the front page of the websites of The Washington Post or The New York Times.
None of the above is exactly news; American journalism in general has shown shockingly little interest in the Afghan War the last seven years. But it melds rather disturbingly with another long term trend in these matters. The initial reporting about yesterday’s strike often mentions that several top Taliban commanders were killed, but not Baitullah Mehsud, the main guy we’re gunning for. It has shades of that idiotic “find the evil mastermind” policy that permeated the action movie obsessed Bush Administration. How many times did Bush the Younger announce that we’d captured or killed al-Qaeda’s #2 man? Remember how all the violence in Iraq was attributable to al-Zarqawi? He was killed three years ago. This Baitullah Mehsud guy is probably a nasty asshole, but he’s not John Connor. Killing him won’t end the Taliban and killing innocent people while trying to get to him sure seems counterproductive.
This is about the part where I’m obligated to point out that yes, indeed, it is vastly better to have Obama and his crowd than the zealous crusaders of Bush the Younger or whatever cigar chompers John McCain would’ve installed. It’s very much preferable to have people who are not certifiably insane running the show. But if the show itself is insane . . . well, then there’s only so much they can do, isn’t there?
That has been the basis of much of the criticism Obama has taken from the left over his decision to escalate the Afghan War. Better leadership of a doomed project doesn’t change the fact that it’s a doomed project. As Tom Engelhardt pointed out last week the odds are very good that this war will still be going in two years when it will be a full decade long. Think about that, a decade of war; of a war that barely rates mentioning because its continuation has become a given in our political discourse.
In the short term (i.e. the next 2-3 years) there isn’t much that can be done. Obama’s plan, such as he has one, appears to be to get us the fuck out of Iraq and hope that an undistracted and focused US military can bring something akin to order to Afghanistan (and by extension the government-less parts of Pakistan). It’s an open question as to whether or not it will work. And in the meantime we’ll continue ignoring it, because that’s what we do.
“Please don’t tell the supervisor I have the flu.” – Subtitled Juicer Factory Employee #1
“I’ve been working with a shattered pelvis for three weeks.” – Subtitled Juicer Factory Employee #2
“Flu” is not a very scary word. It’s something most people have gotten – and gotten over – many times. “Influenza” is a very scary word. It means pandemics and quarantines and deaths. In reality the two words describe the same virus. We just expand it by three syllables when we’re taking it seriously. Five years ago John M. Barry wrote a book that takes it very seriously, “The Great Influenza”. The bombastically grim subtitle is “The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History”.
(I meant to read the book when it came out but I never got around to it. I was reminded of it when Barry penned an op-ed piece in The New York Times back in April at the height of the media obsession with what we’re calling “swine flu”. It’s now officially reached “pandemic” status which basically means that not only is it transmissible from one person to another, but it’s also reached all the way around the globe. Fortunately, this variant of the H1N1 influenza virus has so far proved relatively mild, which means that, as of earlier this week, it had killed only 163 people despite infecting almost 36,000. In the op-ed Barry pointed out that the 1918 virus, which was also of the H1N1 variety, had a similarly mild first trip around the globe in the spring of 1918 before coming back in the fall and killing in unprecedented numbers. Happily, Novartis announced last week that it had developed a vaccine.)
“The Great Influenza” is a marvelous book which tells the tale of the horrible 1918 pandemic, and tells it well. It is thoroughly researched and manages the always tricky feat of explaining scientific concepts to non-scientists without causing boredom or confusion. For example, it explains what the H and the N stand for. The H is hemagglutinin and little spikes of it allow the virus to attach itself to, and then penetrate, the cells in your respiratory tract. Once inside the virus begins replicating itself until the cell dies and between 100,000 and 1 million new viruses come bursting out. The N is neuraminidase, a different kind of little spike, that prevents newly formed virus from sticking to the cell from whence it came so they can instead go infect other cells. Creepy, huh?
Beyond the microscopic nitty gritty is the story of how medicine came to be a science based discipline and of how in 1918 it wasn’t quite ready to cope with influenza. It is a tale both chilling and thrilling, even when you know how it ends. Hospitals overwhelmed, men dropping like flies in overcrowded army camps, and scientists maddeningly behind the curve of the disease.
Something Barry only touches on in the book, but which is clearly repeating itself today, is the simple human denial of disease. World War I, to which the pandemic is inextricably linked, killed far fewer people and yet it looms much larger in out memories. Trench warfare, poison gas and the guns of August still ring a bell with us. Whereas there are almost no works of fiction concerned with influenza. There are no cenotaphs or cemeteries, no famous poems and no Mel Gibson movies.
It isn’t hard to understand this willful amnesia. Death by disease in these numbers lacks the drama necessary for tragedy. It doesn’t feel like a contest and so there is no suspense. Indeed, it wasn’t a contest, it was a culling. There’s no glory in the virus because there wasn’t any victory. Influenza came and went of its own accord. And this forgetting isn’t limited to fiction. Anyone who’s taken high school level American history has studied World War I at least a little, but if the pandemic is mentioned at all it’s in passing, or as a deathly side effect and nevermind the relative body counts.
But of course influenza didn’t just come and go leaving no mark on the world. Barry makes a convincing case that in fact it had a profound outcome on the peace treaty that led to the next war. In 1919 when President Woodrow Wilson was in Paris negotiating with the French and the British he was struck ill. Weakened, he lost his spirit for fighting with his European counterparts and gave in to their demands for a harsh peace. Post-war Germany was crippled and humiliated by that deal and it set the stage for the later rise of the Nazis. Wilson’s illness is usually explained as a minor stroke, he would later suffer a massive one, but Barry finds a far more credible and likely culprit in influenza. The symptoms match and there was, to say the least, a lot of it going around. Hell of a bug.
“Oh really? What if I gave you a whole mess of that neon toilet paper you Frenches call money?” – Duke Phillips
It’s getting completely subsumed by the much more dramatic and, I’ll freely admit, much more interesting story going on in Iran, but the rather odiously named “BRIC” summit that happened in Russia this week deserves a brief comment. (If you must relate it to the Iran story, Ahmadinejad flew off to the same place for a security summit earlier in the week.) BRIC is an acronym that stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China. It was coined in 2001 by a guy at Goldman Sachs to refer to big countries that had very promising economies and were likely to become major economic players in their own right someday. It’s a formulation that’s just clever enough that it became a fashionable buzzword for internationally minded people (think readers of publications like The Economist) and now the countries themselves have adopted it as a mark of pride.
While the “group” itself exists in only the loosest and most informal of ways, that doesn’t make it completely meaningless. The usual criticism of it is that the countries that make it up don’t have all that much in common, hence the idea of a summit is kinda silly. But they’re highlighting an important trend that otherwise gets very little attention. Namely that the economic institutions of the world have been very slow to adapt to an increasingly flat global economic playing field. Their main concern, one that the summit addressed only obliquely, is that it’s simply unfair for the dollar to be the world’s currency reserve.
It’s a fair complaint. Having the dollar as the world’s favorite currency shields America (to some extent) from its own economic stupidities by imposing some of the negative effects on other countries. (Imagine what professional lunatics like, oh, Michelle Bachman, would say if the reverse were true.) The problem that the BRIC countries, and others, face is that there isn’t a good alternative, nor can one be manufactured.
It’s not as though the current system was devised with the overarching goal of American advantage. It was setup the way it was setup because everyone trusts the US government to pay its debts. Even after eight years of catastrophic mismanagement and scandalous squander US Treasuries remain the safest investment on the planet and the dollar remains supreme. Why is that? Because the alternatives are worse.
The Euro is hamstrung by the fact that no one really knows that the EU is, or is going to be in five, ten or twenty years. As for the BRIC countries, Russia defaulted on its debt a little more than a decade ago. China is an authoritarian state answerable to no one. Brazil emerged from military dictatorship just a quarter of a century ago and has been a roller coaster ever since. India has a relatively stable government, but its economy and its society are anything but.
It’s always dangerous to speak in grand generalizations like these. Innumerable issues get swept up and obscured and so gross inaccuracies are very possible. However, the main point here stands pretty firm. The financial system upon which the world economy depends is largely a Western, and specifically an American, creation. That cannot go on indefinitely.
This isn’t an immediately pressing issue which is why for once I’m not complaining about something important getting lost in the shuffle. But it does serve to highlight an issue which will probably need to be reconciled sometime in the next couple of decades. This is only the most tentative of beginnings of that reconciliation, but it cannot be postponed forever.
“You see Starvin’ Marvin, these are what we call appetizers.” – Eric Cartman
“App-e-tizr.” – Starvin’ Marvin
“This is what you eat before you eat, to make you more hungry.” – Eric Cartman
David Kessler’s new book is titled “The End of Overeating”. It is a bit of a misleading title; “An Explanation for Overeating” would’ve been more accurate (though probably also less marketable). The misdirection continues on the table of contents, where we find a whopping forty-eight chapters divided amongst six main parts. There’s nothing wrong with the chapter breaks, but the book really only has two parts. The first, and vastly better one, is an explanation of why some people eat far more food than they need. It focuses on brain chemistry and neuroscience instead of psychology and willpower, and it’s a very interesting read. The second part, which takes up less than a fifth of the book and feels almost like an afterthought, is a rather banal instruction on how to eat less. It succumbs to the worst kinds of diet book cliches and should in no way be held against the rest of the manuscript.
Let’s start with the good parts, which are very good indeed. Using efficient prose that does not require a biology degree to understand, Kessler explains some of the physiological mechanisms of eating. He then goes on to explain how modern food science and industry have learned to exploit these mechanisms for fun and profit. He’s a doctor, so he can’t help but tsk-tsk a little at food companies and chain restaurants, but he also recognizes that industrial food production is a necessity and is here to stay.
Kessler’s main point is that human beings as a species have evolved to chase salt, fat and sugar. Not only do we find foods that contain these items tasty, but our brains reward us for locating them. It is when these reward mechanisms are thrown out of whack by the unlimited availability of these treats that problems begin to arise. A significant minority of people have reward response systems so skewed that, regardless of whether or not they are hungry, they will either eat anything that’s placed in front of them or be seriously distracted by the effort of not eating. Speaking with a dizzying array of scientists, in and out of academia, Kessler clearly describes the mechanisms behind this and experiments that demonstrate it.
In just the last thirty years or so the science behind food (and the presentation of food) has become so exquisitely refined that it’s changing the way our brains process eating. In one memorable example, modern preschoolers are less able to compensate for overeating than their predecessors of just fifteen years ago. In this case “compensate” is a technical term, it means that if you give a normal four year old a high-calorie juice drink, he will naturally reduce his caloric intake the rest of the day to compensate. His body is a self regulating system that, without any conscious action from him, keeps his food intake within limits. There have always been fat kids who lack this kind of self regulation, the difference is that now there are more of them.
This type of “dysregulation” continues up the age ladder, for both populations and individuals. So not only are fat kids more likely to become fat adults, but as children age even the skinny ones become more accustomed to what Kessler causes “hyperpalatable” foods. Over time those foods, scientifically calibrated to be fun to eat, tasty as hell and easy to swallow, will knock more of them off their regulatory balance. Once that happens the brain’s reward system has essentially been hijacked. People begin eating for the pleasure rush it produces. Satiety no longer suppresses craving and overeating becomes a conditioned response to food advertising, vending machines and other unavoidable stimulus.
Kessler described this vicious and self reinforcing circle convincingly, at least for this layman. But Kessler is a doctor, and having isolated and identified this ailment he feels compelled to offer a remedy. It is here that the book falls to pieces. At the beginning Kessler scrupulously notes that this kind of condition only affects some people. Towards the end Kessler switches into self help mode and begins copiously using the universal word “you”:
The elements of the Food Rehab program outlined here have been used and tested in other contexts and still need to be rigorously evaluated for the treatment of conditioned hypereating. Nonetheless, I believe they can offer you some help.
He then walks, rather blithely, right into the trap of stigmatizing eating in general:
We can lead long and healthy lives without consuming alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs of abuse, so treatments for those addictions can be built around the principal of abstinence. But since we can’t survive without eating, we need other strategies for changing our perception of foods that are superstimulants and for keeping them at bay.
That is a pretty good distillation of the odious “gospel of naught” so thoroughly debunked by Barry Glassner in “The Gospel of Food”. Shortly after the above passage, he even succumbs to that most one-size-fits-all of diet tropes: the calorie restriction (1200-1500 a day for “just-right” eating).
Kessler has identified a very real problem, unfortunately the only solutions to it he can come up with are bland and prosaic suggestions about how to mentally coach yourself to avoid self destructive eating behaviors. He is an extraordinarily accomplished doctor who has served as the dean of two different medical schools and as an FDA commissioner. Surely he has some thoughts on how foods like these can in some way be regulated or bettered? Nobody’s going to vote to ban Oreos or gargantuan appetizers at Chili’s, but the reasoned voice of public policy certainly deserves a say in something that negatively affects the health of millions of Americans. Yet Kessler remains curiously quiet on the subject, save a presentation he gave to some food executives about the real world effects of their products. It is a wasted opportunity.
Nevertheless, the first 80% of the book is an excellent and easy read. It explains the real world consequences of having a food industry (armed with modern science and rich budgets) pursue the single minded goal of greater consumption. Skip the dessert.
“Shut up! Shut up! If I don’t hear you it’s not illegal!” – Homer Simpson
This can probably be filed away as just another sign that the times they are a changing, but it’s still a very remarkable lead for a newspaper story:
President Obama recently summoned aides to the Oval Office to discuss a magazine article investigating why the border town of McAllen, Tex., was the country’s most expensive place for health care. The article became required reading in the White House, with Mr. Obama even citing it at a meeting last week with two dozen Democratic senators.
“He came into the meeting with that article having affected his thinking dramatically,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. “He, in effect, took that article and put it in front of a big group of senators and said, ‘This is what we’ve got to fix.’ ”
The magazine article in question was Atul Gawande’s fascinating look at Medicare costs in the June 1st issue of The New Yorker. (The fact that the word “fascinating” can be legitimately used to describe anything to do with Medicare speaks to the high quality of the article.) In it, Gawande spends a lot of time in south Texas trying to figure out why cities which are geographically, demographically and economically similar have wildly different Medicare costs. The two primary examples he cites are El Paso, where costs are about the national average, and McAllen where costs are double those in El Paso. As recently as 1992 costs in each city were roughly equal, so it isn’t a case of El Paso doing something radically different to control costs along the border, it’s a case of something fundamental changing in McAllen.
The article’s conclusions are both encouraging and disheartening when it comes to health care reform, and they can’t really be summarized here. (In other words: it’s worth reading in full.) What’s interesting about this incident isn’t that The New Yorker had a long and thoughtful article that gleaned new information about a prominent topic of public interest. That happens all the time. Rather, what’s interesting here is that the President of the United States acquired information he found to be useful not from some government report or think tank white paper. He got it from a mass market magazine. This is the very definition of “outside the bubble”.
The contrast with the Bush Administration is obviously very stark. (Would it surprise anyone if URLs like www.newyorker.com were blocked with filtering software during their tenure?) Amongst its many problems, that Administration was notorious for ignoring information it did not want to hear. The apotheosis of this is probably the White House staff’s decision to make a DVD of gut wrenching news footage to get Bush the Younger to realize disaster was unfolding in New Orleans. The Gawande article isn’t all doom and gloom, but it’s no walk in the park either. It presents some very grim realities and some very sobering facts for anyone intent on changing health care policy.
There’s no knowing how Obama became aware of the article, perhaps he’s a regular New Yorker reader, perhaps someone with his secret e-mail address recommended it to him. It doesn’t matter. In the grand scheme of things this particular instance isn’t likely to matter much either. What does matter is that even though he sits in the middle of the bubble, Obama found a piece of outside information he found useful. It speaks well of the way the new President has organized his very complicated work life.
“You’ve changed, man. It used to be about the music.” – Milhouse van Houten
Matt Taibbi had an interesting post up this week. He was puzzling over just why Barack Obama (freshly inaugurated, insanely popular, Savior of the People Barack Obama) has so publicly embraced these goofy tribunals and odious concepts like indefinite detention. Taibbi is a sharp and cynical political observer, but this has him confused to the point of throwing his hands up:
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t get what Obama is doing here. He could have closed Gitmo, created some sort of tribunal system for the current inmates, and then stood up on a pedestal and announced that the United States is no longer a country that detains people without due process. And as soon as he finished that speech he could have gone on doing what presidents have done for decades before Bush, finding the soft spots in international criminal/military law to basically arrest and detain anyone whom they considered a genuinely dangerous suspect. But what he’s done instead of that, seemingly, is specifically endorse preventive detention. He apparently is anxious for people to know that that is in fact what he stands for.
Which to me is just… weird. I don’t get it. What does he gain from making this move? I know what we lose, but what does he gain? Votes in Alabama three years from now? Is that really what this is all about?
This is essentially the same reaction I had to Obama’s FISA problem last July. He’s very publicly embracing ideas that are antithetical to longstanding Constitutional principles in exchange for a short term political benefit that’s so tiny it may not even exist. As Taibbi points out, this isn’t like the financial mess. In that case it makes sense that a new president, dealing with a complex subject on which he is not an expert, could be pressured by advisors into being overly generous with ghoulish bankers. But the Guantanamo mess and everything that goes with it are issues of Constitutional law, a subject that Obama knows back to front.
The chances that Obama has multiple personalities and one part of him simply doesn’t know what the other part is doing are vanishingly small, so his decisions on prisoners and tribunals have to make sense to him in some larger context. In an effort to figure out what that context is, to try and see this from Obama’s perspective, I conducted a thought experiment: what is the most craven and cynical thing I can plausibly devise for Obama’s true motives? (The keyword there is “plausibly”, no matter what you may read on the dark corners of the internet Obama is not a fascist, a communist, or a space alien.) The short answer I came to is “health care”. The long answer is below. Here goes:
The most undernoted aspect of Obama is his political skill. Oh sure every once and a while someone will refer to him as coming from the “Chicago machine” or some such, but it’s usually some right wing crank who’s seen The Untouchables too many times and thinks fedoras are still in style. But Obama really did come from a brutal political culture, as Ryan Lizza detailed in The New Yorker last summer. This experience included direct participation in nakedly gerrymandering Illinois after the 2000 census. This gives us a first postulate from which to work: Obama cares deeply about Democrats winning elections and fucking over the Republican Party. Blue success at the polls isn’t a paramount goal for Obama as much as it is an omnipresent concern, something which must at least be considered in every other decision.
The second thing we can say for sure is that Obama, and his closest advisors, understand the political lay of the land in this country better than anyone right now. He spent two years barnstorming the country and when he wasn’t giving speeches or talking with voters he was studying issues and looking at enough poll numbers to make an ordinary person’s eyeballs melt and pour back into his skull. That doesn’t mean they can’t misjudge an issue here or there, but it does mean that their overall take on things should be treated with a lot of respect.
Third, for all his high minded rhetoric and genial nature Obama knows that the bungling of Bush the Younger has given him a tremendous opportunity, the kind that doesn’t come along too often. The last time the Reds were this discredited and in this much disarray was the mid-1960s. Before that it was the 1930s. Introspective as he his, Obama has probably allowed himself some pretty grandiose thoughts. Johnson pushed through Civil Rights and Medicare, arguably the two greatest achievements of the post-war federal government. Roosevelt brought the federal government into the modern age and erected an idea of government as a positive force which has withstood nearly eight decades of conservative assault. Those men changed this country for the better and even after all these years majorities of Americans look on their works as good things. They are giants and Obama has a chance to take his place amongst them. He and his brain trust are thinking in those kinds of terms and on those kinds of time scales.
That brings us to health care reform; it is the key to Obama’s agenda. Successful health care reform, defined as the twin goals of covering everyone while not disrupting the lives of people who already have coverage, paves the way to everything else. Not only does it look good from policy and historical perspectives, but it also has tangible and immediate political benefits. Think of the millions of voters out there who don’t have health insurance. What’s more important to them, addressing climate change (which will take decades) or being able to go to a doctor next time they or someone they love gets sick? It seems almost laughable to say, but there’s a very good chance that by this time next year every single American will have some kind of medical coverage.
And so we come to the next important item on Obama’s agenda: November 2010, a mere seventeen months from now. Successful health care reform would make the election vastly easier on the Blues. Anyone with a D next to their name is going to proclaim, often and loud, that their team got the health care system fixed. That means more Blue Senators and Representatives, which will be nice for Obama, but it also means big things below the federal level.
Obama is very cognizant of the power of redistricting, he’s been in the secret room in Springfield and he’s helped draw the maps. Winning elections in years that end in zero can tilt the playing field in your favor for the rest of the decade. It doesn’t guarantee anything, but it means a few more House seats and friendlier state legislatures and makes everything a little bit easier. Remember, Obama is thinking big and the easier things are on the Democrats the more he can get done while in office. He’s not just trying to win an election, he’s trying to create a self reinforcing system.
That doesn’t mean he’s trying to create a one party state, but it doesn’t mean he’s trying to shift the country to the left in a permanent way on some issues. Opposing him is what’s left of the Republican Party and it’s true that the Reds have a lot of problems right now. These range from unfortunate demographic trends (proportionally less white people) to simple matters of political organization (plummeting party ID numbers) to the fact that it is currently being led by catty buffoons (Michael Steele, Rush Limbaugh) and disgraced has beens (Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney). Despite all that, they aren’t dead yet.
In fact, there is still one area where the Reds hold an advantage over the Blues and it falls under the heading of “national security”. Any doubt of that was erased by all the mileage conservative wackaloons have gotten out of the ludicrous idea that Obama wants to drop off Gitmo guys in Kansas City with panel vans, Kalashnikovs and your child’s after school schedule. Those attacks have been so successful that only half of Americans even want that fucking place closed. Terrorism and national security remain weak spots for the Blues and a major catastrophe in that area could unmake all of the progress of the last two and a half years.
The alternative is almost too ghastly to contemplate. If Obama goes down like Carter, as a nice liberal who couldn’t handle the big chair, it would mean a return to the bad old days of Bush the Younger and worse. It would mean the hard core of the Republican Party gaining control over the federal government again, only this time with an enormous sense of vindication and the world even closer to an environmental apocalypse. It would mean an America that’s a militant supply side nightmare, with walled cities protected by private guards and draconian punishments for anyone who steps out of line.
That is what’s riding on Obama’s shoulders and it is a fearsome burden. With that much responsibility they’re loathe to take any chances. Indefinite detention of suspicious men so stateless that their own governments don’t even want them back is a very small political risk to take. These men, villains all in the public imagination, have no constituency. And then, of course, there are the many spies and generals Obama has, at least some of whom are no doubt warning him in emphatic terms that abandoning this or that tactic (or releasing this man or that) is downright irresponsible.
From that perspective publicly embracing indefinite detention makes a lot more sense. It’s black belt level politics on a national scale, divide and conquer. Destroy the Republicans by cleaving off their moderates and letting the rest of the party shatter against its own stupidity and ignorance. Assure party loyalty on your side by balancing between the moderates and the liberals, tough-on-terrorists in exchange for public-option-health-care, more-troops-in-Afghanistan for talks-with-Castro/Assad/Khamenei.
So when Taibbi asks if it really is all about votes then the answer is yes, it is. But it’s not just about votes three years from now, it’s about votes one year from now, and five years from now and deep into the next decade. Health care reform can cement the Democratic majority, it must not be risked. The Republicans are wounded but they’re not dead, they must be treated with the utmost caution. Civil liberties? Due process for terrorists? Legacy burnishing policy changes like that are what second terms are for.
“I was watching; I saw the whole thing. First it started falling over, then it fell over.” – Milhouse van Houten
Two months ago I predicted doom for Benjamin Netanyahu’s second stint as Israel’s Prime Minister. My conclusion was based on two irreconcilable facts. First, that Netanyahu needs to push hawkish, right wing policies to appease his shaky right wing Knesset partners. Second, President Obama, who is considerably more secure and more powerful than Netanyahu, is opposed to those policies. The last week or so has seen those differences break right out into the open.
“With respect to settlements, the president was very clear when Prime Minister Netanyahu was here, he wants to see a stop to settlements. Not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions. We think it is in the best interest of the effort that we are engaged in that settlement expansion cease. That is our position, that is what we have communicated very clearly, not only to the Israelis, but to the Palestinians and others and we intend to press that point.”
That is, shall we say, a bit of a departure from what Israel is used to hearing from Washington. Netanyahu, caught between his fickle fundamentalist allies and a liberal and determined American president, seems flustered (via):
Referring to Clinton’s call for a settlement freeze, Netanyahu groused, “What the hell do they want from me?”
Those are not the words of a man preparing his supporters to make compromises; those are the words of a man that, though only in office for two months, is already between a rock and a hard place.
That post, by Laura Rozen at ForeignPolicy.com is worth reading in full, but I’m going to quote one other part here that strikes me as a particularly ill tiding for Netanyahu’s job prospects. Quoth Hussein Ibish, “senior fellow at the American Task Force for Palestine”:
There has been a growing sense of members of Congress who are well-informed on foreign policy … that peace is essential to the American national interest and the Israeli national interest. And there’s been a growing sense that the possibility of a two-state agreement is time-limited and that things like the settlements are incompatible with the goal of creating two states.
That’s the crippling problem Netanyahu faces. The creation and expansion of West Bank settlements, tacitly (if not openly) supported by the US Government for eight years, is now seen as detrimental to American interests. So while Netanyahu is free to torment the Palestinians he can’t count on the US remaining silent while he does so.
Events look set to take the next step starting next week when US Middle East envoy George Mitchell visits Israel. He’s there to, “hear official responses to U.S. demands for a halt to West Bank settlement building.” That ought to be a fun conversation. Though it will be interesting to see what Netanyahu and his government come up with. America is far and away Israel’s most important foreign relationship and its government can’t be seen as openly thumbing its nose at Washington. This is especially true given the enormous international clout and prestige of the new American President.
Netanyahu remains stuck between Obama and his Knesset allies. Enacting a genuine freeze on settlement activity (and as Juan Cole points out Obama seems unlikely to be satisfied by half measures and evasions) could cause Netanyahu’s government to collapse as his right wing allies shriek “Betrayal!” Ignoring Obama and continuing the settlement project could cause a serious breach in the Israeli-American relationship, and no Israeli government can long survive the cold shoulder from Washington. Keeping both placated will require an extremely delicate balancing act; indeed it may be completely impossible.
It’s also worth remembering that in January Tzipi Livni, who would presumably be the favorite to replace Netanyahu if his government fell, told this to 60 Minutes:
60 Minutes: Can you really imagine evacuating the tens of thousands of settlers who say they will not leave?
Livni: It’s not going to be easy, but this is the only solution.
60 Minutes: But you know that there are settlers who say, “We will fight, we will not leave, we will fight”.
Livni: So this is the responsibility of the government, of the police to stop them. As simple as that. Israel is a state of law and order.
Obama and his people are certainly aware of that position so in the end, Obama’s answer to Netanyahu’s question (“What the hell do they want from me?”), may simply be “To go away”.
End Note: For a nice idea of just how short sighted Netanyahu is capable of being, read “Mishal’s Luck” in the 14 May issue of the London Review of Books. The article details Israel’s enormously botched 1997 assassination attempt on Khalid Mishal, one of the founding members of Hamas. Long story short, it ended with Netanyahu flying to Jordan to personally apologize to the king. Mishal is still alive and is now, in no small part thanks to Netanyahu’s bungling, the leader of Hamas. Good decision making is not one of the Israeli Prime Minister’s hallmarks.
“Nuke the whales? You don’t really believe that do you?” – Lisa Simpson
Since January serious “security conservatives” have attacked the changes Barack Obama has made to his predecessor’s hideous and disastrous national security policies. The main charge is that those policies were what prevented another serious terrorist attack for seven and a half years. It is tempting to dismiss these charges as merely political gamesmanship, but whatever the political theater looks like it’s good to remember that they are motivated by a comprehensive worldview. Understanding that worldview is important if you want to place the attacks that result from it in their proper context.
Consider Rush Limbaugh’s infamous “I hope he fails” comment. He’s openly rooting for greater harm to befall America because he views the acquisition and maintenance of political power by conservatives as the ultimate goal. But should the need for self examination ever penetrate his fiery intellectual defenses one presumes he comforts himself with the notion that even greater harm is the inevitable result of pussy liberal policies. Within this worldview people’s pain and suffering (caused by, among other things, disastrous wars of choice) are a tincture necessary to cure the public of its liberal affect.
Cheney and the roughly 20% of the country that supports him are twisted fundamentalists. They have a warped and fact free conception of what it means to Protect America. These are the people who take Chuck Norris and Jack Bauer seriously and, despite the omnipresent wreckage that resulted from their maniacal grip on power, still believe that their way is the only way. Real life horror and suffering are inconsequential to them because their imaginations can always produce something worse. To weigh the real against the fantastical never occurs to them because they view their terrible fever dreams as inevitable.
While these sorts of arguments have grown less successful as the 2001 attacks begin to fade into history they will never fully cease. After all, imaginary staw men of this template are easy to conjure, all you have to do plug in the names and places and then say “America is in danger!” as loud as you can. It’s political theater, sure, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a relatively honest representation of their true opinions. By all accounts Cheney really believes that America is in dire peril and that most people just aren’t attenuated to the danger. Saying so as often as possible not only serves his short term political interests, it also helps raise an issue he cares about.
That dismal outlook on life and political affairs is what motivates the drive for right wing purity. It’s a powerful force, but it’s noticeably on the wane. Let’s hope it keeps going in that direction, however many colorful ways it finds to express itself.
“I checked on the internet, Kyle, and getting Butters to put my wiener in his my mouth wouldn’t make me not gay like you said.” – Eric Cartman
“You figured that out, huh?” – Kyle Broflovski
Most good movies have a third act and the ruling upholding Proposition 8 issued by the California Supreme Court yesterday set up a doozy. The court set the stage last year when it legalized marriage for everyone. As if on cue, ranting villains (straight out of central casting for angry, ignorant conservatives) materialized and brought things down with a stealth ballot initiative that was largely ignored in the widely expected coronation of Barack Obama. A doomed court challenge was mounted, seemingly out of little more than pique, and yesterday it died. But ballot initiatives are easy in California and there will almost certainly be another one in November of 2010, this time enshrining same sex marriage in the state constitution. Now that we have our third act scripted out, all that remains is lights, camera, action.
Prior to last November most political observers assumed that Proposition 8 would go down to defeat because, c’mon it’s California. But with massive financial support and less than honest arguments (preachers would be forced to marry fags!) it passed. That narrow passage replaced Proposition 8’s previous obscurity with nationwide attention and now it’s become the Plessy vs. Ferguson of homosexual rights. It even comes with a catchy nickname, “Prop H8”.
This is the greatest thing that could’ve possibly happened for supporters of equal access to marriage; it’s the clarion call that the issue had previously lacked. The 2003 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court was national news, but it just isn’t that exciting from a storytelling standpoint. First of all, it’s a court decision and those are inherently dry, they lack the democratic panache and easily understood arithmetic of ballot initiatives.
More importantly, it was in boring old Massachusetts. Let’s face it, nobody west of the Hudson River gives a fuck about the state that produced Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. California, though, is a place everybody cares about; it gave us Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, it’s where movies and teevee come from, its governor is a multi-millionaire movie star. Nobody in one of the flyover states ever shopped at Mervyn’s Massachusetts, did they?
Not only does this thing already have a compelling plot and a sexy location, but it’s going to happen in a non-presidential election year. Without the bright spectacle of a presidential contest media types are going to be hungry for stories and the California vote on same sex marriage will be easy pickings. It’s obviously not a national referendum, but it might feel like one and in terms of the larger national battle over same sex marriage that’s important.
Once Proposition Whatever passes, and while surprises can happen the odds have to be heavily in its favor, the idea of same sex marriage as a rolling fait accompli will be pretty much cemented in the national consciousness. Of course, if one speculates a bit further one can ask what happens after 2010. Will another initiative opposing marriage, with newer and cleverer wording, be on the ballot in 2012? Will the cycle repeat itself? Of course not, the forces supporting ye olde tyme marriage know that theirs is a losing cause. Licked at the ballot box they’ll likely not rise again.
Yesterday’s ruling and the passage of Proposition 8 in general have set the stage for a monumental battle over same sex marriage. Since that battle is going to take place on friendly ground and on national television it’s ultimately to the benefit of those who would see the various joys and miseries of marriage extended to homosexual couples. Just since last November’s vote, a mere six months ago, three more states have legalized same sex marriage and New Hampshire is right on the brink. That’s a pretty rapid advance for an issue that was considered politically radioactive as recently as 2004. There’s no reason to expect anything except further progress and this week’s little setback is only going to make the eventual victory bigger and more legitimate.
“Dad, that’s a gag paper we got at the carnival.” – Lisa Simpson
“Oh, no wonder I didn’t hear about Bart being elected World’s Greatest Sex Machine.” – Homer Simpson
I am generally a defender of The New York Times. Even during the heights of the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller fiascos I was always telling anyone who would listen that the Times is still an American newsgathering organization without peer. The daily A section remains a marvel, with datelines and photographs from around the world and across the country. Their website is also in a league of its own in terms of available information and breadth and depth of coverage. There isn’t another newspaper (or group of newspapers), to say nothing of television channels, that even comes close to reporting that much news.
So while there are, and always will be, a lot of legitimate complains to be leveled at the Times, too many of them take the newsgathering for granted. That doesn’t lessen the validity of complains over vacuous “trend” articles, the frequent relegation of female oriented news stories to the Style section, or the rather strange group that makes up the op-ed columnists. (Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman treat their Times columns with the kind of yawning indifference usually seen only amongst the most checked out of tenured faculty.) But it’s worth recalling that the reason so many different people complain about the Times is because so many different people read the Times. And so many people read the Times because it’s head and shoulders above every other newspaper in the country.
That lengthy intro concluded; I have a complaint to make. The image below is from the www.nytimes.com, it’s the above the fold portion of Thursday’s front page.
Real news in blue, useless partisan hackery in red.
The lead story is outlined in red; it was written by Elisabeth Bumiller (one of the least informative Times bylines) and carried a dateline of Washington, D.C. It was essentially a write-up of an “unreleased Pentagon report” stating that one in seven of prisoners who’ve been freed or transferred from Guantanamo have taken up arms again. Setting aside the fact that there are probably unreleased Pentagon reports that deal with alien landings and Soviet weather control, it’s a transparently news-less article. Even an unsophisticated provincial like me saw it as little more than pre-emptive media spin in advance of the Obama speech on Guantanamo.
In fact, it was so breathlessly and carelessly put together that the Times subsequently changed the story and the headline after complaints that it was misleading about whether or not prisoners who may have not been terrorists before they got to Guantanamo could be said to be “returning” to terrorism if they became terrorists (itself a fuzzy term) after being released. They then had to defend the changes as well as the original story; all in all, not a proud day.
The other story I’ve highlighted, outlined in blue, was not the lead in that day’s paper, but probably should’ve been. It reported on very quiet negotiations between the Afghan government and at least some of its various opponents. The basic outline would be a withdrawal of American forces in exchange for peace; and these negotiations are occurring with the tacit support of the US Government. The State Department issued a rote denial, but the men interviewed for the story said that they had indeed met with American officials about the negotiations. If true, this has the potential to be a huge development in the course of the American war in Afghanistan.
Comparing those two stories and their relative placement in the Times is an exercise in head scratching. The lead story was a naked attempt at media-cycle spin that was so news-less it required subsequent revisitation and revision, the other contained actual news and is the very definition of diligent journalism, ferreting out new information (in a war zone) that could be very important in determining how the war eventually ends. The former was a partisan leak that could’ve been given to any organization with a significant media profile; the latter was serious and immeasurably valuable foreign reporting that is done by only a tiny handful of outfits. I love The New York Times, but this wasn’t them putting their best foot forward.
“That story isn’t suitable for children.” – Lisa Simpson
“Really? I keep my pants on in this version.” – Chief Wiggum
I have a theory about why Dick Cheney has been all over television since he left office. He, more than any other person, knows about the darkest secrets of the Bush Administration; he knows all the wet and bloody details and his newfound fondness for interviews and public speeches is a kind of preemptive defense of those awful things. He’s selling a catchall defense (we did what was necessary/doing these things kept America safe/I would do them again) that can be applied no matter what kind of twisted evil shenanigans come out next. I doubt very much that I’m the first person to think of this theory and I have no real evidence to support it, it just fits the facts.
On Friday, McClatchy added new weight to the simple and explosive allegation that Cheney ordered prisoners tortured to try and bolster the case for invading Iraq:
The head of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantanamo from 2002-2005 confirmed to McClatchy that in late 2002 and early 2003, intelligence officials were tasked to find, among other things, Iraq-al Qaida ties, which were a central pillar of the Bush administration’s case for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
“I’m aware of the fact that in late 2002, early 2003, that (the alleged al Qaida-Iraq link) was an interest on the intelligence side,” said retired Army Lt. Col. Brittain Mallow, a former military criminal investigator. “That was something they were tasked to look at.”
But wait, there’s more. Not only did they torture guys to get them to confess to something that didn’t exist, Cheney then cited those torture induced false confessions in an interview in early 2004 (when he was running for office):
The Rocky Mountain News asked Cheney in a Jan. 9, 2004, interview if he stood by his claims that Saddam’s regime had maintained a “relationship” with al Qaida, raising the danger that Iraq might give the group chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to attack the U.S.
“Absolutely. Absolutely,” Cheney replied.
[…]
“The (al Qaida-Iraq) links go back,” he said. “We know for example from interrogating detainees in Guantanamo that al Qaida sent individuals to Baghdad to be trained in C.W. and B.W. technology, chemical and biological weapons technology. These are all matters that are there for anybody who wants to look at it.”
That’s a devastatingly open and shut case. No relationship ever existed and even if it had there were neither chemical nor biological weapons in Iraq with which to be trained.
What this and other stories like it are cementing is the easy to understand idea that torture and the Iraq invasion are intimately linked. It’s a simple story, the Bush Administration needed to justify their war of choice, they tortured some guys to help produce evidence, and then they cited their in-house bullshit in public. It’s easy to understand, it’s becoming increasingly easy to prove, and it’s the kind of simple narrative that can be quickly explained to the distracted public.
Cheney, of course, knows all of this. (He probably also knows about even more horrible stuff that hasn’t yet become public.) Whatever else may be said about him, Cheney isn’t stupid, and he’s certainly aware that without the full power of the Executive Branch trying to keep a lid on things even more vile deeds are going to see the light of day. In short, Dick Cheney knows he did a bunch of illegal things, he knows that proof exists, and he knows that he is very indictable. Television is the best place for him because the torture story is now so simple that anyone can understand it. Muddying the waters by crowing about national security is the only line of defense he has left.
End note:
You know who looks increasingly better the more we find out about the Bush Administration? John Kerry. 2004 was never going to be an easy election for the Democrats, for a whole host of reasons, but I don’t think Kerry, or anyone else for that matter, understood or even suspected just what they were up against. I mean, Cheney, whose name was on all the bumper stickers, was ordering men tortured to produce false information which he ended up using against Kerry and company. Political tricks are one thing, but nobody was prepared to combat that kind of ferociousness.
“Would the world judge me harshly if I threw away the key?” – Principal Skinner
“No, but the PTA would tear ya a new arse.” – Groundskeeper Willie
There is no denying that the Obama Administration’s decision to make use of the Bush Administration’s sham military tribunals, announced like many embarrassing policies in the Friday news hole, is a serious disappointment. (For the gory details it’s best, as always, to read Glenn Greenwald.) Candidate Obama spoke unflinchingly against this type of thing, and yet here he is, barely four months into a four year term, nervously embracing some of the stupidest of his predecessor’s policies. More broadly, it fits into a sad pattern of political expediency which has hitherto gone relatively unremarked upon. And make no mistake, this is a political decision.
The safeguards within our legal system (chains of evidence, presumptions of innocence, trials by jury) exist in no small part to keep the authorities in line. The only threat that has any chance of keeping the people in charge following the rules is that of a guilty man going free. When it comes to the prisoners of Bush the Younger’s failed War on Terror, however, those safeguards were arbitrarily removed for more than seven years. The one constant of all the Bush Administration’s legal wrangling over prisoners was their absolute assertion, contra all previous American legal history, that they could hold these men indefinitely. Because they were operating without any fear of acquittals everything else got short shrift, from the messy realities of humanely treating prisoners to the simple bureaucratic necessity of maintaining coherent case files.
That is the mess with which the Obama Administration must contend. Our legal system isn’t set up to have seven year gaps where anything goes followed by a complete return to normalcy and the quagmire bequeathed to them when it comes to Guantanamo is too messy and too complex to be cleaned up without significant political costs. As a result the new Administration is faced with two unpleasant alternatives.
On the side of the angles they can bite the bullet and remand everyone over to civilian courts or regular military trials under the UCMJ. That runs the very real risk that guilty prisoners will go free. Should that happen the fault will lie with the Bush Administration, which in its long and lawless detention created conditions that resulted in the release of guilty men; but the blame will sit squarely on Obama (this is a familiar dynamic for our new President).
The other choice is to try and ram some of these men through the newfangled military tribunal system, where convictions can either be assured or significantly advantaged. This is seen as having a higher likelihood of keeping these men behind lock and key, but it comes at an enormous cost to America’s long term reputation. Obama appears to be betting that he has so much credibility and goodwill right now that no one, save a few cranks in his party and on-line, will really hold it against him. He is probably correct.
Obama has shown a willingness to place political expediency above principal before, witness his naked flip-flop on the FISA bill last summer. It’s a side of his personality which, despite all the scrutiny he has endured the last couple of years, remains widely underappreciated: beneath everything else he is a consummate and masterful politician. All the “Hope” shirts and Shepard Fairey posters in the world cannot change the fact that Obama is a ruthlessly clear eyed political animal.
The principled course of action would be to take these trials back to existing courts, and if there are acquittals then the acquitted should be set free. That is a chance we should be willing to take because, in theory at least, we cannot put a price on our values and our principals; and sticking by them has always benefitted us in the long term. However, an acquittal of someone implicated in American deaths, especially if those deaths occurred in September of 2001, would be a public relations nightmare at the very least. It would also have every opportunity to turn into a full blown political catastrophe for Obama specifically and Democrats in general.
Obama weighed American legal tradition and the human rights of these men against all else that he hopes to accomplish and found the former wanting. It’s as simple as it is sad. One can hope that when he’s got some of his signature proposals behind him, when he feels more secure politically, he’ll remember them. But there are a lot of conditionals in that sentence and it seems a thin hope.
“I’m getting sick of your stereotypes.” – Token Black
“Be as sick as you want just give me a goddamn bass line!” – Eric Cartman
We’re now three columns in to Ross Douthat’s residence in the opinion section of The New York Times (I say “section” because his columns haven’t yet made it to the printed page, though one assumes that’s coming). His first effort used a hypothetical “Cheney ’08” campaign to lament Republican unwillingness to confront the ugly reasons they’ve lost power. The second was a dismissal of Arlen Specter and a call for more “centrists” in the Republican Party. The third, yesterday’s, was an attempt to paint an optimistic face on the anti-abortion movement. This is an admittedly small body of opinion work from which to draw any conclusions, but it appears that Douthat is acclimating himself well to the role of conservative minstrel.
Provided you’re willing to be ostracized by your own kind it’s a pretty sweet gig. You can’t ask for a higher profile, the pay is quite nice and all kinds of people will take your phone calls and invite you to parties. Look at David Brooks, he’s been doing this for years and as much scorn as he has had heaped on him (and as incoherent as many of his columns are), he’s recently been singled out for attention by the President of the United States. Constructing grammatically correct sentences that pick at liberal arguments in a Reasonable Conservative way has its perks.
There is, of course, a downside to this (after all, any real conservative will tell you that there’s no such thing as a free lunch). The Reasonable Conservative can’t just go gallivanting around the airwaves, best seller lists and op-ed pages making outrageous statements in a fact free environment like the Limbaughs, Coulters and Krauthammers of the world. That’s more fun and more crowd pleasing, but it will never get Serious people to think of you Seriously. Rather, the Reasonable Conservative has to recognize the existence of facts and reality (and their well known liberal bias), and then still say conservative things. That is not an easy thing to do, and it leads to intellectual train wrecks like yesterday’s column.
Titled “Faking Left” Douthat starts by arguing that conservatives are inherently fucked in the debate over gay marriage because they’re arguing against freedom, in this case the freedom to marry whomever you please:
Thus gay marriage opponents’ persistent disadvantage. They can argue from tradition, custom and Christianity — as Obama himself does, albeit with dubious sincerity, to explain why he backs civil unions but not full-fledged marriage. They can note the perils of formally severing the link between marriage and childbearing in a society where far too many children are born outside of wedlock as it is. But supporters of gay marriage are the only ones making an argument from personal liberty — the freedom to marry, the right to marry — and that has made all the difference.
This is Reasonable Conservative argumentation at its finest. He’s agreeing with the liberal position (that’s nice!) but he’s doing so within a serious intellectual framework, so it’s okay for him (the conservative) to do so. He deploys words like “freedom” and “right” which everyone can endorse and while there is a whiff of lament about the increasing liberalness of the world, he seems okay with it on account of that rigorous intellectual framework. Unfortunately it’s at this very moment, when the Reasonable Conservative line of argumentation has built up a good head of steam, that it begins to jump the rails. What’s really fascinating about this is that you can actually watch it happen, sentence by sentence. Here’s the very next paragraph:
On abortion, though, the picture is very different. The pro-life movement is arguably more comfortable with the language of rights and liberties than its opponents. Abortion foes are defending a right to life grounded in the Declaration of Independence, after all, whereas pro-choicers are defending more nebulous rights (privacy, autonomy, etc.) supposedly grounded in “penumbras” and “emanations” from the Constitution.
There’s a lot going on there, so let’s fisk it line by line:
On abortion, though, the picture is very different.
Did you agree with what I said in the paragraph about gay marriage? Remember how Reasonable I was? Well hold tight because I’m about to blow your liberal mind.
The pro-life movement is arguably more comfortable with the language of rights and liberties than its opponents.
Mind. Blown. You like “rights” and “liberties”, don’t you? And when it comes to abortion you’re not used to thinking of pro-lifers as people with a high regard for “rights” and “liberties” because to you a woman’s “rights” and “liberties” should take precedence over the pre-born person you don’t even care about. Oh yeah, and nevermind that the hypothetical woman in question is a breathing autonomous person, I deftly skipped that part and you didn’t even notice.
Abortion foes are defending a right to life grounded in the Declaration of Independence, after all,
See what I did there? “Right to life”, “grounded”, “Declaration of Independence”, I’m arguing from first principals which are unassailable because they hearken back to our most hallowed traditions.
whereas pro-choicers are defending more nebulous rights (privacy, autonomy, etc.) supposedly grounded in “penumbras” and “emanations” from the Constitution.
Ah, there’s privacy and autonomy, thought I was going to ignore them, didn’t you? Instead I’ve minimized them by using quote marks and weak-kneed words like “nebulous” and “supposedly”. Your position now looks mushy and weak whereas mine is straight edged and solid.
That is a tightly crafted paragraph (transition in the first sentence, statement in the second, and support in the third) written by someone who probably got a lot of “A”s in English classes over the years. It has all the marks of the clean, unassailable logic that is supposed to be the Reasonable Conservative’s calling card. Unfortunately it’s an intellectual house of cards because the whole thing is constructed on a premise, all but unstated, that is neither clean nor logical. It rests on the hoary idea, easily dismantled by anyone with a passing knowledge of biology, that Life Begins at Conception. Douthat ignores that entirely because engaging it would spoil the mood; instead he blows right past that gaping logical hole and keeps on moving so that the finished product looks nice and sounds Reasonable; and that’s good enough for minstrel work.
No opinions are likely to be changed, and anyone who feels the urge can take it apart without too much effort, but Douthat accomplished his purpose: he amused the liberal majority with easily defeated arguments and gave the Times’ opinion space the veneer of ideological balance. If he keeps it up for a decade or more he too can dine with a liberal president as a show of tokenism.
Towards the end of Barry Glassner’s The Gospel of Food he describes the rather convoluted process the federal government uses to come up with its official dietary guidelines. Competing interests lobby for their particular foods, the dietary restrictions and limitations of specific groups are weighed and considered, supposedly impartial contributors are often anything but. The resulting suggestions and guidelines are woefully ill crafted and widely ignored by pretty much everyone. Nevertheless, the need to create an official dietary recommendation that sounds both scientific and definitive exists and must be served, no matter the stupidity of the underlying logic.
Glassner gets to this topic only after having dismantled most of the commentary and generally accepted theories out there about how Americans eat; but the official “scientific” guidelines highlight something that is central to a healthy and skeptical understanding of food. Namely, that there are no panacea foods, nor is there one supreme dietary philosophy, nor is there a way to eat which can honestly be described as universally “healthy”, “right” or “correct”. There are, quite simply, too many varieties of people, too many varieties of food, and too many different contexts (income, lifestyle, family situations, etcetera) to create the One True Diet.
That, of course, doesn’t stop nutritionists, doctors of various stripes and anyone else confident enough to append the word “expert” to their names from attempting to do so. The results are all around us, in newspapers, magazines, on television and on-line: a hodgepodge of conflicting advice, competing best sellers and other assorted nonsense that has made eating a self-aware act with cultural, social and even political implications. It’s exhausting and it’s completely unnecessary.
Glassner’s main point is that the idea that one’s food intake must be strictly monitored with an eye towards some nebulous and ill defined concept of “healthy” is at best a red herring and at worst genuinely stressful. He calls it the “gospel of naught” and it’s a very apt coinage. Modern nutritional language is replete with spooky terminology that would fit right in with the worst fear mongering of any organized religion, “anti-oxidants”, “beta blockers”, “miracle foods”, the list goes to infinity and it has the same purpose as religious dogma: change your behavior . . . Or Else (oh, and you’ll need to lighten your wallet a bit too).
Glassner isn’t the first person to point out that the public is, for the most part, woefully ill informed when it comes to food and that newspaper and television reports about food and eating don’t help matters. (Even people who conscientiously try to eat smart often have only the foggiest of foggy ideas about what they’re actually purchasing.) But what sets The Gospel of Food apart is that unlike many other food commentators he works without certainty. Glassner makes no claim to unquestionable correctness and his own refreshing uncertainty is on display on every page. He’s not advocating a specific list of things one should and should not eat, nor is he trumpeting any particular philosophy about how one should eat. Rather he’s pointing out that eating is something we all do and that given the choice between it being enjoyable or stressful, the former is vastly better.
Food demagoguery is nothing new and fears about trans-fats and fast foods, prescriptions of organics or veganism, proscriptions of bread or chocolate, and even the myth that families that eat dinner together are more harmonious*, is just its modern form. In 228 conversational and breezy pages Glassner takes them apart and reveals them to be little more than silliness.
(And no it doesn’t matter that the book came out two years ago, all of the shit Glassner describes is still chugging right along.)
*Rates of immediate families dining together are relatively unchanged in at least five decades and that study that purported to show that kids from families that eat dinner together x times per week do better in school doesn’t even exist. I’ve seen that canard in more places and heard it from more people than I care to remember.
“Marge, I agree with you in theory. In theory communism works . . . in theory.” – Homer Simpson
Something’s been bothering me about last Sunday’s post about the newfound leaderless-ness of the Republican Party. There is a pretty obvious rebuttal to that piece which I didn’t even attempt to address; namely that many of the analyses of the Red’s dim future, mine included, share a lot of similarities with the equally dire prognostications being aimed at the Blues circa 2003. I think most of the similarities are superficial, but that doesn’t mean they can simply go unaddressed.
Broadly speaking, the criticisms being applied to the Reds today (They’re leaderless! The extreme fringe of their Party is excluding their “moderates”!) were applied almost verbatim to the Blues circa 2003-2005. They had no one who could counter the towering political and media presence of Bush the Younger and those dirty fucking anti-war hippies made them unpalatable to non-nutjobs. All of that turned out to be bullshit, so, what’s different this time around?
I’d say that there are two big differences, one of which has been extensively covered and the other which is so obvious that it’s underappreciated. The well covered factor is the demographic and party identification trends that look far worse for the Republicans than they ever did for the Democrats. Long story short, even at the heights of Bush the Younger’s power the Democrat’s party identification numbers never plummeted the way the Republicans have. And as bleak as those numbers are, the future looks even worse because the most solidly Republican segment of the population, working class conservative white people, is shrinking as a percentage of the total American electorate every year.
The underappreciated but obvious reason is that Republican policies have themselves failed. This is so simple it barely qualifies as a third grade civics lesson: if the party in power screws up and does things people don’t like, it gets tossed out. They lost power because the policies they implemented were disastrous. There’s really nothing more to it than that.
If the Iraq War had been won quickly, and the tax cuts had caused the federal coffers to overflow, and the economy went off and created millions of new jobs, then the White House and Congress would still be held by the Reds. But there was never any chance of those things happening, not because the policies were implemented poorly but because the theories upon which they were based are completely wrong. The theories and policies to which the Reds are inextricably linked, things like preventative war and supply-side nonsense, are simply unworkable in the real world.
It’s certainly possible that the policies of Obama and the rest of the Blues won’t work either. Heath care reform could cause grief for millions of middle class Americans and see them toss him out over it in 2012; the financial mess could drag the economy for years to come; really, anything’s possible. But the policies they’re pursuing aren’t based on wishful thinking like “tax cuts increase revenue” and “war is a good way to reform other countries policies”. That is the crucial distinction between the depths of Democratic despair in 2003-05 and the current Republican despair.
Before David Souter announced that he was handing in his badge and gavel the big story of the week was the defection of Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter from the Reds to the Blues. Specter’s motive appears to be little more than self-preservation, he likes being a senator and his chances of keeping his job were a lot better on the Blue team. The tone for analysis of his move was set by Olympia Snowe’s mournful op-ed piece in the New York Times, “We can’t continue to fold our philosophical tent into an umbrella under which only a select few are worthy to stand.”
That is an easy way to think about this, but it’s also too simple. Nate Silver calls it the “Republican Death Spiral”:
Thus the Republicans, arguably, are in something of a death spiral. The more conservative, partisan, and strident their message becomes, the more they alienate non-base Republicans. But the more they alienate non-base Republicans, the fewer of them are left to worry about appeasing. Thus, their message becomes continually more appealing to the base — but more conservative, partisan, and strident to the rest of us. And the process loops back upon itself.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but it misses something fundamental: the breakdown of discipline in what was once a very disciplined party. There are a lot of factors contributing to that, including the shrinking tent phenomenon that Snowe and Silver invoke, but perhaps the most glaring new development is what’s missing: a strong leader.
Pretty much since Ronald Reagan the Republican Party has had a clear leader, able to keep the troops’ raging passions focused and in check. Bush the Younger was in charge for almost ten years, particularly from the summer of 1999 (when he became the presumptive nominee) until the debacle in 2006 (when he was undeniably exposed as being out of touch). That was seven years and change as the unquestioned lord and master of the party and then a further two years and change as the nominal head of the party. Before him there was Gingrich, and before him there was Bush the Elder and before him there was Reagan. Three decades, four guys, and that’s it.
The critical difference between the current Republican Party and the one that spent the last thirty years winning elections is the lack of leadership. The party has two main constituencies, social conservatives and financial conservatives (a term that has, unfortunately, lost its connection to a preference for balanced budgets and come to mean strict adherence to disastrous supply-side orthodoxy). It takes an iron fist to rule such an organization (this is the downside of being the more organized and disciplined party) and right now nobody is up to the job.
After eight years of Bush the Younger, most of which was spent with Republican majorities on both sides of Capitol Hill, neither the fiscal conservatives nor the social conservatives feel any better off. Sure, trickle down blows were struck in 2001 and 2003, but Grover Norquist and his ilk saw those as merely first steps in a long campaign. Then Social Security privatization failed to get off the ground and now those hard won upper class tax cuts are either going to be allowed to expire or outright overturned.
The social conservatives are in even worse shape as liberal social mores continue their popular ascendance. Abortion is not meaningfully closer to being outlawed than it was in 2001, nor have swearing and sex been removed from television. Bristol Palin dealt a public, “jump the shark” level blow to abstinence only sex education. Even worse, homosexuals began legally marrying each other the last few years, despite the fact that Bush the Younger campaigned on a constitutional amendment outlawing the practice in 2004. So while John Roberts and Samuel Alito are powerful consolation prizes, the social conservatives, like their fiscal counterparts, saw their dream president come and go with little to show for it. That frustration, combined with two consecutive electoral disasters, has put the Republican rank and file in an even fouler mood than usual.
This is where Arlen Specter comes in. In 2004 he faced a nearly fatal primary challenge backed by fundamentalist supply-siders. He was able to turn it away, by the slimmest of margins, only with the full pressure of a Republican White House bearing down on the Pennsylvania insurgents. Given their druthers the Republican brain trust would’ve rather had a more conservative Republican senator from Pennsylvania, but they recognized that if Pat Toomey had won the primary he probably would’ve lost the general. Protecting Specter was a calculated, strategic decision that helped the Republican Party as a whole, but something like it couldn’t happen right now. No one possesses the kind of intraparty power necessary to shield red legislators in blue parts of the country.
This disintegration began after the 2006 election, but the continued presence of Bush the Younger in the White House (and the need for at least some defense to keep him from being impeached), kept things relatively calm. The first demonstration of the new rancor came in the Republican presidential primary last year when the Lexus conservatives went for Mitt Romney, the Bible conservatives went for Mike Huckabee and John McCain fell into the nomination as the least objectionable choice. That was a sign of things to come and the Specter defection is only the next step.
The structural problem here is that no one will be able to claim the Republican throne for at least three more years. The 2010 election is a mere eighteen months away and short of a nuclear bomb going off in an American city it’s tough to imagine a political catastrophe that would cost the Democrats either house of Congress. That means no national leader until 2011 at the earliest, and that’s if someone jumps out to a Bush-like presumptive nominee status very early, which, given the current list of interested candidates, seems unlikely. Of course, if Barack Obama is re-elected in 2012 the cycle starts again and a party that has long relied on strict discipline will continue without the means to enforce it.
“Oh boy, this is gonna get worse before it gets better.” – Chief Wiggum
Getting out of Iraq was never going to be easy and the last couple of weeks have shown us a hint of what’s in store as the stated American withdrawal date inches ever closer. The most pressing date is the June 30th deadline for American forces to be out of Iraq’s cities. In this case, “cities” is a fairly loosely defined term, but the practical realties, near as anyone can tell beforehand, would seem to be the serious reduction in the number of American troops patrolling Iraqi streets (and all that that entails).
It goes almost without saying that the pushback has already begun. This is from Monday’s New York Times:
The United States and Iraq will begin negotiating possible exceptions to the June 30 deadline for withdrawing American combat troops from Iraqi cities, focusing on the troubled northern city of Mosul, according to military officials.
[...]
But because of the level of insurgent activity in Mosul, United States and Iraqi military officials will meet Monday to decide whether to consider the city an exception to the deadline in the Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, between the countries.
Note the source, “military officials”. The story goes on to describe how our military is generously offering to stay just a bit longer in certain places, you know, if the Iraqis want us to. This is precisely the kind of malingering attitude that remains the only real threat to our long needed exit from Iraq. American foot dragging has been indulged for years when it comes to Iraq, but however persuasive the immediate tactical case seems to be the conclusion is as unchanging as it is false. Our presence there is itself destructive, and if the Shiites and the Sunnis and who knows who else are determined to fight it out, there is very little we can do about it.
Witness another New York Times story, this one from Sunday: Iraq Resists Pleas by U.S. to Placate Baath Party. Nouri al-Maliki is walking a very fine line, between us, his Shiite allies, and the still dangerous Sunni minority which was in power until we invaded. We want everyone to just get along for a couple of years so we can slip out of the country with a little dignity, but our dignity is completely irrelevant to the Iraqis and many of them will not hesitate to do whatever they can to advance their own interests, whether we’re still there or not. This is the bloody trap we’ve gotten ourselves into in Iraq: the locals aren’t done fighting, however much we’d like them to be.
The good news, though, is that the withdrawal timetable has so far proved impervious to distraction or disruption. The same day that meeting about altering the Iraqi-American agreement about troops took place, al-Maliki sat down with the BBC:
“No, no, it hasn’t changed it at all,” he said.
“As we agreed at the beginning when we signed the withdrawal agreement, these deadlines are final and absolute and not open to postponement.
[...]
“But so far there is no thought or intention on the part of the government to ask for an extension of those forces. On the basis of a field assessment we don’t need them, and there is no request.”
Those are very reassuring sentiments. So as disturbing as it can be to see our Secretary of State using Bush-style neoconservative newspeak like, “I think that these suicide bombings are, unfortunately in a tragic way, a signal that the rejectionists fear Iraq is going in the right direction,” it ultimately amounts to very little so long as the Iraqi government and Barack Obama remain committed to our removal. Deadly bombings and hubristic thoughts of staying just a little bit longer (and there will be plenty of both) are to be expected. It was never going to be easy, but so far, so good.
“Tomorrow we were gonna find out who the dish ran away with.” – Bart Simpson
“The spoon, Bart.” – Lisa Simpson
“Of course!” – Bart Simpson
As the American torture story continues to metastasize like the foul cancer that it is, no one seems quite sure what to do when it comes to the thorny yet vital issue of putting a close to this dishonorable period. Other than not prosecuting the low-level CIA officers who were, in the famous formulation, just following orders, the White House hasn’t staked out a clear position. Congress seems to be all over the map; though it usually is so that comes as no surprise. One thing is clear: the increased scrutiny that began with Mark Danner’s Red Cross piece in the 9 April New York Review of Books has elevated the story to levels of public attention it hasn’t seen in five years (when the first harrowing photographs from Abu Ghraib became public). That outcry reached a public conclusion with the conviction of the lowest of low hanging fruit and a White House stonewall effort that was second to none. Something of similar magnitude will be needed this time. The big difference is that this White House doesn’t want it to just go away for the sake of going away. Rather, this White House seems willing to see it through to the end, provided that it goes away for six months to a year while it focuses on other things.
Barack Obama is, here in the spring of 2009, heavily politically invested in getting two major domestic pieces of legislation passed: health care reform and energy/carbon reform. Obama and those around him also appear cognizant, in the way only master political operatives with access to the real inside information can be, of just how politically fraught cleaning up Bush the Younger’s torture mess is going to be. Those of us in the audience were given a taste of that this week with this bombshell revelation from McClatchy, “Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link“. The story begins:
The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.
The use of abusive interrogation – widely considered torture – as part of Bush’s quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.
And just like that we find ourselves a little bit deeper down the rabbit hole dug by Bush the Younger and his cadre of fanatical incompetents. There is a forehead slapping obviousness to the above story that is quite humbling. Anyone paying the least bit attention has known for years that a) the government spent a lot of 2002 and 2003 attempting to manufacture a non-existent link between Iraq and al-Qaeda and b) that was about when we start torturing people as a matter of policy. Line up those two facts next to each other like that and it couldn’t be more apparent that the next logical conclusion is that torture was used as part of that manufacturing process.
(Imagine what little sense that must have made to the prisoners. This would be like an American prisoner of 1942 Imperial Japan being asked, repeatedly and under torture, about secret American connections to Nazi Germany. It would make so little sense, be so transparently insane, that, at least at first, you’d probably think it was some kind of trick.)
This is the latest revelation about the depths to which the Bush Administration sank (it will not be the last), but what hasn’t yet been remarked upon is the fantastic expansion of the political calculus that comes with it. Cleaning up their moral cesspool was never going to be easy, but what this latest development makes clear is that even those of us who long assumed the political costs would be significant grossly underestimated them.
The genesis of the Iraq war, from its earliest rumblings through the October 2002 Congressional vote and right up until the bombs started to drop, was one of the most shameful and dishonorable periods of American politics. One would not be surprised to see people fifty years from now shake their heads about it the same way we do about the McCarthy era. So while our shiny new President was opposed to the war from the start, the same cannot be said for much of the staff of his Administration (starting most prominently with his Vice-President and Secretary of State) and large swaths of his party. When one brings torture and surveillance into the mix things get even dirtier on the Democratic side. Those are wounds no savvy Democratic operator wants to reopen, particularly with not one, but two enormous legislative battles looming.
The health care and energy bills are both major overhauls to longstanding American problems and they represent threats to existing orders which are powerful, entrenched and well funded. Passing either one of them in a form that amounts to more than window dressing would be a legislative achievement unequaled in perhaps forty years. Not only are they of tremendous importance when it comes to policy and outcomes, but if they do succeed they will also strengthen Obama politically.
When looked at from his perspective, the fights over health care and energy are battles he can ill afford to lose. If they fail, or if they pass in toothless forms that will not show obvious benefits to ordinary Americans, Obama will be exposed as weak, just another pretty boy in a long line of empty suit reformers. On the other hand, extending health care to millions of Americans and retooling the economy in such a way as to prevent (or at least mitigate) global warming while creating untold numbers of new jobs will have enormous benefits, for the 2010 midterm elections as well as Obama’s own re-election in 2012. Those are not petty concerns.
As a Friday article in the Washington Post made clear, Obama’s decision to release the four torture memos was not arrived at lightly, nor was it done without significant internal objection. An Administration concerned purely with politics could’ve easily kicked the decision down the road and made the ACLU force its hand in court, if only to buy itself a few precious months to work on other things. But they didn’t do that, they made the right call and the country is better off for it.
Obama isn’t opposed to prosecuting these violations of the law; if he were he wouldn’t have released the memos. But he is aware of just how enormous the political costs are going to be (witness the right wing noise machine going to ludicrous speed the last ten days or so). As important as it is that the architects of American torture face justice, preferably in the form of a jury being asked to render a verdict, it can wait. It’s not as though “prosecute now” and “prosecute never” are the only two options; let John Conyers and Patrick Leahy chew on things for a while, they’re only going to shake even more shit loose. Come Thanksgiving and Christmas the men responsible for one of the greatest disgraces in American history will still be guilty, and the evidence of their deeds will still be there. In the interim the pressure must be kept on, but for political reasons it’s entirely understandable and defensible for Obama and his people to want a clean shot at heath care and energy first.
The thought of these flagrant crimes going unpunished simply because the perps were high government officials is enough to make one physically ill, and postponement carries a real danger of letting them walk. But it may not be an avoidable danger; recognizing that and digging in for the long haul is likely the best course of action.
“Finally a copy of Ethan Frome to call my own.” – Lisa Simpson
This article about xkcd releasing an old fashioned book in Monday’s New York Times got me to thinking about something that’s been rattling around my head since that Ars Technica piece about the history of e-books I wrote about a couple of months ago. Namely, what is the likely future of print books? The future of physical storage for audio and video looks bleak, Blu-Ray could very likely be the last storage device for movies and television shows ever mass produced. But books, and the text within them, last a hell of a lot longer than anything that stores audio or video.
Audio and video frequently change formats, from wax cylinders, vinyl records, CDs and now mp3s to Beta, VHS, DVD, and now Blu-Ray. Simply possessing the hardware necessary to play things become problematic after awhile to say nothing of the short life span and inherent frailty of the discs/cassettes/things themselves; whereas the basic technology of the book is centuries old. That lends it an important distinction: it lasts (probably longer than you will). Provided it’s kept somewhere dry, a mass produced hardcover book can easily last a century or longer (who really knows?); even a cheap paperback, again kept dry, is good for decades.
There is another factor that argues in favor of the survival of books. A CD, even one loaded with liner notes and music videos, probably doesn’t require more than an hour or two to get through. Even a feature laden Blu-Ray with all kinds of on-line activities and special features probably won’t require more than a few hours of your time. But even a short, relatively fluffy novel can take ten hours to read and a thick non-fiction book can take considerably longer. This may seem like a trivial distinction, but in a world where you can get almost anything free or close to free on-line, getting you to spring for the physical copy means making you feel as though you’ve gotten your money’s worth. In terms of time spent per dollar spent a book that takes you fifteen hours to read blows away an album on which you may only like a couple of songs or a movie you might end up watching twice.
E-books are still pathetically underdeveloped. Even Amazon’s vaunted Kindle 2 is suffering at the hands of the foolish emphasis placed on Digital Rights Management, most prominently the text-to-speech function, and the much publicized DRM related disabling of many of it’s features should your Amazon account come under scrutiny, even for non-Kindle related reasons. Despite those type of first-generation technical problems the future of the e-book seems assured, after all you can carry a whole library under your arm. But the digitization of content doesn’t spell doom for ink and paper the way it does for audio and video. Books, after all, are pretty hardy. It’s probably going to be a niche, but it will survive and the sooner publishers realize that and change their marketing accordingly, the better off they’ll be.
“Bailiffs, place the mayor under arrest.” – Judge Snyder
“What? Oh yes, all that stuff I did.” – Sideshow Bob
It was a good week for America. The release of four odious torture memos on Thursday was an important step towards healing one of the most severe of the many wounds Bush the Younger inflicted upon our government. Thursday also saw the publication of a story in The New York Times reporting extensive, and quite likely ongoing, NSA abuses of eavesdropping authority on American citizens. Taken together the two disclosures, one voluntary by the government the other ferreted out by the Times, are a stark reminder of the healing yet to be done and also the progress that has been made.
Authoritarianism runs through all societies; mature and stable democracies such as ours have powerful safeguards in place to guard against it and these two stories are crystal clear reminders of what happens when those safeguards are weakened. Recall that the horrifyingly un-American Patriot Act of 2001 and its subsequent revisions fall under this category. The Patriot Act didn’t materialize in a frenzy of typing on 12 September 2001. It was cobbled together from existing proposals that, absent a national panic, were too intrusive or too expansive to have made it through even a Republican Congress.
Obama has begun to unravel that tangled mess, but it isn’t going to happen overnight. Aside from what appears to be his very short sighted decision on the state secrets privilege (though admittedly not all the facts are in on that one) he’s done an enormous amount for civil liberties and justice in this country in just three months. Glenn Greenwald, the internet’s premier civil liberties advocate and a man who was right pissed at Obama over the state secrets thing, summed up just how impressive this is:
I think the significance of Obama’s decision to release those memos — and the political courage it took — shouldn’t be minimized. There is no question that many key factions in the “intelligence community” were vehemently opposed to release of those memos. I have no doubt that reports that they waged a “war” to prevent release of these memos were absolutely true. The disgusting comments of former CIA Director Mike Hayden on MSNBC yesterday — where he made clear that he simply does not believe in the right of citizens to know what their government does and that government crimes should be kept hidden– is clearly what Obama was hearing from many powerful circles. That twisted anti-democratic mentality is the one that predominates in our political class.
In the United States, what Obama did yesterday is simply not done. American Presidents do not disseminate to the world documents which narrate in vivid, elaborate detail the dirty, illegal deeds done by the CIA, especially not when the actions are very recent, were approved and ordered by the President of the United States, and the CIA is aggressively demanding that the documents remain concealed and claiming that their release will harm national security. When is the last time a President did that?
This is all the more head spinning coming hot on the heels of a president and his minions who spent most of the decade pursuing these mad policies and lying about it in public. Without the awesome stonewalling powers of the Executive Branch the ugly realities of a government that dabbles in lawless surveillance and torture are beginning to see the light of day. Politically that is tremendous because anyone advocating for a return to the old ways is now waging an uphill battle full of uncomfortable questions like whether or not it’s torture to repeatedly slam a bound man into a concrete wall. Reactionary lunatics like Dick Cheney and Michael Hayden can slur these disclosures all they want, but they can no longer do it behind a smokescreen of official euphemisms that conceal the bloody realities of their actions.
Unsurprisingly, a Washington Post poll taken right at the inauguration indicated that not only do a large majority of Americans oppose torture under any circumstances, but that most of us want the policies of Bush the Younger investigated. And that was before the gory legalistic details became public. The onus is now on Congress to begin investigations which are going to be as ugly as they are vital. We aren’t there yet, but things are going in the right direction. John Conyers is on it:
“If our leaders are found to have violated the strict laws against torture, either by ordering these techniques without proper legal authority or by knowingly crafting legal fictions to justify torture, they should be criminally prosecuted,” Mr. Conyers said in a written statement.
Amen to that and godspeed. A good day like Thursday deserves a little praise and if Conyers gets his way there will be more of them.
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos 
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos 
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos 
