History and partisanship.

Here's an interesting exchange (well, one-way exchange) between Philip Jenkins, author of Do Presidents Matter? and Eric Alterman. Jenkins argues that "our interpretation of American history is bedeviled by the excessive focus on the role of the president, his character and personality". He uses the obvious hypothetical cases of Jimmy Carter winning in 1980 and Al Gore winning in 2000 to suggest that things would not have been much been different in either case (Carter would have gone on to be the US' "national greatness" president, maybe with minor tweaks to the narrative; Gore would have militarily overreacted to 911). Alterman takes issue with Jenkins' commentary about Gore and Iraq:

[Jenkins writes that] “Conceivably, the vulnerability of a Democratic administration would have made a Gore presidency still more pro-active and militaristic than George W. Bush has been in practice.”...Note the use of the weasel word “conceivably” as in “Conceivably, my cheeseburger is actually made from the remains of little green Martian men.” To take the above seriously, one must simply ignore absolutely everything Gore has said and done with regard to Iraq, which in my view, rather weakens it.


Three points about this come to mind:

First, isn't this, to an extent, about the conflict between popular and academic history? I read not long ago (I forget where) a good definition of the difference between the two: academic history focuses mainly on prevailing trends in national life, of which democratically elected figures tend to emerge as rough reflections. (I'm not sure how this theory works in authoritian regimes, but maybe the party simply substitutes for the populace.) Popular history focuses, as Jenkins laments, on the personalities of society's Big Men and the forces they engender. So in a sense, Jenkins and Alterman are talking at cross purposes. In fact, Alterman undermines his point a bit when he bases his objection on what "Gore has said and done" since 2000. In fact, Jenkins' hypothetical has nothing much to do with what Gore is like; he's not expressing any particular cynicism toward him or toward politicians in general (to do so would undermine his academic-history position). He's talking about the forces that would have worked on the Gore Administration, forcing it to act in certain ways that are largely detached from presidential personality.

Second, the conflict between these opposing views of political history and development -- the electoral fatalism of the academic approach vs. the character-driven popular approach -- has interesting ramifications for progressive politics. If you read far-left, post-Communist writing, like the stuff at Counterpunch, say, you find a weird (and frankly exhausting) mix of the two approaches: absolute, fiercely personal derision toward politicians (of all stripes) mixed with a tendency toward Great-Forces fatalism, the view that we're all pawns in a cynical corporate-capitalist game over which we have no control. On the popular right, by contrast, you find large numbers of people fighting -- organizing, voting, demonstrating -- tooth and nail against these same forces of history. This depiction (and not his critique of the Democratic Party that caused such a stir) was the power of Thomas Franks' What's the Matter with Kansas (and also of this striking essay by failed Oklahoma Senate candidate Brad Carson) -- a world in which liberlism has replaced capitalism as the target of modern-day Luddites. Conservative foot soldiers (and their leaders) may be fatalistic, but not in a way that causes them to to withdraw from the battle with the Great Forces.

And what of mainstream liberals? Jenkins remarks derisively on "counter-factual scenarios, a technique that many historians find dubious". Actually, liberals seem to find it dubious. Frank writes in What's the Matter with Kansas about Jack Cahsill's book 2006: The Chautauqua Rising, about (what else?) America in the second term of a Gore presidency, in which as Frank puts it "the common people lie prostrate beneath the iron heel of liberalism" and must be rescued by a motley band of roughneck conservative populists led by a sportswriter. Off the top of my head, there's also Liberality for All, and conservative blogger Patrick Hynes' 2004 Gore-counterfactual novel (that doesn't seem to be available online right now; I hope that's not because he's planning on publishing it). It's fair to say, I think, that the equivalent simply does not exist on the left. (I have some theories about what a Gore presidency would have been like, but I'm mildly embarrassed about having them.) Mainstream liberals are not, as a rule, very indulgent of nostalgia or fantasy or the general Great Man theory of politics (I know, I know, there was the Kennedy thing, and Trudeaumania in Canada...but liberals have never systematically produced anything like the Reagan hagiography that threatened to explode and cover me in goo when I picked up a copy of Bruce Barlett's Imposter in Chapters tonight). I assume that this is part of what liberals are talking about when we speak of "the reality-based community".

At the same time, a good case can be made that an over-popularization of politics has none-the-less worked against liberals over the last quarter century. Polling data suggest a very strong determinism in how we elect national leaders, with demographic composition and national attitudes changing very slowly over time -- forces that tend to back up Jenkins' exogenous-forces approach to political history. On the other hand, both of Jenkins' examples, Carter and Gore, went down because they suffered fragmentation of the liberal coalition (slightly different as it existed in 1980 and 2000). In Carter's case, the fragmentation was large, up to one-third of self-described liberals by some estimates; in Gore's case, the fragmentation was actually relatively slight and part of a longer-term consolodation that can be seen in the 1992-2004 trend among the Democratic base groups -- but it was enough to make the difference. In both cases, though, the fragmentation was largely personality-based; liberals felt "betrayed" etc. etc. and declined to vote for the coalition of interests represented by the ticket in favour of rejecting the guy heading it for being, basically, too conservative. These revolts might be statistical blips compared to the deterministic demographic and national-attitude trends, noise around the mean so to speak, but in a closely-divided two-party system, they can certainly be decisive, and are bound to become more so as American society becames more affluent and can afford to be more dilletantish about its politics.

Which brings me to my third point, in which I'm on Alterman's side: not only does the popular, personality-based view of history and politics drive elections, it also determines how Administrations are run, even if it's mostly like a different kind of bias introduced into the error term around the great-forces mean. Like the relatively small defection from the liberal coalition cost Gore the 2000 election, minor differences in the characterlogical makeup of an Administration -- and, more importantly, in the people it has to please to survive politically -- can make all the difference to how policy is created and enacted. For instance, Jenkins ignores the difficulty Gore's people would have had in convincing a dubious military hierarchy to commit to the Iraq occupation relative to Bush, Cheney, Powell and the Republican establishment with their rosy martial history and supposed cultural affinity. He ignores how completely manufactured much of the case for invading Iraq was in real time (and the crucial distinction of occupying the country with ground troops, something Gore, even as the Clinton Admin's head Iraq-hawk, had never endorsed), and how the use of those troops got put on the table in the first place.

In particular, Bush's initial election depended at least somewhat on the institutional support of the neocon establishment and its influence in Beltway opinion-making with all its filter-down effects. Gore would have owed The Weekly Standard nothing and wouldn't have expected their editorial support; on the other hand, he would have owed plenty to socioliberal and generally antiwar groups like the AFL-CIO, women's, environmental and civil-liberties groups, and would also have depended on the editorial support of more war-ambivolent entities like the New York Times editorial page.

Similarly, Jenkins writes that "It is difficult to imagine any president in 2001-2002 who would not have relaxed rules against robust interrogation, against kidnapping and rendition, and above all, who would have maintained legal restrictions on electronic surveillance". That's broadly true, but again, the differences would have been in degree, not in kind. For instance, mainstream opposition to the Patriot Act, the sort voiced by Russ Feingold and Al Gore, is not a blanket opposition to the expansion of government surveillance powers contained in the Act, but criticism of very specific provisions regarding warrants and electronic surveillance. It's also directly in line with the ACLU's major complaints. It's not hard to imagine a Gore Administraion going out of its way to make sure the ACLU kept its dissatisfaction to a low rumble; but there was no reason for Bush or Ashcroft to have cared what an inately hostile liberal civil liberties group thought of their actions. As for rendition, the Clinton Administration was, to my knowledge, involved in six really dodgy renditions, all of them to Egypt, a practice it eventually ended (according to Peter Beinart quoting a WaPo report) because of outcry over the brutal interrogation methods used there. The Bush Adminstration, with its weaker ties to organized human rights groups, has been involved in about 150 such renditions (data from the Wiki rendition page). Would Gore have been perfect on this score? Highly unlikely. Would he have been better than the Bushies? Almost certainly.

In other words, one hardly needs to be mawkish about Gore (athough both Alterman and I and great swathes of the partisan liberal blogosphere are) to believe that his administration would have done things differently. Elections matter; individuals matter; and coalitions really matter. If overemphasis on the peculiarities of national leaders is intellectually and practically problematic, so is underestimating the importance of coalitions and the way their reprsentatives filter history's trends. To be pat about it, fatalism really does us nowhere.

How many deaths?

Oh, good God. From the Washington Post:

Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of a Shiite shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.

Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday -- sprawled, blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies had their hands still bound -- and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.


The same Moqtada al-Sadr who has been working to end the sectarian killings?

Also, this:

The disclosure of the death tolls [from the Iraqi statistics department and the the more complete count from the morgue] followed accusations by the U.S. military and later Iraqi officials that the news media had exaggerated the violence between Shiites and Sunnis over the past few days.


Just 17 hours ago, the WaPo reported (emphasis mine):

The U.S. ambassador, closely engaged in efforts to forge a national unity government, acknowledged Iraqis "came to the brink of civil war" after Wednesday's suspected al Qaeda bombing of a Shi'ite shrine but said: "Things are getting better."

But the Sunni minority's main political bloc said it was not ready to end the boycott of coalition talks which it announced in protest at reprisal attacks on Sunni mosques; police tallies indicate that over 200 people died in the five days of violence.


I read that two hundred give-or-take figure all weekend. And, frankly, two hundred in five days isn't much worse, or any worse actually, than the death tolls from sectarian conflict being recorded in the fall of 2004 while Bush was on his way to reelection -- making me doubtful about all the "civil war" talk following the initial Golden Mosque bombing and its reprisals (though, granted, it was mainly Shiites being killed then, and now mainly Sunnis).

Thirteen hundred in five days, on the other hand, is pretty much brand new territory. And the very idea of conservative and military outrage over deaths being overreported...

Let's test that theory.

Controversial International Trade Minister David Emerson said Monday he thinks he could still win an election as a Conservative despite the continuing furor over his decision to switch teams just weeks after January's election.


I'll believe it when I see it.

Unserious: How conservative pundits keep churning out books of the type no liberal would get caught dead writing

Every time fresh evidence presents itself, I manage to be amazed at how transparently hackish conservative "pundits" are (and I'm talking about the ones who presumably aren't directly on the take from the White House). Case in point: Bill Sammon has a new book out. It's called... Strategery: How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats, and Confounding the Mainstream Media. Just to give a little context, Sammon's last two books were called Misunderestimated: The President Battles Terrorism, John Kerry, and the Bush Haters and At Any Cost : How Al Gore Tried to Steal the [2000] Election.

Honestly, is there a centrist or liberal pundit alive who would have published a book called Hope's Man: How Bill Clinton Pacified the Balkans, Broke the Gingrich Revolution and Restored American Greatness for mainstream consumption in, say, 1999? What do you think would happen to such a pundit's career? Try to imagine any of the comparable hacks of the center-left -- Sidney Blumenthal, Joe Conason, James Carville, Paul Begala -- stooping to publish such a thing. Carville's Stickin', which is really more a dumb autobiographical ponderance on political loyalty than a valetine to Bill Clinton, is the closest thing I can come up with right now. The Clinton Wars was retrospective and a stab at serious, if slanted, analysis of the battles that consumed the poltical decade from an insider's perspective. Ditto, say, Waldman's Potus Speaks, though it at least was published just before the 2000 election. Conservatives justifably accused Brinkley's Tour of Duty of being intended to influence the 2004 campaign, but it was also a fairly serious work of history from a man who had built a career writing serious political history, and was undertaken long before Kerry became the Democratic nominee.

Sure, there are hack authors on the left pumping out viciously anti-Bush books by the month, alleging Diebold-stolen elections and the whatnot. (There are plenty of serious liberal writers who write these sorts of books and do it well.) But even the most devoted hacks on the left geneally feel they need some actual, like, ideas, some critical distance, to fill out their manifestos. There really are no Democratic Bill Sammons. I'm not sure if this is a blessing or a curse.

Summers, speech and self-selection redux.

The funniest thing about the Larry Summers resignation is how much interesting, insightful, genuinely balanced commentary it's produced in the mainstream media. Compare the multi-facetted Summers commentary to the critical confusion over more serious topics like the Dubai Ports World controversy the question of whether Iraq is technically descending into "civil war" (with commentators on both sides asserting rather blithely that it is or is not) and the Summers talk seems like a breath of journalistic fresh air.

On one side, you've got Martin Peretz and Peter Beinart engaging in an unusual level of lucidity at in defence of Summers and in condemnation of his faculty plotters (Peretz in particular manages to stay on point for an entire TNR column, no mean feat). At TPM Cafe, Greg Anrig reminds us that, for all the attacks from the left of Summers' contempt for "diversity", he vastly improved Harvard's diversity in one crucial aspect: by wealth background. He did it by eliminating tuition for students from households earning under $40,000 and increasing financial assistance for middle-income families, and by talking, talking, talking about the wealth gap in elite academic admissions. (I also side with those who think Summers deserves real credit for trying to expand the range of ideological acceptability at Harvard: pushing patriotism and ROTC participation and speaking against Israeli devestature, but these are more debatable virtues.)

Then, level-headed, mildly affectionate, pieces by Eugene Robinson in the WaPo and James Traube in Slate suggest the emerging concensus position that, while Summers is basically a good egg, his failure of tact rendered him, as Robinson puts it in the Post, a terrible politician in a job that requires ridiculous amounts of diplomacy -- and diplomatic common sense. The strange conflict between Summers as champion of neglected undergrads, teaching a first-year survey course on globalization and haranging the faculty to make themselves more available, while at the same time riding a stretch limo with chauffeur around campus, suggests a man whose tonedeafness or irrational contempt for decorum undermines his egalitarian substance. And, per Ellen Berry's L.A. Times reporting, anybody who informs his FAS that "economists are smarter than political scientists and political scientists are smarter than sociologists" basically deserves what he gets.

Finally, there's the one aspect of Summers-ism his defenders don't seem willing to discuss: his weird, unsavoury-looking protection of Andrei Shleifer and the Harvard Russian privatization program, that Matt Bivens of The Nation wrote about way back in 2001.

In other words, Summers is a complex guy. The whole affair seems a good way to come back to my point about free-speech and its self-selection problem. When Summers made his wildly misconstrued remarks about "intrinsic aptitude" in the elite sciences (he did not claim that men were "smarter than women") to a conference on diversity and inequality in academia, I defended him tooth and nail, mainly on context but also on the legitimacy of the substance. The remarks themselves were only debatably offensive and were based on real research. While it was within anyone's rights to take offense (and for the experts in attendance to pointedly challenge Summers to his face at the conference), the shrieking insistence that ensued from various liberal quarters that we all had to be offended and that our collective, objective offense-taking warranted a grovelling apology at least and Summers' resignation and blackballing at most, struck me as a lot more ill-informed and offensive than what's recorded on the conference transcript.

The problem, though, is that ropey, controversial remarks almost never emerge out of a vacuum or fade back into one. The same tendencies that led Summers to "provoke" (his word) the prevailing orthodoxy on gender differences at the conference were the same ones that led him to make those off-the-cuff but wildly inappropriate criticisms of entire disciplines reported in the L.A. Times. By the same token, while I've got no great love for Cornel West, nobody ever seems to point out that the glaring problem with Summers' decision to (privately, as I understand it) confront West over his lack of serious research and leaves of absences from teaching was the massive political conflict of interest that existed between the two -- West's having taken those leaves of absense mainly to campaign from the left against Summers' potential boss in the 2000 Democratic primary and general election. But the instincts that would have led Summers away from West in the interests of propriety would, again, probably also have led him down a more well-trod path at that conference on gender equality, to worry more about appearances, and try to rein in or tone down his fight with the FAS. And so it continues.

Conservatives have rolled out the trope about the moderately liberal Summers' downfall proving once again the arrogant intolerance of the academic left (an image helped along by the faculty member quoted in the L.A. Times who actually laments the fact that the Harvard student body is looking "more like America" since the 60s.) But it's messier than that. There's intolerance of provocative dissent -- which we rightly condemn -- and there's the far more mundane, defensible intolerance of basic assholery. Which type of intolerance directly led to Summers' demise -- and therefore whether his resignation under duress is a basically good or basically bad thing -- is impossible to know due to the close marriage of provocative dissent and assholery in Summers' behvaviour, and in general. Free speech is vital, but it ain't easy.

The sexed-up United Nations.

"We find an organization that is deeply troubled by bad management, by sex and corruption and by a growing lack of confidence in its ability to carry out missions that are given to them," Mr. Bolton told an audience at a Columbia Law School symposium held by the Federalist Society, a conservative law organization.


The U.N. is hobbled by sex? Of course, Bolton is talking about this, as well he might. Still, you think he could have come up with some, ah, less ropey phrasing.

Last thoughts on DPW.

Dave raised an interesting point last night. As the Globe and Mail reported today, it turns out that the DPW buyout of P&O has reprocussions for Canada as well, not that anyone cares:

In a multibillion-dollar deal that is reconfiguring the container-shipping industry, British-based P&O Ports is selling off terminals in several major U.S. cities and one in Vancouver. Dubai Ports World, which is controlled by the United Arab Emirates government, is buying the assets.


Dave asks:

So, do we start ragging on Harper for selling out the 2nd busiest port in North America to the UAE? Or is that secret little Canadian Forces base in Dubai too important to ruffle the feathers of the Emirates? Or, is it even an issue?


Frankly, it's a very good point. It's not an issue to me at all, at least not beyond my vague academic concerns about the basic propriety of state-run multinationals competing with private enterprise on the global market. These aren't, frankly, the sort of concerns one can fairly apply to a single deal that follows the rules and meets global standards as they currently exist. (Surely, these questions were more relevant back when the West was debating admitting China into the WTO.) On a gut level, I couldn't care less if Dubai ports operates the Centerm hub in Burrard Inlet. Moreover, if, say, Paul Martin had made the sort of complaints that some U.S. Congressmen are presently making about foreign infiltration of our ports, I probably would have been put off by the anti-pluralistic hyperbole of the whole thing.

But if I lived in New York or Los Angeles, I expect I would care, very much, about the UAE's presence in my city's harbour. There are lots of theories about what's really behind the deal and Bush's sudden burst of free-market principle. (Most recently, John Judis thinks it's about American's stake in the Boeing-Airbus rivalry.) At the gut level, tough, this is an American story in the basic sense that it could only be a story in America. Opposition to the deal is built on quintessentially American concerns and fears (though not, as certain free-market fanatic op-ed columnists sanctimoniously assert, simple racism.)

Maybe it's as simple as that, even with Harper's Conservatives in charge, I trust the Canadian government more than I ever would its Bushie counterpart to balance business interests with the public interest. (Would we care if it a Kerry Administration had approved the deal? Would a Kerry Administration have approved the deal or tried to quietly scuttle it?) But maybe the problem is deeper, the residual of 911, or something from even further back, a product of the US' self-defeating, unlovely 20th Century history with the Middle East, one from which Canada is at least broadly exempt. At any rate, it's been plenty interesting watching the debate unfold on the liberal blogs. It seems like the rarest of all types of issues: on which reasonable people really can disagree.

Republican "facts".

Good God. Via Michael Crowley at The Plank, the GOP's weekly bulletin called Iraq Facts is certainly, ah, incongruous with the latest macro news out of Iraq. Honestly, though, the one-page sheet is worse than just ill-timed. Have a look. For one thing, there's the GOP's heavy leaning on that alleged bastion of nattering liberalism the New York Times for its "happy" story about the Iraqi postal service. Actually, the article quoted is quite a moving human interest piece, especially this bit:

The closest call came when [mail carrier Abbas Mikayel] was stuck in traffic and a group of gunmen walked up to the car in front of him to drag out the driver, kicking and screaming. He watched silently, hoping the gunmen would not take him, too.

"I cried when I got back to the office," Mr. Mikayel said, pushing his large-lensed glasses farther up along his nose.

But humor, however black, seems to have remained intact among the postmen.

"If the terrorists heard he made an interview with the foreign press, they'd behead him!" Mr. Alwan said of Mr. Mikayel. Both men laughed...


Mainly, though, the "fact sheet" doesn't contain much in the way of facts; it's more a collection of anecdotes weirdly disconnected from anything that might be thought of as a big picture or even a unifying theme: the mayor of Tal Afar says nice things about Americans (and Lawrence Kaplan's new article suggests why: he's terrified they'll leave his city to the insurgency again). American officers claim that Iraqi Special Operations Forces are nearing self-sufficiency. School kids will be using revised math and science texts. All this could serve as an important reminder that even the biggest human disasters are never homogenously bad, that diversity is part of chaos, that people perservere and cope. But that's not the point at all: the point is to suggest that things in Iraq are basically good. Even if the existence of progress in Iraq is a debatable matter (at least prior to the latest outbreak of violence and Sistani sending his people into the streets), there's nothing in Iraq Facts that seriously backs up the affirmative side of the debate.

Iraq Facts takes me back to 2004 and the Ashley's Story TV ad. Different contest, same shit. In the midst of this fiercely negative, fiercely partisan, unprecedently expensive, expansive and in some ways substantive presidential campaign, here was this image of Bush hugging some kid who had a 911 sob story suddenly blared into living rooms all across the country. Rational people would not extrapolate much from this: Ashley was one child in a nation of 300 million, and politicians earn their chops and votes in party by hugging people and knowing when and how to express empathy. But the Progress for America Voter Fund, who ran the ad, was obviously putting some chips on Americans just not being that rational, the captive of pretty soothing images of a commander in chief who cares. (Actually, Bush looked pretty cynical in the photo. Vacant too. It is possible to manage both at once though usually Jeb pulls it off better than Dubya.) It was just. so. meaningless. And as the GOP continues to successfully insult its supporters' intelligence with this kind of meaningless, detached progaganda, eventually it gets a bad independent draw from reality and ends up embarrassed. But given that this government has survived for five years based on exactly the same sort of bullshit, we should all be embarrassed.

The GOP-friendly politics of ports.

Buck Betard has a point. There are a lot of political upsides in the UAE port-facility-takeover controversy for the GOP. An emailer to The Corner yesterday spelled out some of the reasons:

Maybe it's just me (and apparently it is), but I think this port thing is a BIG win for W, both on substance and one atmospherics.

First, nobody is going to believe Bush would risk the safety of the country. He absolutely holds the high ground on that issue.

Second, I think that most people, after the initial shock, quickly realize that the actions of a few crazys do not indict a whole country. If they did, may we'd deserve to be blown up for the degrading trash that out "media" spews out onto the world. Really, all Bush has to say is "racial profiling". Liberals can't argue for that, and conservatives don't open that debate.

...I agree that this deal is payback from Bush, probably for help given in the terror war. But even if he fails to make this stick, I think he'll get credit from the UAE, and he'll look principled while the congresscritters look panicked.


I assume that liberals (including me) who initially thought Bush had screwed up wildly by pushing this corrupt-looking deal mainly dispute the premise that "nobody is going to believe Bush would risk the safety of the country". Certainly the era of Bushie infallibility on the subject of terrawah is over. But sadly, the emailer may be mostly correct, at least given that the options for trust are the White House on one side and a pack of flailing, grandstanding, emasculated congresspeople on the other. But even if Bush's popular credibility on national security is pretty much shot, three complicating factors may still make this controversy a net gain for the GOP.

First, as Buck points out, it gives House and Senate Republicans the opportunity to distance themselves from an not-terribly-popular (particularly on the related issue of immigration) White House as midterm season approaches. Midterms are about turning out the base, not about wooing the vast middle swathe of voters who don't much care whether the UAE runs a port facility somewhere and who might find nativist opposition to the idea slightly unseemly. (In supporting Bush on the matter, John McCain is speaking to this part of the electorate, his 2008 lodestar.) The activist Republican base is far more likely to donate and turn out in 2006 for the party that prevents Elitist Washington from turning US ports over to the Arab Menace than for the party that is unflinchingly loyal to its fallible (particularly on immigration) commander in chief.

Second, if the GOP nativists benefit in the short run, Bush, representing the institution of the Republican Executive, benefits in the long run (i.e. the three-year-run)from his role as defender of the meritocracy of the market. Bush gets to play the neoliberal grownup, putting policy above politics, and picks up much-needed CW points. The Washington Post editors agree with him. The L.A. Times editors agree with him. Only the NYT editors, who joined the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill awhile ago have joined with rightwing base-stroking publications like the New York Post in dissent.

Third, the whole affair was from the start bound to tie liberals up in logical knots and provoke lots and lots of internal disagreement and self-questioning. (My opposition hinging on the distinction between state-owned and private-sector corporations, whether the former should be judged by their owners' performance as a government or on their narrow corporate performance, and whether most people understand that the blurring of the state and the corporation is a major part of multinational commerce under "free trade" is a case in point.) On one hand, we dispute the secrecy and heavy-handedness of the sale, Bush's continued contempt for Congress, and the White House's slavish devotion to the tenants of insiderish corporate free trade in general and Sheikh-dominated Big Oil in particular. On the other, we liberals want to steer clear of anything that sounds even vaguely like the arguemnts eminating from faux-populist wingnuts like Michelle Malkin against capitulation to the Great Arab Menace. As we agonize over the correct middle ground to take, rightwingers swoop in to self-righteously accuse liberals of hypocracy. It's like the Iraq War debate writ on a small scale. Somewhere, Karl Rove is smiling.

More on Fukuyama.

Krauthammer argues that it’s Fukuyama’s secular sensibility that blinds him to the appeal of radical Islam. “It has 1 billion potential adherents, which means that [Osama] bin Laden’s ideology has the potential to appeal to infinitely more people than the Aryan ideas of Nazism ever did,” he told me. “Frank has a stake in denying the obvious nature of the threat, but the fact is that history returned after 9-11 … . There are people running around trying to acquire anthrax with which to wipe out an entire city. If that doesn’t qualify as an existential threat, I don’t know what does.”

Fukuyama replies that these are the kinds of sentiments America should resist. “For the U.S. to treat every Muslim as a potential suicide bomber is precisely what fanatics like bin Laden want,” he says. “Iraq before the U.S. invasion was certainly not an existential threat. It posed an existential threat to Kuwait, Iran, and Israel, but it had no means of threatening the continuity of our regime. Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups aspire to be existential threats to American civilization but do not currently have anything like the capacity to actualize their vision. They are extremely dangerous totalitarians, but post threats primarily to regimes in the Middle East.”


Fascinating, must-read article on Fukuyama and neoconservatism by Robert Boynton in The American Prospect (via Tapped). Whether you believe the claim or not, it's a very good, very signficant thing that a prominent thinker like Fukuyama is willing to argue the position that the threat of fundamentalist Islamic is drastically overblown in the West.

And it turns out that Fukuyama did, in fact, vote for Kerry!

Bush's bizarre ports deal.

Bush talks tough about the deal to turn over shipping operations at ports in in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia to United Arab Emirates' Dubai Ports World:

"They ought to listen to what I have to say about this," the president said. "They'll look at the facts and understand the consequences of what they're going to do. But if they pass a law, I'll deal with it with a veto."

Bush, who has never vetoed a bill as president, said on the White House South Lawn: "This is a company that has played by the rules, has been cooperative with the United States, from a country that's an ally on the war on terror, and it would send a terrible signal to friends and allies not to let this transaction go through."


So bizarre. Of course, concerns that domestic opposition to the deal is built on anti-Arab sentiment are certainly valid, particularly when you've got Lindsay Graham saying things like this on Fox:

"Americans right now want free trade, but when it comes to national security issues, we want to maintain the infrastructure ourselves...I don't think now is the time to outsource major port security to a foreign-based company."


But the dispute isn't over a simple matter of subverting "free trade" to security concerns, however obvious that politicians from both parties would try to frame it as such. Beside the fact that the panel that reviews these deals operates in complete secrecy (the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States reviewed the deal but its report is classified), it's not as if DPW is a private company that happens to locate its headquarters and corporate governance in the UAE. It's a state-owned company poised to buy out the private London-based corporation that currently handles U.S. port operations. We're not talking about turning over port management from one foreign company to another, but turning it over from a private foreign firm to a foreign government wearing its corporate hat.

The blurring of the corporation and the state is already a contentious issue, and for good reason. There are both conservative and liberal cases to be made against state-owned international corporations. Not only they drive industrial concentration in a way regulated private companies cannot (or not without serious lobbying efforts), but state-owned corporations that operate globally necessarily blur the public functions of a government with profit-oriented functions of the company. For instance, The shortcomings of the UAE's banking system and unregulated gold market, through which Al Qaeda and Taliban representatives moved money before 911 and again before the US invasion of Afghanistan, would have no real bearing on a private Dubai-based firm's fitness to run a US port under US law. But they sure as hell matter when that firm is part and parcel of the UAE's (completely undemocratic) government.

At the very least, you don't have to be a nativist bigot to have a problem with the arrangement. Of course, by inviting the inevitable controversy, the Bushies have certainly given nativist bigots a platform from which to rant (and to make incorrect assertions; the actual port employees aren't going to change much because the merger). Chalk another one up to the Bush Admin's excellent judgement.


Update: Doing some further reading, Scott Shields at MyDD quotes Glenn Greenwald pointing out that a Chinese state-owned company already runs several ports in the US and it hasn't been an issue. I didn't know that, and I guess I see the dilemma here, in the sense that the distinction between private and state-run firms isn't always obvious, particularly in quasi-communist states like China.

It still seems to me, though, that the meta-issue with this deal isn't about the tradeoff between security and free trade, but about whether governments should ever turn over their public functions (like the operation of port facilities) to other governments operating through state-run corporations. And, no, I don't think they should. And, even if you think that such a blurring of government and private enterprise on the international stage is OK, the standards to which those governments (not just the firm itself, as the Bushies are stressing) should rise in order to secure a deal ought to be higher than what the UAE has achieved in recent years.


Update 2: This time it's Atrios who already made the exact same point, only shorter.

Fukuyama disowns neoconservatism.

Snark aside, I really enjoyed Francis Fukuyama's lucid deconstruction of neoconservatism and its fatal flaws in the latest New York Times Magazine. The whole thing is good, but the really striking parts are these:

Four common principles or threads ran through much of [neonconservative] thought up through the end of the cold war: a concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends.

The problem was that two of these principles were in potential collision. The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering — which in earlier years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare — suggested a cautious approach toward remaking the world and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipated consequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on the other hand, implied that American activism could reshape the structure of global politics...

...Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also to "tear down this wall."...And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened in 1989-91... The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside... As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book "Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades."

This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform.


I was shocked at how appealing I found Fukuyama's arguments, both against Kagan-Kristol-type neoconservatism and -- more surprisingly -- for what kind of policy should replace it. Maybe that's because the ideal foreign policy he lays out in the second half of the essay reads pretty much like the standard Democratic liberal internationalism of the Biden-Holbrooke-(dare I say it?)-Kerry variety. Fukuyama advocates a robust internationalism built on regional arrangements and crowned at least symbolically by the UN. He espouses a quiet version of American exceptionalism, confident enough to subject itself to international accountability, informally by courting and respecting international public opinion, and formally by becoming subject to institutions like the International Criminal Court. His ideal American foreign policy "pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens" but "does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about". He believes the Free West should encourage and empathize with the universal human desire for prosperity and autonomy, but at the same time should acknowledge that "promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism".

The "ideas" Fukuyama calls for -- to "retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about" -- are fine; they're just mainstream Democratic ideas. In fact, it's better than that. What Fukuyama sees as neconservatism's two essential failures -- the unacknowledged contradition between aversion to social engineering and institutional change by force, and the over-indoctination of the Reagan experience in "ending" Soviet totalitarianism -- are exactly the two problems that don't apply to liberal internationalists. In the first case, that's because most liberals are already open to micromanaging domestic policy for the public good or on behalf of vulnerable members of their own society. Therefore, I'd argue, our leaders are fundamentally less susceptible to the sort of half-assed follow-through that has marred US post-war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the second case, liberals generally reject all that crap about how Reagan's foreign-policy brilliance, idealism and toughness stopped communism in its tracks. (Hendrick Hertzberg's brilliant 1991 essay on Reagan is the essential read here.) The Clinton Administration mapped out its own post-Cold War foreign policy, one that, however hapharzard in the first few years, represented a fairly fundamental break with 80s-style Republican doctrine.

Democratic spinelessness over Iraq notwithstanding, that chasm between the parties still exists today and Fukuyama seems to have found himself on the other side of it. I guess if James Webb and Author Laffer could become Democrats, why not Francis Fukuyama?


Update: Whoops, it looks like Matthew Yglesias already made the exact same point (but shorter).

Defending the defence of freedom of speech.

Free speech has a self-selection problem. As an institution, it deserves better than to held up by assholes. Unfortunately, assholes like Ezra Levant (Michelle Malkin, the PowerTools, Hugh Hewitt, Sean Hannity etc. etc.), not to mention the Western Standard's anonymous ignorant Tory sources, are all too happy to pick up the Torch of Freedom and wave it around menacingly until they set something on fire.

On the other hand, there are always exceptions. Like this guy (via Shakespeare's Sister):

Now, a group of Israelis announce their own anti-Semitic cartoons contest. Amitai Sandy, the publisher of Tel-Aviv, Israel-based Dimona Comix, and founder of the contest jokes, “We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published! No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!”

Very, very cool. Can we trade him for Ezra Levant?

The Guantanamo disgrace.

Dahlia Lithwick's new Slate piece summarizing three new reports out of Guantanamo is very good and quite appalling. The reports suggest that the Gauntanamo detainees constitute less a collection of "the worst of the worst" than a random sample of the Afghanistan and Pakistani male populations.

The big question about Guantanamo for me, though, has always been why. Why did the U.S. begin rounding people up and putting them there in the first place -- not soldiers captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, mind you, but the 86% of current detainees who were rounded up by Northern Alliance or Pakistani forces after the U.S. offered "large bounties for capture of suspected enemies". And why does it keep holding them more than four years after 911 even though it would actually be impossible to bring credible charges against most of them and most of them must have depleted their interregation value years ago? Lithwick's response:

The only real justification for the continued disgrace that is Guantanamo is that the government refuses to admit it's made a mistake. Releasing hundreds of prisoners after holding them for four years without charges would be big news. Better, a Guantanamo at which nothing has happened in four years. Better to drain the camp slowly, releasing handfuls of prisoners at a time. Last week, and with little fanfare, seven more detainees were let go. That brings the total number of releasees to 180, with 76 transferred to the custody of other countries. Are these men who are quietly released the "best of the worst"? No. According to the National Journal one detainee, an Australian fundamentalist Muslim, admitted to training several of the 9/11 hijackers and intended to hijack a plane himself. He was released to his home government last year. A Briton said to have targeted 33 Jewish organizations in New York City is similarly gone. Neither faces charges at home.


Nice to know our "freedom" is in such good hands.

Early midterm blogging.

After having depressed myself by reading one too many rightwing blog yesterday, I was shocked to stumble on what looks like some intellectual honesty, or perhaps a genuine bit of self-questioning, at National Review:

What happened? Why does a man who served in the Reagan administration now embrace the very party that, since Vietnam, has denigrated the martial virtues he epitomizes? Part of it is his opposition to the war in Iraq. Webb is no knee-jerk Bush hater, and his opposition to the Iraq war is based on strategic considerations — he is concerned that by committing such a large force there for an extended period of time we have weakened ourselves in the long run against a rising China.

More to the point, though, is his growing anger at the Bush administration for what he sees as a McNamara-like disregard for military advice, and even worse, a tendency on the part of too many Republicans and conservatives who did not serve in the military to attack the service of veterans like Jack Murtha who oppose the war. Webb's New York Times op-ed of January 18, "Purple Heartbreakers," was a clear harbinger of his break with the Republican party. There he wrote:

"[I]n recent years extremist Republican operatives have inverted a longstanding principle: that our combat veterans be accorded a place of honor in political circles. This trend began with the ugly insinuations leveled at Senator John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries and continued with the slurs against Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry, and now Mr. Murtha."

The political tactic of playing up the soldiers on the battlefield while tearing down the reputations of veterans who oppose them could eventually cost the Republicans dearly. It may be one reason that a preponderance of the Iraq war veterans who have thus far decided to run for office are doing so as Democrats.


The piece is written, of course, in response to James Webb (Reagan's ex Secretary of the Navy)'s apparent decision to run for George Allen's Senate Seat in Virginia. Hugh Hewitt, of course, has the exact same deferential reaction over on his awful blog. So is this a strategic pandering initiative designed to address what the GOP worries will become a media focus on disconnect between the Administration and the military brass (and a coup in the DC/SCC's "Fighting Democrats" strategy)? Or is it a more genuine concern that Republican ruthlessness may be souring the "Scots-Irish" pro-military voters whom Webb epitomizes, and also risking the permanent alientation of the realist-nationalist part of their base, which would leave them with a combination of starry-eyed neocons and grassroots anti-Muslim populists (Paul Wolfowitz and Little Green Footballs)?

I'm not very familiar with Webb or his novels, but a look at his commentary over the past ten years suggests a pretty impressive character. His opposition to the Iraq War was awfully damn prescient, not just in the general "bad idea" sense, but in the emphasis and details. But just because Webb's no hack doesn't mean he's a liberal. Actually, he reads like the sort of old-school Kissengerian conservative who views neoconservatism (and probably also liberal internationalism) as a hyper overcorrection to McGovernite-Carteresque dovishness (Webb uses the term "McGovernite" a lot) and who viewed the Clinton White House as the epitome of the dovish dilletantism of the 60s counter-culture.

He expresses the latter view in this fairly recent piece on Clinton and Carter:

As one who shares Mr. Clinton's ethnic background, and whose family was not afforded the opportunity for higher education until this generation, it is irritating beyond words to see commentators repeatedly refer to his actions as "redneck" or typical of "white trash" behavior. Rednecks might hang a velvet picture of Elvis on their living room wall, but precious few would tolerate any sort of conduct that might demean the greatness of their country, much less take part in it. Check the casualty lists in any war. See who stands tall and salutes when the flag passes by. Note who wasn't sleeping in Lincoln's bedroom when Bill Clinton occupied the White House.

Instead, Bill and Hillary's misadventures provide an echo of a different time and place, another set of values. Of bright students brought to good schools and becoming convinced, as Ben Stein wrote of his years at Yale Law School with the Clintons, "that we were supermen, floating above history and precedent, the natural rulers of the universe. . . . The law did not apply to us." Of young men who not only avoided service when 58,000 of their peers were dying, but who persuaded a softie like Jimmy Carter to say that they were right, all of them, without distinction. The law? The law was what you made it.


More interesting is his take on the 2004 campaign (not to mention his would-be Senate colleague):

To be sure, Kerry deserves condemnation for his activities as the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (WAW). In the early 1970s,this small organization - never more than 7,000 veterans out of a potential pool of 9 million- became the darling of the anti-war movement and the liberal media. Its activities went far beyond simply criticizing the politics of the war to repeatedly and dishonestly misrepresenting the service of Vietnam veterans and the positive feelings most felt after serving.

...Kerry's own comments were filled with hyperbolic exaggerations that sought to make egregious acts seem commonplace. During a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 1971, he testified that fellow veterans had routinely "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan. "With those words, he defamed a generation of honorable men. No matter how he spins it today, at a minimum, he owes them a full and complete apology.

...But in the zero-sum game of a presidential campaign, to go after Kerry is to give a free pass to Bush, whose actions then and now deserve no prizes. Recent statements defending Bush claim that the National Guard was not a haven for those who wished to avoid Vietnam; but it clearly was. According to the National Guard Association, only some 9,000 Army Guardsmen and 9,343 Air Guardsmen served in Vietnam. Considering that nearly 3 million from the active forces did so, one begins to understand why so many of America's elites headed for the Guard when their draft numbers were called.


Clearly, Webb sees his differences with Bush and the PNAC types as larger than his differences with the party of the 60s-70s anti-war movement and its aftermath. That's interesting in itself. But U.S. liberals from the late-60s on worked long and hard to establish and maintain a distinction between Vietnam-era campus radicalism and lawful, mainstream opposition to the brand of Cold War Great-Powers realism that defined establishment conservative thought and that, in their view, made the world so terrifying. There's little suggestion in his writings that Webb sees that very fundamental, very necessary distinction between figures like Clinton and Kerry who worked within the system to stop what they considered a terrible, misguided war built on a flawed worldview (Webb's worldview) and, say, the sort of campus and Hollywood-based radicalism that Webb talks about in this article (in which he takes additional swipes as potential future Senate colleagues like Chris Dodd).

In a way, Webb (D-Va) is terrfying to Republicans because he stides onto a middle ground -- hawkish, pro-military, anti-meddling-in-the-Gulf, personally conservative -- they like to pretend disappeared with Sam Nunn. But he's also the type who doesn't seem to see the gradations that made mainstream liberalism in the US possible over the past 20 years, that (arguably) brought us close to cementing a neoliberal governing majority. It's the worldview that allows one to view Kerry's 1971 anti-war activity as fair and honourable while still rejecting the ideological or pacifist left. That could end up being a problem once the campaign is over.

Why are we losing to these idiots?

The American right has been absolutely outdoing itself this week. Today’s nugget of lunacy has me following Instapundit to James Taranto’s Opinion Journal where, summing up four days of rightwing caterwauling about Al Gore’s latest speech in Saudi Arabia, Taranto offers this bit of meta-analysis:

Usually when Al Gore gives a speech, left-wing blogs are filled with enthusiastic reviews. But we haven't noticed a single plaudit for, or even defense of, Gore's weekend speech in Saudi Arabia, which we noted Monday.

The rest of Taranto’s attempt at being clever isn’t worth worrying with; but it’s worth pointing out that, beyond the fact that liberal bloggers don’t have the time or energy to follow the action every time a big Dem makes a speech at some international conference, the main reason the liberal blogs haven’t exactly been “full of enthusiastic reviews” is because we have no idea what Gore said in Saudi Arabia. There’s nothing to review. Incredibly, the massive wall of outrage that has towered over the right blogosphere over the past three days is built from a single short AP story. Ezra dug up a tonally conflicting (and more detailed) account of what Gore said from Arab News, but nobody to my knowledge has seen a transcript of the actual speech or the q&a in question. Jeddah didn’t make them available online.

My take is this: from the Arab News account and the AP account, Gore’s comments on the Danish cartoon controversy and the Gulf region’s stance on Iranian nuclear ambitions were perfectly mainstream and, better, right on the money. His complaints about visas and Ashcroft’s post-911 policy read like diplomatic pandering, something the Bushies are pretty familiar with themselves. But Gore has been making these same complaints about post-911 domestic policy toward Muslims for years. Given our globalized media, any business-class Saudi citizen of the sort he was addressing at the forum would already have had plenty of opportunity to know his – or any U.S. figure’s for that matter – positions on the subject. This just ain’t the stuff of sedition. It’s a nothing-burger – exactly the sort of nothing-burger the right would like us to believe Cheney’s hunting accident is – except for real. The reality-based community, in our relatively infinite wisdom, has treated it as such.

Pajamaline.

Bizarre. The Pajamas Media meta-blog has started a new blog called WMDFiles... about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

So far, there are only two posts up, both of them about this giant pile of nothing recently reported by ABC and a bunch of tiny rightwing outlets like CNS news.

Ok, ok. I'm showing my liberal bias. It's not nothing. Actually, the 12 hours of previously unreleased recordings of Hussein meeting with his cabinet sometime in the mid-90s includes audiotape of Saddam and Tariq Aziz discussing how they won't commit terrorist acts using WMDs on American or British soil (though Saddam worries that somebody unaffiliated with a state might do so as developing small-scale dirty bombs is easy), and how bummed they are that the U.N. inspectors have discovered things -- again, this is the mid-90s -- they didn't want known about their biological weapons program. Meanwhile, the relevance of the information contained on the tapes to the case for war with Iraq has already been poo-pooed by John Negroponte's -- yes that's right, John Negroponte's -- spokeswoman.

Is this really the sort of thing to which Pajamaline wants to be devoting a whole new blog? I mean, there's circle-jerking and then there's circle-jerking.

More Danish controversy reading.

The Globe and Mail proves its worth with this article from Saturday's edition, "A Tale of Two Muslim Danes", by far the best thing I've read on the Jyllands-Posten controversy so far*:

Are these "cultural" Muslims really the majority? Almost certainly.

Denmark, a fairly typical European country in this respect, has an estimated 180,000 Muslims out of a population of five million. They are served by 80 to 100 mosques, with an estimated 15,000 worshippers. In other words, fewer than 10 per cent of Denmark's Muslims are even religiously observant. A similar majority of Western Europe's Muslims are believed to be secular — in France, only 5 per cent visit a mosque weekly. The rest presumably view Islam as a culture rather than a religion or a basis for politics.

...Some observers believe that the small and powerless nature of Muslim immigrant communities actually creates this harsh polarization...Arabs, however, began arriving only in the 1970s, through refugee programs. Those programs mostly ended, abruptly, in the 1990s. Denmark stopped all immigration in 2002, imposing Europe's most restrictive immigration laws.

The Arabs were desperately poor, usually illiterate, and often had left not because they wanted to join Europe but because they were forced to flee. Lacking a successful, assimilated elite who could create role models for harmonious membership in society, the orthodox religious extreme — never very large in number — became the leaders and figureheads of Arab Muslims. This not only gave Muslims few visible alternatives, but turned them into figures of fear and revulsion.

"Our newspapers for years have been absolutely full of headlines about the perceived threat to fundamental values of tolerance and freedom from these Muslims, even though they are almost invisible and have no power to change anything," said Garbi Schmidt, who, as director of the Research Programme on Ethnic Minorities at the Danish National Institute for Social Research, is one of Europe's leading authorities on Muslim immigrants.

Because their rank-and-file are so unknown and invisible to Europe's mainstream, people hear the only voice that is speaking loudly and clearly. In many countries, this is the radical, orthodox religious leaders, who often, like Mr. Abu Laban, resemble extremist politicians more than preachers. In places like Denmark, where Hitler's rampage left terrible memories, the hateful messages of people like Mr. Abu Laban, and their calls for censorship of the media and repression of women, strike a troubling chord.

That helps explain the freedom-of-speech debate that led the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten to publish the offensive Mohammed cartoons. To outsiders, it seemed a bit bizarre: Denmark's freedom of speech has never been challenged, and the country's Muslims, most of whom live in grubby neighbourhoods and work in shipping industries, and who have only three MPs in a Parliament of 179 seats, have never had the power to challenge it.

...With each cycle of conflict, to use that analogy, the Europeans became a bit more Viking, and the small group of Muslims became a bit more like the rampaging Moors of mythology. The effect, in the words of Ms. Shmidt, is "mental segregation." Most Muslims continue to identify themselves as members of society, but some take the rhetoric seriously and turn themselves into the fearful jihadists of the European imagination.

Fleming Rose, the cultural editor of the Jyllands-Posten, stated this clearly to a German newspaper this week, a day before he was forced to resign for planning further offensive publications. He was trying to defend the publication of the cartoons, a noble cause, but his words, in retrospect, look like the perfect recipe for the dirty bomb of European-Islamic relations.

"By making fun in this way, we've not only created Muslims [i.e. extremists], we've also created Danes," he said. "Humour, even offensive humour, brings people together. Because by making fun of people we're also including them in our society. It's not always easy for those concerned, but that's the price they've got to pay."

This is the threat: That frightened Europeans will continue to manufacture "Muslims," transforming promising young children of immigrants into closed-minded extremists. And that those orthodox Muslims will in turn create angry, closed-minded "Europeans."


Rose's words ring oh-so-harmoniously with Western Standard editor's Ezra Levant's comments, as quoted in the Toronto Star (and rightfully derided by Dave at the Galloping Beaver). Levant was confronted with criticism that reprinting the 12 original cartoons might endanger Canadian troops in Afghanistan:

"In Canada we have freedoms, and our soldiers' and diplomats' job is to protect those freedoms at home and expand those freedoms abroad," Levant said Tuesday.

"I think most of the soldiers get it."

"So when Gordon O'Connor or others say we've got to clamp down on freedom in Canada so our soldiers and diplomats have an easier go of it, I don't think that's what soldiers and diplomats are for."

Levant said terrorists in foreign countries should not be allowed to hold Canadian domestic freedoms hostage.

"If a terrorist is going to attack our troops in Afghanistan, he's going to do it whether . . . he has some fig leaf of an excuse or not. Cartoons don't kill people; terrorists kill people."


As Saunders' article makes clear, there are a lot more players in this drama than just the disembodied Free West and "the terrorists", and a lot more issues involved than our freedom to offend our neighbours without reprisals as we see fit. But it's a lot simpler for Levant and his ilk to reduce the whole story to this pro-freedom, against-freedom dichotomy, with brave libertarian editorialists (and soldiers, of course!) on one side and placard-waving crowds of swarthy young men shouting "Death to America" and torching the local McDonalds on the other. Afterall, simplification is at the heart of successful progaganda. But, contra the Bull Moose, it's sure as hell got nothing to do with any conception of "liberalism" I'm interested in.

One bright spot is that Canada's new PM has (belatedly) opted not to descend into his supporter's fever swamp:

"I regret the publication of this material in several media outlets... While we understand this issue is divisive, our government wishes that people be respectful of the beliefs of others. I commend the Canadian Muslim community for voicing its opinion peacefully, respectfully and democratically."


*I also heartily recommend Gregory Djerejian's thought-provoking conservative takes (this post, the one above and the one below it) on the controversy at Belgravia dispatch.

A Dem who makes Kathleen Blanco look good.

Oh Good God. Via Political Wire, here's the news out of Louisiana:

Louisiana Agriculture Commissioner Bob Odom said Tuesday that he has lost confidence in Gov. Kathleen Blanco's ability to lead and is trying to convince retired U.S. Sen. John Breaux to run for her seat in 2007.


Obviously, it's hardly a matter of prime importance to me who becomes the next governor of the state of Louisiana. But John Breaux is really one of those characters you wish, as a Democratically-minded foreign national, would just amble into history. Nevertheless, this possible revival does make a depressing amount of sense. Katrina and its aftermath made obvious the need for efficient, responsive, functional government. That could mean a new onus on professionalism, perhaps buttressed by public service benchmarks. Or it could mean more geniality and "working across the aisle to get things done". I'll bet John Breaux and his supporters will be banking on it being the latter.

Liberalism is more than freedom of speech.

I see Marshall Wittman, that self-proclaimed beacon of liberalism, has histronically joined William Kristol's latest call for the West to rise up and "fight" against Muslim extremism -- as exemplified by Hamas, Iran and the Muslim protests against the Danish cartoons:

The Moose suggests that the conservative Weekly Standard is defending liberalism.

...Radical Islam has been accorded a special status. The rioting Islamo-fascists have won a victory by intimidating the West. Surely, no one should ever go out of their way to offend. But, freedom of expression a central component of Western liberty and liberalism, and it is under attack by an extremist mob. We are all Danish.


This is such utter bullshit. Kristol and The Weekly Standard are doing what they always do, what their predecessor publications have been doing since the McCarthy era: ginning up the popular emotion designed to lead us toward some sort of end-of-history showdown between the West and whatever totalitarian force stands against us, threatens us, offends us. It's not even clear from Kristol's op-ed what we're supposed to go to war with. Islamic funadamentalism? The various undemocratic majority-Muslim governments who have condoned or helped gin up populist anger over the cartoons vary in their degree of state-sanctioned piety and their brand of Islam. The extremely fundamentalist Ayatollah Sistani, for instance, has been one of the relative good guys in the controversy. The crowds may be fervent, and freightening in their irrationality, but they're armed with little other than repulsive slogans and molotov cocktails, and have so far hurt only themselves. Tyranny? Hamas and Ahmadinejad were both democratically elected, and in Palestine at least, the conditions under which Hamas came to power were actually pretty "liberal" by global standards. Today's riots in Pakistan are being reported partly as an intended blow against the Musharraf dictatorship.

At least two actual liberal Western politicians have spoken to the subject recently. Gerhardt Schroeder at this weekend's Jeddah conference in Saudi Arabia:

In an address at the Jeddah Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia, Schroeder called the publication "a major mistake", saying "we should return now to a reasonable and acceptable way to respect sanctities and beliefs".

And Marshall Wittman's hero Bill Clinton, two weeks ago:

None of us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic groups, and different religions ... there was this appalling example in northern Europe, in Denmark ... these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam.


I don't agree that the original cartoons were "totally outrageous", nor do I (or anyone else I've read) disagree with the Danish government's position that, regardless of its official opinion of the cartoons, it can't apologize on behalf of a private publication. But Schroeder and Clinton are basically right. They're right because they're speaking to a liberalism robust enough not to be threatened by mobs of powerless and angry Muslim rioters and their pandering imams and governments, and sophistocated enough to know that the illiberal, irrational, deeply impotent anger on display hardly here needs to be met with the firebreathing "solidarity" of a culture fundamentally under attack. Free speech is not in any danger in Europe or North America, and there's no need to indulge those who think we ought to gin up more conflict just to prove it. Afterall, by nature of its reach, its absoluteness, free speech must necessarily contain our multitudes: all our discretion, all our decency, all our balancing of the responsibility to consider the effects of our actions with our right to challenge what's acceptable. As Western liberals, that's what Clinton and Schroeder are speaking to. To label them "cowards" (along with those publications that don't see fit to reprint the cartoons) as so many on the right are doing, is illiberal.

People like Wittman try to define "liberalism" as pandering to the insecurities and conflict-mongering of western conservatives and/or Islamic fundamentalists, both of whom crave the sort of epic cultural showdown that most of us hope to avoid. That's exactly what liberalism needs to stand against, or rise above as the case may be.

The two Americas.

There's just too much to say about the story of Cheney shooting his hunting partner, starting with the most obvious: Do you feel safer yet?. Then, let the smirk slide off your face as you go on to reflect on the basic truth that, accidents aside, the U.S. is run by the sort of people who drive around in trucks and shoot birds with pellets for fun, which I've always thought of as the sort of "sport" most men give up around the age of 15. (To clarify: My conversations with hunters suggest that most of them actually take more pleasure in the going-into-the-woods part rather than the shoot-to-kill part, or at least that one doesn't work terribly well without the other.)

But I think my favourite part is the wealth angle:

Harry Whittington, a millionaire attorney from Austin, was in stable condition in the intensive care unit of a Corpus Christi hospital Sunday, said Yvonne Wheeler, spokeswoman for the Christus Spohn Health System.

...Armstrong told The Associated Press that emergency personnel traveling with Cheney tended to Whittington before an ambulance - routinely on call because of the vice president's presence - took him to the hospital.

...The 50,000-acre Armstrong ranch has been in the influential south Texas family since the turn of the last century. Katharine is the daughter of Tobin Armstrong, a politically connected rancher who has been a guest at the White House and spent 48 years as director of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. He died in October. Cheney was among the dignitaries who attended his funeral.


These people are brutal dilletantes at work and at play. All of Katharine Armstrong's folksy talk doesn't change the fact that the sort of privilege, the sort of self-stratification by wealth we see on display in this episode, is absolutely antithetical to what Americans like to think about their culture and their government. The joys of juvenile, low-tech blood-sport may transcend class barriers, but the heirloom ranches, agribusiness connections, and private medical teams standing by in case the VP gets chest pains, most certainly don't.

There are two Americas, and, even if you're the type that thrill-kills birds at age 65, Dick Cheney doesn't live in yours.

Time for him to go.

That's it. I'm convinced. There's not enough red-state-moderation, damage-control strategic value lurking in all that poor-me-I'm-a-victim-of-my-party's-ideals self-pandering to justify it. Not a single instance where the Senator slips in a quick, under-the-radar defence of his party or its leaders, other than that vague reference to "the issues on which I agree with Democrats -- health care and education": distant, harmless bread-and-butter topics over which a few of Hannity's listeners might have a vaguely Dem-leaning view but over which nobody in his orbit, bombarded by Hannity's incessent talk of the "far left" and national security, will actually cast a vote. Lieberman wasn't even willing to come out and deny that, had he been the deciding vote, he might have cast it for Alito.

It's not even that the interview in itself is terribly damaging. It's a self-selected audience of rabid sanctimonious conservatives who are already lost to a robust partisan-liberal message and Lieberman is simply playing to that particular base. The problem is just that: he's just playing, just indulging himself, and perhaps, more damagingly, he's indulging the possibility that he might someday have to become a political independent if he angers too many activists and donors in his party of first choice. Either way, the big problem is how little substance there is anymore to fill in the yawning gap between this sort of interview and those he gives his more progressive hometown papers, to justify the constant playing of both sides.

It wasn't, I argue, always so. Once, Lieberman was closer to Russ Feingold than to Chuck Grassley in his "principled" idiocyncrasies, directing his considerable legislative and strategic energies toward certain ideals: maintaining funding for federal regulatory agencies in the '90s, say, or giving the Dems a loud voice on homeland security post-911 (however misguided his attempts on that issue turned out to be), or harnessing John McCain's clout toward pushing a politically viable alternative to start hitting Kyoto targets, or just generally being a walking tribute to the idea that progressive pluralism isn't incomptable with classic American puritanism (a more important idea, I'd say, than we non-puritans are willing to admit).

The trick, however, is using one's "bipartisan" credentials to redefine the "partisan" issues you care about as common interests and move on them. Hillary Clinton has famously been indulging in this sort of across-the-aisle, changing-the-tone prudish moderation schtick. You might balk at the strategy itself (I do), but it's hard to doubt that HRC is strategizing as someone whose personal futures and loyalties are harnessed irrevocably to the fate of the Democratic Party, and whose goals must coincide to some extent with those of the interest groups who form the "progressive" agenda in the U.S. and give the Democratic Party its lifeblood. The same can be said for Dianne Feinstein, who might want to tangle with the Constitution over burning the flag, but who also supported the Alito filibuster when enough of her constituents asked her to. It can be said for any number of red state moderates who opt to be Democrats even though it would be far easier to get elected and then to get rich afterward as Republicans.

That's no longer certain regarding Liebs, who seems more dilletantish, more self-pitying, and less attached to his party's hierachy of interests all the time. I don't subscribe to the whole list of sins that pile up against him on various blogs, and maybe to some extent it's a vicious cycle between Liebs and his activist detractors. But if he's has done anything "interesting" since his disgraceful vote against preserving habeas corpus for Gitmo denainees (including their right to challenge the US decision to send them back to their home countries upon release -- which at times could be little more than code for rendition), besides slipping his most recent party leader the shiv on his attempt at leadership during the Alito filibuster (and bragging about it on Hannity!), I've certainly missed it.

So I guess, with some sadness, it really is time for him to go. Although, of course, when it comes to this sort of thing, it's always important to put first things first: taking out "Club For Growth"-Democrat Henry Cueller in the TX-28 primary. This could be one seriously exciting midterm.

One politician who sold his soul defends another.

You have to laugh at the Conservatives' decision to have Peter "not a merger candidate" MacKay of all people take up Emerson's defense:

International Trade Minister David Emerson's controversial leap to the Conservatives was "different" from past party defections and suggests a politician who was "obviously very disillusioned" with the Liberals, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay said Friday.


Different, say, from when Scott Brison crossed the floor after MacKay turned out to be "a merger candidate"? Yes, different because Emerson was obviously very disillusioned with the fact that the Liberals lost the election... almost as disillusioned as he had been at the prospect of winning his seat in liberal Van-Kingsway as a Conservative when only 25% of voters could name-check him.

Stop. Digging. People.


Update: Via Dan Cook, heard the one about the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for La Francophonie and Official Languages who couldn't speak French?:


"We have two official languages in this country. Not just French. Not just English. We have two official languages," said Menzies.

Who better to represent Canada's two official languages than a minister from Quebec for the French and a parliamentary secretary for the English, he said.


Yes, but presumably Josee Verner can, in fact, speak English.

Why now, TNR?

Of course, The New Republic would choose today of all days, after I've defended it, to print this utterly disagreeable piece.

First, it's a very good thing for the Times print at least one "Capital-D Democrat" in its op-ed pages. Democrats suffer mightily from the public perception that all Democratic analysts and nominal partisans who aren't directly on some candidate's payroll are necessarily perpetually-underwhelmed with the party and its leaders. The Maureen Dowd-Richard Cohen worldview is already overrepresented in the newspapers.

Second, even if Vowell's offerings aren't scintillating, that's par for the course. Most op-eds aren't scintillating. I thought Barbara Ehrenreich's stint at the Times produced a series of real stinkers, but I'd still recommend having her back given the fact that very few people could credibly present a similarly respected "hard-liberal" viewpoint on the paper's pages. More generally, there's no reason to expect "whimsical" partisans to be less vacuous faced with the vacuity-inducing job of writing political op-eds on a bi-weekly basis than non-whimsical, non-partisan centrists like Freidman or Kristof or Dowd, all of whom produce self-indulgent groaners on a regular basis. Op-ed pages are what they are: opinion under deadline from people who represent what the Editors decide is a sampling of mainstream thought. (And given that op-ed writers aren't supposed to refer to their own dreams, I must have missed TNR's "Case Against Richard Cohen", since he's been known to do the same thing.)

Third, in dissing Vowell's qualifications for the op-ed page, Keelin McDonell skips quickly over Vowell's four books, the last two of which sold well and the most recent of which, Assassination Vacation, was very well-reviewed (also it was more of a travelogue than a book of humourous essays). Moreover, her criticism misses the point: what's good, and important, about Vowell is intrinsicly tied to her simplicity. What makes her books tick is their light mockery of her own and her friends' and her urban demographics' moderate liberal identity politics -- the sort that raises the Florida recount to the status and timbre of a Greek tragedy; that wallows in the disappointment of seeing her prefered candidate lose each time; that obsesses in the microfilm section of the library over finding the right historical parallel for the Iraq War, that refuses to give up. In her obsessiveness and half-nerdy, half-glamourous idealism, Vowell foreshadowed the Huffington Post like nobody else in America.

There are really few mainstream writers in America who embrace modern pluralistic liberalism uncynically, who are content to simply pick a side in the political war between left and right and admire the good in yours and detest the bad in theirs. Conservatives certainly do it. That Vowell does it too, with just a hint of a wink, is why she touches a nerve with liberals like me. It might not be McDonell's cup of tea, but that's not the same as saying that Vowell's approach doesn't deserve a place at the table. If McDonell gave some indication of knowing why Vowell is popular and could name somebody who does what she does better, I'd be quite willing to listen. As it is, I think she just doesn't get it.


Update: Whoops. Apologies to Ms. McDonell for getting her gender wrong.

Update 2: Ezra makes a good point about TNR's unfortunate tendency to put its up-and-comers through their non-doctrinaire-liberal paces. The archetype for this has surely got to be (speaking of smart writers) T.A. Frank's article on attending a counter-inaugural event and briefly turning into Rambo. If getting a motley band of Counterpunch readers to picket outside TNR's office was the point of the piece, then it was a success. Otherwise it was simply an attention-getting throwaway, from a writer who is normally very good at not letting irreverence fade into throwaway. It reminded me of a much better, much sadder and more serious piece on the "cultural left" by John Judis published in TNR just before the 2000 election. If TNR is so interested in the break between leftism and liberalism, or between partisan liberalism and ideological liberalism, then let figures like Judis with a history in the movements write about it seriously, rather than sending writer-researchers out to produce hatchet jobs to chortle over. There's a certain discipline involved in dealing with movements that are loosely tied to yours but that have no power, to which most other publications on the left adhere. Taking easy shots at easy targets nominally "on your side" isn't counterintution, it's just laziness.

Fluffy.

I wrote a post on the Muslem cartoon controversy that I think is less stupid than the time I tried to prematurely weigh in on the French riots (yes, I know the French system is not pluralistic -- now). But in the interest of its being a sunny day in Vancouver (!) and needing to do school work, instead of finishing it I'm instead going to perpetuate Neil's meme, Ten Views I Hold without Evidence (or at least not more than prejudicial, anecdotal evidence). Except I ended up with 12 such views:


1) Universities and libraries make a fortune off students who leave their copycards in the photocopy machines before being able to return the plastic card for the refund.

2) Energizer batteries are worth the extra couple of bucks over Duracell. Duracell is worth the extra couple of bucks over no-name brands. The no-name brands differ in quality but since they all look the same, I can never remember which brand it is NEVER to buy, making it a lowest-common-denominator trap. The really crappy no-name battery ruins things for the rest of them.

3) With the exception of batteries (and maybe some kinds of canned soup), almost all generic items in North America are just as good as the brand-name items and the cost difference is all in the packaging. This is not true in the UK, where brand name quality structure is as comparably rigid as the class structure.

4) Kate Bush's new song "Mrs. Bartolozzi" is quite possibly the sexiest song ever written. It's about laundry, and about clothes fucking each other in the washing machine. And memory. And some vaguely-hinted at, deeply felt loss that's never spelled out.

5) On the subject of popular music, in the case of male-fronted bands, sublimity comes from being as knowingly, operatically, emotionally stupid as possible without quite crossing the line over to obviously annoying. Also, nothing wrecks a song faster than the false rhyme. Case in point: U2's "All I Want is You" would be the greatest love song in the history of human life if somebody had pointed out during recording that "make" does not rhyme with "grave".

6) The international free flow of small arms (a topic I know almost nothing about but would like to) is comparable to global warming and nuclear proliferation as a problem facing humanity's future, and also much stronger evidence than the oil company perfidity I read so much about that corporations are amoral and that governments aren't terribly interested in controlling them.

7) The Democratic Party's decision to drop its emphasis on tougher gun control in the past five years on the specious premise that it cost Al Gore the 2000 election is simply disasterous from a social-justice perspective. It's terrible from a Canadian perspective too, and the descrepancy in our respective guns laws and their consequences is helping to push us toward adopting a U.S.-style justice and penitentiary system.

8) Despite all that, humanity improves with time and wealth, up to a point where our wealth and the hording of it pushes us hard to the right. We're far better and more functional as a species than we were even a half century ago. But how progressives deal with this trend -- the turn away from traditional liberalism in the face of massive wealth -- will determine how we fare in the next century.

9) When young, everyone should work at least a year at minimum wage without help from family or friends, especially anyone who wants to go into the social sciences and ESPECIALLY anyone who wants to go into economics.

10) Far too much emphasis has been placed by neoliberal and neoconservative governments on acquiring property, and in particular, home ownership over the past 30 years. Houses take up too much space, are illiquid and produce sentimentality that makes them even more illiquid. Now that the damage is done, though, a big government-run-and-regulated actuarily-fair reverse mortgage program will improve welfare enormously when the baby-boomers retire.

11) The internet and the whole blog thing is a powerful and illuminating tool which has drawn a shocking amount of semi-professional political and pundit talent from both the US and Canada, but it often brings out the worst in people. I'm blessed with a small pool of readers and commentators who are friendly and respectful. While any blogger can handle getting yelled and/or sneered at, it bodes very badly for our ability to shape a better society if we can't take each other in good faith and avoid petty persecution complexes in a semi-anonymous medium where there's no "real life" price to pay for small-mindedness.

12) Charles Peters' "Tilting at Windmills" column for the Washington Monthly hardly ever gets mentioned on the liberal blogs, even though it's an absolute treasure-trove of pithy anecdotes about how government and bureaucracy works that you really can't find elsewhere else. Relatedly, Hendrick Hertzberg is still the finest liberal writer in America after all these years. And The New Republic, despite the bile it attracts from the liberal blogosphere, is the closest thing to printed candy for political junkies that exists.


Anyway, if (and only if) they'd like to continue the meme, I tag the exceedingly talented and informative Dave and Cheryl.