Irreverent thoughts

Racism lives on

2011-04-08T21:36:00.000-07:00

This surprised me:

46% of Mississippi Republicans said [interracial marriage] should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal.

I thought we had long since moved past the question of whether interraical marriage was OK, and were now debating whether to extend the right to marry to gay and lesbian couples. But then, I don't know any Mississippi Republicans.

Copyright and the Internet

2011-02-16T09:21:00.000-08:00

The Op-Ed piece titled "Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?" tries to make the case for copyright.

An obvious problem with this piece is that the primary example cuts against the value of copyright. When the Globe Theater was built, it marked the start of a golden age for drama, despite the lack of copyrights at the time. When the theater shut down, it marked the end of the golden age, despite the fact that a copyright law had been passed in the mean time. The obvious conclusion is that what playwrights need most is not copyright law, but professional theaters to perform their works.

A more serious flaw, in my view, is that the authors consider only half of the picture. They warn:

[Progress is] the result of abiding by rules that were carefully constructed and practices that were begun by people living in the long shadow of the Dark Ages. We tamper with those rules at our peril.

But the rules have been tampered with, at the behest of copyright holders. The U.S. Constitution specifies that Congress may write laws that protect intellectual property "for limited times," but these days copyrights rarely expire; instead the laws are changed to increase the length of the copyright protection. In the wake of Citizen United, the odds of works like the early Micky Mouse cartoons ever entering the public domain are less than ever. The anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act extend the reach of intellection property law in a variety of ways, in particular interfering with the "fair use" that has traditionally been allowed under copyright law.

In short, the bargain implicit in copyright is being undermined from both sides. Copyright owners are winning most of the legislative battles, demonstrating that special interests with a lot of money at stake can often prevail over broad interests of the public at large. On the other side, consumers are doing massive amounts of copying of copyrighted works, and probably most of this is not fair use excerpts or works created 60 years ago.

Republicans and the Deficit

2011-01-21T19:27:00.000-08:00

If you don't want to increase the deficit, you have to pay for any new government spending by raising taxes or other revenues. And if you want to go further and actually reduce the deficit, you have raise taxes by more than the new spending, right?

Not according to Charles Krauthammer, who considers the notion so absurd that he doesn't even try to spell out what's wrong with it; he simply suggests that anyone making it deserves to be "laughed out of town."

Having linked to Krauthammer's piece, I should link to some counters to his misstatements. Ezra Klein disects the six years of expenditure vs. ten years of taxes claim here. A brief summary of the CLASS Act reveals that the long term care insurance benefits will be paid for out of premiums (and thus, contra Krauthammer, won't bust the budget).

But on the central point of this post, no link is required because Krauthammer lays out the facts for us. Republicans want to cut revenues by about $770 billion over the next 10 years while reducing expenditures by only $450 billion. Democrats claim that this will increase the deficit; if Republicans want to cut taxes by $770 billion without increasing the deficit, they have to match those tax cuts with $770 billion worth of spending cuts. Krauthammer thinks this is absurd.

Krauthammer doesn't speak for all conservatives, but he is an influential conservative commentator. If he can get away with this article, I doubt that Republicans are feeling too much pressure to address the deficit. And we know from their behavior during the Bush years that most of them don't have any desire to do so.

Update 2011-01-22: In a comment on Ezra Klein's blog, Fishpeddler suggests that:

People like Mankiw appear to be tripped-up by the disconnect between what they ask for and what they actually want. Let's say someone has a budget of $100 and revenues of $50, and they really, really want to cut spending. One way of pressing for the desired spending cuts would be to insist that the budget be balanced. However, when someone comes back and says, "We did what you demanded. Revenues have been increased to $100", they feel like a fast one has been pulled on them, because the end result is nothing like what they envisioned.

I think that's it. Folks like Krauthammer are so used to pretending that their desired for spending cuts is actually a concern about budget deficits that they lie automatically, without even being consciously aware that they are doing so. So when someone calls them on the lie, they can't figure out what happened.

The only thing I would add is that most Republicans seemed fine with the spending increases of the Bush years, so it seems safe to say that a lot of Republicans don't oppose higher spending per se, they oppose spending when Republicans don't get to decide how the money is spent.

Alleged Gonzales Lie

2008-12-19T16:19:00.000-08:00

Matthew Yglesias gives a slightly unclear explanation of Waxman's latest memo.

On page 51 of the Senate intelligence committee's Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, we read the following:

In a response to questions form Committee staff, the White House said that on September 24, 2002, NSC staff contacted the CIA to clear another statement for use by the President. The statement said, "we also have intelligence that Iraq has sought large amounts of uranium and uranium oxide, known as yellowcake, from Africa. Yellowcake is an essential ingredient of the process to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." The CIA cleared the language, but suggested that "of the process" be changed to "in the process." The President did not use the cleared language publicly.

According to Waxman, the White House statement was false; the CIA refused to clear the language. The false statement appeared a letter written in reponse to a request for information that the intelligence committee sent to Condoleezza Rice. The writer of the letter was Alberto Gonzales, who was White House Counsel at the time.

Waxman tells us that Gonzales also claimed, falsely, that the CIA had cleared language intended for use in a speech by Bush to the United Nations. (See page 49 of the Intelligence Committee report.)

I don't know whether Gonzales lied or was misled, which is why I include the word "alleged" in the title. If I felt that Gonzales's reputation hung on the distinction, I probably wouldn't use the word "lie" at all without spending some time trying to figure out whether it applied. But as I see it, Gonzales has so thoroughly discredited himself that his reputation can't get any worse.

Taking into account Waxman's corrections to the record, here is the timeline in a nutshell:

On Sept. 11, 2002, the CIA rejected language saying that Iraq was attempting to obtain yellowcake.
On Sept. 24, 2002, the White House again requested that the CIA approve language stating that Iraq was attempting to obtain yellowcake, and again the CIA rejected the claim.
On Oct. 6, 2002, the White House then included the claim in a draft of the Cincinnati speech (see Intelligence Committee report page 55), and the CIA rejected it again.
On January 27, 2003, the CIA received a draft of the State of the Union message (see page 64), but it is not clear who if anyone at the CIA read it. The next day, Bush delivered the State of the Union message containing the infamous 16 words.

A Case for Employer Mandates

2008-11-30T16:43:00.000-08:00

The consensus on the political left seems to be that a single payer health care system is the best approach if you are designing a system from scratch. The alternative, building on the existing system to provide universal coverage, is generally seen as somewhat inferior from a policy point of view, but much more politically feasible because you can transition to it without forcing people to give up their existing coverage.

I was therefore interested to see a 1989 paper by Lawrence Summers, who is slated to head Obama's White House National Economic Council, that takes a somewhat different point of view. The paper discusses mandated benefits in general (it is not limited to health care), and makes the case that mandating benefits is more efficient than having the government provide the same benefits out of tax dollars. It also lists some downsides to the use of mandates. Summers' basic concern is to argue that economists should pay more attention to the differences between mandated benefits and benefits provided directly by the government, and therefore he doesn't deal with the question of when the benefits of mandates outweigh the drawbacks. It is interesting to see that there are arguments for mandates (as opposed to single payer) that don't depend on political considerations or transition costs. The complete paper (in PDF format) can be found here.

I suppose I should give a hat tip to Pjeman Yousefzadeh at redstate.com, although his posting is stupid on many levels, one being that he misreads Summers' paper so badly that I suspect he didn't actually read it at all.

Big Government Ahead?

2008-11-03T13:31:00.000-08:00

David Brooks is about eight years too late with his column titled Big Government Ahead. Government spending has grown faster under Bush than anything we've seen in recent memory. For some reason Brooks counts tax cuts as spending, which would make Bush's record look even worse.

So what will happen to government spending going forward? If McCain is elected, he has talked about controlling spending, but I don't know how serious he is about that. McCain is willing to tell blatant lies in order to win this election, so it's not clear we can believe him when he talks about what he will do if he is elected. His talk about cutting earmarks is not a serious approach to controlling the budget, because earmarks are generally for small amounts of money. More recently, McCain has proposed freezing most of the budget for one year. That is a more serious suggestion, but it would face strong opposition in Congress. Freezing spending on programs such as unemployment insurance, which normally cost more during a recession, is both bad economics and bad politics.

Now let's suppose that Obama wins. When Obama states that he has explained how he will pay for all his proposals, he is describing something similar to "pay-go", the Congressional budgetting discipline which requires spending and tax cut proposals to include matching tax increases or spending cuts. Obama compares his spending proposals to a baseline which assumes that the Bush tax cuts are permanent. In contrast, the pay-go rules use a baseline in which the tax cuts expire. (That's because the expiration is current law, passed by a Republican congress and signed into law by Bush.)

What that means is that deficits will continue under an Obama presidency at something like the current level. It's fairly easy for a politician to run up the deficit; it is politically difficult to bring it down. My sense is that, after seeing how quickly Bush was able to wipe out Clinton's legacy of fiscal prudence, Obama isn't interested in spending a lot of political capital to bring down the deficit. On the other hand, Obama is indicating that he doesn't plan large increases, either. That means that the growth in government spending should be significantly slower under Obama than under Bush.

Obama's proposals don't take the current economic downturn into consideration. Depending on how the economy plays out, Obama may see a need for government spending to stimulate the economy. But doing that would involve a one time increase. I feel fairly safe in predicting that if Obama is elected, federal spending will grow more slowly during Obama's first term than it did during Bush's first term.

McCain Advertisement Disses Hillary

2008-10-04T12:40:00.000-07:00

McCain's has an advertisement featuring Biden's supposed gaffes. The whole notion that a handful of stupid-sounding comments taken out of context form a sound basis for evaluating a candidate strikes me as silly, but I won't dwell on that because there are a lot of silly political advertisements out there. What I find striking about this one is that one of the supposedly embarrassing clips in one in which Biden says that, "Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am" to be Vice President.

I know that the far right has spent the last 15 years trying to demonize the Clintons, but after watching Clinton's performance in the Democratic primary I don't see how anyone could believe that she's not qualified to be President or Vice President. I've been critical of Clinton at times, but her command of the issues and her ability to lead have never been in doubt. So when McCain releases an advertisement premised on the notion that Clinton is not qualified to be Vice President, I have to wonder what was going through McCain's mind when he approved the ad. Does he really think that Clinton is unqualified? Or is he pretending to think that in order to appeal to the Republican base?

To give McCain the benefit of every possible doubt, I suppose it is possible to interpret McCain as saying that Biden shouldn't say that Clinton is qualified even if she is. But that interpretation leaves McCain saying something that doesn't make any sense. Clinton, like the majority of people who run for President, didn't actually win. What she did accomplish was to demonstrate that gender is not a disqualification for the Presidency. Remember the 3 AM ad? It may or may not have persuaded any voters to vote for Clinton, but the fact that Clinton could run it demonstrated what Clinton had already accomplished. By spending years studying foreign policy issues, and explaining them to the public in ways that the public could understand, Clinton made people understand that she would have an idea of how to deal with the crisis, no matter what it was.

Contrast that to Palin's recent performance. Republicans are pleased that whenever Palin got a question that she couldn't answer during the Vice Presidential debate, she simply ignored the question and talked about something else. Being able to smoothly change the topic is an excellent ability for a hostess to have, but a President who gets a 3 AM phone call can't make the problem go away by talking about how wonderful her five children are. Palin's performance would be feeding every stereotype saying that woman can't lead if it weren't for Hillary Clinton. But because of what Clinton accomplished, it's crystal clear that Palin's problem isn't that she's a woman; it's that she's running for a position that would require her to deal with issues that she's never been interested in.

Given the significance of Clinton's campaign, and the need to bring the Democratic party together after a hard-fought primary campaign, there was every reason for Biden to acknowledge what Clinton had accomplished.

That leaves us with the obvious interpretation of McCain's ad: McCain, whether he believes it or not, is saying that Clinton is not qualified to be Vice President. Given the historical significance of Clinton's campaign, I suspect that there is a bit of misogyny behind that position. If there are any Hillary supporters who are still considering voting for McCain, I hope they see this ad.

Chocolate

2007-04-23T15:35:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what I think about the war on chocolate, which is really about what can be labelled chocolate. But I will point out that the Modesto Bee is wrong when it says that cocoa butter is an ingredient of chocolate. To set the record straight on this most beloved of foods:

To make chocolate, you take cacao beans, ferment them, dry them, roast them, and grind them. The resulting chocolate consists of small pieces of cacao bean suspended in cocoa butter. (The cocoa butter comes out of the beans during the grinding process. Think of this as analogous to making peanut butter, where you grind up peanuts and end up with small bits of peanut suspended in peanut oil.)

If you want to make chocolate candy, you mix the chocolate with other ingredients (typically sugar, powdered milk, additional fat (either cocoa butter or lecithin), and sometimes vanilla). If you want to make cocoa powder, you remove most of the cocoa butter from the chocolate. (It's not possible to remove all of the cocoa butter, but modern equipment can come close.) The result is a powder because it does not contain enough cocoa butter to bind the bits of cacao bean together. The cocoa butter which you removed can be sold to makers of chocolate candy.

In other words, cocoa power and cocoa butter aren't ingredients of chocolate because you make cocoa powder and cocoa butter out of chocolate, rather than the other way around.

Conservatism and Dishonesty

2007-04-21T15:52:00.000-07:00

Is dishonesty a core value of modern conservatism? Mark Kleinman calls attention to Ross Douhthat:

1. Professional racist Steve Sailer writes a dishonest, bigoted anti-Obama screed for The American Conservative, in which he grossly misrepresents Obama's Dreams from My Father.
2. Assistant editor Alex Koznetski, having failed to convince his bosses not to print a piece of lying trash, quits The American Conservative in protest.
3. Ross Douthat makes fun of Koznetski:
If you're not at least somewhat conservative, you probably shouldn't go to work for a magazine called, um, The American Conservative. And if you do, you probably shouldn't get all outraged and resign in protest when they turned out to be, um, conservative.
So telling racist lies is a natural and expected part of being, "um, conservative"? (Douthat doesn't challenge Konetski's careful account of the falsehood of Sailer's review, or Sailer's own solidly racist credentials as a contributor to the VDare website.)

Douthat is not alone. Via The Cheerful Iconoclast, we get a link to Steve Sailer's response to Konetski, and Sailor quotes James Antle writing on the American Spectator blog:

This kind of groundbreaking investigative reporting is why I read the Washington Monthly. I confess: When I went to work for the American Conservative, I was shocked to discover it was a conservative magazine. Then I came to The American Spectator and quickly learned that by some strange coincidence, it too was a conservative magazine!

Douthat makes it very clear that, for him, conservativism implies dishonesty. James Antle's writing is slightly more ambiguous, but if he's not saying that conservativism implies dishonesty, it's not clear what his point is. Koznetski was willing to work for a magazine that espoused conservative opinions, but not one that lied to its readers.

It's hard for an outsider to tell whether dishonesty is a core value of modern conservatism, but when Douthat, a former intern at the National Review, or Antle, who works for the conservative magazine The American Spectator, say it is, that has to carry some weight.

Supply-side Economics

2007-04-09T20:40:00.000-07:00

Bruce Bartlett's April 6 Op-Ed piece has generated a lot of discussion which Brad DeLong quotes. Krugman says that Bartlett is misrepresenting the Keynesian position in the 1970's, but I haven't seen any discussion of the rest of Bartlett's historical claims.

I think Bartlett is misrembering (or misrepresenting) some of the history. Rather than pit my memory against his, I'll post some excerpts from an April 13, 1980 New York Times article by Steven Rattner (page F1):

From the start of the 1980 campaign, he [Ronald Reagan] has added to his standard anti-Government stance a new brand of Republican theory known to most as "supply-side economics."
That view has been represented to Mr. Reagan principally by Representative Jack Kemp of Buffalo and Jude Wanniski, a New Jersey economic consultant. It holds that taxes are now so high that a cut will generate a new upsurge of economic activity that will produce more revenues for the Federal Government than were lost by the original cut. The theory is set out in the Laffer Curve, named after Arthur Laffer, an economics professor at the University of Southern California and sometime advisor to the Reagan campaign.

Bartlett writes that the original supply-siders that tax cuts might increase revenue "under very special circumstances." But the question was whether cutting taxes in 1980 would increase revenue, and supply siders--or at least the ones getting the attention Ronald Reagan and the press--are reported as saying it would.

Continuing directly:

The Kemp-Wanniski group has also been promoting the notion of returning to the gold standard, under which dollar bills could once again be turned in for gold.

Bartlett claims that the supply-siders supported "tight money to stop inflation," which seems misleading to me. A gold standard can result in tight money, but "tight money to stop inflation" sounds like a reference to Volker's policy rather than a call for a gold standard. Continuing:

Both of these concepts are in conflict with the more traditional Republican conservatism, which has emphasized, as the first fiscal priority, reducing the size of Government and the size of Government spending. In addition, that camp has voiced little interest in the gold standard as a solution to the nation's economic ills.

The article goes on to list advocates of "traditional" view associated with the Reagan campaign, and says that there is some uncertainty about where Reagan stands on economic policy because his advisors have differing views.

To all appearances, the supply-side group has thus far remained the more influential.
Although he has stressed the need for a balanced budget, Mr. Reagan has also argued in favor of the 30 percent, three-year tax cut proposed in a bill bearing the names of Mr. Kemp and Senator William V. Roth Jr. of Delaware.
Particularly, Mr. Reagan favors the notion that such a cut would lead to an increase in Federal revenues, because of the new economic activity.
Other Republicans have found that this tenet has not been persuasive. After first backing a Kemp-Roth bill that included only the tax cut, Republicans Congressional leaders have now reverted to the more traditional party view, that the first priority was spending cuts, which in turn would allow tax reductions. A revised Kemp-Roth bill now embodies this idea.

Bruce Bartlett tells us that the writers of the Kemp-Roth bill expected it to lose revenue all along.

Bartlett complains that asserting that lower taxes result in higher revenues is "a simplification of what supply side economics is all about," but if so it's a simplification that's appeared in political discussions since supply side economics first appeared.

UPDATE: An anonymous commentator on Mankiw's blog summarized it nicely:

The point seems to be that if you broaden the "supply side" theory to be the elements that have persevered (and are often in common with other theory), then people today are supply-siders. The flipside is that if you pigeon-hole Keynesian economics into just what Keynesians thought in the 1970s, then people today aren't Keynesians. Thus his conclusion is drawn through generalization and oversimplification.

The parts of supply side economics that the supply siders were selling to the Reagan campaign, namely that the tax cuts would pay for themselves and that the U.S. dollar should be convertable to gold, appeared dubious at the time and don't look any better in retrospect.

The soft bigotry of low expectations for the Commander in Chief

2007-03-27T22:28:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I switched on C-span and caught a group of Republicans attempting to defend the President's position on Iraq. I won't bother to analyze all the nonsense these Representatives spewed, but the following comment by David Davis (R-Tenn.) is noteworthy:

Can you imagine being a soldier over there and knowing that the Congress has the potential to pass a law that we could pull out in 18 months. Can you imagine being a soldier over there at 17 months, 3 weeks, 4 days, and you are on patrol and knowing you can lose your life or your limb, but in 3 days you are going to be pulled out and we are going to lose the war anyway. I can't imagine being a soldier that is being asked to do that. We need to have soldiers that understand that we are going to be there for them because they are there for us.

Like Davis, I can't see any justification for asking a soldier to do that. But unlike Davis, I would say that Bush shouldn't ask a soldier to do that. Davis is one of those Republicans who insists on blaming everybody else for Bush's flaws. Thus, even in a hypothetical which Davis himself constructed, in which Bush sends a soldier out on a dangerous patrol even though we will "lose the war" regardless of whether the soldier goes or not, Davis doesn't see the problem as being that we have a commander in chief who callously sends our young men and women into combat without seriously thinking about whether the benefit is worth the sacrifice. Instead, Davis blames Congress.

"Being there" for our soldiers means, among other things, ensuring that they are only sent into combat when they can accomplish something worth while. Davis basicly concedes that Bush does not do this--otherwise Davis's hypothetical doesn't make sense. Bush will try to keep the war going until the end of his presidency, not because it is in America's national interest, but in the hopes of shifting some of the blame for the war onto his successor. So it is up to Congress to exercise its power to decide whether we fight indefinitely or bring the war to a close.

I actually agree with Davis that Congress should not "micromanage the war." This means that Bush should be the one to decide exactly when and how to withdraw our troops, even though, as in Davis's hypothetical, Bush will probably make those decisions with callous disregard for our troops and for America's national interest. But Congress can and should set a deadline for withdrawal. Bush will probably mismanage the withdrawal, but he's been mismanaging the war ever since it started. The choice, as I see it, is between Bush mismanaging a withdrawal and Bush mismanaging a continuing occupation. I vote for withdrawal.

The Iraq Study Group's wishful thinking

2006-12-07T22:03:00.000-08:00

Michael Gordon doesn't pull any punches in his analysis of the military aspects of the Iraq Study Group's report.

The military recommendations issued yesterday by the Iraq Study Group are based more on hope than history and run counter to assessments made by some of its own military advisers.
Ever since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States has struggled in vain to tamp down the violence in Iraq and to build up the capacity of Iraq's security forces. Now the study group is positing that the United States can accomplish in little more than one year what it has failed to carry out in three.
In essence, the study group is projecting that a rapid infusion of American military trainers will so improve the Iraqi security forces that virtually all of the American combat brigades may be withdrawn by the early part of 2008.
"By the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq," the study group says.
Jack Keane, the retired acting Army chief of staff who served on the group's panel of military advisers, described that goal as entirely impractical. "Based on where we are now we can't get there," General Keane said in an interview, adding that the report's conclusions say more about "the absence of political will in Washington than the harsh realities in Iraq."

The Iraq Study Group had a "Military Senior Advisor Panel" composed of retired military officers, but, "the group's final military recommendations were not discussed with [the members of the panel], several of those officers said."

The prospects for training an effective Iraqi military look dim:

Even if the number of American advisers is increased, it is highly unlikely that the Iraqi forces would be capable of assuming the entire responsibility for security throughout the country in little more than a year. It took four years, from 1969 to 1973, for the Nixon administration to make South Vietnamese forces strong enough to hold their own and withdraw American combat forces from Vietnam. Even so, when Congress withheld authority for American airstrikes in support of those forces in 1975, the North Vietnamese quickly defeated the South and reunified the country under Communist rule.
The rapid withdrawal of American combat forces would also deprive the Iraqi military of the opportunity to work as partners with the Americans in combined operations. "There is no meaningful plan for creating a mix of effective Iraqi military forces, police forces, governance and criminal justice system at any point in the near future, much less by 2008," noted Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, referring to the group's study.
Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star general, said in an interview that the overall concept of withdrawing American forces as the Iraqis built up their military capability was sound. But he argued that the specific recommendations by the panel raised a second problem: if American combat brigades were withdrawn from Iraq, the thousands of American advisers who remained might find themselves dangerously exposed, particularly if the fighting in Iraq grew into a full-scale civil war. The advisers could be killed or taken hostage.
"They came up with a political thought but then got to tinkering with tactical ideas that in my view don't make any sense," General McCaffrey said. "This is a recipe for national humiliation."

The Iraq Study Group couldn't really be expected to find a good solution to the situation in Iraq, but it might have faced up to the reality in Iraq. Instead, it appears to have refused to acknowledge how intractable the situation is.

I applaud the Iraq Study Group for being willing to acknowledge more of the reality in Iraq than the Bush Administration has been. Should the report convince Bush to persue a slightly less disasterous approach in Iraq, that will be a worthy accomplishment. But, as far as I can tell, the Iraq Study Group did not really attempt to figure out the best course of action for the United State to take in dealing with Iraq.

The era of big government is back

2006-02-15T12:59:00.000-08:00

Clinton famously declaimed, "The era of big government is over." Then Bush came into office and changed all that. The annual growth in total government spending under the five most recent presidents is given in the following table:

President	Growth per year
Bush II, 1st term	4.6%
Reagan	2.6%
Carter	2.0%
Bush I	1.9%
Clinton	1.5%

As you can see, the federal government has grown much faster under Bush II than any other recent president.

Bush's 4.6% increase in spending (after adjusting for inflation) may not seem all that large, but remember that that is per year. Spending grew by 19.7% over his first term. Furthermore, the Bush Administration is predicting that government spending will increase by 6% this year. (All the data in this article comes from the historical data tables of Bush's 2007 budget proposal.) If that prediction turns out to be correct, Bush's five year average will be 4.9%.

Right wingers sometimes argue that cutting taxes doesn't increase the deficit because if taxes are higher, the government will just spend more. The table above shows that this is nonsense. The presidents who were fiscally responsible enough to raise taxes in order to cut the deficit presided over the lowest spending growth. The highest growth in spending occurred under presidents who passed irresponsible tax cuts.

We've seen that Bush and Congress have spent a lot of money during Bush's first term. What have they spent it on? The answer is, just about everything. Here is a table showing the changes to the federal budget spending by function, in constant (inflation adjusted) dollars:

Function	2001	2005	change	percent
National defense	297.9	436.6	138.6	46.5%
Education, training, employment, and social svcs.	55.8	86.0	30.1	53.9%
Health	168.3	220.9	52.5	31.2%
Medicare	212.4	263.2	50.8	23.9%
Income security	263.6	304.8	41.2	15.6%
Social security (On-budget)	11.4	14.6	3.1	27.4%
Veterans benefits and services	44.0	61.8	17.8	40.5%
Energy	0.0	0.4	0.4	4199.1%
Natural resources and environment	25.0	24.7	-.3	-1.4%
Commerce and housing credit (On-budget)	3.4	8.3	4.9	145.7%
Transportation	53.2	59.8	6.6	12.5%
Community and regional development	11.5	23.1	11.6	101.2%
Net interest (On-budget)	268.7	243.1	-25.6	-9.5%
International affairs	16.1	30.5	14.4	89.2%
General science, space and technology	19.3	20.9	1.5	7.9%
Agriculture	25.7	23.4	-2.2	-8.7%
Administration of justice	29.5	35.3	5.8	19.5%
General government	13.9	15.0	1.0	7.5%
Undistributed offsetting receipts (On-budget)	-38.2	-47.8	-9.6	25.2%
Total, On budget federal outlays	1481.8	1824.4	342.6	23.1%
Function	2001	2005	change	percent
Social security (Off-budget)	411.7	446.7	35.0	8.5%
Postal service (Off-budget)	2.2	-1.6	-3.8	-170.2%
Net interest (Off-budget)	-67.2	-80.9	-13.7	20.4%
Undistributed offsetting receipts (Off-budget)	-7.7	-9.6	-1.9	24.8%
Total, Off budget federal outlays	338.9	354.5	15.6	4.6%
Total, Federal outlays	1820.8	2178.9	358.2	19.7%

In looking at these numbers, we can use the Clinton spending growth rate of 6.2% over four years as a base line. In any category where spending increased less than 6.2%, we can say spending was restrained.

Starting at the bottom of the chart, we see that off budget spending grew by only 4.6%. This category includes Social Security benefits and the Post Office. The off budget net interest is mostly interest earned by investing the money in the Social Security trust fund; this is a negative number in the chart because it is income rather than an expense.

The reason that off budget spending grew slowly is that Bush hasn't done anything to these programs. He wanted to change Social Security, but left that project for his second term.

In the on-budget spending, we can ignore two categories. "Community and regional development," which doubled, is dominated by disaster relief spending. The "Agriculture" category, where spending declined, is dominated by price supports. The spending in both these categories varies all over the map, depending on events.

That leaves us with two categories where spending decreased, the first being net interest. That declined because interest rates have fallen. The total debt increased by 23.6%. If Bush had balanced the budget, like he said he would do during the 2000 campaign, the debt would have decreased by 9.8% due to inflation. The bottom line is that Bush did all he could to increase net interest payments.

That leaves one category where Bush has cut spending: Natural resources and environment. Mostly, this is due to a 21.1% cut in conservation and land management. He also decreased pollution control and abatement by 3.64%, and spending on water resources by 1.5%. He increased spending on "recreational resources" by 16.4% and spending on "other natural resources" (which I assume goes mostly to business interests) by 33%.

The bottom line is that Bush's hostility towards protecting the envronment is reflected in the budget, but in every other category he has been a big spender. Of course he didn't do this alone--the Republican congress also played a role. The myth that the Republican party is the party of smaller government is just that: a myth.

For those who like numbers, here is a table of federal spending since 1960. A few notes:

The year is the fiscal year. Currently, the fiscal year is three months earlier than the calendar year (e.g. fiscal 2001 began on October 1, 2000). Prior to fiscal 1977, the fiscal year was six months earlier than the calendar year. Because the start of the fiscal year was change in 1976, the third quarter of calendar year 1976 doesn't fall into any fiscal year. The data for that quarter are labelled "TQ" in the table.
The dollar figures are in billions of of fiscal year 2000 dollars, meaning that they are adjusted for inflation.
This table includes all federal revenues and spending, including money which is classified as off budget. Money which is put into a trust fund is not included in the outlay column until the money is actually spent.
The "surplus" column lists the difference between receipts and outlays; it is negative in most years because the government usually runs a deficit. Starting in the 1980's, large amounts of money have been placed into the Social Security trust fund in order to cover the costs when the baby boomers retire. The Social Security taxes used to raise the money going into the fund are included in the "receipts" column, but the payments into the fund are not included in the "outlays" column. For that reason, subtracting outlays from receipts is like subtracting apples from oranges; the difference isn't very meaningful.
The "president" column specifies who was president at the start of the fiscal year. Generally when presidents come into office, they stick with the previous president's budget for the current fiscal year (which began when the previous president was in office), and put their proposals into the budget for the next fiscal year.
The last column is the year over year increase in constant dollar outlays.
As I write this, the 2006 fiscal year is less than half over. The values for 2006 are estimates.

Year	Constant dollars			Percentage of GDP				Spending
	Receipts	Outlays	surplus	Receipts	Outlays	surplus	President	growth
2006	1951.1	2312.3	-361.3	17.5	20.8	-3.2	Bush II	6.1%
2005	1898.3	2178.9	-280.6	17.5	20.1	-2.6	Bush II	4.3%
2004	1712.5	2088.3	-375.9	16.3	19.9	-3.6	Bush II	3.4%
2003	1667.0	2020.1	-353.1	16.5	20.0	-3.5	Bush II	4.7%
2002	1777.8	1929.2	-151.3	17.9	19.4	-1.5	Bush II	6.0%
2001	1946.1	1820.8	125.3	19.8	18.5	1.3	Clinton	1.8%
2000	2025.5	1789.2	236.2	20.9	18.4	2.4	Clinton	2.5%
1999	1874.9	1746.0	128.9	20.0	18.7	1.4	Clinton	1.5%
1998	1793.1	1721.0	72.1	20.0	19.2	0.8	Clinton	2.2%
1997	1661.2	1684.2	-23.0	19.3	19.6	-0.3	Clinton	0.7%
1996	1557.9	1673.0	-115.2	18.9	20.3	-1.4	Clinton	0.6%
1995	1482.4	1662.2	-179.8	18.5	20.7	-2.2	Clinton	1.2%
1994	1414.0	1642.2	-228.2	18.1	21.0	-2.9	Clinton	1.7%
1993	1323.2	1615.5	-292.3	17.6	21.4	-3.9	Bush I	-0.5%
1992	1282.7	1623.9	-341.2	17.5	22.1	-4.7	Bush I	0.9%
1991	1282.6	1609.9	-327.3	17.8	22.3	-4.5	Bush I	1.3%
1990	1309.4	1589.9	-280.4	18.0	21.8	-3.9	Bush I	6.1%
1989	1298.9	1498.9	-200.0	18.4	21.2	-2.8	Reagan	3.6%
1988	1235.6	1446.5	-210.9	18.2	21.3	-3.1	Reagan	2.9%
1987	1196.1	1405.7	-209.6	18.4	21.6	-3.2	Reagan	-1.4%
1986	1107.3	1425.7	-318.4	17.4	22.4	-5.0	Reagan	2.1%
1985	1082.6	1395.7	-313.1	17.7	22.9	-5.1	Reagan	7.4%
1984	1016.8	1299.5	-282.8	17.4	22.2	-4.8	Reagan	0.4%
1983	961.7	1294.4	-332.7	17.5	23.5	-6.0	Reagan	3.4%
1982	1036.9	1251.7	-214.8	19.1	23.1	-4.0	Reagan	2.6%
1981	1077.4	1219.4	-142.0	19.6	22.2	-2.6	Carter	3.8%
1980	1028.3	1175.1	-146.8	19.0	21.7	-2.7	Carter	6.1%
1979	1017.8	1107.3	-89.5	18.5	20.2	-1.6	Carter	1.3%
1978	952.5	1093.6	-141.1	18.0	20.7	-2.7	Carter	5.1%
1977	903.8	1040.2	-136.4	18.0	20.7	-2.7	Ford	1.8%
TQ	216.5	255.8	-39.3	17.8	21.0	-3.2	Ford	0.2%
1976	818.8	1021.4	-202.6	17.2	21.4	-4.2	Ford	4.0%
1975	824.7	982.1	-157.3	17.9	21.3	-3.4	Nixon	11.9%
1974	857.4	877.4	-20.0	18.3	18.7	-0.4	Nixon	1.2%
1973	814.7	867.3	-52.6	17.7	18.8	-1.1	Nixon	1.1%
1972	770.7	857.6	-86.9	17.6	19.6	-2.0	Nixon	2.8%
1971	742.9	834.3	-91.4	17.3	19.5	-2.1	Nixon	0.8%
1970	815.9	828.0	-12.0	19.0	19.3	-0.3	Nixon	0.5%
1969	838.0	823.5	14.5	19.7	19.4	0.3	Johnson	-2.8%
1968	727.4	847.0	-119.6	17.7	20.6	-2.9	Johnson	9.0%
1967	734.6	777.2	-42.7	18.3	19.4	-1.1	Johnson	14.0%
1966	662.8	681.5	-18.7	17.4	17.9	-0.5	Johnson	11.1%
1965	605.9	613.2	-7.3	17.0	17.2	-0.2	Johnson	-1.7%
1964	592.7	623.8	-31.1	17.6	18.5	-0.9	Kennedy	5.0%
1963	568.9	594.3	-25.4	17.8	18.6	-0.8	Kennedy	0.3%
1962	552.8	592.5	-39.6	17.6	18.8	-1.3	Kennedy	8.8%
1961	525.8	544.4	-18.6	17.8	18.4	-0.6	Eisenhower	3.3%
1960	528.5	526.8	1.7	17.9	17.8	0.1	Eisenhower	-0.1%

Bin Laden truce offer is nothing new

2006-01-21T18:18:00.000-08:00

The take of the conservative blogosphere is that bin Laden's proposal of a ceasefire in his latest tape is that it is a sign of weakness. At least that's the view of Glenn Reynolds, Dave's not here, and even Gregory Djerejian, who is one of the more thoughtful bloggers on the right.

But this is not a new theme for bin Laden. In October 2004, he stated, "We fought with you because we are free, and we don't put up with transgressions. We want to reclaim our nation. As you spoil our security, we will do so to you.... Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked."[1] And as far as I know, bin Laden has always insisted that he is merely defending Muslims from Western aggression. Like the religious right in the United States, he loves to play the victim.

Because of this, I don't think that the conservative blogosphere can be accurately said to be doing analysis in this case. It is operating in political smear mode, taking bin Laden's speech out of context to make bin Laden look weak. There's nothing wrong with that as long as you read those blogs for entertainment. It's not so good if you are looking for a serious discussion of the threat posed by al Qaida.

[1] A different translation (by al Jazeera) can be found here.

Probably no more indictments

2005-10-28T23:13:00.000-07:00

Mark Kleiman remains hopeful that Rove will be indicted:

Fitzgerald did a very skilful dance in refusing, politely but persistently, to answer various versions of the question "Are you going to indict anyone else?" But he very carefully didn't say that his previous request to witnesses not to discuss their testimony was no longer in force.

When asked about this, Fitzgerald said he hadn't decided. Fitzgerald has been clear all along that he would prefer that witnesses not talk about the investigation. Now he has to think about the matter before he can say whether he still holds the position. In other words, the status of the investigation has changed enough that his previous thoughts about whether witnesses should talk about the investigation are no longer applicable. That's a pretty strong indication that he hasn't decided to indict anyone else.

In a followup article, Kleiman points out that Fitzgerald has told Rove's lawyer that no decision has been reached about whether to bring charges against Rove. So Rove isn't out of the woods yet. Fitzgerald did explain that an indictment of anyone other than Libby would have to be done by a grand jury, and that currently there are no sitting grand jurors to issue such an indictment. He also said that he had no plans to call a grand jury at this point. This suggests to me that an indictment of Rove (or anyone else) is not particularly likely.

My guess about what is going on is that Fitzgerald has decided that he cannot conclusively prove that people in the White House acted with criminal intent when they revealed Plame's employment, and that he would have closed up shop a while ago if Libby hadn't committed perjury. As for Rove, my guess is that Fitzgerald hasn't told Rove's lawyer that Rove is in the clear because Fitzgerald suspects that Rove committed perjury, and will therefore be on the lookout for evidence against Rove as he prepares to try Libby. But given the length of the investigation, it seems unlikely that conclusive evidence against Rove will emerge at this point. My prediction is that the Libby indictment is the only one.

Under the American justice system, the majority of crimes are never punished. This doesn't mean it's a bad system; it's a consequence of living in a free society rather than a police state. So I'm not going to fret about the possibility that Rove and others in the Bush Administration may get away with breaking the law.

The bigger issue is the willingness of the American electorate to tolerate the disregard of America's national security. When the Bush administration told Iran, via Chalabi, that we could intercept Iranian communications, we lost the ability to intercept those communications. When the Bush Administration informed al Qaeda that we were monitoring their cell phones, al Qaeda stopped using cell phones. And when the Bush Administration informed the world that it was more interested in domestic politics than in protecting the contacts that Valerie Plame had built up over her career, it undoubtedly made the job of collecting human intelligence harder.

Like Fitzgerald, I cannot prove that the Bush administration intended to undermine America's national security. In fact I would guess that the actions I listed were the result of a combination of indifference and incompetence. But patriotic voters don't have to explain the Bush Administrations behavior; they have to make it clear that they won't tolerate it.

Government's response to Katrina

2005-09-16T15:38:00.000-07:00

Check out this Newsweek article about the government's response to Katrina. There is much more to be written on the topic, but it's an interesting if very preliminary first draft of history. Credit to The Daily Howler for providing the link.

I was a bit slow to appreciate the magnitude of hurricane Katrina--due to the tendency of television news to hype every minor hurricane I ignored the early TV coverage--but no slower than the White House. On September 1, when I was composing a blog entry titled, "A Failure of Leadership," Dan Bartlett was making a DVD of TV coverage of the event for Bush to watch. The next day there was a meeting on Air Force One:

As the president's plane sat on the tarmac at New Orleans airport, a confrontation occurred that was described by one participant as "as blunt as you can get without the Secret Service getting involved." Governor Blanco was there, along with various congressmen and senators and Mayor Nagin (who took advantage of the opportunity to take a shower aboard the plane). One by one, the lawmakers listed their grievances as Bush listened. Rep. Bobby Jindal, whose district encompasses New Orleans, told of a sheriff who had called FEMA for assistance. According to Jindal, the sheriff was told to e-mail his request, "and the guy was sitting in a district underwater and with no electricity," Jindal said, incredulously. "How does that make any sense?" Jindal later told NEWSWEEK that "almost everybody" around the conference table had a similar story about how the federal response "just wasn't working." With each tale, "the president just shook his head, as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing," says Jindal, a conservative Republican and Bush appointee who lost a close race to Blanco. Repeatedly, the president turned to his aides and said, "Fix it."

"The president just shook his head, as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing." That's been my response to just about everything the Bush Administration has done over the past five years.

Bush's Hurricane Speech

2005-09-15T20:33:00.000-07:00

Bush did one thing really well in tonight's speech: while acknowledging the problems in America's response to the hurricane, he evoked the courage and heroism of many of the people dealing with the tragedy. It was appropriate, and important, for the president to do that.

Having said that, I should acknowledge that I have never actually been to any of the places devastated by the hurricane. In the case of the 9/11 attacks, the shoe was on the other foot. Living in New Jersey, I was not personally affected by the attacks, but I know people who were. I was shocked when I realized through online discussions with Bush supporters that some of them didn't really want a president who would effectively address the terrorist threat. They wanted a president who would feel their pain. Thus they didn't really care whether Bush bombed al Qaeda or Iraq; the important thing was that America was inflicting damage rather than being the target of it.

This actually makes some sense when you consider that for most people in the red states, the 9/11 attacks were something rather distant events that filled their television screens with disturbing images. Although people in the red states would presumably agree in the abstract that the Unites States needs to address the threat of terrorism, it's pictures of heroic American soldiers toppline the statute of Saddam Hussein which address the problem that is most immediately bothering them: that they don't like images of America being attacked to dominate their TV news coverage.

Thinking about it, I expect that people directly affected by the hurricane weren't impressed by Bush's references to American heroism. They aren't concerned about the image of American incompetence created by the ineffectual response to the hurricane; they are concerned about food, housing, jobs, and the other necessities of life.

Bob Herbert's column in today's New York Times [link requries registration] points out that FEMA seized supplies being shipped to Methodist Hospital in New Orleans:

Everybody's suffering would have been eased if the emergency relief effort mounted by the hospital's owner, Universal Health Services in King of Prussia, Pa., had not been interfered with by FEMA. Company officials sent desperately needed water, food, diesel fuel to power the hospital's generators and helicopters to ferry in the supplies and evacuate the most vulnerable individuals.
Bruce Gilbert, Universal's general counsel, told me yesterday, "Those supplies were in fact taken from us by FEMA, and we were unable to get them to the hospital. We then determined that it would be better to send our supplies, food and water to Lafayette [130 miles from New Orleans] and have our helicopters fly them from Lafayette to the hospital."
Significant relief began to reach the hospital on Thursday, and by Friday evening everyone had been removed from the ruined premises. They had endured the agonies of the damned, and for all practical purposes had been abandoned by government at all levels.
When you consider that the Methodist Hospital experience was just one small part of the New Orleans catastrophe, you get a sense of the size of the societal failure that we allowed to happen.
Welcome to the United States in 2005.

Bush's speech includes some excellent writing, but some of the patients at Methodist Hospital died. Bush's speech won't bring them back to life.

Time for Leadership

2005-09-01T23:51:00.000-07:00

I haven't been blogging for a while because thinking about the current state of American politics every day starts to get depressing. I do try to be an informed citizen, but to read the news and then sit down and write about it, rather than moving onto something more positive, gets wearing after a while.

As we entered the 21st century, the big question for me was how the Unites States should build on its successes and good fortune. A tough question to answer, but it was inspiring to try. Now the big question is how to survive another three years of Bush mismanagement and incompetence.

Tonight I caught a portion of the News Hour, with the head of FEMA talking in an upbeat fashion about how they were providing food to the people in the Superdome and bussing them out. Later I watched the footage from the convention center on MSNBC. The reporter practically begged the government to send in busses for these people. Three days and no one waiting at the convention center has been evactuated.

I try to be cautious in my writing, argue from facts, and not underestimate the complexity of the real world. But I have a hard time accepting that we are doing the best we can do. There are going to be mistakes and confusion in the wake of a catastrophe like this one. But we should be getting beyond that. Round up food, commandeer busses, do whatever it takes to get the people waiting at the convention center fed and evacuated.

"Once upon a time..."

2005-08-04T08:11:00.000-07:00

Juan Cole takes a step back from day to day events and writes a brief history of our involvement with radical Islam.

Bush for torture

2005-08-03T19:08:00.000-07:00

A letter to the New York Times:

Let me get this straight. Leading Republican conservatives have attached amendments banning interrogation using torture to the Pentagon's appropriations measure for the coming year. And President Bush has threatened to veto this defense bill unless these anti-torture provisions are removed?
What does it say about the present administration that it is so insistent on its right to abuse prisoners that it is willing to refuse to finance the entire national defense establishment if it doesn't get its way on that issue? Nothing good, as far as I can see.
Eric B. Lipps
Staten Island, Aug. 1, 2005

Payola and the seven magic words

2005-07-31T13:09:00.000-07:00

Daniel Gross writes an entire article about record companies paying radio stations to play songs without once using the phrase "deceptive advertising." He does explain that, "government decided that radio stations should be as independent as possible from their suppliers (the music industry). The public should be able to count on radio stations to exercise independent critical judgment." But he fails to acknowledge that passing off paid promotional material as programming content is deceptive.

Does this sort of deception really matter? I'm not sure, but I'm struck by the willingness of radio stations and the music industry to break the law. It's perfectly legal for radio stations to accept payment for playing a song. Before playing the song, all that the DJ has to say is the seven magic words (or something equivalent): "The following is a paid commercial announcement." What's illegal is deception.

If the radio and music industries are willing to risk criminal convictions, they must believe that they are reaping significant benefits from this deception. Before declaring the practice harmless, Daniel Gross should figure out what those benefits are.

Appeasing al Qaeda

2005-07-30T22:50:00.000-07:00

An otherwise sensible letter to the New York Times illustrates the effectiveness of the Bush propaganda machine.

The announcement by the Irish Republican Army that it will renounce violence represents a long-overdue realization that terrorism is an ineffective method of producing political change.
Long years of terrorism against Israel have not eliminated Israel. The bombings of American airplanes, embassies and even the destruction of the World Trade Center towers failed to alter American foreign policy. Chechnya was not made independent by the murder of children in Moscow.
To produce political change, you must do so by political means, and it is time that the rest of the world's terrorists realize this.
Fred Levit
Wilmette, Ill., July 29, 2005

The writer's basic thesis is correct; terrorism is generally ineffective in achieving the goals of the terrorists. But I believe that he is wrong about the 9/11 attacks. These achieved two goals of al Qaeda: the overthrow of Iraq's secular government and the removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia.

The first of these achievements is arguable. For propaganda reasons, bin Laden has to portray the overthrow of Saddam as part of a war on Islam. And we don't know what the replacement government will ultimately look like. It seems likely that the new government will be less secular than Saddam's government, but will deviate too much from Sharia to satisfy bin Laden and company. It may be that the only thing bin Laden really likes about the invasion of Iraq is the propaganda boost it provides al Qaeda.

But if we discount the invasion of Iraq as a terrorist succcess, that leaves the withdrawal of American troops from Saudi Arabia. We had troops stationed there since the first Gulf war, and had no thought of removing them. Is there any way other than the 9/11 attacks that bin Laden could have gotten those troops out of Saudi Arabia? I don't think that writing a polite letter to the U.S. State Department would have done the trick.

Under normal circumstances, the 9/11 attacks wouldn't have done the trick either. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, nobody I knew was saying that we should give bin Laden what he wanted and withdraw our troops from Saudi Arabia. A typical American president wouldn't have considered the possibility. And few politicians would have succeeded in withdrawing our troops, at least not without paying a huge political price. Bush is perhaps the only president in American history who, facing the 9/11 attacks, would have had both the desire to grant bin Laden some sort of victory and the political ability to carry it off.

The letter writer's thesis is basicly correct, and would have applied to the 9/11 attacks under normal circumstances. What the writer fails to recognize is that Bush being president is not a normal circumstance.

Open letter to Congress re: Valerie Plame

2005-07-20T21:39:00.000-07:00

From Josh Marshall, we have the text of an open letter to Congress from eleven former intelligence officers. It includes some harsh words for the leadership of the Republican party:

The Republican National Committee has circulated talking points to supporters to use as part of a coordinated strategy to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife. As part of this campaign a common theme is the idea that Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame was not undercover and deserved no protection....
These comments reveal an astonishing ignorance of the intelligence community and the role of cover. The fact is that there are thousands of U.S. intelligence officers who "work at a desk" in the Washington, D.C. are every day who are undercover. Some have official cover, and some have non-official cover. Both classes of cover must and should be protected.
While we are pleased that the U.S. Department of Justice is conducting an investigation and that the U.S. Attorney General has recused himself, we believe that the partisan attacks against Valerie Plame are sending a deeply discouraging message to the men and women who have agreed to work undercover for their nation's security.

The writers also point out that as a current CIA employee, Plame is not in a position to defend herself. (According to the New York Times, Plame "drafted an op-ed article to correct what she felt were distortions of her and her husband's actions, but the C.I.A. would not authorize its publication.")

This is a case where moral values and national security concerns coincide. The Republican party is supposed to be strong in each of these areas. Under President Bush, it's not.

Framing the Debate

2005-07-16T17:04:00.000-07:00

The New York Times magazine has an article by Matt Bai about Lakoff and framing. Since the article is currently not available on line, I'll just address the concluding paragraphs:

Consider, too, George Lakoff's own answer to the Republican mantra. He sums up the Republican message as "strong defense, free markets, lower taxes, smaller government, and family values," and in Don't Think of an Elephant! he proposessome Democratic alternatives: "Stronger America, broad prosperity, better future, effective government, and mutual responsibility." Look at the differences between the two. The Republicans version is an argument, a series of philosophical assertions that require voters to make concrete choices about the direction of the country. Should we spend more or less on the military? Should government regulate industry or leave it unfettered? Lakoff's formulation, on the other hand, amounts ot a vague collection of the least objectionable ideas in American life. Who out there wants to make the case against prosperity and a better future? Who doesn't want an effective government?
What all these middling generalities suggest, perhaps, is that Democrates are still unwilling to put their more concrete convictions about the country into words, either because they don't know what those convictions are or because they lack confidence in the notion that voters can be persuaded to embrace them. Either way, this is where the power of language meets its outer limit. The right words can frame an argument, but they will never stand in its place.

OK, let's take the first "concrete choice" Bai mentions: Should we spend more or less on the military? In the 2000 election, Bush proposed military spending of $50 billion over baseline, whereas Gore proposed $100 billion over baseline. So voters were presented with a concrete choice. Want higher military spending? Vote for Gore. Want lower military spending? Vote for Bush.

Only one problem: Bush was lying. That's not just my conclusion. Supporters of higher military spending who voted for Bush did not merely suspect that Bush was lying--they were counting on it.

Matt Bai doesn't discuss how lying fits into the Republican communication strategy. As I see it, it's a way to avoid having to make arguments for their positions. The primary argument against higher defense spending is that the money has to come from somewhere. By rather transparently lying about how much he was planning to spend on defense, Bush was able to satisfy the proponents of higher defense spending while avoiding a real debate about the impact this would have on the federal budget.

When Bai looks at the Democratic alternatives, he asks, "Who out there wants to make the case against prosperity and a better future?" Well, put like that, no one does--just as no one would make the case for a weaker national defense.

In 2002, Bush explained that his tax cut was structured to reduce its economic benefits:

We got the tax cut passed. But because of the rules of the Senate -- and this one's a hard one to explain; it's a hard one to explain in South Dakota and it's a hard one to explain in Crawford, Texas -- but because of the rules of the Senate, that tax relief plan we passed goes away in ten years, nine years from now. And that creates uncertainty in the economy. It's hard to plan when the tax code shifts around. It's hard to -- it's hard to envision a future that's stable. And people need a stable environment in order to create jobs. For the sake of economic vitality, for the sake of job creation I need people in the Senate who will make the tax cuts permanent, a permanent part of our tax code.

Bush finds it "hard to explain" why he supported a tax package that "creates uncertainty in the economy," thereby discouraging job creation and economic vitality. That's understandable, and explains why Bush doesn't argue against prosperity and a better future. That doesn't mean that there is nothing to debate; it means that the debate won't take place if Bush can avoid it.

"We don't do dissent here"

2005-07-15T18:56:00.000-07:00

Via Daniel Drezner, we have this quote from the Weekly Standard:

At home, the strength of the dollar will inevitably cut into exports and encourage imports; protectionist sentiment is rising, spurred on by China's attempt to acquire Unocal; it is unclear whether the president can or cares to restrain spending; and his economic team remains closed to outside ideas. "We don't do dissent here," one White House aide told me a few weeks ago.

Wilson's statement

2005-07-14T22:42:00.000-07:00

Here is Wilson's statement made at a press conference set up by Senator Schumer:

Thank you, Sentor Schumer.
Let me just say up front how much I appreciate the leadership that the senator has shown in this matter from the very beginning, his willingness to address it straightforwardly, and as a matter of principle, not as a matter of partisanship.
It's of great sadness to me that we're here discussing this today. Those of you who know me know that I've reentered the public sector several years ago to discuss why, and how, we might go to war or resolve our policy issues with Iraq. This has been an enormous distraction from that principled debate--a debate on war and peace--but it is what it is.
The fact that somebody decided that they would go ahead and leak classified information for the purposes of achieving a political end is simply unacceptable. It's unacceptable for Democrats; it's unacceptable for Republicans; it's unacceptable for Americans, and for the national security of this country.
I am committed to seeing that justice is done. I do believe, as the Senator does as well, that justice will be done, and that Pat Fitzgerald will get to the bottom of this one way or another.
But irrespective of whether it is ultimately decided that a crime has been committed--and that is not my decision; I'm not a lawyer--I was going to make a lawyer joke, but I don't think I will--but irrespective of whether a law has been violated, it's very clear to me that the ethical standard to which we should hold our senior public servants has been violated. And it is for that reason that I have called for, not Karl Rove's resignation, but for the President to honor his word that he would fire anybody who was involved in the leak.
I'm here to support Senator Schumer today, and his colleagues, in calling for the lifting of his security clearance as a first step, and as a way of dealing with the specific violation of national security.
I'm also here, and I've said this repeatedly, that the smear campaign lauched from the west wing of the white house, is just ethically unsupportable.
Thank you. And thank you, Senator Schumer.

Afghan Opium production

2005-07-13T12:37:00.000-07:00

Let a Thousand Licensed Poppies Bloom is the title of an Op-Ed in today's New York Times. It addresses two problems:

Opium production in Afghanistan has increased seven-fold since 2002, and accounts for 60% of Afghaninstan's GDP. The writer thinks that eradication programs are unlikely to reverse this. For example, "Cocaine continues to be widely available, despite the roughly $3 billion that the United States has spent on coca eradication in Colombia over the last five years."
There is a lack of availability of medication to treat severe pain. There is some undermedication in the United States, but the major problem is in the third world. The prices of patented prescription opiates such as OxyContin are prohibitive for many patients.

The proposed solution is to use Afghan opium to manufacture morphine and codeine. The writer thinks that this would turn a profit, but even if subsidies were needed to make this viable, it would be a bargain. Afghan farmers are producing $600 million of opium per year, and the United States is planning to spend $780 millon on eradication this year.

The article doesn't go into great detail on the ramifications of this proposal for Afghanistan. Attempting to eliminate 60% of Afghanistan's economy, which is our current policy, cannot be good for Afghanistan's future. The proposal will weaken the warlords, who currently capture much of the profit from illegal drug sales. On the other hand, "Warlords would not relinquish profits without a fight, and their attempts to undermine the proposal could be formidable." It is also not clear how easy it would be to ensure that all opium produced in Afghanistan would go to legal uses rather than being diverted for the production of heroin, but of course currently all opium being produced in Afghanistan is being used to produce heroin.

The article is based on a feasibility study currently being conducted by the Senlis Council.

Rumsfeld

2005-07-12T20:44:00.000-07:00

Via Brad DeLong, we get Praktike's summary of this anecdote from Squandered Victory:

One story that really got me was the tale of former ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine suggesting to Rumsfeld in March of 2003 that it would behoove the Bush administration to develop a plan to pay Iraqi civil servants. Rumsfeld replied that American taxpayers would never go for it and that he was not concerned if they were paid for several weeks or even months; if they rioted in the streets in protest, he said, the US could use such an eventuality as leverage to get the Europeans to pick up the tab.
Stunning, no?

I really don't understand why half the country thinks that Bush & Co. are capable of looking after America's national security.

The Energy Bill

2005-07-12T12:08:00.000-07:00

From today's New York Times, page C7, column 1:

But this time around, [as opposed to in the wake of the 1973 oil embargo and subsequent price increases,] the government has done almost nothing to reduce the nation's vulnerability to a sudden interruption in oil supplies. Even the advocates for the long-stalled energy bill that has finally passed both houses of Congress - though in radically different forms - acknowledge that neither version of the measure will be effective.

Remember this when the energy bill is finally signed into law and Bush claims credit for doing something about our dependence on foreign oil.

Mere Stupidity, We Hope

2005-07-08T22:35:00.000-07:00

"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity." I don't know who originated this maxim, but is seems like a good one to follow. Otherwise, you end up attacking people's motives rather than their reasoning. I must confess, however, that I sometimes find it rather hard to stick to this maxim when I encounter folks from the political right.

Take a post on evolution by Leon H. at redstate.org.

If atheistic evolution is true, and there is no God, then a number of logical conclusions are also immediately assumed to be true:
It is first immediately recognized that physical matter is all that exists. As such, humans are neither unique or special in the cosmos, as they are merely matter arranged in a specific way. The implications of this are staggering, from both a philosophical and political point of view. This means:
Humans are no more special or worthy of protection than any other species of animal, since we are are merely matter arranged in a different structure, and our existence here is just a matter of random chance.
Humans are no more special or worthy of protection than any species of plant, for the same reasons listed above.
Humans are no more special or worthy of protection than inanimate objects such as rocks, since the only principle difference between us are the proportionate amounts of Carbon, Hydrogen, and various other elements.

If structure doesn't matter, then Leon should be happy to exchange a collection of diamonds for an equal quantity of graphite. After all, both are composed of carbon. The only difference is the structure, and Leon doesn't think that structure matters.

In fairness, Leon does leave himself an out: his assertion that structure doesn't matter is predicated on the non-existence of God. But is he really saying that the only reason he wouldn't exchange diamonds for graphite is that God tells him not to? Does he really think that an atheist would make the exchange?

Continuing directly:

Think that goes too far? Observe the logical conclusion reached by noted humanist Linus Pauling (2001):
Dr. Albert Schweitzer believes that not only man but also other forms of life should be included in the field of our concern. He has expressed this belief in his principle of Reverence for Life. I would like to go further: I advocate the principle of Reverence for the World.
This is a wonderful world in which we live. Yet some of its wonders are being annihilated, destroyed, so that our children's children will never be able to experience them. I do not like to think of the beautiful minerals, beautiful crystals, that are being removed from the ground and destroyed in order to make more copper wire or uranium rods... There will never be a second crop of minerals.
Instead of the principle of maximizing human happiness, I prefer the principle of minimizing the suffering of the world (all emphasis mine).
Before dismissing Pauling as a fringe atheistic evolutionist, stop and consider whether or not his conclusion is valid, when man is reduced merely to his material self.

Since Leon doesn't provide a citation for the quote, let me note that it is from an article which is available on the web and which was first published in 1961 (not 2001).

The quote doesn't support Leon's position. First, Pauling may have been an atheist, but Schweitzer was not, and there is not a big gap between Pauling's views and Schweitzer's "Reverence for Life." Pauling extends the principle to the inanimate, but so did Schweitzer. According to one web page, "Schweitzer said the ethical person is reluctant to shatter ice crystals gleaming in the sun." So Pauling's atheism is a red herring.

Second, Pauling doesn't claim that there is no difference between the value of a human being and the value of a plant or inanimate object. Being reluctant to shatter ice crystals or to mine minerals doesn't mean that these actions are ethically equivalent to murder. In fact, Pauling justifies his concern about preserving mineral crystals by referring to our "children's children." This approach makes future generations of humans more fundamental than mineral crystals. In short, Pauling would have rejected the proposition that Leon claims is supports.

Continuing directly:

Further, if atheistic evolution is true, we are doing a great disservice to ourselves by keeping the weakest members of our society alive and affording them legal protection. From Darwin himself, in The Descent of Man:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive comonly exhibit a vitorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process off elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skills to save the life of everyone to the last moment. THere is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
If Darwin's logic sounds familiar, it should. I'd tell you where you've probably heard it more recently, but I don't want to get Godwin's law invoked on me.

The quote is from chapter 5 of The Descent of Man.

Leon doesn't mention Hitler by name, but he is clearly suggesting a that Darwin would have supported Hitler's program. He doesn't mention that Darwin rejected forcible eugenics in his next paragraph:

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind...

There has been over a century of scientific progress since this was written. Leon claims that keeping the weakest members of our society alive does a "great disservice." I don't know whether that is true, and Darwin's writings don't shed any light on the issued because they don't reflect the current state of scientific research.

Leon then makes a point which is valid as far as it goes:

Further, if atheistic evolution is true, then there will be no accounting after this life is over for how one's life has been lived. In other words, Stalin, Hugh Hefner, and Mother Theresa all receive the same recompense - absolutely nothing. What is the value of choosing one path over the other, except to satisfy one's own personal desire?

What is missing from this is the recognition that people don't always make decisions based on the hope of a reward in this life or the next. Sometimes people do something simply because they believe that it is the right thing to do.

These are a few of the starting points when discussing where throwing God out of the equation leaves man in the philosophical and political sense. I could go on by noting that if atheistic evolution is true, Marx was correct and Locke was wrong, there is no justification for condemning the Nazis, and so on and so on - but I hope that the point has been driven home adequately that one's metaphysical view does have real life political, philosophical and actual consequences.

This is getting long, so I won't bother to analyze this paragraph.

It is no surprise, therefore, that when a passive-aggressive troll such as our good friend DS comes to RedState in an attempt (as he frankly admitted at dKos) to proselytize us all, he does so under the guise that he is "only talking science" and simply seeking to deal with the superstition of the religious, when in fact he is attacking the very pillar of the government of our country, much less our party.

If DS is really "only talking science," then he isn't talking about atheistict evolution; he's just talking about evolution, which is compatible with many strains of Christianity. Leon's objections to atheistic evolution are mainly objections to atheism.

Leon doesn't say what he means by "the very pillar of the government of our country," but I think the gist of his meaning is clear. He is saying that atheism is undermining our nation. This has a McCarthyesque ring to it. Leon may have a legitimate beef with DS, but his attack is sweeping enough to hit all atheists.

Let's now have an honest discussion of where atheistic evolution leads us, shall we?

For this to be an honest discussion, one must believe that Leon is guilty of honest stupidity rather than malicious propaganda. But there is an intermediate possibility. Perhaps he is guilty of something closer to intellectual lazyness. Maybe he's smart enough that he could see the flaws in his arguments if he worked on it, but he finds them congenial enough that he doesn't try.

Protection for Confidential Sources

2005-07-07T00:56:00.000-07:00

In a comment over on TPMCafe, an individual going by the name of "hyperbolic pants" explains why the journalists whose testimony is being sought in the Valery Plame investigation are on particularly weak ground when they shield their sources:

Plame source wasn't communicating to a reporter about a crime. The Plame source was committing a crime by communicating to a reporter. That is an essential, significant difference. The act of communication itself was a crime.
Shielding the source in this case is damaging in two ways:
1. It is akin to having a murderer ask you to hold the victim's arms to keep them from flailing in self-defense. You may not be the murderer, but you are aiding and abetting. Think about it: who is the victim of this crime? The United States. By acting as passive participant in this crime (which is the act of communication itself), you make it impossible for the United States to defend itself from this crime, because...
2. You make it, ultimately, an unprosecutable crime. It would mean that the crime of this particular kind of communication would be absolutely and utterly unprosecutable if the other person involved happened to be a reporter. That's unacceptable.
The fact of the matter is, not even those accorded the greatest legal privacy protections -- clergy, attorneys, and mental health professionals -- are granted the right to be party to their clients' crimes. By committing a crime which takes the form of a piece of communication to a reporter, the source made the reporter a party to a crime, not just a person who happens to know about a crime.

Of course, as Joe Wilson points out, none of this debate would be necessary if it weren't for the irresponsible behavior of the White House.

Exit Strategy for Iraq

2005-07-05T22:14:00.000-07:00

The New York Times published another letter on Iraq:

To the Editor:
President Bush says our exit strategy is victory. You can have victory in a war only when your enemy surrenders. Anything less is not victory, and in Iraq there is no one in charge of the enemy to surrender.
That said, we must define an exit strategy, a series of well-defined goals that when achieved can be the beginning of our departure.
Some reasonable goals might be electricity for 90 percent of the country 100 percent of the time; clean drinking water for 90 percent of the country 100 percent of the time; 90 days with no United States casualties; 90 days with no car bombs.
If these four items can be achieved, we may not have achieved victory, but we would have achieved a measure of success.
Jim Garfield
Baiting Hollow, N.Y., June 30, 2005

The first paragraph says it well: We won't achieve victory in Iraq. Instead, we will eventually declare victory and leave. The debate should be about the timing of our departure and what can be done before we leave to improve the situation in Iraq.

I would say that the last two suggested goals are not particularly good ones. If the insurgents were unable to mount an attack for 90 days, that is one thing. But if they simply refrain from doing so, perhaps just to get us to leave, that really doesn't signify anything.

Xenophobia in Iraq

2005-07-02T19:00:00.000-07:00

John Tierny writes about xenophobia and Iraq:

[Xenophobia is] an impulse that's far more ancient and widespread than the yearning for democracy that President Bush talked about this week. Yet it's been curiously underestimated by conservatives who used to pay close attention to just this sort of instinct.
When liberal intellectuals dreamed of a socialist world with a selfless "New Man," conservatives realized that he'd be as greedy as ever. When some feminists envisioned the end of gender stereotypes, conservatives insisted there were ingrained differences between the sexes. Yet when American troops met resistance after the war, conservatives dismissed the early insurgents as "dead-enders" and expected Iraqis to join Americans in quickly vanquishing the thugs.
In those early days, when the memory of Saddam was still fresh, you could walk down a street in Baghdad and be greeted by an Iraqi stranger thanking you for bringing freedom. But even back then there were plenty of Iraqis like Saleh Youssef Sayel, who proudly told me of the reaction of his 5-year-old son, Mustafa, to an American soldier.
"The soldier tried to shake his hand, but my son refused," he said. "He knew enough English to say, 'No. You go.' Later he told me he wanted a gun to kill Americans. This is a natural feeling. Nobody wants a stranger in your house or your country."

Tierny mentions some of the psychological research on groups and prejudice, then and concludes:

Maybe, as President Bush hopes, Americans can stay long enough in the Middle East to jump-start democracy and reduce the long-term risk of terrorism. But in the meantime, they're bound to face resistance, no matter how noble their intentions.
During the Civil War, Union soldiers were amazed to see poor Southerners without any stake in the slavery system defending it in suicidal charges. But there was a simple explanation, as a barefoot, emaciated Confederate captive famously put it when a Union soldier asked him why he kept fighting: "Because you're here."

Incidentally, the term "dead-enders" appears to have been first applied to Iraq by Donald Rumsfeld. I suspect its use in conservative circles is largely a reflection of the willingness of significant numbers of conservatives to blindly follow the White House line.

The Gadflyer's Memo To The Hawks

2005-06-29T00:32:00.000-07:00

The Gadflyer has a response to hawk who are gearing up to blame the lack of public support for "losing" the war in Iraq:

You knew--or certainly should have known--that there are a lot of us and we'll never support a war unless it's clearly necessary. You just can't face that simple reality so you never plan for it....
Sure, you hawks can convince a lot of folks in the beginning of a war that it's an absolutely necessary fight, but as it drags on and people have a chance to think it through, they realize that that bad guy wasn't so bad, at least not for us--and certainly not as bad as the neighbors' kid coming back all mangled. And, after all, wasn't that bad guy 6,000 miles away?
When those conversations hit Main Street, we become the majority. And then you bitch and moan about it like you never saw it coming....
What's more, we are just as firm in our sense of moral superiority as you and your 'honor thy country' crowd are in yours. You don't understand how we can fail to support our president and our troops, and we can't understand how you can betray those troops by blindly supporting a president who sends them into harm's way for anything less than the most noble purpose.
I guess it's an irreconcilable difference. But it would be nice if you planned to lose the country's support beforehand instead of whining about it afterwards. If you factored it into your calculus and chose a course other than war, we'd be happy and the world would be a little less bloody.

The President's Speech

2005-06-28T19:57:00.000-07:00

There is nothing major new in the President's speech, so I'll just comment on one section:

I recognize that Americans want our troops to come home as quickly as possible. So do I. Some contend that we should set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. forces. Let me explain why that would be a serious mistake. Setting an artificial timetable would send the wrong message to the Iraqis - who need to know that America will not leave before the job is done. It would send the wrong message to our troops - who need to know that we are serious about completing the mission they are risking their lives to achieve. And it would send the wrong message to the enemy - who would know that all they have to do is to wait us out. We will stay in Iraq as long as we are needed - and not a day longer.

Since Bush wants our troops to remain in Iraq until the mission is completed, let's back up in the speech to find out what our current mission is:

Our mission in Iraq is clear. We are hunting down the terrorists. We are helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally in the war on terror. We are advancing freedom in the broader Middle East. We are removing a source of violence and instability - and laying the foundation of peace for our children and our grandchildren.

This makes in supremely unclear how we will determine when to leave Iraq. At the risk of beating an obvious point to death, I'll take this one goal at a time.

"hunting down the terrorists:" This part of the mission will be completed when we get tired of hunting down terrorists in Iraq. That's hardly a bright line telling us when it's time to withdraw.
"helping Iraqis build a free nation:" Again, this is a pretty open ended commitment. They have an elected government now, so if we haven't completed this mission yet, it's hard to say what event would constitute the completion of the mission.
"...that is an ally in the war on terror:" That's a rather presumptuous goal unless we are trying to create a puppet government.
"advancing freedom in the broader Middle East:" So the timing of our withdrawal depends on events in the greater Middle East, not just in Iraq?
"removing a source of violence and instability:" Bush doesn't bother to identify this "source," so we have to guess what he means. My guess is that he is referring to Saddam Hussein, in which case this part of the mission is already accomplished.
"laying the foundation of peace for our children and our grandchildren:" And how in the world are we supposed to know whether we have achieved this, or even whether we are getting closer to achieving it?

Bottom line: with this mission, it's basicly meaningless to say that we will stay until the mission is completed.

With that in mind, Bush's claimed reasons for refusing to give a timetable for withdrawal look unconvincing. I think it is important to make clear to the Iraqi people that we are not going to stay indefinitely. I think our soldiers are prepared to withdraw from Iraq when our government determines that it is in our national interest to do so. And I think that the insurgents are planning to wait us out in any case. The insurgents won't be defeated by us; they will be defeated, if at all, by there fellow Iraqis.

Bush's speech continued:

Some Americans ask me, if completing the mission is so important, why don't you send more troops? If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job. Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever - when we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave. As we determine the right force level, our troops can know that I will continue to be guided by the advice that matters - the sober judgment of our military leaders.

This illustrates the disconnect from reality of this Administration. If Bush read the newspapers, he would understand the problem: when we go into a city and defeat the insurgents, we don't have enough troops to continue to secure the city. We leave, and the insurgents come back. If commanders aren't requesting more troops, it's because they know that such requests would not be welcomed by the White House. Bush's assertion that he would send more troops is an empty promise--we don't have more troops to send.

Bush's speech has done nothing to reassure me that he has a reasonable plan to achieve a decent result in Iraq and get our troops out.

Next Debate Question - Will We All Ever Agree That Iraq Was Right or Wrong?

2005-06-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

The next question is posted:

If Iraq becomes a real and stable democracy, will we all be able to agree it was worth it? If Iraq descends into anarchy or a terrorist-supporting theocracy, will we all be able to agree we made a mistake?

I think it is going to be hard to get an agreement that Iraq was worth it even if all goes well, because of the opportunity costs. One of these is the war against al Qaeda et al. According to Seymour Hersh,

By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war. The undeclared decision had a devastating impact on the continuing struggle against terrorism. The Bush Administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and special operatives were abruptly reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terrorism intelligence programs were curtailed.

If al Qaeda fades away, this will be a minor footnote in the history books. If not, people in the future will be amazed that even after 9/11, fighting al Qaeda wasn't the top foreign policy goal of the United States.

A second opportunity cost is that we haven't stopped the genocide in Darfur. When told about Clinton's inaction on the Rwandan genocide, Bush is reported to have declared, "Not on my watch." But as a result of Iraq, we have neither the troops to intervene nor the international standing to shame other contries into addressing the issue. Because of Darfur, I don't think that Iraq can be justified on humantiarian grounds, no matter how much it improves the lot of people living in Iraq.

Yellow Line Debate Series on Terrorism and Iraq

2005-06-27T23:59:00.000-07:00

The Yellow Line blog is having a debate on a series of questions about Iraq and Terrorism. It's a nice idea.

Question 9 (which includes links to the earlier questions) is:

What do you feel should be the next steps in the War on Terror?
What steps do you think the Bush administration will take?

I don't have a real clear idea of what the "War on Terror" is. I would therefore replace this question with questions about the following:

The war against al Qaeda and affiliates. These are the people who attacked us on 9/11.
The war in Iraq. I opposed this, in large part because I believed that al Qaeda and affiliates were a bigger threat than Iraq, but we are there now and must figure out how to deal with the situation.
Nuclear proliferation. I include this because if al Qaeda or one of its affiliates obtains nuclear weapons, we will be facing an existential threat.

None of these three problems are easy to address, and I won't try to do so in this short note. But I think they are important problems worthy of discussion.

Washington Monthly Appeal for Cooper

2005-06-27T20:01:00.000-07:00

Charles Peters, founding editor of The Washington Monthly makes an appeal on behalf of Matt Cooper. I was going to write something critical about it, but 150 commenters on the site have beat me to it. Although Peters doesn't mention it, Cooper is a Washington Monthly contributing editor in addition to being an employee of Time, so I can see why Peters might feel an obligation to him. But the comments make clear that his appeal is ineffective.

Patrick Fitzgerald hasn't been leaking information to reporters. This creates an information vacuum which allows critics to assume the worst about him, but it also suggests to me that Fitzgerald is a man of integrity. My guess is that he hasn't issued those subpoenas lightly.

Insensitive

2005-06-26T14:06:00.000-07:00

Thirteen C.I.A. agents have been indicted in Italy, and another six are under investigation. It's a safe bet that the usefulness of the 13 who have been indicted, and probably the usefulness of all 19, has come to an end. The 13 will become fugitives from justice, probably hiding out in the United States with the help of the C.I.A.

This is the same Administration that outed Valerie Plame as a C.I.A. agent. It's the same Administration that destroyed our ability to monitor the communications of Syria's embassy in Baghdad.

The New York Times says:

"We do feel quite betrayed that this operation was carried out in our city," a senior Italian investigator said. "We supplied them information about Abu Omar, and then they used that information against us, undermining an entire operation against his terrorist network."

Abu Omar may be in an Egyptian jail, but what about the rest of his network?

According to Cheney, "America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes, but not a one of them was won by being sensitive." And it appears that when Cheney said he didn't see a need to be sensitive to our allies, he meant it. The Italians may continue to share intelligence with us, but the message to the world is clear: the Bush Administration is not a good partner.

Rove Is Right - We Seek Understanding, Like Sun Tzu

2005-06-25T13:44:00.000-07:00

Rather than echoing liberal outrage at Karl Rove's recent remarks, Paul Rosenberg takes on Rove's underlying claim that conservatives are better equipped than liberal to fight terrorism. Unlike Rove, Rosenberg supports his position with quotes from Sun Tzu's The Art of War. Excellent.

It's Never the Republican's Fault

2005-06-25T13:02:00.000-07:00

Karl Rove's recent coments include the following:

Let me put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts to the region the words of Senator Durbin, certainly putting America's men and women in uniform in greater danger.

And indeed, there is an Al Jazeera article which begins as follows:

A US senator has refused to apologise for comparing the actions of US soldiers at Guantanamo Bay to those of Nazis, while others have decried or defended the mandate and method used to hold prisoners there.
US Senator Dick Durbin on Wednesday refused to apologise for comments he made on the Senate floor referring to Nazis, Soviet gulags and a "mad regime" like Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Illinois Republican party chairman Andy McKenna had demanded he apologise.

As Karl Rove and anyone else who has paid attention to the story knows, the reason that al Jazeera is covering the story is because the right wing spin machine decided to make it into a story. Indeed, al Jazeera mentions Andy McKenna by name as one of the one of the people responsible for turning Durbin's remarks into a news story.

This is, you might think, a pretty bold move by Rove: Going to a fundraiser and accusing Republicans of putting our troops in great danger. But apparently Rove didn't see it that way, because the complete paragraph is:

Let me put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts to the region the words of Senator Durbin, certainly putting America's men and women in uniform in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.

Our national discourse has reached the point where Rove can accuse Republicans of endangering our troops, throw in a non-sequitur reference to liberals, and be confident that his audience will blame liberals for what the Republicans did.

In fact, it's worse than that. I've seen no evidence that the lives of our troops have been placed in danger. Certainly Rove doesn't present any. So it appears that Rove has made up the charge that Republicans are endangering our troops, purely so that he could redirect the blame at liberals. If that's not bizarre, I don't know what is.

UPDATE (Saturday, June 25, 2005): Apparently Rove was lying when he said that al Jazeera broadcast Durbin's words. Abu Aardvark says:

I just ran a FBIS search (Foreign Broadcast Information Service - which monitors and translates foreign broadcasts for the American government). "Durbin" in the year 2005 for reports coming from Doha (where al-Jazeera broadcasts) turns up zero hits. "Guantanamo" turns up 17 hits, none of which mention the remarks of the Senator from Illinois.

Before the Downing Street Memo, there was Plan of Attack

2005-06-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack made a big splash when it was released, but has largely faded from public discourse. The book is not available on line, so Bob Somerby provides a six part series that reminds us how the book described the Bush Administration fixing the intelligence and facts around the policy, to use the phrasing from the Downing Street Memo. The first four parts don't have their own web pages; to find them follow the links and search for "Downing". The last part has not been posted as I write this, but might be by the time you read this.

You can also read this old article in Slate, which lists some of the high points of the book, though its selection emphasizes cute over substantive.

My impression of Woodward's books is that his sources are all trying to promote the president or to describe their own successes. And Woodward, for his part, does try to be accurate and complete, and does a pretty good job of getting the real story, including a few things that his souces might rather not see published. He then writes it up using a nonjudgemental writing style that comes across as somewhat lauditory.

Take for example this passage from Bush at War (page 83):

[Rice's] fears were shared by others, which led to a different discussion: Should they think about launching military action elsewhere as an insurance policy in case things in Afghanistan went bad? The would need successes early in the war to maintain domestic and international support.

There's not a hint of outrage that the Bush Administration would consider launching military action for public relations purposes. There's nothing to highlight this scoop. That's why Woodward could include information like this in Bush at War and still get the White House to cooperate with his reseach for his next book, Plan of Attack.

Bush Isn't Rude, He's Just Clueless

2005-06-24T23:13:00.000-07:00

Bush and Jaafari's joint news conference ended with a question to Jaafari by an Iraqi reporter. The reporter made it really, really clear who the question was for:

Mr. Prime Minister, I am a presenter on radio in Iraq. My question is for you. For more than two years we've started a change in Iraq, but the process of building is very slow. There are secure cities in Iraq, Samarra and Kurdistan. When will you begin the reconstruction in Iraq? When do we begin to establish the first bases of reconstruction? And you know that if you started reconstruction in Iraq it will mean that young people will have something to do, and they will leave terrorist activities. So the question is for Mr. Prime Minister. There were discussions held with the President Bush, and the most important thing you discussed with him we want to know about it.

The questioner begins the question by addressing the Prime Minister. But, as though it occurred to him that there might be someone listening to him who is really, really slow, he repeats the point: "the question is for Mr. Prime Minister."

So what happens next? Bush jumps in and says:

Sometimes we don't tell you things, you know.
No, we discussed a lot of important things. We discussed democracy, we discussed having the constitution there, and we discussed security, we discussed reconstruction.
We are spending reconstruction money, but, you know, you need to ask that to the government. They're in charge. It's your government, not ours. This is the government that is -- that has got the ministries in place that spends the money. We're willing to help, and we have helped. And I want to thank the Congress and the American people for their generosity in helping Iraq rebuild. And we're spending money.
But, remember, your question kind of made it seem like -- that we're in charge. We're not. You had elections; 8.5 million people voted, and this good man is now in charge of the government. I don't want to be passing the buck, as we say, but we're more than willing to help reconstruction efforts, but this is a sovereign government --
PRIME MINISTER JAAFARI: Thank you, very much.
PRESIDENT BUSH: -- with an elected Prime Minister by the people of Iraq. And so we want to look forward to working with the government. Our role is to help. His role is to govern and lead. And we've got the money allocated. Obviously, it's important to get electricity to the Iraqi citizens and clean water to the Iraqi citizens. And, you know, I was pleased to see the other day when I was reading that there's a lot of air traffic in and out of the airport now, quite a lot of air traffic. In other words, there's commerce beginning to develop. We want to be helpful. But the responsibility rests with the people who the Iraqi people elected. And that's you, Mr. Prime Minister.

When Bush jumped in to answer the question, rather than letting the Prime Minister go first, I cringed at the sight of our President having such a huge ego that he couldn't wait for Jaafari to answer the question before making his own comments about it. But then we got to, "You need to ask that to the government." Uh, Mr. Bush, the questioner did ask the government.

Hopefully, Iraqi's will conclude that Bush didn't intentionally upstage their prime minister and that Bush's answer was not intended to be patronizing even though it sounded that way. But wouldn't it be nice if we had a president who could hold a joint press conference without leaving us hoping that foreigners will forgive his screwups?

Karl Rove vs. National Security

2005-06-24T13:30:00.000-07:00

Juan Cole does a nice riff on Karl Rove's recent remarks.

The problem our country faces is that Rove and company are so good at manipulating public opinion that there is little incentive for Bush to actually care about America's national security. This is not to say that public opinion hasn't done anything to push Bush in the right direction. For example:

"To the extent that we define our task broadly," Cheney said, "including those who support terrorism, then we get at the states. And it's easier to find them than to find bin Laden."
"Start with bin Laden," Bush said, "which Americans expect."

[Bush at War, by Bob Woodward, pg. 43]

Unfortunately, Bush didn't keep the pressure on bin Laden once a bit of time had passed:

I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority.

Bush received some criticism for this, but Rove has still managed to convince the public that Bush is strong on national security. In theory, when the public is basicly agreed on an issue (we all want national security), politicians in a democracy will give the country what it wants in order to get elected. With Bush and Karl Rove, our democracy no longer functions that way. And the problem won't disappear when Karl Rove leaves the political scene, because now that Rove has shown the way, there are plenty of people with the ability to copy his approach.

Honesty and the War in Iraq

2005-06-24T11:45:00.000-07:00

David Brooks has finally decided that honesty is a good thing:

On Tuesday, Senator Joe Biden gave a speech in Washington on Iraq, after his most recent visit. It was, in some ways, a model of what the president needs to tell the country in the weeks ahead. It was scathing about the lack of progress in many areas. But it was also constructive. "I believe we can still succeed in Iraq," he said. Biden talked about building the coalition at home that is necessary if we are to get through the 2006 election cycle without a rush to the exits. [The speech is available on the web.]
Biden's speech brought to mind something Franklin Roosevelt told the country on Feb. 23, 1942: "Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst, without flinching or losing heart. You must, in turn, have complete confidence that your government is keeping nothing from you except information that will help the enemy in his attempt to destroy us."
That's how democracies should fight, even in the age of polling.

Brooks is right, but he can't quite bring himself to say directly that Bush hasn't been honest, or to address the problem that Bush shows no inclination to change. Not surprisingly, Krugman doesn't share this inclination to pussyfoot around the problem:

...it's crucial that those responsible for the war be held to account.
Let me explain. The United States will soon have to start reducing force levels in Iraq, or risk seeing the volunteer Army collapse. Yet the administration and its supporters have effectively prevented any adult discussion of the need to get out.
On one side, the people who sold this war, unable to face up to the fact that their fantasies of a splendid little war have led to disaster, are still peddling illusions: the insurgency is in its "last throes," says Dick Cheney. On the other, they still have moderates and even liberals intimidated: anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls far short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic.
We need to deprive these people of their ability to mislead and intimidate. And the best way to do that is to make it clear that the people who led us to war on false pretenses have no credibility, and no right to lecture the rest of us about patriotism.

Alas, I fear Krugman is right. It may be that a reasonable resolution in Iraq is dependent on Democrats winning the political framing battle here at home. And based on past performance, I'd have to say that the odds are against that.

Brooks argues that it is too early to "pass judgement on the overall trajectory of the war" and that therefore we have to keep fighting. But the overall trajectory of the war is partially predictable.

Brooks acknowedges that one of the difficulties we face in Iraq is that, "There aren't enough U.S. troops to hold the ground they conquer." That's true, and not because the United States lacks the resources to hold that ground. The United States could hold that ground, and thereby render the insurgency vastly less effective, by deploying less than 1% of the American population to Iraq. We can't increase the number of troops on the ground immediately, but we could institute a draft right now and begin training people.

If we did that, the insurgents would realize that they were facing an America that was just as determined to win this fight as they were. That's not going to happen, because Americans, including President Bush, simply aren't all that determined to win.

Bush said that, "We will not set an artificial timetable for leaving Iraq, because that would embolden the terrorists and make them believe they can wait us out." But the insurgents have every reason to believe that they can wait us out, regardless of whether we publish a timetable.

So at one level the overall trajectory of the war seems pretty clear. We will eventually withdraw our troops, and the insurgents will claim that they have defeated the United States. We will also be able to claim victory because the goals we set at the start of the war (removing Saddam Hussein from power and seizing his WMD) are either accomplished or moot. What is up in the air is when this will occur, and what the situation in Iraq will be at that time.

Republican Talking Points Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink

2005-06-22T20:57:00.000-07:00

David Sirota writes about the dishonest GOP spin machine, and how it is helped by self-identified progressives/liberals/democrats such as Ari Melber.

Sirota's view is that people like Ari Melber are "only interested in promoting their name at the expense of others," and he may be right about Melber. But I think there is another factor at work here.

The strand of liberalism I identify most closely with is pragmatic and relatively nonideological. Consider the Brookings Institution, which is perhaps the premire liberal think tank in Washington. It was "was founded on the principles that research, expertise and administrative competence were needed for government efficiency." In contrast, its conservative counterpart, the Heritage Foundation, was founded "to formulate and promote conservative public policies." The liberal notion that we are all in this together and should be working together for the common good is reflected in the Brooking's mission. In contrast, the Heritage Foundation's purpose is to do battle against the liberals.

Matt Miller comes from the same strand of liberalism, to judge by his NY Times column titled "Is Persuasion Dead?" But let's see how that worked out in the first column he wrote for the NY Times. Miller says that Democrats shouldn't call Bush's proposed Social Security benefit cuts "cuts," because they aren't cuts if you measure them the way that the Republican talking point does. However, it is standard in financial planning to measure retirement income as a percentage of pre-retirement income, and by that measure, Bush's cuts are cuts.

I think it is pretty clear what happened. Miller doesn't appear to have any expertise in financial planning. So he heard the Republican talking point, thought about it, failed to spot the flaw in it, and accepted it as valid. I can't really blame Miller for this. Everybody makes mistakes, and I don't think it is reasonable to expect a columnist to become an expert on finance before commenting on Social Security. But when liberal columnists endorse misleading Republican talking points, we have a problem.

Whenever I think about the state of political discourse today, I find myself feeling pessimistic. The conservative approach to politics strikes me as fundamentally unpatriotic. In my view, Americans should care more about America than about the success of a political party. At the same time, I can't deny that it has been successful. As far as I can see, the left has no choice other than to copy some of the techiques used by the right. The Center for American Progress is a liberal think tank designed to counter conservative think tanks like Heritage. Air America Radio is breaking the conservative monopoly on political talk radio. The challenge is to avoid selling out our souls for political success.

Wither this blog?

2005-06-22T14:51:00.000-07:00

David Sirota has linked to one of my blog entries, which makes me an official, if marginal, member of the blogger community.

Can I hope for this blog to ever become non-marginal? I must admit that the prognosis doesn't look that good. A few problems:

I am not a fast writer. I think that the quality of my prose is decent, if unexceptional, but I have this unfortunate tendency to struggle over wording. A successful blog has to be updated regularly, which is a lot easier to do if you write quickly.
I'm not really a political junkie, which makes it hard to write about politics all the time. I could write about a variety of topics rather than just focussing on politics, but I don't think that that approach works for readers, who want to know what to expect when they visit a blog.
The market for political blogs is pretty saturated. The time to start a major blog of political commentary was a few years ago. Now, even if I somehow manage to equal the brilliance and insightfulness of the best of the existing blogs, there is little reason for people to switch to reading me rather than the blogs they are currently reading.

Of course, rather than trying for brilliance, I could go for stupidity. Donald Luskin seems to be pretty dumb, but Brad DeLong links to him all the time. I think that approach only works for people who have jobs writing commentary. Luskin isn't entirely stupid, because he's figured out how to get paid for writing stupid things.

Sirota and Melber on National Security

2005-06-21T21:21:00.000-07:00

David Sirota blasts Ari Melber for blasting Democrats in the New York Post. I don't know Ari Melber's motives for writing the piece, but it does read like something written by a partisan Republican, which would be fine except that Melber is a Democrat.

Melbar not only attacks Democrats; he misrepresents the polling data he uses:

Exactly 50 percent of Democrats do not believe dismantling al Qaeda should be a top foreign-policy goal. In fact, when recently asked to name the top two "most important foreign policy goals," more Democrats worried about outsourcing than about al Qaeda.

I found the poll Ari Melber is referring to on the web. The poll didn't ask people to name the top two most important policy goals; it asked them to rate the importance of a number of policy goals on a scale of one to ten. (Different people were asked about different policy goals.)

"Breaking up the al Qaeda terror network" was rated a 10 by 58% of all respondents, and by 50% of Democrats. That's not a huge difference. Nobody likes al Qaeda.

The related goal of "capturing Osama bin Laden" was given a rating of 10 by 45% of all individuals polled and 48% of Democrats.

The poll did not ask about outsourcing.

Now He Tells Us

2005-06-21T00:16:00.000-07:00

From The Daily Howler, we learn that last Sunday, NBC's David Gregory said:

Janice Rogers Brown...by most accounts on the right and the left did not have the judicial temperament, to be considered in this zone of fair-minded people to be on the courts. There are people in the White House who have told me, who worked on this, that she had a very difficult time getting along with other people in California, on the high court there.

People on the right including people in the White House are alleged to have problems with her judicial temperment. Too bad we weren't told this before the vote.

How I felt about invading Iraq

2005-06-19T22:10:00.000-07:00

A Comment by hilzoy over on TPMCafe captures what I thought about the Iraq war so well that I will quote the entire thing here. The post hilzoy is responding to said in part, "It is with chagrin that I admit that the 'radical left' was more correct than the CIA and the national security establishment with regards to whether Saddam was a threat. But...they were reflexively anti-war, and in this case, their automatic position turned out to be right."

Well: I'm about to pile on with everyone else, so let me just start by saying that I take you at your word that you want to figure out how to criticize people civilly, and hope that you'll take this as an attempt to explain what I think needs changing, not as an attack. I should also say that I am not the sort of person you seem to be thinking of when you talk about the 'radical left'. But:
Other people have pointed out that it's both odd and probably unproductive to say that only a few 'serious people' opposed the war in Iraq. I agree with them. But there's another odd rhetorical move in your comment: in your original post, you said that the radical left 'opposed Afghanistan', but in this coment, miraculously everyone who opposed the war, with the exception of a few 'serious people', was on the radical left. That is: you seem to have written those of us who opposed the war in Iraq but not the war in Afghanistan completely out of the picture.
If that reflects your asssumptions, then I can see how you'd feel frustrated at the thought that oddly enough, they were right and you were wrong. But that assumption is not true. I, for instance, supported Gulf I, Kosovo, and Afghanistan; and I would have supported trying to stop the genocide in Rwanda by force. I am 'antiwar' in the sense that, other things equal, war is never my preference, but not at all in the sense that I think wars can never be justified.
I think that the burden of proof is always on those who want to go to war, not just because wars kill people, but also because they have all sorts of unforeseen consequences, often bad. I think this burden of proof is especially heavy when there's no consensus that the war is justified, both because in that case one probably won't be able to get either a security council resolution favoring it or the sort of broad consensus in its favor that we had in Kosovo, and also because I think that when a lot of people don't get what you're doing, you should wonder whether they might be right.
In this case, I thought that burden was not met. For one thing, I thought we needed to stay focussed on al Qaeda, and I couldn't see how we could fight a war in Iraq without losing that focus. Second, I saw no evidence that Saddam had cooperated with al Qaeda. Moreover, this struck me as antecedently implausible: Saddam was a control freak, and al Qaeda was an uncontrollable organization. (I mean: I thought that terrorists would be likely to gravitate towards failed or very weak states like Afghanistan, not tightly controlled totalitarian dictatorships.)
Third, I thought that if we were going to do this at all, we needed to do it right. Screwing up a war is bad in general, but in Iraq it would be disastrous. (Civil war. Secession. The Turks trying to block a Kurdish state. On and on, and all of it bad.) But the Bush administration's approach to Afghanistan convinced me that they would not do it right, and might well do it disastrously.
Fourth, I believed Saddam had WMD (chem and/or bio, not nuclear), at least at first, but I did not believe he would sell them. (Control freak with enough oil revenue not to be desperate for the money.) And I certainly never theought he could deliver them to this country.
Fifth, I stopped believing that Iraq had nuclear weapons sometime around January. I thought that the administration had to be giving Hans Blix information, since it would strengthen their case immeasurably if he found evidence of WMD, but also since it was such a perfect way for them to check out their intelligence. When Blix came up empty, I thought: plainly our intelligence is not as good as the administration seems to think. We had to be telling him where to look, and he was finding nothing.
Finally, I also thought that this war would be disastrous for our image in the region, and that it would make people who would not otherwise join al Qaeda or groups like it do so.
So for all these reasons, I thought this war was a spectacularly bad idea. You may agree with my reasons and you may disagree with them, but I don't think they're self-evidently stupid. Nor do I think they show an insufficient concern for our security: I was watching us move towards war with a kind of horror, thinking: but what about al Qaeda? What about the people who actually attacked us?
So: that's me. While I was thinking these thoughts, there were all sorts of people going on about how opponents of the war just didn't get it, weren't sufficiently serious, and so forth. And it was the fact that they never seemed to so much as entertain the idea that there was any reason why someone might disagree with them other than some sort of non-seriousness or idiocy that was, if memory serves, particularly annoying.
And so now, reading a comment in which you seem to assume that the entire part of the spectrum that's filled by people who opposed only this war, but who did not oppose Afghanistan (or Gulf War I, or Kosovo...) -- well, it's the same thing. It's identifying lots of people who have perfectly reasonable views, and who are moreover quite serious about national security, with another group entirely.
And when you add in apparent bafflement that you could have been wrong while these peculiar people whom you assume to have been out on the fringe somewhere were right -- it just brings back so many old memories ;)
I think the way to criticize people you disagree with is: with respect. It would go a long way.

After 9/11, I wanted a president who would go after the terrorists, not persue his pet project of finishing what his father started in Iraq.

Lying us into War is Wrong

2005-06-17T21:57:00.000-07:00

Michael J.W. Stickings seems to think that lying us into war is OK. But his writing is slightly ambiguous, so I'll let him speak for himself:

As it turns out, based on a more careful reading of the documents in question, there really isn't much that's at all surprising. Bush was planning (even itching) to go to war even as he was talking diplomacy, even as he wasn't being straightforward with the American people. So what? Isn't that generally what "war" leaders do? It would have been foolhardly to publicize his intentions too early, and equally stupid not to start planning for war well ahead of the invasion.

Stickings talks about "planning" here. The issue isn't the creation of a plan for the war--the U.S. military has plans for invading all sorts of countries on file just in case they should be needed. The issue is that Bush decided to invade Iraq and then lied about this to Congress and the American people in order to get a Congressional Resolution authorizing the war.

Bush didn't have to lie about his intentions to launch the war in Afghanistan because in that case there was a clear case for war. In the case of Iraq, Bush didn't have a clear case, or at least nothing I would catagorize that way. So he tried to use people's patriotism against them by claiming that he was seeking to use the threat of military force to get Iraq to disarm. That puts someone like myself in the position where anything I say questioning the wisdom of going to war with Iraq has the potential to convince Saddam not to take the threat seriously. The result is that Bush and his supporters had the opportunity to go around the country advocating war without having being seriously challenged on the weaknesses of their arguments.

Yes, I'm mad. Patriotism is something that the president--any president--should encourage. It shouldn't be treated as a weakness to be exploited because that undermines the very idea of patriotism.

Proof Bush lied us into war

2005-06-05T19:42:00.000-07:00

The Downing Street memo has been heavily covered by others. I will lay out what I think is the clearest case against Bush. The report states:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

That was July 23, 2002. But in public, Bush continued to insist that no decision to go to war had been made. And on Oct. 7, Bush made the case for Congress to authorize military action:

Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable. The resolution will tell the United Nations, and all nations, that America speaks with one voice and is determined to make the demands of the civilized world mean something. Congress will also be sending a message to the dictator in Iraq: that his only chance -- his only choice is full compliance, and the time remaining for that choice is limited.

If Bush had said that he had already decided to go to war, the resolution might have failed. For example, Kerry would not have voted for it. Bush's lies played a key role.

Withholding the cost of the Medicare drug prescription program was bad enough. But if the Downing Street memo is correct--and Bush hasn't said it isn't--Bush lied to get Congress to go to war. If Bush lied about that, he will lie about anything.

UPDATE (Wednesday, June 8, 2005): Bush has denied that he had made the decision to go to war at the time the Downing Memo was written. "There's nothing farther from the truth."

I include this denial for completeness, but I honestly don't see a reason to give it any weight. You may recall that in the third presidential debate Bush denied saying that the wasn't very concerned about bin Laden, even though he made the statement in a nationally televised press conference. Bush's statements about his past are not reliable.

Amnesty International and Darfur

2005-06-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

The rather over-the-top suggestion in the forward to the Amnesty International report that Guantanimo Bay was the "gulag of our time" did succeed in at least one case: It got me to move the report to the top of my reading list.

I suppose it's worth noting that Bush's claim that the Amnesty International report is "absurd" is more than over the top. He's characterizing the entire report as absurd based on a single sentence. And even that one sentence is not exactly absurd. A letter to the Washington Post [registration required] sumarizes it well:

The May 26 editorial chastised Amnesty International for drawing parallels between the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and the Soviet gulags. It noted that the size and scale of the facilities do not compare, nor does the frequency of human rights abuse. Points taken. But as a former Foreign Service officer who monitored Soviet prison abuse from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and Vietnamese abuse of prisoners in its "gulag" from the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, I note that abuses that I reported on in those inhumane systems parallel abuses reported in Guantanamo, at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan and at the Abu Ghraib prison: prisoners suspended from the ceiling and beaten to death; widespread "waterboarding"; prisoners "disappeared" to preclude monitoring by the International Committee of the Red Cross -- and all with almost no senior-level accountability.
I am dismayed to find any such similarities with previous gulags.
EDMUND McWILLIAMS

News reports might give you the impression that the United States was the primary topic of the report, but the forward starts out talking about crisis in Darfur. In today's New York Times, Kristof talks about the systematic rape of women in Darfur.

Doctors Without Borders issued an excellent report in March noting that it alone treated almost 500 rapes in a four-and-a-half-month period. Sudan finally reacted to the report a few days ago - by arresting an Englishman and a Dutchman working for Doctors Without Borders.

Kristof ends his column as follows:

I'm still chilled by the matter-of-fact explanation I received as to why it is women who collect firewood, even though they're the ones who are raped. The reason is an indication of how utterly we are failing the people of Darfur, two years into the first genocide of the 21st century.
"It's simple," one woman here explained. "When the men go out, they're killed. The women are only raped."

Under Clinton, the Democrats came around to the proposition that genocide had to be stopped. If one wants to read a partisan political message into the Amnesty International report, as conservatives seem determined to do, it should be this: The biggest losers in the 2000 presidential election weren't the Democrats. The biggest losers were the people now being raped and murdered in Darfur.

America's DNA

2005-06-01T15:40:00.000-07:00

Thomas Friedman has an interesting article about the effects of the 9/11 attacks on America's soft power:

I worry that 20 years from now [people will write about] how America's reaction to 9/11 unintentionally led to an erosion of core elements of American identity. What sparks such dark thoughts on a trip from London to New Delhi?
In part it is the awful barriers that now surround the U.S. Embassy in London on Grosvenor Square. "They have these cages all around the embassy now, and these huge concrete blocks, and the whole message is: 'Go away!'" said Kate Jones, a British literary agent who often walks by there. "That is how people think of America now, and it's a really sad thing because that is not your country."
In part it was a conversation with friends in London, one a professor at Oxford, another an investment banker, both of whom spoke about the hassles, fingerprinting, paperwork and costs that they, pro-American professionals, now must go through to get a visa to the U.S.
In part it was a recent chat with the folks at Intel about the obstacles they met trying to get visas for Muslim youths from Pakistan and South Africa who were finalists for this year's Intel science contest. And in part it was a conversation with M.I.T. scientists about the new restrictions on Pentagon research contracts - in terms of the nationalities of the researchers who could be involved and the secrecy required - that were constricting their ability to do cutting-edge work in some areas and forcing intellectual capital offshore. The advisory committee of the World Wide Web recently shifted its semiannual meeting from Boston to Montreal so as not to put members through the hassle of getting visas to the U.S.
The other day I went to see the play "Billy Elliot" in London. During intermission, a man approached me and asked, "Are you Mr. Friedman?" When I said yes, he introduced himself - Emad Tinawi, a Syrian-American working for Booz Allen. He told me that while he disagreed with some things I wrote, there was one column he still keeps. "It was the one called, 'Where Birds Don't Fly,' " he said.
I remembered writing that headline, but I couldn't remember the column. Then he reminded me: It was about the new post-9/11 U.S. Consulate in Istanbul, which looks exactly like a maximum-security prison, so much so that a captured Turkish terrorist said that while his pals considered bombing it, they concluded that the place was so secure that even birds couldn't fly there. Mr. Tinawi and I then swapped impressions about the corrosive impact such security restrictions were having on foreigners' perceptions of America.
In New Delhi, the Indian writer Gurcharan Das remarked to me that with each visit to the U.S. lately, he has been forced by border officials to explain why he is coming to America. They "make you feel so unwanted now," said Mr. Das. America was a country "that was always reinventing itself," he added, because it was a country that always welcomed "all kinds of oddballs" and had "this wonderful spirit of openness." American openness has always been an inspiration for the whole world, he concluded. "If you go dark, the world goes dark."
Bottom line: We urgently need a national commission to look at all the little changes we have made in response to 9/11 - from visa policies to research funding, to the way we've sealed off our federal buildings, to legal rulings around prisoners of war - and ask this question: While no single change is decisive, could it all add up in a way so that 20 years from now we will discover that some of America's cultural and legal essence - our DNA as a nation - has become badly deformed or mutated?
This would be a tragedy for us and for the world. Because, as I've argued, where birds don't fly, people don't mix, ideas don't get sparked, friendships don't get forged, stereotypes don't get broken, and freedom doesn't ring.

Thomas Friedman seems to have somewhat of a blind spot with regard to the Bush administration. He supported invading Iraq before the war, on the grounds that defeating Saddam would transform the region. After we invaded, he started blasting the Bush Administration for failing to manage the war in a way that would set the stage for this transformation. The question is, why was he surprised? Bush never expressed any interest in using the invasion as a lever to transform the region. And if Friedman wanted to get a pretty good indication of how Bush would manage a war, all he had to do was look at Afghanistan.

His proposal for a national commission shows a similar blind spot. What does the Bush Administration care about such long term effects? This is the Administration that managed to sour our trans-Atlantic relationships over Iraq. It doesn't take a commission to tell us that Guantanamo is hurting America's image abroad.

But if his proposed solution is wrong, his observations are interesting, particularly regarding the conflict between security and openness. I would think that creating architects could find ways to make our embassies more secure without creating the effect Friedman describes, at least for new buildings. Retrofitting an existing building, as was apparently done in London, is harder. As for visas, I don't know how much security the new procedures actually provide. I would guess that a determined terrorist likely to succeed in gaining entry to the United States in despite the new rules.

2005-05-30T23:05:00.000-07:00

Representative Tanner (D-Tenn.) has introduced a bill to "take politics and partisanship out of the Congressional redistricting process." People have been complaining about redistricting for years, but Tanner has an argument which seems particularly compelling in the current political environment:

"The political center has been disappearing in Washington," said Tanner, a founding member of the Blue Dog Coalition, comprised of 35 moderate to conservative House Democrats. "Part of the reason is that so many Congressional districts have been designed to guarantee victory for one political party or another, paving the way for partisan extremists unwilling to work cooperatively with others toward the best interest of the country."

A New York Times editorial agrees:

Drawing less partisan lines would reinvigorate the center in American politics, and make House members pay more attention to their constituents and less to their party leaders. That is why Mr. Tanner's bill is likely to have a hard time in today's Congress. It is also why it is important for everyone who wants to improve American politics to support it.

How does the bill, H.R.2642, work? Tanner's press release explains:

States already have the Constitutional duty to develop Congressional maps. Under Tanner's legislation, each state would establish an independent redistricting commission of at least five members to draw that state's Congressional district map exactly once every 10 years. Majority and minority party leaders in the state legislature would appoint an even number of commissioners, who would then elect an additional commissioner to serve as the panel's chair. Commissioners could not be recently active in politics and would be ineligible to run for a U.S. House seat in that state for 10 years.

The redistricting commission would be required to consider the rights established by the Constitution and Voting Rights Act, as well as population and geography of each district but would not be allowed to consider political issues such as voting history, party affiliation or the potential impact on a sitting incumbent. The commission's report must be approved or disapproved by the Governor and the state legislature without amendment. These provisions would serve as minimum standards, but states would have the option to adopt stricter guidelines.

I like it.