My turn with Joe Klein

(Cross-posted, slightly modified, at Galloping Beaver.)

Reading Joe Klein makes me want to grind my teeth -- hardly an original position. But one moment in his radio interview with Michael Krazny (thanks to Pacific Views) stands out because it's one thing that lazy pundits like Klein repeat ad nauseum and never get called on:

Klein: I do believe, on the other hand, that Americans are pretty good judges of character and in the 2004 election, they are not going to vote for someone who says I voted for it before I voted against it. You know, in the lesser of two evils, they're going to take someone they disagree with go with but they know where he stands. Now that was on John Kerry, by the way. After he said that, by the way, and after it became the heart of the Republican advertising campaign, he said it to camera. John Kerry had a responsibility as a politician and as a candidate to go to the places where Americans don't watch politics, to go on the Tonight Show, and to make jokes about how stupid a statement it was, the way that Bill Clinton did after he gave that long boring speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention. You know, creativity is not forbidden in Politics, and also, self-deprecating humor will get you a long distance. You have to be able to communicate with people in ways that doesn't involve dental drilling. You know, you have to try and make yourself entertaining, because you are going to be living in their kitchens, as I said before.

Good God. Leaving aside how astonishing this paragraph is coming from the author of a book called Politics Lost : How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You're Stupid, Klein is wrong. When Kerry made his "voted for" ramark, he didn't "say it to the camera". If I recall correctly, he actually said to to an audience member at a rally, as part of a longer explanatory quote about the votes for the appropriation. But more important, Kerry never said "I voted for it before I voted against it." The famous quote is "I actually did vote for the 87 billion dollars before I voted against it." We all know the story -- Kerry voted for the bill in which the money for "the troops" was offset by a tax hike, and voted against an alternate Billionaire Protection Bill.

You can say -- correctly I think -- that it's a trivial misquotation, compared to groaners like "invented the internet" or "who amongst us doesn't love Nascar". You can say -- correctly I think -- that the Kerry campaign and its surregates did a piss-poor job of making Americans understand the distinction between his votes on the different appropriations. But the fact remains: (1) it's never ok for professional pundits to paraphrase what politicians actually say into nicer-sounding soundbites in order to enhance whatever narrative is going about said pol. And (2) The quote in question was an attempt by Kerry to justify what actually happened in the Senate. By dropping "the 87 billion", Klein like so many before him, drops the substance of the question altogether. We're left with awkwardness -- which Klein demands be dealt with by having the overspun pol in question yuk it up on the Tonight Show (being creative by immitating Bill Clinton). This is the same guy who, later in the interview, rhapsodizes about "our most precious institution, the presidency". Good. God. Banging. Head. On. Wall.

Klein is so full of shit it's amazing that he can walk. Anybody who followed the 2004 campaign knows, as Klein surely must, that the Kerry campaign was roughly the opposite of "trivial". Kerry was in many ways (and for reasons I think largely beyond his control) an abysmal nominee. But he was an extremely substantive candidate. His platform was capped by a complicated public-private hybrid health care plan that Kerry explained at length to audiences on the trail, even when pundits complained he ought to be spending his time engaging with Bush in meaningless brinksmanship over Osama bin Laden. It also contained a few brave surprises, like the reneging of support for the domestic death penalty and a strong, essentially unbidden labour plank (the unions, except the firefighters, hadn't supported Kerry in the primary; and the campaign was already overflowing in GOTV cash. One might surmise that Kerry's support for labour was -- gasp -- genuine. Part of that "authenticity" Klein says he likes so much when it involves riffing to sympathetic crowds about state holidays, the sort of thing -- come to think of it -- Kerry did a lot of too. In fact, Kerry's refusal to just recite his talking points was criticized at length by carping pundits.) Moreover, the people who fed him or indulged that diet of substance were the very same consultants that Klein rips in his new book for "trivializing" politics.

Sadly, Klein is right about one thing: most voters aren't political junkies and candidates do need to reach them where they're not looking for politics and get into their heads in unconventional ways. The problem is that Klein takes it as given that Americans who don't follow politics approach politics exactly as he does -- as theatre critics searching for thematic cues. But isn't it more likely that people who don't follow the news and write blogs and grind their teeth listening to Joe Klein also don't have the same minute emotional reactions to candidates' performances that Klein, a political junkie, has? Isn't it more likely that trivial, awkward comments by politicians wouldn't matter to voters if opposition operations, abetted by pundits like Klein, didn't fetishize them... for the simple reason that voters wouldn't catch them and, if they did, wouldn't think to read so much into them? Most voters weren't fully aware of the Kerry campaign's substantive approach because they didn't watch Kerry rallies or read "Our Plan for America". And because Joe Klein is allergic to substance, he wasn't likely to help them understand. Maybe that's because Klein is stupid. But I don't actually believe the author of Primary Colors is stupid in the conventional sense. I think it's more because he thinks you're stupid.

Sexing down the language.

Part of what's great about reading Lee Siegel is wondering whether he's slyly aware of how funny he is or whether the whole thing is unintentional, which in itself would require a massive, artificial, intentional irony reduction -- which, once undertaken, makes the author aware of his hilarity even if he isn't, because he's aware of its negation. (Siegel wins either way.) I especially adored yesterday's tirade against the cultural acceptance and proliferation of the phrase "to suck":

But I think something deeper is going on [with the popularity of "sucks"]. Pardon the following intimacy, but performing oral sex has a lot to do with the unequal distribution of pleasure and power. It's more satisfying for the recipient than for the bestower. Without love or emotional connection, it usually makes the bestower an instrument of the recipient's will.

So saying someone or something "sucks" is not just an expression of contempt. It's a verdict on that person or thing as being, literally, beneath contempt. It's a wish not so much to rise above others as to subordinate them, an angry anti-democratic retort to the nettleseome tides of democratization. After all, when someone "sucks," they can't talk back. Isn't that the bully's and the tyrant's timeless dream, to move among people who can't talk back? It's certainly the dream of a child's fragile ego. It could be that we are surrounded by adults who have the fragile egos of children. And I know exactly what those unwitting people would say about that situation.


Maybe, but my personal take is that "sucks" is completely the wrong term for this sort of analysis, because it's the one tawdry term that has essentially broken free of its literal meaning. When I say something "sucks", which I do all the time, I'm basically never thinking of it as a literal analogy to cocksucking (if I want to be literal, I'll use the term "blows", which has yet to bust out of its anological straightjacket -- and I use it rarely.) On the other hand, I use the term "money quote" -- Siegal's other example of creeping casual vulgarity -- fully or mostly aware of its meaning. Ditto even for a seemingly harmless phrase like "about to explode". As a rule, the more contemptuous I am of the person or phenomenon that I think is "about to explode", the more overt is the sexual metaphor. (i.e. "The real prospect of a war with Iran has the neocons gearing up to explode their half-baked panic-mongering all over the media".) The sexual slur is that the characters in question can't control themselves, they're just pure dumb instinct dressed up in suits and backcopies of The National Interest.

At face value, this seems pretty retrograde. Why do we continue to denigrate things by associating them with sex, something which -- in the ideal modern society we'd like to create -- brings far more pleasure than pain and, if unwanted, is simply avoided? For instance, Siegel's take on "suck" is that we invoke the idea of sucking someone off as an act of subjication and sneer at it an an expression of our casual sadism. But anything can be an act of subjugation in the right circumstances. Humiliation comes in all shapes and sizes -- why no dark vernacular allusive turn of phrase for being turned down for a bank loan, for going without needed health care, for sleeping on vents? All these things are more unambiguously bad in degree and in kind than giving someone a blowjob. Why reserve our linguistic derogation for something most of us -- ideally, as part of a functional modern society -- enjoy, just because we know that some people somewhere else have been or may be victimized by it?

To an extent it's pure tawdriness -- the Butthead in us all. But I like to think there's some progress involved, the refinement of our inner Buttheads. Specifically, sexual turns of phrase tend to insert linguistic daggers into the spaces between the ideal and the non-ideal, and thereby to expose the non-ideal to ridicule. When I complain that some wingnut is "going to explode", my allusion is to the idea that he has no control over himself, in an age when control is praised, even demanded both in punditry and in bed (I also love the term "premature articulation" for running one's mouth off, for exactly the same reason). A similar thing goes for accusing somebody of "sucking". We can't just imagine their performing a certain act we all enjoy -- what's wrong with that? -- but performing that same act unwillingly, out of desperation or coertion (something we ought to hope ideally never happens). But that's a complicated mental maneouve for such a casual phrase -- which may be why the phrase has escaped its moorings and (in my experience) doesn't mean much of anything anymore beyond vague denigration.

Tax blogging 2: The Globe & Mail whiffs on the Fraser study.

Declan wrote about this a couple of days ago, but I think it's useful to point out again the screaming inadequacy of Terry Weber's Globe & Mail summary of the Fraser Institute's latest TaxFacts (pdf). Essentially, Weber's piece is a flat regurgitation of the anti-tax hyberbole contained in Fraser's press release -- minus the whining about how hard the system is on the nouveau riche. Meanwhile, the wealth of actually interesting (despun) data contained in TaxFacts goes unreported.

For instance, Weber leads off the article by repeating -- at length -- the completely misleading Fraser spin about how taxes are, percentage-wise, replacing spending on essentials like food in the "average family" budget. In fact, the reason shares of income spent on necessities have fallen has nothing at all to do with taxes -- it's because most Canadian incomes kept going up long after households could purchase enough calories to feed themselves and still pay the electric bill. That's also, by the way, a big reason that the tax burden has gone up, not just in Canada but worldwide (see p. 91 of the report). Wealthier voters demand better roads, safer streets, more convenience in government services, and more cutting-edge health care.

As Declan complained, the article also repeats Fraser's ropiest, inflation-unadjusted numbers at face value, i.e. that the mean family tax burden has increased about 1600% in dollars since 1961. That sounds exciting but of course has no economic meaning whatsoever when presented as a raw number (hence the bogus "essentials" comparison Fraser perfers you to make). In fact, from the numbers on page 40 of the report (Table 4.3), almost two thirds of the real increase -- that is, inflation-adjusted but not wealth-adjusted -- in per-household tax-burden took place in the years between 1961 and 1974, i.e., during the decade that government-provided universal health care was coming fully online in Canada. A full 80% of the real increase had been accounted for by 1980. The trend toward statis is even more obvious when looking at the tax burden as a percentage of total household income. Dividing the relavent columns in table 4.2, shows that the figure was 29.5% in 1981 and 29.8% in 2005. (Taxes paid out of cash income -- which excludes things like employer health plans, accruing pension income and corporate retained earnings and has fallen as a percentage of total income over the period -- increased about 5 percentage points for the average family over the same period.)

Weber goes on to tie the oh-my-god-you're-being-taxed-a-lot excitement into the Tories' coming budget in the most unimaginative way he can: "The government has heralded the [GST] cut as the best way to deliver broad tax relief to all Canadians. Critics, however, have argued that the move is likely come at the expense of personal income-tax reductions planned by the previous Liberal government."

Yeah, yeah, we all know that. Personally, I think a more interesting factoid is found in the graphs on on page 53 of TaxFacts. The timeline suggests that the GST did nothing at all to make the effective tax system more regressive, as the Tories (and, previously, the Liberals) keep claiming as justification for chopping it. In fact, the income distribution of taxes has gotten slightly more progressive (a good thing!) over the past decade -- probably due in part to the low-income GST rebates. Meanwhile, the international comparison chart on page 89 indicates that Canada already already has relatively low consumption taxes, and relatively high income taxes, among developed countries. I wonder what percentage of Canadians knows this?

I beat on this lazy article not because I think tax cuts are always unjustified or because it's pure irresponsibility on the part of an electorate to believe, as ours does, that it pays too much tax. Neither of these things are true; in fact, I basically favoured the Liberals' income tax cuts (though partly out of self-interest). But I do worry about the massive disconect that exists in the West between what we want out of government and what we want to pay for it (and how unrealistically efficient and clean we sometimes expect government to be). That disconnect has done loads of damage south of the border by fostering a political culture that enables both massive taxcutting and massive spending on entitlements, as well as helping the sort of rightwing opportunists who demagogue against taxes without knowing or caring about the consequences. It's easy for politicians like George Bush and Tom Delay -- or Stephen Harper -- to play the you-pay-too-much-tax pander, and very hard for their opponents to counter it, even when they're right.

That is -- or should be -- the job of journalists. So how about it, Globe & Mail?

Please nominate this man.

Ryan Lizza on Confederate George Allen. The problem, as I see it, isn't that Allen "is" a racist -- that's probably impossible to know, and he almost certainly doesn't see himself as one. It's that he was too weak, too mean, too much of a shock-pleaser not to have been drawn into the "rebeliousness" of southern racist culture in his youth. For an aspiring politician, that's dumbness on a grand scale. Allen is like the Mr. Hyde version of Bush. Dubya might have passively accepted his entitlements, afflably for the most part, and shrugged off attempts to be more or think beyond (or question in any way) what privilege could do, just loafing along until his time came as it inevitably would. That's hardly admirable -- in fact it's a fairly disgusting commentary on the shame of American meritocracy. But it's one we, apparently, can live with; Bush was a winker. He knew how to stay out of trouble for the most part, knew there was nothing to get irreparably angry over for the sheer hell of it. Call it the zen of the frat brat. Allen, judging by Lizza's story, was the just the total opposite: the classic rich-kid thug, acting it all out, not content merely to be rich and popular and athletic, but needing to hate as well, needing to inflict punishment and discomfort. His sister has even written a book about what a sadistic brat he was! And it's early days yet. Lizza moved a little too much earth for the Senator just looking at Allen's yearbook photo.

Oh, but wouldn't it be wonderful for Americans to get a chance to prove that it is possible to be too retrograde for the U.S. presidency? Reading the article I acutally got excited about the dormant sense of national greatness that a George Allen defeat would reinvigorate. What a fine thing for Americans of all incomes, genders, races, relgions to unite in denying George Allen and everything he represents 45% of the popular vote. And there's just so much there -- so much history, so much narrowness -- for a smart Democrat to run against. Bring it on.


Update: Ed Kilgore's version of this:

As a native southerner, I find this weird and a bit troubling. Personally, I have all sorts of issues with the Confederate Flag and the whole self-destructive cult of the Lost Cause. But I do understand its appeal to people who have grown up saturated in southern culture; I may sometimes consider them SOBs, but they are my SOBs. The idea of young, incredibly privileged, golden-boy-quarterback George Allen of California choosing to embrace southern shibboleths at the precise moment, in the late 1960s, when they were most associated with atavistic racial attitudes, bothers me a lot.

Allen is going to make a lot of Americans feel pretty squirmy; but that's no reason he can't win a GOP primary.

Tax blogging 1: Dumbing down the anti-tax demagoguery for the working stiff.

For all its ideological anti-tax spin -- complete with a nice plump for a flat tax and the bizarre tangential argument that government regulations should be considered a form of tax because they're distortionary -- the Fraser Institute's TaxFacts (this year's findings summarized, badly, in this Globe and Mail piece) do contain lots of valuable and accessible information, particularly since Canadian statistics of this sort tend to be bloody hard to track down relative to American ones.

None the less, this, on page 49 of this year's TaxFacts, is just amusing:

The calculations in this chapter underlie our calculation of Tax Freedom Day, the day of the year when the average family has earned enough income to pay the total tax bill imposed on it by all levels of government. We are occasionally asked why we calculate Tax Freedom Day using cash income rather than total income before tax. We use cash income because the main purpose of Tax Freedom Day is to convey the total size of the tax bill imposed on Canadian families in a format that is easily understood... Cash income is a useful tool in describing the tax burdan because it does not force people to go through arithmetic gymnastics to get an idea of how large the total tax burdan is.


And here I thought the main purpose of Tax Freedom Day was to hammer home the essential, universal point that you ought to be OUTRAGED at how much those politicians ARE STEALING FROM YOU.

Actually, though, my favourite bit of drive-by demagoguery comes from TaxFact's handy comparison of how the "average family"'s taxes keep going UP while the amount of money the "average family" spends on neccesities is going DOWN. Here's how they put it on page 46:

By 2005, the situation had gotten worse. Whereas the proportion of income consumed by taxes had continued to increase, the fraction of income spent on necessities (shelter, food and clothing) had dropped dramatically. The average family spent 23.2% of its income on the neccesities of life while 29.8% of its income went to taxes.


This is funny for two reasons. First, from the numbers Fraser gives elsewhere in the report, taxes paid have not noticably increased as a percentage of the "average family"'s total pre-tax income since around 1974 (see the figures on page 40). The increases in per-household dollar amounts paid since that time are basically due to a combination of inflation and the fact that the "average family" has gotten a whole lot richer in the past forty years. Second, and in spite of this, the writers seem to be heavily implying that taxes have become so burdensome that they're crowding out expenditure on the "necessities of life" -- and that the situation just keeps getting "worse". In fact, as the writers of the report know perfectly well, just the exact opposite is true: falling income shares to food and housing are a sign of increasing descretionary wealth, not of the iron-toed boot of the taxman pressing ever closer against the Canadian throat.

Still, the information is well worth the spin.

Tony mostly snows.

While Think Progress' Tony Snow Quoables is fun and good fodder for a kick-off press conference, I think the apparent tendency to give the White House credit, however backhanded, because, as Michael Crowley put it, "the choice of a man who has often bashed--even mocked--him in public him makes Bush look freshly open-minded (even if that itself is a kind of strategic pose)" is just all wrong.

Worse, it confuses the basic issue. Snow's assention is far less a sign that the White House still feels the need to address criticism from across the Republican coalition (even if only the watered-down Fox News variety) than the exact opposite: a sign of just how easy it is for a Washington conservative player to move between punditry (where he's required to offer token criticisms of power) and politics (where he repeats the powerline straight). When the Clintonites brought on David Gergen way back when, it might have been "savvy" in the way Crowley means: a candid admission that the Admin needed wider, less partisan, less insular appeal. When Bush brings on Snow, it's a sign of how easy and tempting it is to do and admit absolutely nothing -- and to mollify the mainstream press with the chance to ask Snow what he meant that time he took a break from all the gushing to call Bush and "embarrassment". (I expect if you examine James Carville's whole oeuvre, he's said things just as bad about Clinton.)

The Anonyous Liberal has what I think is the better take: all the bad "snow job" puns are perfectly appropriate. They're how Tony got the job in the first place. They're how conservative Washington works.

Flag follow-up.

Dave has the right idea.

Lights off and full mast.

(Cross-posted, with modifications, at the Galloping Beaver.)

My co-blogger Dana at Galloping Beaver had a post up yesterday about the Harper government's decision not to fly flags at half-mast anymore for Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Now, Dave reports that the Tories have further adopted the Republican playbook by barring the press from the airfield where the bodies of four soldiers are arriving home.

The Toronto Star reports:

Canada’s death toll in Afghanistan has reached 17, and Conservative government officials fear the mounting casualties could present a political problem.

Why, one wonders, if the Tories are so concerned about the political problem, did they acquiese to the NDP's demand to open up Parliament to a non-binding (i.e. irrelevant except for restating the parties' positions) debate on the mission just a few weeks ago?

I have to say I'm more intrigued by the flag decision (announced by the Tories a few weeks ago and noted, though I missed it, by Mike at Rational Reasons) , because it raises questions beyond just straightforward politics and spin-management. While the Liberals rightfully pounded yesterday on the "callous" decision to keep the flag at full mast as the soldiers' bodies returned, the CBC provided the other side of the debate: many military people don't think the decision to lower the flag should be made at politicians' discretion, and veterans groups don't like the practice because it affords a status to current casualties that wasn't afforded to Canadian casualties of other wars.

It has to be said that Sheppard's piece wasn't helped by its invocation of some run-of-the-mill WSJ op-ed page hyperbole about the Liberals showing "an almost pathologically antimilitary" streak in lowering the flag too often. But that seems, if anything, like a symptom of a larger problem. In today's Globe and Mail, Roy MacGregor gets at it really well:

Greg Clark, who is best remembered as a humour writer for the old Star Weekly, won the Military Cross at Vimy and spent the Second World War filing dispatches from the front. After so much experience, so much horror, he could only conclude that "War is so small, so sad, so inexcusable."

Small numbers -- such as the single soldier in the tomb and the four who died on Saturday morning -- are quantities the mind can grasp. According to the Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century, the last 100 years saw 42 million die in wars. It is a number with far less effect on the imagination than the one that was a carpenter, the one that delivered mail, the one who liked to laugh.

No wonder the roses cringe.

The only rationale for war deaths is just cause. It is why we say they have made the "ultimate sacrifice" and, undeniably, they have. We salute them and, as the concrete letters beside this monument promise, "We shall remember them . . ."

It feels odd, though, to look up at the Peace Tower from this place and see that the Canadian flag has not been lowered. From now on, Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor said this weekend, tribute will be paid as it was in the past, "all casualties of war or operations on one day -- November 11."

It is almost as though the government of the day realizes there are more days like this coming, perhaps many more. We hope not, but fear so.


One of the implications of lowering the flag for every soldier killed in Afghanistan is that we can, in fact, afford to honour every life lost in battle -- a (for lack of a better word) luxury that wasn't available to us in the largely necessary but terrible bloodshed that dominated global politics just half a century ago (and, in fact, has dominated most of Western history). So isn't this a profoundly good thing, the clearest sort of sign that, despite our technological capacity for evil, we live in a better world, a better century, than the ones that are behind us?

And is it therefore insulting to the soldiers of previous generations to demonstrate how their largely anonymous sacrifice brought us to a place where every Canadian who falls in Afghanistan -- and every American who dies in Iraq -- can be remembered individually as a specific life lost? Granted, I'm a yuppie grad student who will never have to face combat or even boot camp. I don't claim to understand military culture or mores. But even so, that the Tories want to return to the practices of the past in honouring the dead strikes me less as a sign of respect for the formalism and stoicism of military life and history than as a somewhat ominous warning that the worst of that history isn't yet behind us, that we haven't actually come as far as we think, in Afghanistan or beyond it.

Roger L Simon asks a very good question.

Roger today:

I can't believe it's true, but John Fund - who has turned into Yale's worst nightmare on the pages of the Wall Street journal, no less - is reporting the startling news the university is considering Juan Cole "to fill a new spot as a professor of contemporary Middle East studies."

Wow. Why not go the Full Monty and choose Ward Churchill? I know - Churchill's in Native American studies, not the Middle East, but given the reliability of either of these gentlemen, I can't see what difference that makes.


Roger's sharp to catch that thing about Ward Churchill not actually having any academic training at all in Middle Eastern studies, so probably not being the right choice to serve as a professor of contemporary Middle East studies at Yale. But I think he misses a subtler point about credentials. For that, you have to go a bit deeper, and turn to the two men's wiki pages.

First, Cole:

Cole obtained his B.A. in History and Literature of Religions at Northwestern University (1975), his M.A. in Arabic Studies/History at American University in Cairo (1978), and his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies at University of California Los Angeles (1984). He was awarded Fulbright-Hays fellowships to India (1982) and to Egypt (1985-1986). Cole is fluent in Arabic (Modern Standard as well as Lebanese and Egyptian dialects), Persian, and Urdu, and is familiar with Turkish...

Cole is a Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History in the History Department at the University of Michigan.

From 1999 until 2004, he was the editor of The International Journal of Middle East Studies. He has served in professional offices for the American Institute of Iranian Studies.

He was elected president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in November 2004, term to start in November 2005. His election was described as "an endorsement of his work by hundreds of professors in various fields of Middle Eastern studies in American universities."


And then Churchill:

Churchill was born in Elmwood, Illinois and attended Elmwood High School... Churchill later received his B.A. and M.A. in Communication from Sangamon State University, now the University of Illinois at Springfield.

In 1990, he joined the University of Colorado at Boulder as an assistant professor and was granted tenure the following year. He resigned as chairman of the Ethnic Studies department at the University of Colorado in January 2005, but remains as a tenured professor.

...University of Colorado administrators ordered an investigation, which as of 2006 is currently underway, into the allegations of research misconduct, which include plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification.


Cole has a PhD in a relevant subject and, while controversial in some popular and academic circles, is currently a professor in good standing. Churchill does not and, while controversial in some popular and academic circles, is not. That's probably why Yale is considering one and not the other.

The potential Iranian tragedy.

In his Sunday L.A. Times op-ed, warning against U.S. aggression against Iran, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote (among many other smart things):

Iran has the objective preconditions in terms of education, the place of women in social affairs, and in social aspirations (especially of the youth) to emulate in the foreseeable future the evolution of Turkey. The mullahs are Iran's past, not its future; it is not in our interest to engage in acts that help to reverse that sequence.


This sort of goes hand-in-hand with what Juan Cole pointed out recently: that "the Iranian hard liners are down to a popularity rating in Iran of about 15%." Or the sentiments in this Kevin Sites dispatch to which Neil pointed me back in January. Yes, Ahmadinejad's election (if legit) was a setback for reform and the reformist instinct in Iran, but it's very likely to be an aberation in a longer-run pro-Western trend, one that stands out among Gulf states. Right now, Ahmadinejad is busy strengthening the convictions, or at least buttressing the superficial case, of Western Iran-hawks. But if he ends up with nothing to show for it -- and no real power to effect the domestic populist agenda he campaigned on last fall -- he's finished. On the other hand, if he can demagogue the U.S. into taking the bait and preemptiviely attacking Iran's nuclear facilities, or even seriously threatening to do so, it will do far more to strengthen the case of the anti-reform, hardline forces. (In this game of chicken, to induce an anti-Western backlash at home, Iran's hardliners have every incentive to make sure that American strikes hit a few civilian areas too.) And that could very well launch the mullahs right back into Iran's future.

Republicans and generals.

Two must-read responses to the recent Instapajamaline attacks on Rumsfeld's critics in the military, i.e. "retired military brass and bureaucrats who don't like the Secretary for reasons having little or nothing to do with Iraq; opponents of the war who want Rumsfeld out as the first step in changing our policy to one of "cut-and-run"; and supporters or former supporters of the war who attack him for the self-serving purpose of pretending that the difficulties we face in Iraq are not the inherent consequences of a decision they supported, but instead stem from the administration's incompetence."

The first must-read is by Doghouse Riley (via LGM) on just what constitutes a Powerline "expert"; the second, lengthier, must-read is by Greg Djerejian (via Oliver Willis), explaining to the Instapundit, and to the rest of us, why, most likely, Rumsfeld's suborinates are coming forward now rather than two or three years ago.

The truth about Carter's skybox.

(Cross-posted at The Galloping Beaver)

This is pretty frivolous, but as someone who believed that canard about how the elder Bob Casey wasn't allowed to speak at the '92 Democratic Convention because he was pro-life for years (would any organizer worth his salt schedule a speaker who was busy providing anti-Clinton fodder to the National Review?), I think this story, via Tom Tomorrow at HuffPo, should be wider knowledge:

So. You want the true, inside scoop on how Michael Moore ended up in the Carter skybox that evening [at the 2004 DNC]? Simple: utterly at random. After Michael went head-to-head with fightin' Bill O'Reilly (the reason we were on the skybox level in the first place), we were walking through the corridor and the crowd was gathering around us and starting to get scary in that Hard Day's Night kind of way. We happened to be passing the Carter skybox at that moment, as one of Jimmy Carter's sons -- Chip, if memory serves -- was coming out. He saw us about to get crushed by Michael's fans, and offered us sanctuary.

That one random moment of kindness has fueled right-wing conspiracy theories for two years now.


For the record, my theory has always been that, whatever you think of Micheal Moore, President Carter can do whatever and fraternize with whoever the hell he wants -- so I've never bought the Joe Klein "disgraceful" line on the subject. But this version of events seems imminently more plausible and appealing than the idea that Carter purposely brought Moore up just to personally stick it to Bush one more time, pundit-, conservative- and Kerry-handler-opinion be damned. I also makes the wingers who perpetually harp on this non-event seem that much more histronic.

The ghost of Republican histronics past.

Via Sean Wilentz' new indictment of the Bush Administration, here's Henry Hyde circa 1998:

"The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door.

That, of course, would be the very same rule of law that protects us from our leaders having embarrassing affairs and then lying about it to partisan headhunters who manage to get them under oath in the White House Map Room. Wilentz is offering Hyde's histronics as an example of GOP hypocracy in light of Bush's far greater contempt for the nation's laws regarding warrants and wiretapping. But one doesn't want to lose sight of how hilariously inappropriate the quote is all on its own -- only a man who has never had to worry about a late-night knock at the door could possibly waste his time caring about whether Bill Clinton was a physically faithless husband and what it said about the moral state of the republic.

With regard to executive scrutiny, since Bush took over the Daddy Party in action has simply become the Daddy Party in inaction -- variations on a theme. However history judges Bush, what kind of probability ever existed that Henry Hyde's party would actually produce a good president?

Good news from the top.

The best thing I've read all day, via MyDD, is Harry Reid saying No War with Iran:

Reid said the Middle East is a "powder keg" because of U.S. failures in Iraq, the rise of fundamentalism and the recent election of Hamas in Palestine.

"Our not being involved diplomatically in trying to solve the situation in Iran shows the Bush failure in foreign policy there and elsewhere."

And he said the U.S. has no military option in Iran.

"We don't have the resources to do it" because of the ongoing war in Iraq," he said.


Chris writes that "Apart from the fact that threatening to nuke a country that hasn't attacked you is insane and exactly the sort of reckless action we fear from a country like, say, North Korea, the number one reason why there are no good military options in Iran is because Bush and company are still in charge of the military." That's probably the right political angle, but Bush being in charge of the military is only, in my view, the number two reason why a military strike on Iran is a bad idea, though maybe the number one reason to fear one. The number one reason is closer to the North Korea thing: attacking Iran would virtually end, for a generation at least, the US' and its allies' ability to exert a modernizing, moderating influence on the world stage and on much of the Islamic developing world. There's a legacy for you.

Conservative burn.

At TAPPED, Ezra writes:

I'm fairly puzzled by the emerging conservative line on global warming. Realizing they've lost the debate on whether it will happen, they've begun turning to the difficulties of stopping it. Pushing that line today is Ross Douthat, who's frustrated by Al Gore's insistence on energizing the issue and adamant that "the kind of economic reforms necessary to do anything significant about the accumulation of carbon dioxide would be immediately and decisively disastrous."

Ezra and Matt go on to have a wonky discussion about whether cutting emissions globally is feasible, technologically or politically. Being shallow, I'm more interested in the domestic politics of the issue. Because this really captures the fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives: liberals' massive soft spot for issue-wonkery. As a result of this soft spot, expertise on some issue or another is de rigeur among Democratic politicians. Everybody's got to have their theme, be it Warner's enthusiasm for the information economy or Edwards' laser-like focus on working poverty. The standard liberal complaint about big Democrats is that "they don't believe in anything". The current crop of Dems is having none of it.

Sure, Republicans have their would-be intellectuals too: Andrew Sullivan-Reason Magazine types have been known to swoon over Newt Gingrich or Charles Murray. Conservatives have their definitive issues too: terrorism, unfortunately, came to be seen as a "Republican" issue -- and now its permutations like jihadism, or dhimmitude or whatever live on as fixations of the right. But it's not like any prominant conservative had, to my knowledge, actually been banging the "gathering storm" drum for years before 911, leaving liberals to choke on the fact that, say, Phill Gramm was right. Probably the closest politician we had to a terrorism cassandra was wonky Atari Democrat Gary Hart, obsessing away in relative obscurity with his (admittedly bipartisan) commission. It's also true that Republicans once had Big Intellectual Ideas about tax-cutting, and the being on the good side of the Laffer curve. But it turned out, after the Reagan tax cuts, then the Clinton tax hike, and then the Bush tax cuts, that the US was actually on the bad side of the Laffer curve (if there is a Laffer curve). The purity of conservative aversion to taxes lives on, now based as much on laughable fairness arguments as on laughable growth arguments. But, again, no liberal will ever have to clasp his throat and rasp that Steve Forbes was right.

And, really, it hardly matters that he wasn't. As a rule, Republicans thrive on symbols and on theme (too often confused with "vision"), a favourite theme being the Big Man of History who doesn't know things so much as he just "gets" things. This is stuff that, unfortunately, wows a big chunk of the punditocracy. It's also been very good politics. The idea that Reagan, unlike Carter "got" the Soviets, and that Bush, unlike Kerry, "got" al Qaeda are vital to the Republican canon, and to Republican electoral success over the past third of the century. Liberals may have nursed their issues and marshalled facts; but Republicans dominated the narrative and consolodated power.

The upshot, though, of the liberal/Democratic wonkery dominance is that, nowadays, pretty much every big liberal issue has its associated issue wonk. And, on climate change at least, this could actually start paying some dividends, at least in schadenfreude, in which liberals have been severely undernourished. As climate change has come closer to its political moment, there has been, in the past couple of years, some competition for the role of head climate change issue-wonk among liberal political figures. Well, I guess about as much competition as there was in the 2000 Democratic primary. How did Al Gore win this time? It's not that he's more charismatic than, say, Robert Kennedy, or more politically promising than, say, Eliot Spitzer, both of whom have prioritized the issue. It's the sheer, indisputable, quasi-messaniac purity of his wonkery. Not even Douthat feels, in his column, that he can challenge the fact that Gore knows more or cares more about climate change than most people; afterall, as David Remnick recently noted, he's been hammering those flow charts for 26 years now, from before global warming was even on the horizon as a political issue.

Thus the condundrum: accepting the reality of climate change is one thing. Afterall, establishment conservatives eventually came to accept that passing the Civil Rights Act was, in fact, a good thing. Ideas are important only insofar as they fit into the current narrative, and the narrative can open up to accept them or it can downplay them. But accepting that Al Gore was right about climate change, well...hoo... That throws a wrench into the personality-based Republican justification machine. As an example of what we can expect, Douthat spends the first few paragraphs of his piece pandering to his readership on the subject, mainly by suggesting that liberals used to share his negative views on Gore before they flip-flopped in typically feckless liberal fashion. Having got that out of the way, he goes on to make some quite substantive points about the global costs of curbing emissions -- the sort of thing a serious, issue-based conservatism might have argued five or six years ago when the science was solidifying but the question of what to do was yet to be seriously hammered out.

Anyway, this is a trend I expect to see a lot of: Roger L. Simon is no Ross Douthat but he does live uncomfortably close to Hollywood, and you can see him lashing out recently on the same uncomfortable subject. Being right -- politically, substantively -- on such a universally important but traditionally elite issue may or may not translate into better policy and Democratic electoral gains. But Democrats and liberals don't just own the issue; our politicians really do personify it, and through the sheer force of determined, unadulterated, even apolitical wonkery. And, while there are certainly more important things at stake in the global warming debate, it's going to be great fun watching conservatives twist themselves into angry knots trying to encorporate that into the narrative.

(Note: I edited this post a couple of times since I originally posted it.)

Ha!

I concur. (Well, I don't think Chretien was all that bad, considering Iraq, Kyoto, the marijuana and campaign finance laws, etc. But it's always a great source or relief to be reminded that I'm not the only overt amateur Martin Liberal on the internet.)

Tipping points.

Encouraging piece by Christina Larson in the latest Washington Monthly on "the emerging environmental majority". Good title since it seems to follow along the lines of the Judis-Texeira "reallignment" theory anticipating a center-left era to succeed the current rightwing one. Larson's main point is that the post-70s split between traditional sportsmen-conservationists and New Politics "greens" is ending, and that the GOP is going to have an increasingly difficult time over the next years balancing the demands of its outdoorsmen/rural life-interest lobby groups against those of its energy-industry paymasters, possibly pushing fisher-hunter conservationists toward the Democratic camp. Most deliciously, Larson suggests the "tipping point" might come over that most latte of issues, global warming.

Larson convinces me that environmental policy could well improve -- indeed, already has given the anecdotes in the article -- under the pressure of Republican-leaning gunsport groups like Trout Unlimited teaming up with Democratic-leaniing enviros like the Earthworks or the Sierra Club. Carl Pope certainly comes off well in his efforts to de-rarify environmentalism and stress its traditional connection with hunting. But as evidence of a possible political as opposed to policy reallignment, the article's evidence strikes me as pretty thin gruel. Larson cites Bush's declining results among rural and gun-owning households between 2000 and 2004. But outside the east and the south, in the parts of the country where the most probable reallignment would occur, Bush's share of the popular vote among gun-owning households fell only 2% in the west and 3% in the midwest -- hardly the stuff or backlash or reallignment. Among rural voters (including small town voters), Bush's vote share fell 2% in the midwest and actually rose in the western states.

That's not to say that conservation-populist governors like Brian Schweitzer or state-level Democratic electoral breakthroughs like the ones in Colorado and Montana don't fit nicely into Larson's theory. But, if the theory holds, I'm not entirely sure what will prevent western Republicans from simply distancing themselves from the corporate national party in the same way southern and western regional Democrats already distance themselves from the urban "elitist" national Democratic party with a fair amount of success. Surely the conservationist-corporate conflict of interest in the GOP ranks pales next to the theocon-conservatarian conflict of interest, which has been humming along nicely the past 25 years. US political coalitions are mighty durable things.

Not to be unduly negative; if sportsmen and green groups unite to force Republican senators like Conrad Burns and Jeff Bingaman to defend what's left of the American wilderness and demand things like a real energy policy, that's a definite plus. If more people come to accept that environmentalism (like most boogieman liberal causes) is already a totally centrist issue in US politics, that's a good thing too. Whether its a long run pancea for the Democrats though is, to me, more questionable.

In defence of partisan punditry.

TIME's list of the 10 best and worst US senators is a good example of why non-horserace politically neutral analysis can be such a drag. First, TIME cites my favourite senator Carl Levin (D-MI) in its top ten:

[T]he Michigan Democrat has gained respect from both parties for his attention to detail and deep knowledge of policy, especially in his role as a vigilant monitor of businesses and federal agencies. In 2002, a subcommittee he led hauled in Enron's board of directors to question them about the company's shady accounting practices; in hearings a year later, he was one of the chief challengers of large accounting firms that had created illegal tax shelters. Congress passed laws in the wake of both scandals in an effort to prevent the abuses from happening again.

Levin, 71 and first elected in 1978, says he considers congressional hearings a critical part of his job, spending as much as 20 hours prepping for each one so an evasive witness won't outwit him...


But right next to Levin on the list is the odious Jon Kyl (R-AZ):

Last November, for example, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina proposed a controversial amendment barring U.S. courts from hearing cases brought by prisoners in the war on terrorism. It turned out that Kyl was behind it, having worked on the language for months and having assigned his staff to help write the final bill. But "it was a situation where it was best handled by Lindsey," Kyl says delicately, pointing out that Graham had the credibility of a military lawyer and a centrist. When urgent legislation to respond to Hurricane Katrina bumped Kyl's long-sought goal of a vote on abolishing the estate tax last fall, Kyl quietly worked to get it back on the Senate agenda by recruiting Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions in an unsuccessful attempt to find victims of the disaster who would be paying the tax.

Kyl's qualifications are that he's a wily hardass out to exploit a national tragedy in order to manipulate public opinion on the estate tax, thumb his nose at Bush from the right, and hide his agenda behind his "centrist" colleagues. What kind of value system admires both that and Levin's work embarrassing corporate villains and agitating against the dangers of war in Iraq, or Ted Kennedy's "serial battles on behalf of the working class"? (Similarly, why on earth can the harmless Daniel Akaka (D-HI) be on the same "Worst Senators" list as the wacky, unethical Jim Bunning (R-KY) other than to provide bipartisan balance?)

In order to fit both Kyl and Levin on the same list, TIME has to basically ignore ideological concerns completely. The blandness starts with the neat alphabetical order of the senators and goes from there. There's the typical praise for "mavericks" -- senators who, like Kent Conrad or Richard Lugar, can stand down wooing from the White House or marching orders from the party establishment -- and for senators who are wily, appealingly demonstrative, and/or back-room creative in getting their agenda passed, whatever that agenda might be or why it might have been adopted in the first place. The result is, predictably, pure mush: a style-parade lacking any coherent idea of what senators ought to be doing to advance the public interest, or any theory of good govenance beyond the usual, underlying theory that there is a vital centre somewhere out there, that hard work is a good thing, etc. etc. Maybe that worked 20 years ago, maybe not. But when liberals and conservatives today have entirely different ideas of what the public interest is, not taking sides requires saying pretty close to nothing at all. The TIME worldview, neatly symbolized by a list with both Kyl and Levin on it, is just excruciatingly toneless.

New poll: Dog bites man.

The Globe and Mail reports some shocking results from its new poll, complete with the standard platitudes from the ubiquitous Mr. Gregg (whom I have a soft spot for only because he did write the definitely reasonable column on the Sponsorship brouhaha a while back):

Nearly two-thirds of the respondents to a poll conducted by the Strategic Counsel for The Globe and Mail and CTV said their priorities are similar or identical to those spelled out by the Conservatives — accountability, child care, reduced waiting times for health care, safe streets and a cut to the GST.

In all regions of the country, about 9 per cent of respondents said Mr. Harper's priorities were identical to their own, and 54 to 58 per cent said they were similar.

“When you poke further and say, ‘Do you have any other priorities?' a solid majority say yes,” Mr. Gregg said.


Good God. Accountability. Child care. Better health care. Safe streets. A tax cut. Ponies. An Easter egg hunt. Candy canes and Christmas carols. Who the hell is going to take exception to any of this stuff? So long as the Tories get to couch their ideas in these sort of meaningless, feel-good soundbites, we're never going to learn anything (like, for instance, the nuts and bolts of "accountability".) The only news here is that support for the Tories and Liberals is basically unchanged in two months. Only the NDP seems to be sliding a bit.

Republicans insult Hispanics' intelligence.

What was that Bush said about the soft bigottry of low expectations? Via Talking Points Memo, (also the Carpetbagger and Nicholas Beaudrot) the Republicans are panicking about the backlash from their draconian immigration House bill and trying to pin it on the Democrats, in particular Harry Reid. The Las Vegas Sun reports:

The 60-second spot says in Spanish that Reid "blocked our leaders from working together" and blames Democrats for legislation that passed the Republican-controlled House that would make illegal immigrants subject to felony charges.

"Reid's Democrat allies voted to treat millions of hardworking immigrants as felons," the ad says, "while President Bush and Republican leaders work for legislation that will protect our borders and honor our immigrants."

The reference is to a House vote on an amendment that would have reduced the proposed penalty to a misdemeanor. Many Democrats, including members of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus, voted against the amendment, arguing they did not support criminal penalties. Nevada Republicans Jon Porter and Jim Gibbons also voted against the amendment, which failed. The felony provision remained in the bill, H.R. 4437, and it passed the House on a largely party line vote.


And what was that about liberalism being a magnet for identity politics? From the same report:

Reid also is fielding attacks from local Republicans. In a statement Thursday, the Nevada Republican Hispanic Coalition, a group affiliated with the state and Clark County GOP, called Reid "a rich Anglo" and accused him of "using Latinos as a pawn for political gain."


Since the legislation was drafted by Republican James Sensenbrenner, the House Judiciary Committee Chairman, and the deliberation, such as it was, took place last December in an emergency session of the House, I don't even see what Reid has to do with it. But even if Reid is complicit in giving orders, the "political game" complaint is really laughable. Sensenbrenner introduced the bill with the provision to make illegal residence a felony written into the text. Then he introduced an amendment on the floor to downgrade the crime to a misdeneanor, one that he had to know wouldn't pass without Democratic support given that plenty of firebreathing anti-immigrant Congressmen from his own party would vote to keep illegal residence a felony. In the end, 203 House Republicans voted to pass the final bill -- felony provision left in -- compared to 36 Democrats.

Republican moustache-twirling is always fun to watch in a rubbernecking, what-will-they-do-next kind of way. The audacity of Swift Boating or Fancy Fording is sort of admirable in a way, politics at its most raw, and dangerous to underestimate in terms of fundamental effectiveness. But this moustache-twirling plus oh-my-God-we're-going-to-lose-the-Hispanic-vote-for-a-generation flopsweat isn't quite the same. The GOP is treating the very demographic it's terrified of losing like rubes (the ads ran in Spanish), and pitting its dissembling up against the sort of organization that produced the rallies in major cities last week, against the power of the Hispanic talk radio network, churches and unions. I don't see how the GOP isn't miscalculating again with these ads, just like it did with the Sessenbrenner bill. For once the audacity is kind of sad.

Right-wing tax populism.

(Cross-posted at the Galloping Beaver.)

YOU PAY TOO MUCH TAX. Prime Minister Harper explains:

During Wednesday's speech, Mr. Harper focused largely on tax-relief for Canadians, reiterating a number of campaign promises which his government says would improve the lot of individual Canadians and companies.

Mr. Harper also accused the previous government of racking up massive surpluses on the backs of Canadians.

“Billions upon billions were taken from Canadians,” he said. “Talk about surpluses. They were taken from Canadians through over-taxation.

“Nothing more, nothing less.”


Total federal debt per capita in Canada is currently about $16,300, down from $17,700 in 2001 -- a modest reduction over the past five years. The current net per-capita external public debt -- the debt on which Canadian residents don't recoup the interest -- was about $5,000 per capita in 2005, down from about $8400 per capita in 2001 (the latter figure is adjusted using the US-Canada exchange rate and not PPP so it might be a little off). And the Liberals took the % of federal revenues spent servicing the debt rollover from about 38% in 1995 to about 21% in 2003 -- and down further to 19% in 2004, the last year for which I can locate data. Much of this decline came from lower interest rates, though a case has been made that these were themselves facilitated by the "virtuous cycle" of responsible fiscal/monetary policy -- what I think of as (within reason) the "good" supply-side economics.

Now, there is a valid argument that running sustained surplusses to pay down debt in is generally bad public policy, but that argument traditionally comes from the left, and -- allowing for a few purple claims here and there -- really constitutes a debate over degree rather than kind (how big the surplusses should be; whether simply balancing the budget and allowing productivity growth and inflation to eat at the debt is good enough). Needless to say, that's not Harper's contention. Harper's contention, complete with occasional cowboy hat, is that THOSE EVIL LIBERALS HAVE ROBBED YOU BLIND, even as he laughs off the proposed Liberal broad-based income tax cut in favour of his own party's regressive tax package.

Not shocking: Harper is a classic New Rightie, smarter than the typical US version, but a fine specimen nonetheless. Here, he is simply staking out The Movement's position on fiscal responsibility. "Nothing more, nothing less."

Recommendation.

In the blog navel-gazing department, I've always been fascinated by the phenomenon by which some blogs develop really unique, fun, friendly comment sections while other blogs of what seem to me comparable quality and reach (I'm talking about big blogs, not little ones like LWC) develop such crappy, predictable and/or hostile ones.

Anyway, Pierre Tristam at Candide's Notebooks put up a great meta-post on the subject of blog comments a few days ago -- with application to the recent dust-up over a bunch of nasty comments left in a HuffPo thread about a celebrity newscaster marriage. Go read and enjoy.

The Chinese do have a sense of humour.

On the eve of its long-delayed China launch, BlackBerry is facing a sudden challenge from a cheaper Chinese rival called, unapologetically, RedBerry.

So what's the post-Marxist translation of "crackberry"?

Cutting and running.

According to George Packer's newest New Yorker dispatch from Iraq, the occupation phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom really is winding down. There's the adaptive stay-the-course paradigm in Tal Afar that Bush and Rumseld love to talk about. Then there's the rest of the mission in the rest of the country:

...The trend is away from counterinsurgency and toward what, in Washington, is known as an “exit strategy.” Commanders are under tremendous pressure to keep casualties low, and combat deaths have been declining for several months, as patrols are reduced and the Americans rely more and more on air power. (During the past five months, the number of air strikes increased fifty per cent over the same period a year ago.) More than half the country is scheduled to be turned over to Iraqi Army control this year. This is the crux of the military strategy for withdrawal, and it is happening at a surprisingly fast pace. President Bush has always insisted that the turnover and “drawdown” will be “conditions-based”—governed by the situation in Iraq and by the advice of commanders, not by a timetable set in Washington. But everywhere I went in Iraq, officers and soldiers spoke as if they were already preparing to leave. A sergeant in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, said, “We’ll be here for ten years in some form, but boots-on-the-ground-wise? We’re really almost done.” He said that the U.S. Army doesn’t allow itself to fail, and when I suggested that Iraq hardly looked like a victory the sergeant replied, “So you adjust the standard of success. For me, it’s getting all the Joes home. It’s not that I don’t give a damn about what’s going on here. But that’s how it is.”

...In other words, “conditions-based” withdrawal is a flexible term. The conditions will be evaluated by commanders who know what results are expected back in Washington. I suggested to Senator Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican, who has been a critic of the Administration’s war policy, that this sounded like a variation on the famous advice that Senator George Aiken, of Vermont, gave President Johnson about Vietnam, in 1966: declare victory and go home. “In a twenty-first-century version, yes, probably,” Hagel said. “It won’t be quite that stark.” The Administration, he said, is “finding ways in its own mind for back-door exits out of Iraq.” He added, “We have an election coming up in November. The fact is, we’re going to be pulling troops out, and I suspect it’ll be kind of quiet. We’re going to wake up some morning, probably in the summer, and all of a sudden we’ll be forty thousand troops down, and people will say, ‘Gee, I didn’t know.’”


The GOP's wet dream would be to be able to effect a drawdown of troops -- accompanied inevitably by a drawdown in the reporters who accompany them and who will otherwise continue to monitor and publicize the uptick in Iraqi civilian casualties as US forces retreat from the streets to their fortified bases -- without appearing to cave in to demands by John Kerry, John Murtha or other liberal/Democratic critics of the occupation in Congress. (I'm guessing the silent cut-and-run probably has more to do with the need to protect the military vote anyway than to yield to Democratic pressure.) It seems fairly vital for Democrats not to let the Administration get away with this. I'm partially convinced that pulling out of Iraq is the only viable solution for the US and its remaining allies (against the wishes of Tal Afar's mayor and various other Iraqis interviewed in Packer's article). But to overthrow a dictator, plunge a nation into sectarian conflict and then wash your hands of the whole affair is a moral atrocity. Whatever their individual positions on leaving or staying (a hard ethical question), Democrats have to make Americans understand this.

Huffington follies.

I love the Huffington Post. Celebrities really ought to blog, and a lot of the commentary is terrifically spirited and even insightful. But this post honestly reads like a parody of out-of-touch Left Coast liberalism:

It breaks my heart to think the Democrats might be stupid enough to nominate Hillary. But then again, it doesn't really surprise me. Going down this road should finally finish the job Dem bigwig Bob Shrum has been working toward all these years -- driving the party into political extinction.

...Hillary is the most polarizing political figure of our time -- and that's just among Democrats. I live on the west side of Los Angeles, and we're about as blue state as you can get. My friends are all tree-hugging Prius drivers whose idea of a sexy candidate is Dennis Kucinich...

Even so, only about half my friends say they'd vote for Hillary. Sure, those who love her, love her. But most of us just see a disingenuous, win-at-all costs, me-first, power-hungry flip-flopper. She's Bill without the warmth, charm, charisma or common touch. He even got the good hair. And if Hillary is this divisive among loyal Democrats, just think how she'll play in all those Midwest states where the only guy they hate more than Charles Darwin is Bill Clinton.


Ok, so if Hillary is the "most polarizing" candidate among "loyal Democrats" (the often mislabeled "base" which the writer seem to envision as infinite multiples of Bob Shrum but which is actually composed of union members and other working-class whites, blacks, Asian-Americans, Hispanics, single and working women, urbanites, Jews, seniors and even the occassional Hollywood liberal), how exactly is she going to win the nomination? This isn't 1968; becoming the nominee basically requires winning a plurality, probably very close to a majority of votes cast in multi-state primaries. Bob Shrum (who has retired) does not in fact make the final decision on this one.

The simple answer is that she isn't even close to being the most polarizing candidate among "Democrats", unless by "Democrats" the people who always make this argument essentially mean "me and my friends". In fact, Clinton is by far the most popular major Democrat among the party rank-and-file according to actual surveys of registered Democrats. We don't have to like it. It's a fact that could certainly change. It may not translate into purple-state success. But right now at least it really is a good factual point to start from.


p.s. This post was originally a little meaner than I intended (I try only to be mean to conservatives); I edited it a bit, and no offense to the HuffPo blogger Hayes Jackson. This is just a sore spot of mine.


Update: Neil reminds me of his favourite poll, which has results similar to the one linked above, except that HRC and Edwards are tied as the most popular Dems among Democratic identifiers (Edwards is more popular among the population as a whole, which isn't the point here but could still be evidence that he'd make a better general election choice).

George Bush and the Littl Shynin Man.

Any Russell Hoban fans out there? If not, I'm truly sorry about the pretentiousness to follow. But I just happened to be re-reading Riddley Walker, then this great essay on "Riddley Walker and the Terror of History", right when Bush's nuclear-enhanced Middle East-oriented messiah complex comes roaring back in the news, thanks to Seymour Hersh. Talk about freaky parallels. (Donning my literature snob hat fully, I have to say that Riddley Walker, unlike, say, A Clockwork Orange to which it's always compared, actually seems a much better parable for the age of the Islamic fundamentalist /terrorist threat than for the age of communist threat -- the murkily understood and quickly mythologized threat of raids from "Outland" on "Inland" standing in for attacks from stateless or state-alligned extralegal groups on the homeland rather than the threat from a well-defined, powerful single-state enemy competing openly on the international stage. This despite that the book was written in 1980.)

So for any fellow Riddley fanatics: take Pry Mincer Goodparley as Tony Blair and maybe also as the archetypical Senate Democrat- or New Republic- "liberal hawk"; take Granser to be George Bush (Granser -- clueless, myopic, alternately caring and callous -- needs Blair and the liberal hawks' "follerme", or charisma, to make his messianic plan work); the hevvys from the Ram as Victor Davis Hanson, Charles Krauthammer and the rest of the neocon pundits -- boarish, menacing, drawn to sophistic intimidation; Lissener and the Eusa folk as the angry antiwar left -- fundamentally right about the overzealous quest for nuclear/ strategic dominance on the part of politician-pundit class (the Eusa showmen) but too prone to circle-jerk and to waste time and moral strength seeking revenge to be truly effective at influencing events or winning over their enemies.

In the book, the "1 big 1" -- the nuclear explosion that brings about the fall of modern man back to a false-mystic Iron Age -- is recreated in the post-apocolyptic future as the "1 littl 1" -- the reinvention of gunpowder precipitated by a boat manned by a dead man arriving from Outland (or "otherside") with the right missing ingredient... a precipitating event paralleled by 911 if we can stretch a bit. The eventual result is that all the principle characters blow themselves up in their race to recreate the Power of explosives that will protect them from their real but vaguely-understood outside enemies, and make new enemies closer to home in the process.

Iraq could easily be our "1 littl 1" -- a pathetic clusterfuck created by powerful people panicked, driven by a warped idealism, and greatly overestimating what they knew and what they could achieve with a display of state-of-the-art power. But unlike the rulers of Riddley's Inland, whose homemade chemistry and "tryl narrer" epitomizes their pathetic fallen state and leaves them farther than ever from technological utopia and its tragic conclusion in the "1 big 1" -- Bush actually does have nukes. Eusa (Europe and the USA) could still bring on the "1 big 1"... though an attack on Iran would more likely result in something closer to another "1 littl 1"; not the nuclear apolocalypse but more costly, unnecessary embarassment for the flailing, panicked West and its messianic small men leaders, and plenty of human suffering for those exposed to the attack and its aftermath. Presumably, though, many 1 littl 1s led to the 1 big 1 in the Eura Story, with each precipitating event simply compacted into the myth. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Berlin, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Iraq, Iran... the cycle of violence and history, escalation and denouement and escalation again.

The question the book ends with for me is whether Riddley himself -- who, after substituting Punch for Eusa in the roading puppet show (sorry; you really have to read the book) begins to pick up disciples, and whose days are clearly numbered -- is supposed to be the Christ come again to redeem Eusa's precipitation of the second (nuclear) Fall. Even if Riddley fits the role, it's not obvious that Hoban believes in the redemption myth or that the humans of his imagining will even let themselves be redeemed, or that good, sensible, humane, even shamanic or quasi-divine people can make a difference (myth torn as it is between rank superstition and real stabs at grace). Riddley's power comes from rejecting two parallel temptations: the power-hungry, opportunistic, perpeutally self-forgiving mechanisms of Goodparley's class and the fatalistic nihilism of Lissener and the Eusa folk -- the cult of power-seeking and the cult of perpetual victimhood. But it's not obvious that Riddley -- the Sakharov or Mandela of his day -- will head off the quest to harness the 1 littl 1, or that he could have done anything to head off the 1 big 1 back in our day. He doesn't stop Granser; how could he stop the more sophisticated and powerful Eusa? At any rate, the danger and irony of "clevverness" and the "hart of the wud" is obvious in a world that chooses and reconfirms leaders like Bush (or, for that matter, Ahmadinejad). Arga Warga!

Rethinking Foer.

I wrote before that I wasn't overjoyed with the Beinart for Foer change-up at TNR. But maybe I spoke to soon. The Editors have just published the third true-blue editorial in as many weeks, one of which included a brief apologetic nod to their role in damaging the Clinton health proposal back in 1993 by publishing Betsy McCaughey's critque of it. (For the record I've never read McCaughey's article or James Fallows' account in Breaking the News of how it got published. So I can't say I fully share the liberal grievance against it. I might if I knew the story better than just the outlines in the liberal press.) But the grievance is real, and Foer's first act as editor was to acknowledge it sympathetically, a point in his favour.

Much more cut-and-dry among TNR's sins though was the magazine's early-90s promotion of Charles Murray and his "genetic inferiority stuff" thesis. Murray was a simple creation of the VRWC (see Eric Alterman's invaluable discussion in What Liberal Media) and even if most of the Contributing Editors to the TNR Bell Curve issue (even the unorthodox Mickey Kaus) ripped Murray's racist conclusions and helped expose the sham-science on which they were based, the basic decision to take the bait, splash Murray across the cover and raise his and co-author Herrnstein's status to cross-ideological intellectual celebrity really did represent a horrendous error of judgement for which the magazine should be forever ashamed.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that one of Foer's first acts as editor (I assume) has been to bring in Ezra Klein to ask: Can we stop paying attention to Charles Murray now? Ezra trashes Murray's latest Big Right Wing Ideas book in a short, delciciously derisive piece. He concludes:

Having quickly rewritten all of U.S. social policy in a scant 79 double-spaced pages, Murray moves on to even more outrageous claims. The last section of his book, "The Larger Purpose," unveils his true messianic intentions. There is, he writes, a "momentous effect of the Plan: the revitalization of the institutions through which people lead satisfying lives." Thus follows an extended discourse on how the United States can avoid the perils of becoming like Western Europe--where many countries, surveys show, register higher levels of happiness than this country, but not the sort of happiness of which Murray approves. Murray then embarks upon a meditation on the nature of happiness. One such section is titled, modestly, "The Nature of Man as Social Being." The following Murray sentence, from his Journal op-ed, captures much of the flavor: "[I]f you agree with me that to live a human life can have transcendental meaning, then we need to think about how human existence acquires weight and consequence."

Apparently, the timeless quest for meaning comes back to abolishing government programs. "The welfare state is pernicious ultimately because it drains too much of the life from life," he argues. The ordinary conservative pundit maintains that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--which together account for over 75 percent of what the Plan would abolish--are unaffordable. Murray argues that they have created an existential spiritual crisis. Our lives would have more meaning if we spent more time haggling with health insurance bean-counters rather than having Medicare bureaucrats do it for us. Because Murray is not an ordinary conservative think-tank hack. He is oh-so weightier, oh-so-much more meaningful.


Ezra was a great pick to write the piece. But I just love the bigger symbolism involve (or I think it's involved). If Sullivan's TNR ushered in the Murray Era with a bang, maybe Foer's TNR is doing what it can to end it with a whimper. And what an improvement in the world that would be!


Update: Whoops, I wrote this before noticing Ezra's happiness over the direction in which Foer seems to be taking cover pictures. I could have done without last week's Anna Nicole one, but this week's cover does have a certain post-modern something. I suppose, though, I might as well round out the cliche by pointing out that I've always liked TNR's covers.

MA's health politics: rethinking Tweedledee.

Jonathan Cohn writes about the upshot politics of the new individual-mandate based Massachusetts universal healthcare law:

[Progressives should be] thankful, because nationally the most important impact of this new law may be on politics, not policy. Once Romney starts boasting about how he achieved universal health coverage in Massachusetts, it will become that much harder for conservatives to demonize the very concept as "big government." Oh, they'll try--and they'll have at least some success. But now Democrats will have this retort: If a Republican governor and leading presidential contender with strong conservative credentials thinks universal health care is a good idea, how radical an idea can it be?

And Ezra, after giving a brief useful summary of the bill's provisions (a longer summary of the bill and its likely political fallout can be found here), points out the related major reason why the program just might work (emphasis mine):

What emerged, while not glorious, is a distinct improvement on the status quo. Single adults making less than $9,500 will receive free care with no deductible, those netting up to 300 percent of the poverty line ($48,000 for a family of three) will be subsidized on a sliding scale, and individuals with the resources but not the willingness to purchase health care will be fined about a $1,000 annually, presumably through taxes. The bill has no dedicated funding source, so there's a certain amount of apprehension over its implementation, but look for it to get the money it needs -- not only does the cash exist, but Romney desperately wants to tout this achievement in 2008.


Interesting too that Massachusetts' last attempt at a universal health care bill (based mainly on an employer mandate combined with pay-for-performance) faltered for years due to lack of funding... right after the 1988 election and during the embattled end of Dukakis' recession-plagued governorship, until Republican Weld took over in 1991 and killed the program off. Political incentives and the political strength of the parties involved almost certainly do make a big difference. And it does look like the stars are aligned for this bill.

So are we possibly entering a bizarro world where the 2008 Republican primary is fought over health care rather than the Confederate flag? Are we re-entering a golden age of moderate national Republicanism? (I mean actual, boring, public-minded moderate, not McCain media-friendly hard-right-"maverick"-style moderate). Probably not, but another interesting aspect of the Romney bill is how similar it looks to Michael Calabrese and Laurie Rubiner's proposed individual-mandate plan -- albeit with the caveat that the New America team proposes full federal implementation and talks a little tougher about directly imposing the mandate on states and citizens as well as regulating insurance companies. Rubiner is, of course, currently health guru to Hillary Clinton.

I cede that it's unlikely that Romney will win the 2008 GOP nomination (despite Katherine Jean Lopez' ongoing efforts) and that there are more important short-term things at stake... like a test-drive of universal health care. But, hypothetically, what would Clinton vs. Romney 2008 contest look like? My guess: Clinton-Rubiner proposing to expand the "Massachusetts miracle" to the whole country while the actual governor of the state that produced the "miracle" -- by working across the aisle with the Democratic Legislature (changing the tone etc. etc.) -- sagely warns that health care is best left to the states in grand anti-federalist Republican tradition. And standing himself as direct evidence of the assertion.

I'm not liking those political optics at all. If Romney is seriously going to change the debate for Republicans (and the change among rubber-band ideological conservatives could potentially be seismic; at The Corner, even Jonah Goldberg is suddenly sounding reasonable), shouldn't it be matched with a similar seismic shift on the Democratic side? Then 2008 could potentially actually be about a clear health care choice rather than a quibble between Massachusetts Republicanism and New America Democraticness (or, for that matter, McCainiac "maverick" Republicanism and New America Democraticness, which we also lose). Progressives are sounding almost giddy about the prospect of going down to the Romney vision rather than to something worse. So why not take the plunge and go down (or maybe even prevail) with guns blazing single payer? (caveat: Canadian vested interest etc., but still...)

Desirability and enforceability.

The biggest question I have regarding the illegal immigration debate ongoing in the US is whether or not the federal government is or has ever actually been serious about cutting down on the flow of migrant workers from Mexico and Central America, and what, if not, "getting serious" would entail. Doug Massey, op-eding in the New York Times has some remarkable numbers on the subject of border security:

[In response to public outcry,] the number of Border Patrol officers increased from around 2,500 in the early 1980's to around 12,000 today, and the agency's annual budget rose to $1.6 billion from $200 million. The boundary between Mexico and the United States has become perhaps the most militarized frontier between two nations at peace anywhere in the world.

Although border militarization had little effect on the probability of Mexicans migrating illegally, it did reduce the likelihood that they would return to their homeland. America's tougher line roughly tripled the average cost of getting across the border illegally; thus Mexicans who had run the gantlet at the border were more likely to hunker down and stay in the United States. My study has shown that in the early 1980's, about half of all undocumented Mexicans returned home within 12 months of entry, but by 2000 the rate of return migration stood at just 25 percent...


Faced with these stats, it's easy to assume that successive federal governments have been either cynical or incompetent -- in the former case, spending federal dollars to pander to public sentiment while making sure border state business interests are supplied with a dependent, politically powerless pool of workers who are essentially stranded on US soil. While I always sort of assumed that was a big part of the story, it's not really the essential thing. The bigger question is, if we could magically assume away cynicism and political cross-currents, or if public pressure became so great as to override business demand for cheap labour in the politician's calculation, whether the US actually could block the flow of illegal immigrants at the border or increase the flow of migrant workers back to Mexico to any significant degree.

Neil, wonking out at the John Edwards blog, takes up the other major aspect of the enforcement argument:

In the last few years, the government has completely lost interest in fining businesses for immigration violations...For instance, in 1999, 417 businesses were fined for hiring illegal immigrants. In 2004, only 3 businesses were fined. This is despite the fact that the easiest way to crack down on the hiring of illegal immigrants would be to attack the businesses that hire them. Just let the immigration authorities look at the Social Security records, and check if businesses are paying Social Security taxes for people who aren't known taxpayers. This would be a lot more effective than improving border security...or trying to find everyone and deport them (which would cost an insane amount of money, and would be really hard to do).


But, again, is there any evidence that the more vigorous fining regime in the late 90s actually slowed illegal immigration or discouraged illegal hiring? And, if not, would an even more vigourous fining regime do the trick? It's a pretty central question. The thing is, despite the ugly centrality of Tom Tancredo-Michelle Malkin-style nativism (not to mention the Instapundit-Mickey Kaus "let them eat cake" approach), it's perfectly reasonable for conservatives and even some liberals to be uncomfortable with the "illegal" part of illegal immigration. The constant, low-level, implicitly tolerated violation of US law by foreign workers and their domestic employers does present a fairly fundamental challenge to soverignty and raises all sorts of perfectly valid slippery-slope concerns. You don't have to be a cold-hearted bigot to see it that way.

Essentially, then, there are two questions at stake: (1) is a draconian law-and-order-based immigration law of the Kyl-Cornyn variety a good thing on the merits? (Neil has plenty of really good liberal arguments about why it isn't.) And (2) regardless of the merits, is such a law even enforceable? Or will it simply add to the number and cost of regulations being violated, thereby undermining its conservative aims? Without an answer to (2), which we don't seem to have, the answer to (1) seems kind of moot.

Politicians and their adjectives.

My MP's office emailed Quadra Liberals today with Stephen Owen's reaction to the Throne Speech:

"In only eight short weeks, Mr. Harper has traveled the shortest path from sanctimony to breathtaking hypocrisy on accountability," Owen reflected.

Just leave out that "breathtaking" and the whole statement is so much punchier. It's not just John Kerry; political discourse really does suffer from a gross overuse of adjectives.


...On a less shallow note, the Throne Speech itself struck me as a pretty dispiriting mix of platitudes and bad ideas. That's to be expected I guess, but I found this bit particularly omnious:

Recognizing the important role of parliamentarians, members of Parliament will be asked to conduct comprehensive reviews of key federal legislation, including the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, the Anti-Terrorism Act and the Bank Act.


If I could name three Acts off the top of my head I most wanted Harper's party to stay away from, it would probably be those. Thank God it's a minority.

Roger L Simon is a laff riot.

Instapundit occasionally passes as just a decent right-leaning blog aggregator. But a visit to Roger L. Simon never disappoints. Today's nugget (emphasis mine):

I have heard the journalist Claudia Rosett referred to us an enemy of the United Nations. I have also read the same of me (to, justifiably, a considerably more minor extent). Neither of us, however, is an enemy of the UN. Indeed, in a certain way people like us could be looked upon as the instution's greatest hopes because at least we still care. We hold alive the dream of the United Nations at it was once was conceived, not the pitiful corruption center that now exists.


Personally, I think Roger is always at his most hilarious when he puts his giant ego through its "more in sorrow than in anger" paces.


Update: In her latest article, to which Roger links, Claudia Rosett lays out just how much she still "cares" and "dreams of the United Nations as it was once conceived" (emphasis mine):

The United Nations was founded as a forum of governments. As we had ample occasion to learn over the decades, this arrangement presented quite enough problems of its own. Now the UN, in contravention of its own charter, is rapidly evolving into something larger, more corporate, and more menacing: a predatory, undemocratic, unaccountable, and self-serving vehicle for global government. Like the Soviet Union of old, the UN is unwieldy, gross, inefficient, and incompetent; it is also so configured as to reach deep into the national politics of its member states and, by sheer weight and persistence, to force at least some of the worst of its agenda upon all of us.

...All the more reason, then, to force ourselves at long last to take a hard, undeceived look at what the institution has in fact become, put aside the lengthy and futile quest for its reform, and begin to think more concretely about how, with or without it, we can best work to advance the interests and values of ourselves and other members of the civilized world.

Human tragedy.

A new NYT report spells it out, again:

The nature of the Iraq war has been changing since at least the late autumn, when political friction between Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs rose even as American troops began implementing a long-term plan to decrease their street presence. But the killing accelerated after the bombing on Feb. 22 of a revered Shiite shrine, which unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodletting.

About 900 Iraqi civilians died violently in March, up from about 700 the month before, according to military statistics and the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, an independent organization that tracks deaths. Meanwhile, at least 29 American troops were killed in March, the second-lowest monthly total since the war began.

...The Iraqi public's reaction to the violence has been dramatic. Since the shrine bombing, 30,000 to 36,000 Iraqis have fled their homes because of sectarian violence or fear of reprisals, say officials at the International Organization for Migration, based in Geneva. The Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration estimated that at least 5,500 families have moved, with the biggest group being 1,250 families settling in the Shiite holy city of Najaf after leaving Baghdad and Sunni-dominated towns in central Iraq. The families are living with relatives or in abandoned buildings, and a crisis of food and water shortages is starting to build, officials say.

...[T]he focus of the attacks has shifted — in September, 82 percent of attacks were against American-led forces and 18 percent against Iraqis; in February, 65 percent were against the foreigners and 35 percent against Iraqis.


Maybe the killing will abate once the Sunnis and Shiites separate themeselves. But in the meantime, this is an outrageous amount of blood for the US and Britain (not everyone in the coalition deserves the same amount of blame; the real sin was the push to invade unnecessarily, not to lend moral and strategic support once the decision had been made) to have on their hands for what looks like basically no geopolitical or strategic gain whatsoever.