Where's the outrage?

Kevin Drum wonders why the rest of the press has downplayed the New York Times' report on the latest leaked British memo providing more evidence that Blair and, especially, Bush were screamingly clueless about what invading Iraq would entail:

Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.


That they were quite prepared to manipulate international politics to provoke a confrontation, regardless of the state of WMDs:

Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.


That all Bush's "disarm of face the consequences" talk, including Powell's presentation to the U.N. which was just then being drawn up, was just so much lip-service to the international community's belief that conflict would best be avoided:

"The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin."


That Blair still clung to the "last resort" ideal and that Bush was quite prepared to bullshit him too:

[The memo] reported: "Bush agreed [with the need to push for a second U.N. resolution]. He commented that he was not itching to go to war, but we could not allow Saddam to go on playing with us. At some point, probably when we had passed the second resolutions — assuming we did — we should warn Saddam that he had a week to leave. We should notify the media too. We would then have a clear field if Saddam refused to go."


That the Brits' hesitancy was no match for Bush's ambition for war:

The document concludes with Mr. Manning still holding out a last-minute hope of inspectors finding weapons in Iraq, or even Mr. Hussein voluntarily leaving Iraq. But Mr. Manning wrote that he was concerned this could not be accomplished by Mr. Bush's timeline for war.


And, of course, that the bullshit will never stop:

On Sunday, Frederick Jones, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said the president's public comments were consistent with his private remarks made to Mr. Blair. "While the use of force was a last option, we recognized that it might be necessary and were planning accordingly," Mr. Jones said.

"The public record at the time, including numerous statements by the President, makes clear that the administration was continuing to pursue a diplomatic solution into 2003," he said. "Saddam Hussein was given every opportunity to comply, but he chose continued defiance, even after being given one final opportunity to comply or face serious consequences. Our public and private comments are fully consistent."


Faced with all this, Kevin asks:

Is the "collective yawn" from the media because everyone figures this is old news? Because it comes from a competitor and no one wants to credit them? Because no one really cares anymore?

Or are we now so jaded by the relentless mendacity of the Bush administration that high level lying just isn't worth reporting these days? What other explanation is there for this not being front page news in Los Angeles and Washington DC as well as New York?


All of that, I think; but it's also the natural corrollary to the "Bush is over" mood infiltrating the press. It's no surprise; Bush was supposed to be "over" from the moment he was sworn in. With the exception of a few hacks at the Washington Times and blowhard cable pundits, the press is fundamentally not interested in the Bushies. They don't understand them. They're not interested in torturing or analyzing them. Bush's role from the moment he came on the political scene was as a foil to punish the Clinton Democrats, all of whom official Washington found very interesting, if not in a good way.

911 changed that, and Bush's "strong leader" image, then the buildup to war in Iraq, gave reporters something to think about, a theme, and provided an easy storyline, and a source of comfort for Americans in (as the White House put it) "times of change". In 2004, the press again focussed on the more interesting candidate -- John Kerry -- with Bush again as the foil to the ironies and complexities of the 60s generation and the New Politics aftermath. This time, the foil was Bush as bedrock rather than Bush as bipartisan middle-America reformer. But, again, he was just the default, not very interesting except as the alternative to the fascinating mess of US institutional liberalism. That is, of course, what interests the "liberal media" -- just not to the benefit of liberals.

Bush-as-bedrock, as "steady leadership", was an aberration of course. And now that it's faded -- now that Bush is back to being just the harmless mediocrity he was in 1999 (though, it turns out, not so harmless afterall armed when with a frightened electorate, a weak opposition, and high approval ratings) -- most of the pundiocracy just wants to forget the whole damn thing, at least beyond watching the situation unravel in Iraq. Domestically, the only question that matters is how long until the primaries. It was, essentially, always thus.

Damn.

I should just change the title of this blog to "Go Read Dave". Today, Galloping Beaver catalogues the myriad problems with Harper's proposed GST cut as supposedly responsible fiscal/social policy.

My big objection to cutting the GST has been that it smells like a classic New Right measure designed to tie the governmment's revenue-raising hands over the long run. A highly visible and unpopular tax, the GST, once reduced (and if, as has been recently suggested, the cut leads to a more serious reduction in federal revenues than the Tories claim in their budget), will be almost impossible to raise again. This, in turn, paves the way for regressive income and/or payroll tax hikes down the road once those lovely, essential budget surplusses that Paul Martin worked so hard for dry up. (And like most good things that get handed from neoliberal to New Right governments, I'm guessing they're quite likely to do so.)

But this was a bad (i.e. ineffective) argument to make, even to progressives, during the election. So I ususally just fell back on waving my arms and yelling THE TORIES WILL TAKE AWAY THE LIBERALS' INCOME TAX CUT! HIDDEN AGENDA! HIDDEN AGENDA! STEPHEN HARPER OWNS A DRAGON! like the good Martin Liberal I was. Three months too late, Dave hands me all the intellectually honest, non-demagoguic talking points I needed. Thanks Dave.

North America's oldest cliche.

Via Michael J. Stickings, somebody should tell Scott McLellan that getting the Canadian Prime Minister's name wrong is sooooo 1999.

After the revolution.

One of the problems with the Great Man Theory of history (or the positive reformist/ progressive side of it) is that there are so few genuinely great (combining "good" and "powerful") men out there. People are so mediocre by nature, and the ambition mixed with charisma that make a successful political leader doesn't seem to change that. There are plenty of examples of good men out there, but good men go wobbly or get else corrupted by the forces that work on them or can't hold on to power. There are historical examples of leaders who get a lock on power, don't go wobbly, channel rather than react to outside forces. But pretty often, they're tyrants or lunatics or both.

Anyway, watching Ukrainian voters reward the party of Viktor Yanukovych -- head villain of the ballot-stuffing, poison-dispensing retrograde forces in the 2004 Ukraine presidential election (or at least the version of it told in the West, which I take at face value) -- with a plurality of the seats in the Ukranian parliament last week was sort of dispiriting. I know it's not terribly surprising, with the two anti-Putin parties splitting the Western, Ukranian-speaking vote. Yanukovych's party actually took a far smaller share of the vote than Yanukovych did in the first-round presidential balloting in 2004. But it's still a pretty ironic denouement from the romance and good-government euphoria of the Orange Revolution. Keeping up that kind of euphoria on the road to wealth and progress would have required, at the very least, a genuinely "great" leader. Yushchenko probably just isn't that rarest of beasts.

Here, though, are two perspectives on the subject that make me feel silly about my initial bemusement. First John Gray on "the hard slog of democracy":

When Leonid Kravchuk led Ukraine out of the embrace of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was not for the love of democracy. It was to satisfy the nationalist instincts of a country that did not relish being effectively ruled by Big Brother to the east, even if Big Brother was Russian-speaking, as were most of those who ruled Ukraine.

The essential power structure of Ukraine did not change under Kravchuk or Kuchma. As had happened for the better part of 70 years before so-called independence, power was held by former Communists, most of them Russian-speaking, who had scant regard for democracy and even less for market economics – whatever that was.

So the essentials of Ukrainian life changed only with the disputed election of Yushchenko in November 2004, and even then the change was not as profound as it first seemed. His support did not extend to the Russian-speaking east and south of the country, where most of the people in power were still the old Communists.

If democracy had been an assumption of Ukraine life for decades, Yushchenko might have been able to work with his Orange revolutionary partner, his first prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko; and she with him. If Russians had not made Russian the language of power in Ukraine long before the Soviet revolution, the country would not have become a textbook victim of cultural imperialism.


And, on a more positive note, Scott MacMillan writing in Slate:

But politicians weren't the real heroes of the revolution. Everyday Ukrainians were. Political speech has been set free under the new regime, and perhaps more important, Ukrainians are finally beginning to craft their national identity. "They were passive and shit on for years," Dickinson told me. "Finally they stood up, and they won. That's ingrained in the history of the nation."

Chalk the negativity up to the national temperament, but there's no denying things have changed. Sunday's vote received a clean bill of health from international observers and went off without a hitch. Yes, corrupt politicians and sleaze-ridden oligarchs will likely remain as easy to find in Ukraine as four-inch stiletto heels, but there's no going back to the stifling days of Kuchma and his cronies. Give them enough vodka, and you can probably get Ukrainians to sing about that.


Maybe the most romantic thing about history is how little fairytale romance there really is.

Electability update.

Needless to say, I'm honoured to have been chosen as one of Lance Mannion's "guest stars" this week(ish), and sorry I don't have more time to post. Lance has his own post up about that nebulous concept, "electability". It's full of good stuff. The only thing I would quibble with (at least without wandering into the no man's land of whether the 2004 election was sufficiently clean) is Lance's claim that 40% of voters are up for grabs; I'd say it's more like 20% (though Kevin's most recent post suggests it might be growing again, to the Dems' benefit).

This part of Lance's post pretty much says it all:

Voters do care that a candidate stands for something.

They want her to stand for them.


And with a pool of about 100 million voters that might possibly be wooed by a main party candidate, that can potentially mean just about anything. I like to think of it as a question of locating and staking out a tenable position on the spectrum between unthreatening and inspiring. Alienating is the flip side of charismatic; milquetoast is the flip side of inclusive. In trying to map out a position sufficiently inclusive but not totally compromising, it's going to be pretty damn easy to err too much one way or the other. Especially since circumstances will work to push that sweet spot up and down the dial. I still think, in 2004, the Dems could have won by running cleanly and angrily against the decision to invade Iraq, with the whole Democratic chorus just bashing and bashing the White House and the hash it had made in the international community and the Middle East. I think the Kerryites lost for being too cautious, too accomodating of American ambivolance about Big Man Bush. But I don't think that was true in 2000, despite the fact that Gore Inc ran a far more cautious, accomodating, mushy campaign than Kerry did (or likely ever would). The electorate wanted mush and "bipartisan" optimism (and a solid dose of sanctimony, which it got from both campaigns) in 2000; they wanted clarity and control, even if it came packaged in a "swift boat" of partisan anger, in 2004. Both the last Democratic campaigns missed their respective sweet spots -- critical mass -- by just enough to make all the difference. But of course, like any junkie with an opinion, I could be wrong -- and could be very wrong about what and who will work for 2008 as well. At any rate, this "electability" stuff certainly ain't easy.

How cool is this?

Jimmy Carter blogs and responds to questions over at Daily Kos. There really is something deliciously democratic about it.

Conservatarianism.

Scott Lemieux finds Glenn Reynolds up to his old tricks -- opining on how unseemly it is for illegal immigrants to march in LA, "making demands on the polity".

What I find remarkable about this is that, just a few days ago, Insta declared the Kansas legislature's decision to override Governor Sebelius' veto to allow Kansans to carry concealed weapons a "civil rights victory".

Whatever you think of the ultimate merits of allowing people to carry concealed weapons, their doing so has got to represent a "demand on the polity" -- your specific right to carry a gun overriding my generic right not to have to worry that the twitchy guy next to me on the bus is packing.

Really, this is the very essence of conservatarianism: freedom for wealthy white guys who can afford private security systems (and the $150 processing fee for a concealed gun permit) to do whatever the hell they want. And yes, that includes the God-given right to buy the sort of cheap vegetables that are only feasible when the pickers are paid third-world wages and have no worker protection or ability to organize politically at all. And to buy those vegetables without then having to endure pictures of uppity peasant revolts, or more bad news from Iraq, every time you open the goddamn newspaper. Is it really so much to ask? And don't give Glenn that bleeding-heart liberal nonsense either: didn't he tell us he once voted for Gary Hart?


p.s. Instapajamaline weekly bonus: Roger L Simon accusing a fellow human being of "pomposity" right before declaring that "the war against Islamofascism is not about George Bush, despite what some liberals might think."

That electability thang.

Walter Shapiro recently wrote:

In the most telling bipartisan effort to consign George W. Bush to irrelevancy, the 2008 presidential race has already begun -- six months earlier than any comparable contest in modern history.

Has it ever! And to the extent it means that Bush is over, it's fine with me. Anyway, trolling around Friday afternoon, I stumbled on these two interesting diaries by Kossack RonK Seattle, polling the Kos community about who is the most and least electable of the major Dems. According to his respondents, the least electable major Dem is Hillary Clinton, followed by John Kerry. Their most electable major Dem is Al Gore, followed by Russ Feingold and Wes Clark.

Without further ado, my totally subjective ramblings on the subject:

Least electable potential candidate: John Kerry. I remain a fan, but Kerry (a) was never very "electable" to begin with and (b) is now tainted with the "loser" label. Kerry could beat Bush in a rematch, and might even do better than some other potential candidates against Bush. But the story when he goes up against any fresh-faced Republican is how the GOP is "moving on" while us Dems are "mired in the past". Short of a Brownback- or Tancredo-style wingnut winning the GOP nomination, I really don't see Kerry beating anybody in their potential field. More likely, he'd lose embarrassingly.

First runner-up in this category: Joe Biden. Biden is smart, but he comes off as arrogant, without the requisite religosity with which US pols usually back up their arrogance. The press already shows more disdain for him than they did for Kerry and almost as much as they did for Gore. The signs of reversing this trend look bad.

Second runner-up in this category: Russ Feingold. I'm open to being wrong about this. Feingold surprises me with his media presence. And I don't think it matters that he's a divorced single Jew. The bigger problem is that he's a wonk, and his issues are enormously technical ("Section 215 of the Patriot Act"). I expect the Republicans will be able to demagogue him on national security, and that the wonk-averse press will play along, and will render him unpalatable to relatively uninformed, middle-of-the-road voters. It also doesn't help that the party establishment doesn't care for him. He'll be leaked against terribly and some locally popular party hacks will probably refuse to support him. In the ferociously divided country as it stands now, this could be detrimental.

Third runner-up in this category: Bill Richardson. Fun to watch, but more inately gaffe-prone and self-aggrandizing than Biden, and without the counterbalancing gravitas. Being a swing-state governor with a decent biography (save the Lewinsky connection and wandering-eye allegations) raise his profile a little bit. A very little bit.


High-potential, high-risk: Wes Clark. I'm surprised how little Clark-buzz there is right now. Not only is he obviously considering another run at the nom, but he could potentially dessimate the GOP on national security in a national election. Clark makes me nervous, just like he did in the 2004 primary. I could see him being successfully portrayed -- maybe correctly -- as a loose cannon, and, worse, a loose cannon closely associated with high-intensity military and diplomatic issues. I also can't see him winning the nomination. But if he did win it, he's the only candidate I can potentially see humilitaing the GOP (55%+ of the vote)... or being humilitated himself.

Runners-up in this category: John Edwards, Al Gore. I could see either of these two either galvanizing the Democratic coaltion, such that its members drag their usually-abstaining neighbours to the polls to produce a relative landslide (52%+ of the vote); or being total, embarrassing flameouts (<47% of the vote). They're both enormously uneven campaigners and media presences. For instance, I remember seeing Edwards on Larry King with his wife in 2004 and thinking he could walk away with the election if only Kerry would stand down. But, then, his nomination acceptance speech at the convention was a slow-motion trainwreck (the worst, in fact, since Gore's in 1992). Both inspire enormous enthusiasm in their supporters (Here's looking at you, Neil). Like Feingold, they're issue-wonks, so the success of their campaigns would depend on their ability to make the electorate focus on their issues. I want to believe a Democrat could ride poverty and/or environmental degradation to victory but, despite the blog title, I'm, well, cynical. On the other hand, the payoff of making either of these two president might be worth the risk. I don't know yet.


Underrated: Hillary Clinton. I am wildly unenthuiastic about a Clinton presidential candidacy. In fact, "wildly unenthusiastic" understates the case. But the "she can't win / Dole in '96" comparisons that will inevitably be made are wrong. The pros: she's cool as a cucumber. She doesn't make political mistakes. Because of the silliness she inspires on the right, she's a partisan force without having to act partisan: usually the catch-22 of candidates facing a ferociously partisan electorate who swear they hate all things partisan. She could hold together most of the Democratic coalition, including the antiwar vote, which will be desperate to turf the neocons. Democrats already come very close in national elections despite doing appallingly among white men even in blue states. I don't see HRC doing much worse in this demographic (and it doesn't matter how red-state men vote.) The question will be whether HRC can win back the white urban/suburban female vote who switched from Gore in 2000 to Bush in 2004. There's no guarantee, but I see no reason why she'd be less likely to do so than any of the men in contention for the nomination.

Runner-up in this category: Tom Vilsack. I don't mind Vilsack being totally buzzless right now. I hoped he would use the DLC chairmanship to restore a little bit of soul to the organization, but sadly he's seems to simply be dishing out more of the watery arrogance the DLC is known for. But he's also a successful, reasonably media-savvy swing-state governor, and I still believe that beneath the DLC veneer lurks a Democratic soul. Maybe he'll let it peek out at some point.


Correctly perceived as reasonably electable: Mark Warner. So far, Warner has struck me as depressingly mushy and boring -- though any red-state multimillionaire capitalist who chooses to become and remain a Dem and spend his college years working for the DNC gets points in my book. It's a lot easier to be a Republican. Warner is bland, but I'm not sure being bland has anything to do with being unelectable. I'm not sure it doesn't either, which makes me a little hesitant.

Runner-up in this category: Evan Bayh. Unlike Warner, Bayh has been making a concerted effort not to be mushy, a plus. But he's always struck me as a horrible opportunist and I wonder if that wouldn't become a meme were he to run, as it did for Kerry who is (in my view) much less of one.


And the kicker:

Most electable: Tom Daschle. Flame away, but starting from the standard tenets of "electability" -- successful in a red state, non-polarizing, inately unthreatening -- Daschle seems to me less boring and more inately appealing on TV than Warner, Bayh or Vilsack. He's also saying more interesting, forthright things at the moment. The unflattering contrast he makes with Harry Reid will only matter to activists. A Democrat needs credibility on Iraq, and Daschle's work trying to pass the Biden-Lugar alternative to the Bush-Gephardt blank cheque puts him ahead of Hillary Clinton and several of the other senators on the list. As former majority leader, he has strong, long-standing ties to the party and managed to maintain a profile as a mainstream liberal in the reddest of states. Daschle isn't exactly uncorruptable and his wife's lobbying could be a problem. (In fact, I'd tap it as a big problem if it weren't for the fact that recent, still-unfolding history suggests that corruption charges are likely to be moot against any Republican candidate, including McCain.)

I don't see him winning the nomination, but I can see him surprising us in the primary. And I see him see him as reliably competitive in the general election if he did win.


All this is, of course, totally subjective. Thoughts are welcome.

Book blogging.

Occassionally, I can get sucked in by a book to the point where it's hard to put it down at night to go to sleep, or to work (or to blog). Usually it happens with cheapish fiction -- David Guterson Snow Falling on Ceders or Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved come to mind. Usually, though, I read books in an effort to know stuff rather than to enjoy myself.

Anyway, while I'm a decade behind the curve on this, David Remnick's 1993 book Lenin's Tomb, 520-odd small-print pages about the end of the Soviet Union, is the first totally addictive non-fiction book I've ever read. It's suberb. I don't even know what else I could say that would do it justice except that I had no idea journalistic memoir could be like this.

What liberal fundamentalists get right.

Pappy Bush clowning about athiests is plenty amusing, but on the subject of intolerance, this (via The Plank) is unspeakably horrible:

Following a death-to-gays fatwa issued last October by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, death squads of the Badr Corps have been systematically targeting gay Iraqis for persecution and execution, gay Iraqis say. But when they ask for help and protection from U.S. occupying authorities in the Green Zone, the secure area officialdom has carved out within Baghdad, gays Iraqis are met with indifference and derision.

...Badr militants are entrapping gay men via Internet chat rooms,” Hili said. “They arrange a date, and then beat and kill the victim. Males who are unmarried by the age of 30 or 35 are placed under surveillance on suspicion of being gay, as are effeminate men. They will be investigated and warned to get married.

...There is great fear that the Badr Corps-SCIRI campaign against gay people will become official Iraqi policy, especially if the report that a top SCIRI politician may become the new prime minister turns out to be true. Under the Iraqi Constitution-virtually written by the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and his associates-Sharia law, which mandates death for homosexuals, is the foundation of all Iraqi law.


Note that these attacks aren't geared toward or reacting to a pereceived need to control public behaviour. They're designed to systematically root out homosexuals, even those who aren't "out" in Iraqi society. Given that homosexuality itself (if not the way individuals choose to practice is) is almost certainly genetic, there's not even techically a difference between this and ethnic genocide.

Which makes the US complicit in proto-genocide:

“These assaults and murders have been reported to the Green Zone, but the Americans don't want to upset the religious authorities, and so they do nothing or treat gay Iraqis with contempt or as an object of humor,” Hili explained, adding that the reports to U.S. authorities were made by underground gay activists.

The U.S. has long sought to court Ayatollah Sistani, and gave its approval for SCIRI's participation in the current coalition government. SCIRI has since brokered the current plan for talks between the U.S. and Iran over Iranian interference in Iraq, a plan much in the headlines last week.


Digression: I used not to support legalizing gay marriage in any country wherein a majority of the public did not agree with the position. I had good debates on the subject with open-minded "liberal fundamentalists" who did support it, polls be damned. They were right and I was wrong.*

I changed my mind about gay marriage about six months ago because of stuff like this. You can't be half-hearted in opposing this worldview. You have to go the whole way in forging the alternative: full, symbolic equality. This isn't my preference: in a near-perfect world, I'd want the government completely out of the business of therapeutic symbolism except on the broadest, most generic levels. But just like there's no room for Holocaust denial or anti-semetic polemic in a decent society given the historical reality of the Holocaust and the enduring pathologies that led to it, there's no room for Sam Brownback's nonviolent bigottry in a world in which the exact same bigottry, founded on pretty much the exact same tenets, curdles this easily and overtly into violence just half a world away.

When Western homosexuals read the news they see pure unadulterated hate-killing being systematically carried out against people just like them, and the West mum (regarding Iran or in much of the Middle East) or, worse, complicit. The toppling of Saddam created this situation, at least in Iraq. There's no getting around that fact. There's no glossing over it. There's no fudging it by appealing to Saddam's other atrocities (or Sistani's other merits) as if they negate the awfulness of this dilemma. This is not a political or material dispute; dealing with Sharia politicians who would have the state murder gays is not a question of acknowledging the awful truths of global realpolitik or tiptoeing around repression in the name of stability. The gay-bashing in Iraq (or anywhere else) is pure in-group selfishness brought to its bloody, untenable extreme. It's simply intolerable. We don't support it, but we precipitated it, and now we swallow and tolerate it. Then you see Sam Brownback's creepy puritanism or Bush promoting the FMA to score cheap political points off his decadent, selfish conservative audiences, and you wonder -- gay or straight -- how great the distance is between our bigottry, our zenophobic populism, and theirs.

Sometimes there's nothing to do but oppose -- full-throated, demanding, obnoxious -- because anything less is appeasement of the very worst we can be.


* Actually, what I argued and still ideally would prefer is to see a broader form of civil unions defined for any emotionally and/or financially dependent couple independent of any declared or implicit sexual relationship. But that's a whole other topic of discussion, and its feasibility depends on the non-existent postulated near-perfect world in which, say, Sam Brownback and not al-Sistani or Ahmadinejad, represented the extreme of politically acceptable bigottry.

Good fucking God (no pun intended version)

I rarely read anything anymore that really, truly surprises me. But this, via Kevin Drum, manages it.

Actually, what's shocking about Kevin's post isn't the information that Americans distrust athiests (I expect the respondants imagine an athiest as someone who spits on the Bible in public and stuff like that, not somebody who just quietly doesn't believe or is agnostic or "non-religious"), it's this bit of political history from 1987:

Robert Sherman: Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?

George H.W. Bush: No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

Sherman (somewhat taken aback): Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation of state and church?

Bush: Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I'm just not very high on atheists.


Wow. The stupidity, not to mention pure cynicism, of that exchange is just staggering. It's also a useful reminder to naifs like me, who sometimes look back in wonder at the pure distain Poppy Bush once evoked from liberals (from TNR's endorsement of Dukakis in 1988: "That this mediocre man [Bush] and his sub-mediocre running mate stand poised to become president and vice president of the United States is a sad comment on America's decadent political culture") that the apple really doesn't fall far from the tree. Actually, it's sort of interesting that outright athiest-baiting seems to have been dropped from the lexicon of "compassionate conservatism" -- Massachusetts-bashing, sure, but not athiest-bashing. Also that Dick Cheney seems to be an aberation in the modern Republican cycle of the vice president as small-man moral scold to the big man strong leader president (Bush to Reagan; Quayle to Bush.) If anything, it's the opposite with Bush and Cheney (i.e. big man kowtows to small man to prove small man's inner bigness).

I wonder though: could a mainstream Republican get away with those remarks today, even in light of the numbers reported in the University of Michigan survey? The thing is, Poppy Bush was almost certainly just pandering a la Dubya and the Federal Marriage Amendment. But Brownback and probably George Allen surely believe those words in the core of their souls. So will we get to find out in the 2008 GOP primary? Or would Lee Atwater's ghost advise his clients to keep their traps shut (and would they listen)? That might tell us something about "tolerance".

Somehow, it sounded unlikely.

JPod at The Corner:

Hugh Hewitt gracefully and with calm understatement eviscerates the Washington Post's Harold Meyerson.


Possibly JPod is being sarcastic. But on the off chance he isn't, let's look at the columns in question.

Meyerson is writing in the Post about the threat of escalating outsourcing to the American middle class standard of living, basing his arguments on two recent studies by center-left economists Alan Blinder and Bradford Jensen & Lori Kletzer. They argue that advances in globalization and information transmission are making white-collar service and R&D-type jobs, including highly skilled ones, increasingly vulnerable to the same sort outsourcing that has lowered wages and displaced jobs in traditional manufacturing jobs like automaking. The result, Meyerson argues, is a continuing and potentially accelerating hollowing-out of middle class lifestyle and a reduction in the return to, and hence the incentive to acquire, the sort of skills that enhance productivity (i.e. engineering rather than divorce lawyering).

Meyerson writes about aggregates too: "The threat of globalization and the reality of de-unionization have combined to make the raise, for most Americans, a thing of the past. Between 2001 and 2004, median household income inched up by a meager 1.6 percent, even as productivity was expanding at a robust 11.7 percent." In the current American Prospect he fleshes out his argument, and provides additional supporting statistics:

The decline in income is hardly limited to manufacturing. A new survey of the nation’s 361 metropolitan areas, which account for 86.3 percent of the nation’s GDP, has found that the average wage of jobs lost in the recession of 2001-2003 was $43,629, while the average wage of jobs created in 2004-2005 was $34,378 -- a tidy 21 percent decline... Indeed, as Northwestern University economists Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon have demonstrated in a recent study, over the past couple of decades, all the income from productivity gains have gone to the wealthiest 10 percent of our countrymen.


Now, ready for Hewitt's powerful "evisceration" of this? Well, it apparently rests entirely on the fact" that the WaPo's current "advertising pitch" is touting Washington DC's great wealth as a reason to consider moving to the city.

To be fair, I think Hugh's wants us to look and reflect on those big "average household income" numbers quoted for the top ten American cities, the idea being that they don't square well with Meyerson's doom and gloom about falling incomes and rising insecurity. But who is especially concentrated in big cities? Wealthy people (as well as desperately poor people). And which measure of prosperity is enormously sensitive to the inclusion of super rich urban dwellers? "Average", also known as the "mean" (though don't tell Roger L Simon). Briefly, if the median household income of a city is $50,000, even the very poorest of the 50% of households below that level can't drag down the average by more than about $35,000 per household. But incomes aren't bounded above, so the 50% of households above the median can potentially haul the average up a lot. Throw in a few billionaires, and the city-wide mean becomes very unrepresentative of the typical standard of living.

So what does the ad tell us? Well, start with the fact that readers of newspapers tend to be relatively affluent to begin with. Then add the fact that this particular ad is obviously targeted at the most affluent members of their readership -- those who might be attracted by the confluence of other wealthy people in Washington D.C., or specifically in the rich parts of town, where the city-wide mean is more likely to approch the local median. But Meyerson isn't arguing that, in the near-term anyway, current trends are reducing aggregate affluence. He's arguing that these trends -- the global pressures forcing down wages, discouraging North workers from acquiring productive skills and declining unionization rates among occupations that remain non-outsourcable -- are concentrating wealth and security... on the sort of people Hewitt's "eviscerating" ad is geared at.

Maybe I'm being charitable in assuming that Hewitt (and JPod) are being sophistic rather than ignorant. Hell, in Hewitt's case, I definitely am. But I hate to think conservatives are really this stupid. How to manage globalization and the shifting of returns to productivity from labour to capital is the major debate of our time, our era. Meyerson is holding up his end of the debate. Marc Schmidt, from a somewhat more neoliberal perspective, made some appealing arguments on the same subject recently, focussing on redirecting the returns to capital (through taxation and redistribution of stock ownership) rather than trying to shift them them back to wage-labour, per Meyerson's ideas. Both liberal approaches are valuable. Conservative pundits might have important things to add to the discussion too. But we won't know as long as Hewitt is telling us to LOOK AT THE BIG SHINY NUMBERS and JPod, who ought to know better, is encouraging him. It's tragic, really.

Update: Shit. While I was in seminar this afternoon and before posting, Jonathan Chait already made all the same arguments. I swear, I didn't rip the above off his post.

Staying optimistic about the midterms.

Just a quick blog today to recommend Chris Bowers' post yesterday addressing the niggling problem that Democrats almost always lead in the generic midterm balloting polls until near the actual election, then blow it anyway. Chris convinces me that the upcoming 2006 midterms really are different.

Anecdotally, I'd add that even forgiving, accomodating me thought the Dems to be barely worth the trek down to the polling station in the fall of 2002. As frustrating as the party can be, I don't think that way now.

Three tidbits.

All good.

First, Kate O'Beirne at The Corner thinks the GOP Senate is in trouble:

Just spoke to an experienced GOP analyst who is fretting that the Democrats have a real chance of picking up 3 to 4 seats this November. He sees Ohio, PA and RI as "gone,"...GOP opportunities? MN, WA, and NE.

Ohio is "gone"? Could be that the GOP analyst just means that DeWine is a RINO, but it reads like he actually thinks Brown is going to beat Dewine. Interesting. If I could choose one pickup for November, it would be Brown taking out Dewine, so here's hoping he's right. As for Cantwell's WA seat, it's looking pretty safe.

Second, I got a chance to watch Feingold's Charlie Rose appearance, and he really is impressive: straight-shooting, articulate and the rest of it. I'm still not feeling that charitable about Feingold's refusal to consult with his caucus over censure, but watching him talk does get my all excited about how dangerous Feingold's going to be to the GOP if the Dems take the Senate and grabe control of the committees.

Third, I was really happy to see the Liberals have set the date for their nominating convention at the end of the year, and seem to be feeling a few of their oats again. People are throwing their hats in, and I'm already getting "meet and greet" spam from various hopefuls! Also, true to form, after initial disorganization and waffling around, the Libs have done (what I consider, subjectively) the right thing, backing the Tories on Afghanistan.

Obliging Ezra.

Ezra asks his friends to link to his first ever cover story, about Al Gore. How can I refuse?

It's a really good piece. Personally, I think Gore's 2000 effort is underrated and his chance of ever mounting another credible national campaign is overrated by a lot of my favourite bloggers, including Ezra. But the only substantive comment I have is on this part:

In endorsing Dean, Gore did more than signal support for the chaotic, democratized nature of the campaign. For a wonk like Gore, the endorsement of Dean -- the DLC’s bête noire during the 2004 primaries -- was an embrace of the new “it” Democrat. If the DLC’s “New Democrats,” led by Clinton and Gore, were the buzzworthy wing of the Democratic Party in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the 2004 election ushered in their successors, led by Dean.

Call them the New New Democrats, MoveOn Democrats, or whatever you want. They were the liberal response to Clinton’s triangulation and Bush’s ascension. Gleefully pugilistic, fiercely opposed to the Iraq War, deeply distrustful of a “corporate media” they believe screwed Gore specifically and Democrats generally, and proudly unapologetic about the progressive agenda, they found their first champion in Dean and, in Gore, their most surprising convert.


I basically buy this narrative (although I'm inclined to believe Gore that he supported Dean because of Iraq). But how much really has changed? Dean wasn't and isn't that "liberal" in the old-school sense. Often during the 90s, he placed himself to the right of the Clinton White House on fiscal matters (and military matters, if we equate hawkishness with being on the right). Yes, Dean was a free trade skeptic by the time he ran for president in 2004 (actually, from about 1998). But Gore moved left on trade (quietly) in 1999 as well. So did John Kerry. It's not that politicians, at least the ones worth supporting, have no core beliefs. But their views are shaped by the political and ascendent intellectual forces working on them, the times in which they campaign and woo their coalitions, and the demands and counter-arguments of those coaltions. By 2000, Gore probably owed more to Joseph Stiglitz' crtique of go-go global capitalism (Stiglitz, btw, is quite nice to Gore in his excoriation of Clinton Admin globalization policy The Roaring Nineties) than to Larry Summers, Joel Hyatt and "the end of economics".

Adjust for these forces and the new Atari Democrats are pretty much like the old Atari Democrats -- idealistic, hyper-rationalist, secular* technophiles, combining a fierce partisanship (and judging by everything I've read, Gore was basically the Clinton Admin's house partisan) with systematic challenges to industrial-era liberal orthodoxy. I find it all very appealing in the way an upper-middle-class blogging grad school student would. But the distance between Gore-Hart-Wirth neoliberalism of the late '80s -- the sort that "went to the South Pole and shot home movies of penguins playing on the ice surrounded by senators in parkas and wrote about it for The New Republic" -- and the milky third-way politics of fake consensus and managed conflict that defined the 90s (including Howard Dean's Vermont, what Clintonism would have been if Republicans were weaker and/or reasonable) and the new hyper-partisan netroots-fuelled Democratic party (as symbolized, perhaps by Dean's DNC and maybe also by Gore's little renaissance) is probably a lot shorter than we think.


* Secular by American standards, anyway. I'm thinking of the rather unsubtle references to evolution Gore stuffs into all his speeches. I don't think it's an accident.

Last throes.

I've thought for a while that all this discussion of whether Iraq was falling or has fallen into a "civil war" was a maddeningly artificial dispute. It depends completely on what you consider the definition of "civil war", and nobody claiming the situation to be one way or the other seems able to supply one.

Yesterday, for instance, former Iraqi PM Iyad Allawi said: "We are losing each day, as an average, 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

Chuck Hagel agreed: "I think … the former prime minister is correct. I think we have had a low-grade civil war going on in Iraq, certainly the last six months, maybe the last year. Our own generals have told me that privately."

Ok, so cue Victor Davis Hanson to explain how the Romans would have laughed at such paltry figures in the provinces. Or Roger L. Simon to explain how a typical day's worth of casualties in Iraq is no greater than the carnage during last year's Thanksgiving rush on the California freeways. Or Glenn Reynolds to chalk anyone's contention that Iraq is a clusterfuck up to a pre-existing irrational loathing of Bush. And how this is all the perfidy and liberal lack of patriotism we've come to expect from the stab-in-the-back MSN.

The problem is that, somewhere buried deep in all this stupidity, Instapajamaline actually have a (minor) case that the fixation on "civil war" is unnecessarily ropey and overstates the extent of recent deterioration on the ground. If Hagel is right, why wasn't the press obsessed with "civil war" six months ago? What about during the bloodbath going on during the months leading up to the American and Iraqi elections? Why wasn't "civil war" a US campaign issue? I know, I know: back then it wasn't Shia killing back in an organized way, or not so openly. And there were still political benchmarks ahead. But it's really not worth arguing about, defending the existence "civil war" every time the casualty rate drops down to 20 or so for a few days or somebody files a happy story about a school being painted. Arguing about it is just a perfect outlet for Instapajamaline sophistry -- which, frankly, seems to be all they've got left at this point. They dispute and get passive-aggressively outraged over the terms of the debate as a way of avoiding acknowledging the actual human tragedy involved -- not to mention that precipitating mammoth error in judgement on the US political establishment's and particularly the Administration's part.

In a way, it reminds me of what Mark Benjamin wrote about "the return of body counts":

Traditionally, the Army's job is to take ground and hold it, a clear way to mark victory or defeat. Bogged down in atypical warfare with no tangible measure of progress, US commanders in Vietnam used the body count to show the alleged destruction of enemy forces. "To make the obvious comparison, you land in Normandy in June 1944 and you can liberate Paris in August and show that you are making progress," says historian and journalist Stanley Karnow. "You can make a measure of progress in a conventional war by showing you are pushing your front lines against the enemy. But in Vietnam, there were no front lines." a lot like the American military's obsession with casualty figures in the early days of the Vietnam conflict.


The same sort of thing. Meaningless figures. A meaningless phrase. The purpose is to distract, propagandize, to stop us from thinking too much, to trivialize the dispute into something entirely pedantic, academic, blah, blah.

But then I read this:

The vice president, speaking on CBS' "Face the Nation," said that "terrorists" in Iraq wanted to provoke civil war, but added, "I don't think they've been successful."

"That's been their strategy all along," Cheney said, "but my view would be they've reached a stage of desperation from their standpoint."


OK, fine. I was wrong. It's a civil war.

Still right, three years later.

Judging from a procrastination-cruise around the blogs, the third anniversary of the start of the Iraq War has been quite effective at bringing the InstaPajamaline chorus to a hyper-sophistic crescendo. With that in mind, here's Bob Herbert, writing for the NYT op-ed page on March 20, 2003:

Ready for the Peace?

Now that U.S. strikes against Iraq have begun, we should get rid of one canard immediately, and that's the notion that criticism of the Bush administration and opposition to this invasion imply in some sense a lack of support or concern for the men and women who are under arms.

The names of too many of my friends are recorded on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial for me to tolerate that kind of nonsense. I hope that the war goes well, that our troops prevail quickly and that casualties everywhere are kept to a minimum.

But the fact that a war may be quick does not mean that it is wise. Against the wishes of most of the world, we have plunged not just into war, but toward a peace that is potentially more problematic than the war itself.

Are Americans ready to pay the cost in lives and dollars of a long-term military occupation of Iraq?

...There is tremendous unease at the highest levels of the Pentagon about this war and its aftermath. The president and his civilian advisers are making a big deal about the anticipated rejoicing of the liberated populace once the war is over. But Iraq is an inherently unstable place, and while the forces assembled to chase Saddam from power are superbly trained for combat, the military is not well prepared for a long-term occupation in the most volatile region in the world.

What's driving this war is President Bush's Manichaean view of the world and messianic vision of himself, the dangerously grandiose perception of American power held by his saber-rattling advisers, and the irresistible lure of Iraq's enormous oil reserves.

Polls show that the public is terribly confused about what's going on, so much so that some 40 percent believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. That's really scary. Rather than correct this misconception, the administration has gone out of its way to reinforce it.

I think the men and women moving militarily against Saddam are among the few truly brave and even noble individuals left in our society. They have volunteered for the dangerous duty of defending the rest of us. But I also believe they are being put unnecessarily in harm's way.

As a result of the military buildup, there is hardly a more hobbled leader on earth at the moment than Saddam Hussein. A skillful marshaling of international pressure could have forced him from power. But then the Bush administration would not have had its war and its occupation. It would not have been able to turn Iraq into an American protectorate, which is as good a term as any for a colony.


I guess you could quibble with the "colony" bit (or whose colony, anyway.) But the rest of it is holding up pretty well, hey?

Speaking of pandering to your blog base...

Feingold may or may not (I say not) pander to his, but the Republican establishment certainly panders to theirs.

Feingold.

Neil nails the outcome of Feingold's censure resolution: "everybody screwed up, including Feingold." The only argument I have with Feingold's censure detractors (most overtly, Ryan Lizza) is their assumption that his censure move is an obvious play for the 2008 activist vote. That may figure into it, but on the other hand, privacy is Feingold's issue. He knows more and cares more about it than his colleagues. After only 30 Dems supported his second Patriot Act filibuster attempt, he was very upset, telling an interviewer: "If Democrats can't stand up on something like this when the president's poll numbers are 34 percent, I just wonder how much right we have to govern this country. You've got to show people you believe in something, not just that you're gaming the issues." When it comes to protecting civil liberties, Feingold may well feel, with some justification, that he's all we've got.

Feingold is an independent senator, of course, but he's not just reflexively anti-establishment (or reflexively pander-to-bloggers as his deference to Administration discretion on appointments proves.) Yesterday, for instance, he praised Hillary Clinton's presidential potential on Charlie Rose. It's really a single-issue thing. I totally agree with those who say the censure resolution is "moderate and reasonable" -- that is, when it's taken in a vaccuum. The problem is -- and this is the root of other Democrats' complaints -- there is no vaccuum. There were the chosen themes of the week, the points other Senators were planning to make before they got derailed answering or avoiding reporters' questions about censure. And there's ego. Of course Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the leadership resent and react negatively to the implications that only Feingold can be trusted to ensure civil liberties and that when he makes a move on the issue they should just fall in line.

You can argue that their resentment, their failure to swallow their pride and rally behind Feingold's authority on civil liberties, speaks ill of them. And to an extent it does. (Why not let the leadership back the censure resolution in stated deference to Feingold's obvious authority on the issue and warn him behind closed doors not to pull such a stunt again?) But it was also to be expected. And that Feingold didn't foresee, or more likely didn't care about, the human problems he was creating by springing his resolution on the party, the negative "disunity" themes he was risking in support of what right now is an essentially meaningless (though perfectly moderate and reasonable) gesture, speaks poorly about his leadership abilities. Just a few months ago Feingold did the impossible (or what only a couple of years earlier looked like the impossible): derailing renewal of the Patriot Act until its civil liberties problems were (albeit inadquately) addressed, with his caucus united behind him. A couple of disappointments later, he's essentially striking out on his own, and accomplishing very little. I don't think he's acting cynically. But I don't think he's demonstrating much effective political leadership either.

Margaret Carlson self-parody watch.

Margaret "they didn't feed us well enough on the plane" Carlson has an opinion piece on the perks and contradictions of being a Washington Insider:

The only thing the public hates more about the press than watching it harangue officials with gotcha questions is watching it cozy up to those same officials at Washington's annual round of press corps dinners, now in full swing.

Journalists are supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. So how come they're all in formal attire eating lamb and sipping champagne and chuckling with, if not fawning over, the president, the vice president and the sundry members of the Cabinet and Congress they have begged to show up?

It's a good question to which I don't have an answer, perhaps because I have done my share of chuckling and fawning. The latest stop on the circuit was the Gridiron Club dinner last Saturday...


What's the ultimate point of all this self-reflection? That Barack Obama would make a good future presidential candidate for the Dems. Why? Because, in Carlson's view, he was genuinely entertaining at the Gridiron Club dinner. Or, as Carlson gushes: "Occasionally, an over-hyped star proves he's not all hype. That's what happened with Senator Barack Obama at this year's dinner. He had the right mix of skewering the opposition and himself."

In fairness to Carlson, she includes one brief, familiar paragraph on Obama's impressive life story in addition to ruminations on his comedic skillz. Then comes the familiar conclusion:

After John Kerry and Al Gore, and facing the prospect of Hillary Clinton, one of the most polarizing figures in public life, the Democrats may decide to put likeability (and brains) ahead of experience and age. If so, they need look no further than the senator from Illinois.


Carlson can't seriously think Dem primary voters opted for Gore and Kerry because they were old. But, that bit of nonsense aside, we're basically back to that old "likeable" canard. Pundits views about who is "likeable" are of course entirely subjective. As Hendrik Hertzberg has pointed out, it's not really even a matter of opinion. It's a matter of taste. Moreover, pundits' tastes don't always coincide very closely with those of voters as measured in the opinion polls. This newer shtick about "most polarizing" is largely a crock too. HRC-mongering may make for good Regnery sales, but recent polling indicates she draws less polarized responses from independents than Kerry or Gore and is not significantly less popular among Republicans than either of them.

Then there's the problem that (as I argued before) being a press darling is hardly a riskless affair for your average Democratic pol. There was a time (say, 1991-92) when the press flat-out adored Bill Clinton, but that didn't stop them from later trying to distroy his presidency in a fit of insider pique. And there was a time when conventional wisdom held that Gary Hart had the charisma and smarts to remake the frayed, outdated liberal concensus for the post-industrial world. But then the press destroyed him too, over an affair and the possibility of an "open marriage". More recently there was the scandalous and under-analyzed way reporter/pundits turned on Bill Bradley at the end of the 2000 Democratic primary when it became obvious he wasn't going to win (and, worse, was sucking air from that more authentic "maverick", John McCain.) And, of course, there's the punditocracy's concerted and still-ongoing effort to turn Howard Dean -- possibly the most serious conservative outsider to make a run at the Democratic nomination since Paul Tsongas -- into some sort of liberal-wannabe-revolutionary curiosity. The press had spent a lot of 2003 building Dean up too.

But whatever. You won't find any of this in Carlson's faux-self-examination. Her point, as ever, is that the Dems would finally start to win if they'd only nominate someone she could be enthusiastic about.

Jane Jacobs and import-substitution.

More way-behind-the-cutting-edge blogging today. I just finished Jane Jacobs' Dark Age Ahead (which I got for Christmas two years ago). I had a pretty mixed reaction to the book as a whole, but her explanation for why Canada didn't follow the US into the early-00s recession is interesting: city-based (specifically, Toronto-based) manufacturing and substitution in final production of locally-made intermediate goods. Jacobs says (p.88-89):

My guess was that the [460,000 in the first half of 2002] jobs were being added specifically in the GTA and that they were materializing because the area was experiencing a significant episode of city import replacing, a process in which companies typically begin providing bits and pieces of producers' goods and services that were formely imported. This process is led neither by export sales nor by sales to consumers. It is led only by perceived opportunity... A number of clues suggested city import replacing. First were bits of anecdotal evidence from manufacturers in the Toronto area that, yes, they were purchasing locally various items that they formerly had to import; second the Canadian dollar was gently rising in value, which is exactly what happens during significant import replacing. And third, Statistics Canada, in an unrelated release, reported that Vaughan [home to several new intermediate goods factory parks] was currently the fastest growing "city" in Canada."


I don't know much or do much economics of trade, but the last thing I read about import-substution (IS) growth was Baghwati poo-pooing it in In Defence of Globalization as official national economic policy for developing countries. I guess what's interesting, if Jacobs is right, is that Toronto's bout of IS-based growth (and presumably Vancouver's during the early 90s) wasn't a result of any official policy -- that is, of import tarriffs or of attached production riders to import sales (i.e. forcing an importer to do final assembly of the imported good in the destination country, i.e. Canada.) Canada has basically signed on to the export-promoting, free-investment (EP) consensus, and is if anything more pro-NAFTA and less politically divided over trade than the Americans. So, the import substitution we experienced wasn't policy-directed but the product of private business-sector responses to the US recession, which otherwise would have dragged our economy down with it. Maybe that's why, as Jacob complains, Canadian economists were so confused by the expansion.

I'm sure there's better reading on this phenomenon out there somewhere. Ian Welsh's posts on cycles of and barriers to effective import-replacement and (Jane) "Jacobian economics" are good places to start. But what made the Golden Horseshoe businesses (spanning several industries) so flexible, the reaction fast enough to prevent us from following (at the aggregate, national level) the Americans into their post-911 slump, at least temporarily? And can spontaneous cycles of import-substitution in an export-promoting policy environment really keep small open economies autonomous from the economic fates of their big trading partners over the long run?

Fred Barnes moves to Canada!

To quote [Bill] Rowe again: “Keep going with the ruthlessly problematic strategy, Harper. Genuine, permanent competition between two strong federalist parties depends on it. And let the media howl.”...The stakes are high in creating a healthy, vigorous, competitive political system. This will take all the spirit, determination and ability to learn from experience Harper has demonstrated.

(Via Declan.)

Chaoulli's irony and socialism for the middle class.

Declan, who's been pondering the important question and crappy debate over whether it's better to force Canadian doctors to choose either the public or private sector or let them practic in both (which could well be what the national debate comes down to over the next year or so), points me to this terrific defence of Canadian single payer health care at Rational Reasons. This is old news, but since I had never noticed this fact before (though it makes perfect sense when you think about it), it's worth blogging about:

Insurance companies try to mitigate [moral hazard and averse selection problems] and remain profitable by refusing to ensure certain people, raising premiums or simply not entering into insurance for an entire class of risks. In health, that means things like pre-existing conditions, age, or sex can be used to refuse coverage, pay only partially or charge much higher rates. It is this that produced one of the bitterest ironies of the Chaoulli case - George Zeliotis, the plantiff in the case that sought private insurance for his hip replacement, would not have qualified for the coverage he sought. The only winners in that case would have been the insurance companies, who would make profit selling insurance and collecting premiums [to other, healthy people], and Dr. Chaoulli, who would get the money.


Before reading this, I'd been working intermittantly on a post about how introducing a private alternative to basic care in Canada on a French or German model would, in its direct effects, be more of a bane to the middle class and moderately healthy and wealthy than to the poor. (I also really don't see how the German model, on which ClintonCare was based, could ever be successfully adapted to a liberal non-corporatist, low-union economy like Canada or the US.) I was interested in Ezra's recent comment that:

Unlike other countries that guarantee floor coverage for all but allows those with more discretionary income to decide their own ceiling, Canada sets both the floor and the ceiling, capping the conceivable quality of care (they've instituted the old adage about socialism: everyone suffers together).


There's a common, implicit assumption that "suffering together" in a strict single-payer health system is a needless concession to equality and therefore to the poor. But the poor -- and, as Chaoulli's plaintiff proves, the sick -- aren't likely to be directly affected at all by opening up Canada's health system to private insurers, clinics and doctors; they'll still rely on publicly-funded care at whatever quality at which it's offered. The very rich will arguably unambiguously benefit by doing what they do in France and Germany: opt for personally-funded state-of-the-art health care. The people who would face a new "choice" in a two-tiered essential services system are those politicians call the "middle class": people who can afford to buy private insurance, who are currently healthy enough to do so, who are presently ok in the single-payer system but who might be tempted by the possibility of an upgrade. "Choice" here implies a decision made subject to some sort of contraint -- aquiring new insurance isn't a painless or obvious decision. It entails some effort and sacrifice.

Is this necessarily a good thing? If there's one thing liberal North American society has proven over the past 30 years is that we'll overconsume if given the option and a little encouragement to do so. Net household saving rates out of income are currently around zero in both the US and Canada. Conservatives pushing health saving accounts focus on the overconsumption of health care that occurs when people don't have to pay for it (that is, when governments or employers pay for it). But they ignore the related problem that people -- who are currently protected in Canada by mandatory public insurance from doing so -- may overinsure to their own detriment, particularly in the face of an aggressive push by the insurance companies to sign up relatively healthy young families. Those who don't opt to cut consumption or saving in favour of extra insurance may face guilt about not doing so, particularly if they're responsible for dependents or if the insurance companies push the notion that buying private insurance is the "responsible" thing to do. Making the complicated choice of whether, what kind, and how much insurance to buy takes time and energy and, judging from the Medicare Part D debacle, doesn't necessarily result in rational decisions.

And of course there's the indirect effect of overconsumption of insurance on the most vulnerable in society. As people opt to insure, their disposal incomes decline, taxes become more burdansome, public health care costs remain about the same since the sickest stay in the public system, we resent those not making the same sacrafices to insure, our middle-class attachment to the public health system decreases, and we start thinking more kindly about service-slashin' politicians like Haley Barbour (or milder Canadian versions like Gordon Campbell). This is a common enough liberal argument in favour of public health insurance, but it's buttressed in our case by specific Canadian concerns about the ongoing devolution into cantonism (the Canada Health Act is maybe the federal government's strongest symbolic hold over the provinces) and the national identity that being stuck "suffering together" brings us.

I'm not necessarily arguing a zero-tolerance position for private incursion into the Canadian system. It's an impossible position for one thing, and there is certainly room for experiment on the margins of what constitutes "essential care". But the benefits of single-payer health insurance go far beyond ephermeral notions of "equality". And if it goes, we'll never get it back.

The culture of lunacy.

It's so easy to forget what American politics is really about. Meet the Brownbacks of Kansas:

Brownback's wife, Mary, heiress to a Midwest newspaper fortune, married Sam during her final year of law school and boasts that she has never worked outside the home. "Basically," she says, "I live in the kitchen." From her spot by the stove, Mary monitors all media consumed by her kids. The Brownbacks block several channels, but even so, innuendos slip by, she says, and the nightly news is often "too sexual." The children, Mary says, "exude their faith." The oldest kids "opt out" of sex education at school.

Sex, in all its various forms, is at the center of Brownback's agenda. America, he believes, has divorced sexuality from what is sacred. "It's not that we think too much about sex," he says, "it's that we don't think enough of it." The senator would gladly roll back the sexual revolution altogether if he could, but he knows he can't, so instead he dreams of something better: a culture of "faith-based" eroticism in which premarital passion plays out not in flesh but in prayer. After Janet Jackson's nipple made its surprise appearance at the 2004 Super Bowl, Brownback introduced the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, raising the fines for such on-air abominations to $325,000.

And Brownback's chief of staff, who no doubt dreams of being White House chief of staff:

Since Brownback took over leadership of the VAT in 2002, he has used it to consolidate his position in the Christian right -- and his influence in the Senate. If senators -- even leaders like Bill Frist or Rick Santorum -- want to ask for backing from the group, they must talk to Brownback's chief of staff, Robert Wasinger, who clears attendees with his boss. Wasinger is from Hays, Kansas, but he speaks with a Harvard drawl, and he is still remembered in Cambridge twelve years after graduation for a fight he led to get gay faculty booted. He was particularly concerned about the welfare of gay men; or rather, as he wrote in a campus magazine funded by the Heritage Foundation, that of their innocent sperm, forced to "swim into feces."


And meet the sponsor of the new Dakota anti-abortion law:

“A lot of this discussion about back-alley abortions are myths that were created,” said [State Rep] Mr. Hunt, a 68-year-old Baptist lawyer, who said he's never seen reliable statistics on illegal abortions. “The fear that we're going to have women dying in coat-hanger abortions are largely figments of the imagination.”

...Serving in the legislature is a labour of love for Mr. Hunt and his colleagues, akin to being a part-time alderman in a small town. South Dakota's 105 citizen legislators are paid just $6,000 (U.S.) a year to meet 40 days in odd-numbered years and 35 in even-numbered years. Legislators get no secretaries and no pensions.


Now it's true that I'm focussing on the gaudily personal in these two pieces. But that's because, as far I as can tell, the personal is basically indistinguishable from the political for these people. There's a very short distance between Mary Brownback being offended by Janet Jackson's breast and the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act busting its way out of Senate committee. The fruit of a good dormroom wank would overshoot the distance between a certain Harvard undergrad fantasizing about his sperm nestling into another man's unexpelled shit and a certain Senator "working to defeat a measure that would stiffen penalties for violent attacks on gays and lesbians" en route to a presidential bid.

By the same token, there's much that's personal, and little that's rational, about enduring the editorial shitstorm, the denunciations, the risk of harrassment Hunt brings on himself, for only $6,000 a year. It's not rational in homo economicus sense. But it's not tactically, politically very rational either. Sure, there's plenty of cynicism involved. Hunt is busy lying about his real agenda -- banning recreational sex and turning women into heifers -- in national publications. South Dakota's Republican governor signed the bill despite the fact he claims to support Roe for the time being and knows the courts will just strike the bill down. But the basic fact that Mr. Hunt's bill, and the carbon copies working their way through other state legislatures, are extremely unpopular with the American public, and that the extreme position enshrined in the SD bill was rejected in a 2004 poll of South Dakotans, doesn't appear to register at all. (As of yesterday, a Rasmussan poll found SD adults were split on the bill itself, though it's unclear if they know yet what it really contains, like forcing women to deliver the children of rapists or siblings.)

"There is a tidal wave sweeping the country to end abortion, and South Dakota has moved to the center of that," says Hunt, against all statistical evidence to the contrary. It's just like the sex permeating the evening news, upsetting Mary Brownback in her kitchen. Like all those innocent sperm swimming their way toward a brown gooey demise, upsetting Robert Wasinger in his dorm room. And an entire segment of society so decadent, so selfish and self-obsessed with its mythology of victimization and a non-existent but constantly violated objective morality that its members want history to stop for them, feel that it can and should stop for them, grow ever more bitter and insular when it doesn't.

These people are fucking terrifying. For them, evidence doesn't matter. Public opinion doesn't matter. Dissenting views don't matter. The screeching contradiction between Brownback's desire to annihilate the federal government and his desire to see a new federal authority (and face it, it will eventually have to be a federal authority if they're going to stop those New York and Massachusetts heathens from bringing on the apocolypse with their sinful ways) powerful enough to trample the free will of 51% of the population doesn't matter. Nothing matters for the true believers, for the lunatics who have managed to swallow up one of America's political parties to the point where the Bush White House is moderate. Digby is right that they mean it. Of course they do. And I forget, I always forget, that this is what American politics is really about.

Perceiving Islam.

I really liked this post by Ogged, guesting at Washington Monthly on the new WaPo poll finding that a plurality of Americans (46%) now have a negative view of Islam. That's up from October of 2001 when the same plurality (47%) had a favourable view of the religion just after 911. It's also up from the numbers reported in the Global Pew Attitudes Project survey released last year (57% favourable, about average among Western nations). The new WaPo figures confirm a CBS News survey conducted last month that also found a smaller plurality (36%) declaring an unfavourable view of the religion, with 32% saying they didn't know enough to judge. More numbers are archived at Polling Report.

Ogged writes:

We [liberals] lose credibility when we don't admit what's obvious to everyone: insofar as we're worried, it's about Muslims (note to those who don't know me and didn't get the opening joke: I'm a (non-practicing) Muslim, born in Iran; no, I'm not pulling a Michelle Malkin on you). We get into these bizarre dynamics because we don't want to give any ground. We worry that if we give ground, unscrupulous people on the other side will take advantage and say things like, "even the liberal Washington Monthly admits Muslims are crazy." But our denial of the obvious is the only thing that gives right-wing complaints any credibility. We make it possible for them to cast their bigotry as truth-telling.


This is, I think, really important. The right completely gets off on its "truthteller" narrative, and its counterpart, the idea that recent displays of Muslem intolerance -- the Paris riots, the Danish cartoon demonstrations -- throw a wrench into the liberal worldview, based as it is on the shibolleth of tolerance (the "true god of the American lefty" according to conservative blogger Tigerhawk not long ago). The caricature is that liberals will, in fact, tolerate anything so long as the perpetrating group isn't in the traditional cultural majority.

This is ludicrous, of course, but it's also true that there's not much of a distinct, powerful mainstream counter-narrative. I rarely read about moderate Muslim activity in the papers and news magazines, unless it's activity directly opposing or reacting to extremism. The "liberal media" tends to take the existence of the great moderate Muslim masses in Europe and North America for granted, and then to startle us with profiles of the extremists who somehow emerged from these masses (like the famous Leeds teaching assistant who became one of the London subway bombers), or of the forces working against moderation within or on the edges of these moderate communities.

For instance, I was actually startled reading the following about European Muslims in the Globe and Mail a few weeks ago:

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.

That was evident last year when France, whose six million Muslims are the continent's largest population, passed a law that bans the wearing of head scarves by girls in schools. It was fiercely opposed by the fundamentalist Muslim leadership...But after the law came into effect, the number of girls who tried to defy it, nationwide, numbered in the low hundreds. For all but a tiny group of Muslims, expressing the orthodox version of their faith held no interest — but being French, and European, was very important.


It's not the information itself that surprised me so much as the perspective. I'd always assumed that the debate over headscraves in French schools was yet another indication of Western Europe's difficulties in dealing with its religious, cultural and ideological diversity and messy history. The idea that, for many of the people affected, the ban just wasn't a big deal... well, that was something new. It wasn't due to a lack of personal experience: I've worked for and studied with Arab Muslims, both secular and devout. I expect like most people, I've known Canadian Muslims who were the victims of prejudice, both professionally and in casual dealings with the public. I cracked Osama jokes with Arab Muslim graduate students in England the year after 911. But like the people quoted in the WaPo article, I saw all these as individuals and hard to extrapolate from to see whole communities, societies, cultural worldviews.

We get a larger working worldview from following the news and reading and viewing editorial opinion. In the WaPo article, Juan Cole worries that Americans "have been given the message to respond this way by the American political elite, mass media and by select special interests...I think anti-Arab racism and profiling has become respectable." I think he's increasingly right, and that it's a big, self-perpetuating problem, fed by those who enjoy exacerbating conflict. But the respectability has to come a lack of explicit, obvious context about Arab Muslims in the West. Maybe instead of taking that context for granted while decrying profiling ("of course most Muslims are peace-loving types" etc. etc.), liberal opinion-makers should work to push it, to push images and examples of it, to the forefront of what North Americans see, and force conservatives to grapple with it too.

Racist or homophobic?

Josh Marshall and Atrios think the National Republican Senatorial Committee's vile new attack site on Harold Ford is notable mainly for its racism. "The message is pretty clear," writes Marshall. "Harold Ford is an uppity black man" -- more gutterally, "a pimp, a black guy livin' large and probably doing white women too".

I agree the racist angle is the main one here. But a good case can be made that a secondary purpose of the site is to challenge the fact of Ford's uppity black manhood. Sure, there are those playboy bunnies, but who doesn't like playboy bunnies? Witness the obsession with all those "fancy" flowers, by which Ford "makes his surroundings pretty". "Shop like Ford" we're advised. We also learn the Ford loves him his pedicures.

I guess there's no real distinction; the stereotypical pimp, if he isn't gangsta (and they're not going for the hardass angle here), is effeminate. Which is convenient, since it helps satisfy the Republican election mantra: no bigotted overtone left behind.

"What would the folks back in Tennessee think? the site asks. Yeah, I wonder.

Update: Yikes. Pam at Pandagon has the essential take on the issue.

Yay! 10,000 hits!

Since, I think, November 2nd of last year. We small-ass bloggers get excited over the silliest things.

(Of course, a big chunk of those hits came from me. But still.)

Update: Actually, the real pleasure is in being pushed over by Ezra Klein's kind words about LWC -- although I'm a little freaked out to learn that he "hates" me. He shouldn't; he's invaluable and deserves all the recognition he gets and more. The only thing I'd say is that the sort of blogging I do -- non-expert riffing on the news -- is dead easy, a timewaster really. So, while I have no dispute with Ezra's other "Klein Award" choices for Best New Blog and Best Writing (I totally agree with Angelica about Starbucks), I would nominate Galloping Beaver -- two Canucks who do have expertise on an unreal range of subjects -- as Most Deserving of Wider Recognition.

Update 2: Perspective, of course, is everything.

Zengerle responds.

Jason Zengerle responds to Kevin Drum and me here.

As the small fry in this exchange, I'm happy to let either he or Kevin have the last word. But I stand by my argument that it was unfair -- a caricature -- to suggest the blogs only went after Cueller because he hugged Bush after the SOTU while ignoring the more substantive complaints Kos, Atrios and other blogs compiled against Cueller after the hug tipped them off. (It's very unlikely they would have gone after him so hard had he turned out to have a decent voting record or a history of supporting other Democrats.) There's also the way Ciro Rodriguez embraced the blogs for support, to jump-start his candidacy. Clearly some candidates do see the value of the activist blogs; they provide a service to underdog liberal candidates. The service is real even if the results so far haven't been stellar.

Zengerle's other claims have merit:

But is it really all that strategically smart to enter a campaign (about which you know virtually nothing) a mere month before election day? Aren't you basically setting yourself up for failure? Isn't it even possible that you risk helping the other guy by creating a backlash (a la all the Orange-hatted, out-of-state Dean volunteers who ticked off Iowa voters)?


Sure, you're setting yourself up for failure -- and that's a criticism worth making (the blogs are tough; they can take it). But is that "winnerism" or is it risking the embarrassment of defeat in order to hold an ideological line (even if, as Kevin points out, it's a fairly obvious, uncontroversial one)? It's also true that blog triumphalism can be obnoxious and occasionally surreal, but I'm not sure about holding up this level-headed postmortem from Chris Bowers (in which he actually addresses some of Zengerle's concerns) as an example of that triumphalism. Chris' levelheadedness also led him, from the start of the night, to doubt Rodriguez would pull it out --suggesting he's learned from his previous over-optimism. Personally, I was over-optimistic to the tune of losing a hundred dollar bet on the 2004 presidential election. So, come to think of it, were various TNR columnists.

Finally, there's a difference between activism and commentary. Part of the activism of blogs is rallying the troops -- assessing what went wrong and the possible upsides to having undertaken the effort. At some point that shades into a self-righteous disconnection from the real world. But I don't think it has in this case.

Just read it.

Dave is righteous about the Canadian role and responsibility as part of NATO's mission to Afghanistan. Just reading him makes me feel a bit heady... and weirdly patriotic. He's right too. Because Bush is such a godawful leader, and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have proved to be such hell, and "freedom on the march" to be such a sham; and our views of international affairs so tainted by the hash the neoconservatives, unchecked, have made of things on the world stage; it's easy to forget the other side of the coin: what it means to be part of a community of nations, and why NATO undertook the Afghan mission in the first place. Dave has all the authority a person can have to discuss these things. His post demands to be read.

Feuds should be based on good arguments.

OK, I swear no more writing about The New Republic for awhile. And I certainly understand Jason Zengerle's desire to continue TNR's feud with Kos and the rest of the partisan liberal blogs by taking a shot at the fact that, with Ciro Rodriguez' Texas-28 primary defeat last night, the blogs' prefered candidates are now 0 for 14 since the start of 2004. In fact, the failure of the blogs to get their preferred candidates past local and national party machines or sell them to offline voters, and how badly this failure jibes with certain blogospheric manifestos about the "netroots"' revolutionary clout, is well worth noting. I'd normally be inclined to sympathize with Zengerle's crow-back stance (Update, since Kevin just sent my traffic through the roof, let me clarify that I'd sympathize with Zengerle on the general grounds that it's a reasonable point to make in the ongoing TNR-vs.-liberal blogs feud, not because I think the the activist liberal blogs are fundamentally unimportant or won't be influential down the road. Actually, I think they will be.) That is if the arguments he chooses to make weren't completely wet:

When Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the proprietor of Daily Kos, recently told The Washington Monthly's Benjamin Wallace-Wells, "I'm not ideological at all. ... I'm just all about winning," he could have been speaking for the entire left-wing blogosphere. If there's one animating idea that's shared by liberal bloggers like Kos and Atrios and all the others, it's, as Wallace-Wells called it, "the ideology of winnerism."


Is it? Doesn't Zengerle posit there might be, like, a reason the blogs launched themselves behind Rodriguez that might have to do with ideology, in the sense that Cueller is (and he really is) a very bad Democrat? If Kos and Atrios just wanted a win for somebody with a D behind his name, they probably would have stayed out of Texas-28, which already gurantees such an outcome given that the GOP doesn't even run candidates in the district (somehow the Republican revolution never took hold there). The blogs took a chance on the underdog Rodriguez. Isn't that the opposite of a blind Democratic "winnerism"?

To the extent he talks about it at all, Zengerle chalks the blogs' preference for Rodriguez up the fact that Cueller hugged Bush after the SOTU. But, in fact, the liberal bloggers' complaints went far beyond, and are far more substantial than, that incident. In fact, most of the librerals' complaints with Cueller are ones Zengerle and his colleagues at TNR probably share. Or does TNR secretly like the Club for Growth? Obviously the majority of the masthead doesn't, but by so blatantly mischaracterizing Kos and other online Rodriguez-supporters, Zengerle is begging to be similarly mischaracterized himself. Not letting this minor point of likely agreement get in the way of a good feud enures that it continues to be the bad, tiring, dumbass feud it's been over the past couple of years.

Fun things ones learns in seminar.

Apparently, it wasn't until 1993 that parents in France became legally free to give their child whatever name they chose, as opposed to having to choose either a classical, Biblical or calender saints' name. Giving your baby a hyphenated and alternately spelled versions of allowed names was permitted in France starting in the 1960s.

Hacktacular.

Great wingnut commentary on Iraq recently. Kevin Drum finds Glenn Reynolds coming right out and saying it:

The press had better hope we win this war, because if we don't, a lot of people will blame the media.


But the the best is yet to come: Insta then links to another blog, The Opinionated Bastard, breaking down Brookings Institution Data on fatalities in Iraq and coming up with the improbable finding that Iraq civilian deaths declined in February. I didn't see a link in the posting to the actual data, but I assume it's contained in this PDF document, their Iraq Index, available on the Brookings site.

The thing is, page 10, the civilian deaths page, notes that "This chart is based upond data from Iraq Body Count". But the (invaluable and statistically conservative) Iraq Body Count database is currently updated only as far as February 22, the day that Askariya shrine was bombed. Brookings also notes that the numbers will not include deaths that were "recorded at the morgue", which -- even after the updates are made -- will lowball the figure given that estimates based on bodies turned into the Baghdad morgue were three times higher than what the Iraqi statistical agency recorded: between 1000 and 1300 deaths over five days following the intitial bombing. That is, frankly, a lot of deaths, semantic disputes over "civil war" aside.

I'm not blaming The Opinionated Bastard who is just another amateur blogger like the rest of us. God knows I've made mistakes. But when the Instapundit complains that the statistics OB reports are "certainly something that's not appearing in the news much", you sort of have to laugh. Insta had better hope he's more careful in the future, because if he isn't, a lot of people will think he is a giant hack.

Update: IBC and the Brookings study are now updated with the higher (official, not morgue) numbers. And, yes, civilian deaths in Iraq were most definitely up in February.