Month: February 2010

Amusingly, you can win a medal for valor if you drop a 500 lbs. bomb from a F-16, but you get a thank you note for manning a successful drone mission. The Air Force doesn’t consider piloting a drone to involve combat and so it doesn’t involve courage. But I have to wonder how much courage it takes to fly a F-16 when there is no opposing Air Force and no anti-aircraft artillery. There is something to be said for performing a mission successfully and getting credit for it. But aside from the physical danger inherent in being a fighter pilot (whether in training or on an actual mission), I don’t see much distinction between the F-16 and the drone pilots.

I missed this Tea Party profile piece in the New York Times until Frank Rich pointed me to it. It seems to me that most of these tea partiers are conservative-minded but not really Republicans. I suspect very few of them have ever voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, for example. But they are not so dumb that they are unaware that Bush and Cheney screwed up the economy and violated the Constitution on a routine basis. The problem is, they’re still getting their information from FOX News and Glenn Beck. So, they’re being fed Republican propaganda and paranoid nonsense on a regular basis, and then they’re going online and reading truly crazy stuff on websites like WorldNetDaily.

How many of these folks are going to do something crazy like flying an airplane into a federal building? I don’t know, but they do pose a danger. What’s ironic is that the kind of government surveillance required to keep track of that danger just feeds their paranoia. But if you are palling around with people that are talking about taking up arms against the government, the government needs to know what else you’re doing.

Personally, I’m more offended by acts of terrorism carried out by acolytes of Glenn Beck than I am by people who have actual geo-political goals behind their actions, but both of them result in dead Americans, so both of them need to be treated the same way.

One piece of constructive advice I have for the people who are working to organize a Tea Party is that you’ll never succeed in sending people to Washington to be your federal representatives and then having them vote against the federal government doing anything. That’s just something Republicans say they are going to do when they are out of power. Lately, they’ve started voting that way, but it will last only so long as they are in the minority and then they will go back to building up huge deficits, cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and generally doing the bidding of Wall Street. It’s just the nature of the federal government that if you control it, you use it to do stuff. So, if you are a Tea Party proponent, you can’t fool yourself into thinking that you can find some leader who will do jackshit about the power of the federal government. What you can do is work with civil libertarians and progressive Democrats to protect our privacy rights and Net Neutrality.

Liberals are smarter according to a recent study:

The study found that young adults who said they were “very conservative” had an average adolescent IQ of 95, whereas those who said they were “very liberal” averaged 106.

The scientists attempt to explain this in evolutionary terms, essentially saying that caring about total strangers is counter-evotutionary and only contemplated by people smart enough to think outside the box.

Probably the saddest thing of all is living in your mother’s basement and feverishly blogging for Exxon/Mobil without even getting paid for it.

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In a panel discussion on today’s BBC foriegn policy forum came forward the following statement: “Obama succeeded in making America irrelevant in Middle East politics.” I noted last summer, Hillary Clinton took the initiative when she praised Netanyahu for his bold moves on Israeli settlements “freeze”.

Hillary Clinton tried, but failed, to get Sidney Blumenthal on board at the State Department as a personal advisor. Clinton Chafes at White House vetting process: “nightmare”.

Obama’s China visit was a debacle. Leaves China experts at home, takes with him campaign advisors.

Traitor Dick Morris is a close Clintonite and has joined the Tea Party movement with harsh Obama criticism and opposition to health care with ads by his League of American Voters.

My earlier diary: Dennis Ross Moves to NSC  A Hawk Within?

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

Compare Sarah Palin’s rhetoric to segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace’s rhetoric.

Palin: “Voters are sending a message.” Wallace: “Send them a message!”

Palin: “The soul of this movement is the people, everyday Americans, who grow our food and run our small businesses, who teach our kids and fight our wars…. The elitists who denounce this movement, they just don’t want to hear the message.” Wallace: “They’ve looked down their noses at the average man on the street too long. They’ve looked [down] at the bus driver, the truck driver, the beautician, the fireman, the policeman, and the steelworker….”

Palin: “We need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.” Wallace: “We have a professor — I’m not talking about all professors, but here’s an issue in the campaign — we got these pseudo-theoreticians, and these pseudo-social engineers…. They want to tell you how to do.”

Palin: “What does he [Obama] actually seek to accomplish…? The answer is to make government bigger; take more of your money; give you more orders from Washington.” Wallace: “They say, ‘We’ve gotta write a guideline. We’ve gotta tell you when to get up in the morning. We’ve gotta tell you when to go to bed at night.’ “

Wallace was not a libertarian. In Alabama, he expanded the state government and built the junior college system. He never presented a program to shrink the government in Washington. That never stopped him from attacking Big Government, at least on the federal level. He called for “freedom from unwarranted, unwise, and unwanted intrusion and oppression by the federal government” and said, “I think that what they ought to do is cut down on federal spending.” But he never put his money where his mouth was.

I thought there was something familiar about Palinism.

I usually think Andy McCarthy is the dimmest bulb at the Weekly Standard, which is an accomplishment of sorts. But his little missive this morning is mostly accurate in the larger sense, even if it is wrong in many particulars. McCarthy argues that since the Democrats have already internalized that they are going to lose seats in November, they might as well pass a stronger bill.

Since the Dems know they will have to ram this monstrosity through, they figure it might as well be as monstrous as they can get wavering Democrats to go along with. Clipping the leadership’s statist ambitions in order to peel off a few Republicans is not going to work.

There is the barest hint of self-awareness here, as it finally begins to dawn on some Republicans that they could have cut a deal to get a less comprehensive outcome.

I’m glad Republicans have held firm, but let’s not be under any illusions about what that means. In the Democrat leadership, we are not dealing with conventional politicians for whom the goal of being reelected is paramount and will rein in their radicalism. They want socialized medicine and all it entails about government control even more than they want to win elections. After all, if the party of government transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, its power over our lives will be vast even in those cycles when it is not in the majority. This is about power, and there is more to power than winning elections, especially if you’ve calculated that your opposition does not have the gumption to dismantle your ballooning welfare state.

Obviously, McCarthy describes a Democratic leadership more like we would wish for than that we actually have. But, he’s right about the hoped-for effect of creating access to health care for 30 million constituents. It’s not that we want to do anything radical, but giving people subsidies to buy health care does transform their relationship to the state, and that will have positive electoral consequences for Democrats in the same way that Democrats benefitted from the creation of Social Security and Medicare. The Republicans keep arguing that polls show that the people don’t want health care reform, but they don’t seem confident that the people will feel that way once they begin to benefit from those reforms.

This next bit strikes me as pretty ironic, as I kept waiting for the Republicans to moderate their positions in the 2006 and 2008 cycles, and it never happened.

Consequently, the next six weeks, like the next ten months, are going to be worse than we think. We’re wired to think that everyone plays by the ususal rules of politics — i.e., if the tide starts to change, the side against whom it has turned modifies its positions in order to stay viable in the next election. But what will happen here will be the opposite. You have a party with the numbers to do anything it puts its mind to, led by movement Leftitsts who see their window of opportunity is closing. We seem to expect them to moderate because that’s what everybody in their position does. But they won’t. They will put their heads down and go for as much transformation as they can get, figuring that once they get it, it will never be rolled back.

That’s the basic idea. That’s what we did under Roosevelt and what we did under Lyndon Johnson. That’s what we’d like to do now. The only quibble I have is that we’re not asking for this because we want or intend to lose any seats over it. I do expect to lose seats in November, but I expect to lose many more of them if reform fails. The stronger (more statist) the bill is, the fewer Democrats will be in trouble. I not only hope this, but polling consistently shows that a public option is vastly more popular than private insurance. If the Democrats pass this bill without a public option then the Republicans will pivot and argue that we’re limiting people’s freedom in an unconstitutional manner by mandating that they buy insurance from a private corporation. And they will get some mileage out of that argument precisely because people hate the insurance industry.

But, however you slice it, Democrats are trying to give people something they will like and benefit from, and they do expect that people will reward them for it for decades to come, just as they did after the New Deal. If only we could get the “leadership” to push for something more popular, we might just get our wish.

In his Saturday radio address the president continued his execution of a point by point plan for passing health care reform.

Pointing to the Olympics, he congratulated American medal winners and their ability to bring the nation together over the past two weeks.

Saying he realizes the difficulties in finding unity for the nation’s larger challenges, Obama said “we need to move past the bickering and the game-playing that holds us back and blocks progress for the American people.”

“If we want to compete on the world stage as well as we’ve competed in the world’s games, we need to find common ground,” he said.

“It’s time for us to come together. It is time for us to act. It is time for those of us in Washington to live up to our responsibilities to the American people and to future generations,” he said. “So let’s get this done.”

You know, it’s not insincere just because it’s strategic. He knows he won’t get any Republican votes, but he would be willing to make concessions for a few of them. But, the fact is, he doesn’t need to. The bill will be more popular if he takes away many of the concessions he’s already made in his vain effort to make the bill look bipartisan.

A long awaited examination of possible ethics violations by the authors of the Bush administration’s torture memos was finally released late last week.  As has seemed typical on this topic, the official document raises more questions than it answers.

For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report on its ethics investigation for torture-approving lawyers has already generated some remarkable reactions.  One of the few defenses came from former deputy counsel to George W. Bush Bill Burck and Bush’s former press secretary Dana Perino; it is an amazingly weak effort.  For instance, they cite the counsel of one of the lawyers under investigation as an analyst, quote her defense of her client, and conclude she is “someone whose credentials and experience as a top-flight lawyer cannot be seriously doubted.”  To which I can only respond, clownish is as clownish does.

They only address the issues in the report peripherally: “What makes this whole affair even more pointless is that OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] itself withdrew or superseded the relevant opinions of Yoo and Bybee during the Bush years.”  That is, the fact that alleged lawbreaking ceased before the investigation obviates the need of it.  Once wrongdoing stops there is no reason to pursue it; instead we need to move on and look forward.  (Remember when conservatives used to accuse liberals of moral relativism?)  They never try to address the central point though – what responsibility do the authors bear for helping construct our torture bureaucracy?

The closest they come is in citing former OLC head Jack Goldsmith – who withdrew the memos – as believing that “none of the interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, violated U.S. law. He also believed that Yoo had come to his views honestly and did not merely use them as a cover to justify torture.”  That is simply obfuscation.  The whole issue can be summed up as follows:  Is waterboarding torture?  (Yes.)  Did the US waterboard?  (Yes.)  Is the US a signatory to the Convention Against Torture?  (Yes.)  Does the Convention require that any credible allegations of torture – even one time, even against an avowed enemy of the state, even against evil incarnate – be investigated?  (Yes.)

The fact that Goldsmith believes waterboarding is not torture is irrelevant.  Waterboarding is torture.  There is abundant case law supporting that.  Yoo could not honestly have come to another belief because it would have required willful ignorance of precedent.  That seems to be the route Yoo actually took, but rather than exonerating him it only makes him more culpable.  Yet even that is largely irrelevant; it might matter when it comes to establishing intent, but that only goes so far.  Ignorance of the law is no excuse, which you can verify yourself if you’ve ever tried to talk your way out of a speeding ticket.

It is simply astounding that this is the best defense torture apologists can come up with: launch substance-free character attacks against the other side, insist any action amounts to criminalizing political differences, call for impunity in the name of looking forward and claim the kids really meant well.  It is basically an entirely insubstantial response.

A wide variety of commentators have pointed out crippling deficiencies in the report.  First, an in-house investigation should not inspire confidence even under the best circumstances.  In the immortal words of Willem Buiter, self-regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance.  On those lines, bmaz posted several links about the author and concluded: “It seems David Margolis has his own institutional interests that present an appearance of conflict with his duties to protect the public from malevolent lawyering by DOJ attorneys, especially high ranking ones.”

Jack Balkin wrote that this cozy review was done according to a standard that would only have found fault under almost impossibly extreme circumstances.  (He followed up with this as well.)  Scott Horton noted that redactions in the report were “made to protect political figures at the White House and CIA, and potentially other agencies, from embarrassment” instead of from national security concerns (and it partially failed there too).  David Cole, correctly predicting the exoneration in the report a couple of weeks ago, contrasted its characterization of the torture lawyers as having used “poor judgment” with the more reasonable treatment of their actions as war crimes by a Spanish judge.

The report is simply a mess.  It was constructed under terrible conditions using a compromised process by a professional whitewasher.  That is not an accident; there is an irreconcilable tension between those inside the DC establishment and those outside it.  Many in the Beltway’s political and media elite stand to look very bad, if not criminally liable, for America’s barbaric treatment of detainees.  It is obvious they want the issue to just go away.  The OPR report is the latest example of something that could have started to chip away at the stonewalling, but failed.  Instead it just slapped a few more bricks into place.