Dysblog

How to Read a War Criminal

2009-11-25T20:33:00.016-06:00

Inquiring minds want to know precisely how much John Yoo was paid to offer his opinions to the Wall Street Journal. We can assume it was less than his rate at the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, where he produced among the most toxic professional opinions in American history.

It was John Yoo, of course, who opined that the President was perfectly within his rights to have a child's testicles crushed in the presence of the father, depending -- and here's where lawyerly nuance comes in -- depending upon what the President intended by this act. There are those who would argue that the President's intent here would be relevant only to determine the President's culpability as a war criminal. But those people are probably not tenured at Boalt Hall, Berkeley's prestigious law school. And those people certainly would not be paid to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.

The headline on the WSJ site is not shy: "The KSM Trial Will Be an Intelligence Bonanza for al Qaeda." Here we have Professor John Yoo, legal expert, offering us a reasoned professional response to a news story: the decision to hold the trial of the terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York. My first impulse upon stumbling over Yoo's piece was to do a page search for the word "torture." My browser informed me that this word was not found in the document. I tried "enhanced interrogation." No results. "Waterboard"? Nada. So I skipped to another news story. Nobody's interested in John Yoo's opinion -- a confession, on the other hand, would be worth reading.

The rigorous reader in me, however, eventually returned to the op-ed page. What sort of thing does the WSJ pay good money for these days? We know that the Washington Post is willing to give William Kristol a column (for which he is presumably paid); that the New York Times flirted with this notion for a bit, before deciding that money on Kristol was ill-spent; so what do we think of the Wall Street Journal, as an institution, for upping the ante here? William Kristol may be criminally wrong, quite predictably, but he's not precisely a criminal. How does this reflect upon the WSJ under its new management: their bold willingness to offer money and a prominent soapbox to the man responsible for providing legal cover for official war crimes?

To properly evaluate this involves, unfortunately, reading the piece itself. The text proves really quite vapid: nothing here requiring a law degree, or any particular expertise for that matter -- most first-year students of political science at lesser schools than Berkeley could probably grind out an op-ed of this quality. The subtext, on the other hand, proves fascinating. I recommend this piece to anyone with a passing interest in how evil, in its fullness of banality, insinuates itself into governmental reasoning.

From the very beginning, we sense a certain pattern of thought. It was not so long ago, remember, that the Department of Justice was considered fully subordinate to a sovereign Executive-in-chief. Those nostalgic for the subservience of Alberto Gonzales will recognize Yoo's first opinion: that the decision to move Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's trial to Manhattan is not even partially a prosecutorial decision -- it is fully a presidential decision. The subtext here: yes, the Department of Justice may have arrived at this decision, but that's only because the DoJ is by definition told what to decide by the Executive. That's how it works. (Note to Mr. Yoo: the current administration has decided to revive whimsical notions of judicial independence.)

The crux of the matter -- the deepest part of John Yoo's considered opinion -- is announced in the second paragraph: this decision is "about the hard, ever-present trade-off between civil liberties and national security."

That old chestnut. Civil liberties are all well and fine, but when it comes down to the hard decisions -- crushing children's testicles, for instance -- rights are always superseded by questions of national security. The key term here is "ever-present." Certainly, in terms of classified information, for instance, this is a constant nagging issue: the tension between the First Amendment and national security. On the other hand, the issues addressed here: the wholesale suspension of the Bill of Rights, the decision to ignore treaties enforced by the Constitution (the Geneva Conventions) -- these are not ever-present issues. They are, thankfully, extremely rare: Lincoln's (very brief) suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, for instance, whose propriety is still debated.

What differentiates America from lesser polities is precisely this fact: that the Constitution is paramount and sacrosanct, and that any emergency deviation from the Constitution is itself an emergency, and rare. For Yoo, the state of emergency is permanent: it is an "ever-present" concern (and the permanence of the War on Terror lends respectability to this interpretation -- one reason that Obama's decision to drop the word "War" is far from mere semantics).

The political theory supporting Yoo's cavalier approach has a quasi-reputable lineage: it came to the Bush administration via students of Leo Strauss, who himself inherited the notion from his intellectual mentor, Carl Schmitt. Unfortunately, it is simplistic to dismiss Professor Schmitt wholesale as a Nazi jurist (which he was); far less controversial figures than Leo Strauss took his ideas seriously, and still do. Nevertheless, in this context, the Schmittian argument has to be examined with extreme care: do we really want to give the Executive wide-ranging dictatorial powers, at all times, in the name of national security? (Hint: we tried that under Bush, and many other nations have tried it under much nastier sovereign leaders, and the answer is no.)

Here we are, in the second paragraph of Mr. Yoo's opinion, and we're already treading old and dangerous territory. The rest of the piece is an escalating alarm, concentrating suspiciously on things that, were they revealed, might compromise Yoo himself in front of a war crimes tribunal. A telling bit: "Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information, and his relationships to fellow al Qaeda operatives." How much of this truly concerns our friend Yoo? Properly classified information will of course be presented in camera -- that sort of thing isn't trotted out before the public. This alarmist reasoning dominated the Bush administration's reign of secrecy: virtually everything was protected by executive privilege -- even judges had to have their eyes shielded from delicate information.

Even though the Obama administration has not fully renounced this shady practice, the truth is that nobody's really concerned that CNN will be permitted to broadcast the names of undercover sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan. No, the concern is not the "sources;" the concern is the "methods." Damn straight, Professor Yoo: it will be difficult to argue that the methods of KSM's interrogation are classified. Anyone who has read a newspaper in the past year is probably aware that the man was waterboarded 183 times in a single month. Anyone truly interested in this issue will almost certainly have encountered the evidence -- very convincing -- that none of those sessions revealed anything new or important. What ordinary readers do not know -- what I, for instance, am dying to find out -- is what precisely the chain of command was, leading from John Yoo's personal approval of this species of technique, down to the sorry grunt who was ordered to strap KSM to the waterboard and drown him.

Please, argue the apologists. We didn't drown him. We simulated drowning. The guy's still alive, isn't he? Well, no. Waterboarding is not a near death experience: it is a death experience. The human response is entirely neural; it is not rational; when you are being waterboarded, you are effectively dying. You are experiencing death: the full terror of death, unmitigated by any notions of truth or fiction. That you emerge from this experience miraculously undead is not the point: psychologically speaking, this man was effectively executed 183 times in a month. Or, if you want to get pedantic, an average of six times per day.

Fine, argue the apologists. Let's accept this bit of sophistry for the moment. The undeniable fact is that KSM is a bad guy. Nothing done to him should be regretted for a moment.

I have no issue with the first part of that statement: KSM is, almost certainly, a terrible man. Not much you could say about him would be hyperbolic: yes, he is a true enemy of the state, a vicious brute responsible for the slaughter of innocents, a genuinely evil man.

The second bit is a bit more of a problem.

Should we regret what we did to KSM? In a remarkable 2007 piece in the Washington Post, interviews revealed that the soldiers at Fort Hunt responsible for debriefing Nazi prisoners prided themselves greatly on refraining from brutality: "'During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone,' said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. 'We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I'm proud to say I never compromised my humanity.'" According to many of today's conservatives, these decent men were -- what? -- weaklings? Naifs? For adhering to American principles? For not compromising their humanity? For being decent?

Some of the prisoners at Fort Hunt were at least as repulsive as KSM. And a man like George Frenkel -- an old-fashioned patriot, concerned with quaint notions of honor -- decided that it was best, for the state of his soul, not to descend to the level of these brutes. So yes, we should regret what was done to KSM. Not because of what it did to him, but because of what it did to America. It diminished the nation. It reduced our collective humanity. This is not a pragmatic calculus -- it is entirely independent of the question whether the torture accomplished anything (which it almost certainly did not).

Our regrets should be multiplied by our knowledge that the same techniques were practiced on the innocent. We know that innocent people were tortured in precisely the same way -- and different ways, resulting in death -- because they were presumed to be very bad men. This is the problem with the denial of due process: it nets you guilty men, sometimes, and crushes the innocent alongside them, always. Even if we accept that KSM deserves to be made to watch his child's testicles crushed (and think hard before you decide, with John Yoo, to accept that); do we accept that the child deserves this? Do we accept that the innocent father of an innocent boy deserves this? That his son deserves this? Precisely how accepting are we, before we have lost any shred of humanity?

The only decent answer, of course, is that we accept none of it. It's a unique kind of slippery slope: once you take the first step, you are already at the bottom. And, thanks to John Yoo, America took that first step. We do not know that anyone was specifically made to watch his child's testicles crushed; we do know that innocent men were tortured, and threatened with the torture of their families. We know that they were tortured in order to elicit false information to justify the Iraq War. We know that they were tortured to death. You don't have to ponder this too long to realize that these latter cases, if less sensational and immediately gut-turning than the approved castration of a child in front of his father, are no less evil.

It doesn't take great skill to parse the rest of Mr. Yoo's opinion piece. "The lawyers in the Bush administration—I was one—understood that military commissions could guarantee a fair trial while protecting national security secrets from excessive exposure." Read: "Even I, a middling legal sycophant, understand that a proper trial exposes me to criminal liability."

Yoo: "The Supreme Court has upheld the use of commissions for war crimes. The procedures for these commissions received the approval of Congress in 2006 and 2009." Translation: "If I make a great show of approving of this commission business wholeheartedly, perhaps these procedures won't be turned on, uh, me."

Yoo: the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (the "20th hijacker") was completely foiled by the defense: "All they had to do was demand that the government hand over all its intelligence on him." Translation: "In the helpful age of the sovereign President, people like me were protected by radical executive privilege, and nobody was going to hand over information that might send me and those I enabled to prison." (Irrelevant footnote: Moussaoui was convicted, despite this travesty of justice, and is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.)

In short, the entire op-ed by John Yoo (was he paid by the word, or a lump sum?) can be boiled down to a single essential opinion: holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Manhattan is very, very bad for John Yoo.

Yes, Charlotte, Some Women are Stupid

2008-03-02T17:11:00.006-06:00

It has become impossible not to argue that the mainstream media is conspiring against the right wing. Charlotte Allen's wondrous piece in the Washington Post -- arguing (mostly without irony) that women are "dumb" -- clinches it. Most of us should have become aware of this pernicious conspiracy when the New York Times hired Bill Kristol. The more perceptive might even have caught on when David Brooks achieved tenure at the Gray Lady.

The plot is simple, but nefarious: give conservatives a voice in the MSM, but make sure that you hire only those who can't actually write.

Certainly one can make the case that the conservative movement has run out of ideas (or never had particularly exciting ideas from the start). To test that thesis, however, you'd have to weigh the best and the brightest, and find them wanting. Putting lightweights on the scale is not good science.

And oh how very much lighter than air they are. Brooks offers us fluff upon fluff: one breezy sociological conceit after another, each cutely named, each less substantial than the last -- it's like watching one of those machines that generates candy floss. Bill Kristol manages to fail Journalism 101 in his very first piece for the Times: he misattributes a quotation. And then, as if it couldn't get any less impressive, we get Charlotte.

Charlotte Allen is certainly in a very good position to demonstrate the inferiority of the female intellect. The more rigorous among us wonder what might have happened, however, if she'd studied a larger sample of women than the magnificent ditz who stares back at her from the mirror.

Take her statistical acumen: "A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women."

The crucial words here -- call it the nexus of stupidity -- are "even though." Um, Charlotte? We're talking about accidents per million miles. Hence, Charlotte, the extra miles driven are *irrelevant.* If you were to derive any meaning from that extra 74 percent, it would be this: men drive more, hence practice their skills more, hence drive with greater skill -- a classic case of nurture over nature.

Another exquisite Allen observation: "The theory that women are the dumber sex -- or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents -- is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence."

Well now. Which is it, Charlotte? That women get into more car accidents -- trivial -- or that women are the dumber sex -- not quite so trivial? I accept that you're being "witty" here, but inquiring minds do in fact want to know. Say, the kind of mind borne by the average WaPo reader -- of either sex -- who is confronted with intelligent liberals, page after page, before being whacked in the temple by you.

The tests, in fact, are not quite so cut-and-dried when it comes to the less trivial question. "I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills, two areas where, researchers agree, women consistently outpace men." Only a creature of Allen's peerless intellect would insist that "superior verbal skills" are unimportant in the evaluation of genius. (And only a creature of Allen's exquisite vanity would imagine that her writing is evidence of superior verbal skills.)

Ms. Allen is capable of the occasional big word or two: "parietal cortex" is apparently something she looked up for this article. The size of this bit of brain -- related to visual and spatial capabilities -- differs between the sexes. Einstein's brain was an average size, but his inferior parietal lobe was about 15 percent wider than normal. This excited researchers, yes (particularly Sandra Witelson, the very brilliant woman who made the discovery), and they found that male brains tended to have larger IPL's. On the other hand, women tend to have 23 percent more volume in Broca's area, and 13 percent more in the superior temporal cortex: both areas associated with linguistic skills. This kind of research, it has to be pointed out, is essentially phrenology, a long discredited science: it may mean something; it may mean nothing. The correlation between size and capability, neurologically, remains annoyingly mysterious.

But let's grant that these differences exist. Now, Allen's argument seems to be that women, by virtue of their inferior spatial skills, are more likely to swoon at the sight of Obama. They're more likely to act stupidly in their choice of entertainment. Etc. Excuse me, Charlotte -- you surpassing neuroscientist, you -- wouldn't this sort of behavior, if it were sexually divergent, depend more upon language-oriented skills than, say, mathematical and spatial capacity? Just sayin'.

As for those spatial skills... well, Charl, many in history have shared your casual bigotry. Bobby Fischer, the greatest chess player who ever lived, had soaring contempt for women's abilities in this department: he insisted that he could go without his queen and still beat any female alive. Nice, huh? Unfortunately for you, Charlotte, there's a coda to this story: Fischer then decided to personally tutor a friend's daughter, Judit Polgár, who went on to become the world's youngest Grandmaster.

Anyway, this isn't really about women's intelligence. It's about Charlotte's gifts. Were she not the victim of a clever affirmative action policy on the part of the mainstream media, designed to offer prominent gigs only to second-rate conservatives, she'd be hard-pressed to publish anywhere not subsidized by Dick Scaife.

Tony Snow Denies Reports That He is "Tony Snow"

2007-07-28T11:47:00.000-05:00

Embattled White House spokesman Tony Snow distanced himself today from earlier remarks, by dismissing reports that he was "Tony Snow." Yesterday, in the growing uproar over the US Attorney General's widely perceived perjury, Mr. Snow found himself stressing that Alberto Gonzales' lies were not "lies," but truths which looked a lot like lies because they dealt with matters of national security that ordinary Americans were not allowed to know about and hence could not understand.

Faced with bipartisan outrage over these statements, Mr. Snow insisted that the remarks were made by "Tony Snow," who was a different person from him. "I cannot, obviously, take responsibility for remarks made by someone else, who by definition does not speak for me," Mr. Snow said about the controversial Mr. Snow.

Yesterday's earnest statement - that Mr. Gonzales' lies were not lies but complex truths - was apparently concocted whole-cloth by Tony Snow, said Tony Snow, and while he had not looked fully into the matter - and could not comment on an ongoing investigation - Mr. Snow sought to distinguish himself from the unpopular Mr. Snow. "I know that some people find Tony Snow's defence of perjury somewhat... difficult to swallow. I know that. And I... well, I might feel the same way, if my job did not require me to not have personal feelings about this matter. But it is a mystery why so many people are asking me to comment upon Mr. Snow's remarks."

When confronted angrily with the commonly held notion that Mr. Snow is Mr. Snow, Mr. Snow sneered contemptuously: "This is just the sort of stunt we can expect from people who do stunts. You guys can get twisted up in semantics if you like, but America faces real problems, which require decisions, not questions. I mean didn't we just go through this with all those questions about whether the Vice President was part of the Executive? Didn't you get tired of asking all those? Aren't you sick of this stuff?"

The reporters did not seem entirely willing to forego questions. "What," asked Benny Bonnet of the Sacramento Bee, "do you make of the president's recently issued statement, that subpoenas are merely 'suggestions?' That he would take subpoenas under serious consideration, but honor them only if he saw fit? In fact, didn't you make that statement yourself?"

Mr. Snow nodded. "Yes, that was me, of course. And I don't really want to say much more on the subject, as it looks as if this may come to a constitutional show-down. It looks as if this issue may have to be decided by the Supreme Court, which is the third branch of the Executive after Congress."

At the increasingly raucous press conference, Mr. Snow was pressed to clarify his own precise function in the administration: he was asked whether he, for instance, was the one who spoke officially for the White House. His answer - which did not seem to satisfy everyone present - was: "It depends."

Encouraged to elaborate, Mr. Snow explained that, "It depends upon whether the White House wishes to express something direct and obvious, such as 'we do not torture.' Such statements are in my purview, and I can assure you that I speak directly for the White House when I say this. Now... when you ask whether certain things constitute torture, then you're on precarious ground, and I tend to refer such questions to Tony Snow, who may or may not speak directly for the White House, depending upon the tone of the question. Of course, when you ask such questions - and people do!" he laughed, "such questions as 'is torture torture?' I refer you to the relevant documents - without further comment - and then you know everything you have to know, except for things you're not allowed to know."

Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post, a consistent critic of the current administration, and generally dismissed as such, pressed the point: "Mr. Snow. Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario, in which you were subpoenaed by Congress, and were asked to comment on the Attorney General's grotesque perjury. Let's further assume that the president chose for you to comply with that subpoena. Would you yourself be committing perjury if you stood by the Attorney General's laughable statements? And by extension, would the White House be, as it were, lying to Congress? And what if your remarks conflicted with, say, remarks before Congress made by 'Tony Snow?' Given that scenario, who precisely would be the bald-faced liar?"

Tony Snow, who - like White House spokesman Tony Snow - cut his teeth in the sometimes boisterous "news" division of Fox, offered a cutting response: "Do we really have to go back to the dark days... of Clintonian dithering over the meaning of the word 'is'?" You elected a Republican administration for a reason - and that reason is, among other things, moral clarity. Okay? We know what 'is' is. And if you don't, we'll be happy to explain it to your congressmen in a closed session, as long as they don't take notes."

The press did not appear entirely convinced by Mr. Snow's responses, and many reporters continued to make noises. Looking increasingly exasperated, Mr. Snow finally held up a hand. "Look, folks, we're running out of time here. It seems you all have questions for Tony Snow, and why don't we give him a chance to explain himself?" Mr. Snow then handed the microphone over to Mr. Snow, who explained that he would be taking no further questions.

A Book To Damage Children

2007-07-17T10:26:00.000-05:00

While taking the occasional breather from pounding the Worst President Ever, it's a netroots tradition to promote a book, preferably one's own. So, having put in my time pounding, I'd like to briefly promote. My novel has been published just this week by Doubleday, and it has an unhealthy, unwieldy title, impossible to remember: Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help. Doubleday calls it "Young Adult." I don't mind. It is aimed equally at Old Adults, but my real purpose is to is mutilate the minds, souls, and political sensibilities of innocent children.

Now, I don't believe in politicizing kid lit -- mostly because edifying fiction puts even the most Ritalin-addled youngster into a coma. But I could not resist devoting half a sentence to the barbarism of the Toxic Texan.

This half-sentence might seem innocuous, at first sight. You might even miss it. A child certainly will. Yet it is designed to plant a pernicious seed: the zygote of a bad bad thought. The children of Bush-lovers, in particular, will -- when this seed quietly sends tendrils into their vulnerable, receptive crania -- slowly become their parents' worst nightmare. They will grow, right before Mom and Dad's blinkered eyes, into drug-addicted homosexual Stalinists, promiscuous and pagan, with FULL HEALTH INSURANCE.

Nothing to be done about this. It's a hardcore half-sentence. And, as we know, gay card-carrying crack-addicts -- dedicated to UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE -- tend to vote Democrat.

When read by a child lucky enough to be born to decent parents, however, Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help accomplishes something slightly less malignant. This half sentence (potent, and potentially illegal), causes such children to look up terms like "habeas corpus." It makes them write papers -- in sixth grade! -- about the perils of a unitary executive. Worst of all, it moves them to oppose torture in all of its forms; and they will cruelly ostracize classmates who pull the wings off flies.

Again, despite this subversive agenda, Milrose Munce is designed primarily as a twisted novel for smart, sarcastic kids. It will probably amuse adults (who can be almost as intelligent). It will appeal, I hope, to those who cast a wary eye upon Harry Potter (except for that series' SUBLIMINAL SATANISM -- which is a joy to encounter, however you feel about popular kids who are really good at sports).

Children of gun-toting autocrats are, of course, innocent. We should not condemn them for the sins of their womanizing fathers. No, what we must do is quietly eat away at the foundations of their nascent, numbing ideology. We must rescue them from their personal Guantanamos. It is only through rigorous literary subversion, I submit, that we can turn these children into pot-smoking, Mao-loving, same-sex-addicted Radical Democrats, with FULL HEALTH INSURANCE. And that is the goal -- the subversive raison d'être -- of this potent and virtuosic half-sentence, subliminally inserted somewhere in the otherwise harmless pages of Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help. I fully expect this Extraordinary Sentence to win me Extraordinary Rendition, but it will have been worth it.

Okay, I'm lying. The half-sentence isn't really that good. But the rest of the book is pretty swank, and I hope you'll buy it.

(Milrose was published last week in Canada; the UK pub date is next spring, and the American date has yet to be nailed down. So for now you'll have to buy it on amazon.com: Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help. But hey: we netroots types have that technical savvy required to shop on the interweb.)

Incompetence, and A Remedy

2007-05-05T12:34:00.001-05:00

An astonishing piece in the Wall Street Journal (subscription only), offers noted academic Harvey Mansfield casually rejecting -- believe it or not -- the rule of law. He's not arguing that we should all be able to act in blissfully lawless ways, of course -- simply that the laws of the nation should not be permitted to rule over (and occasionally over-rule) the president.

It's wartime, you see (always seems to be, these days), and while we're involved in this (perpetual) war, the Harvard professor favors a manly alternative. You guessed it: the strong, unitary executive. Now, it's not as if we haven't encountered this formula before, via John Yoo -- that other manly professor -- and his less academic henchpeople. Bush's enemies have been saying all along that "unitary executive" is merely code (and cover) for the president's illegal policies -- but I believe that Mansfield is the first guy sympathetic to the administration to be this blunt: yes, it's an invitation to extra-legal activity, and that's a good thing.

This tiny, perhaps inadvertent blurt of honesty -- Straussians are not famous for being honest, much less explicit -- has caused more than a little perplexity and outrage in the blogosphere. Allow me to contribute a modest spoonful of bile to the latter.

Surely the best argument against Harvey Mansfield's prepotent presidency -- a particularly relevant argument, just now -- is the possibility of incompetence. A unitary executive might be more efficient than a sluggish democracy should the absolute leader be something of a philosopher-king, or -- more Mansfieldian -- a prince quietly manipulated by a philosopher. But what if the supreme executive is neither? What if he is ignorant, and constitutionally incapable of exposing himself to reason? Do we really want such a figure to lead the nation in the absence of institutional checks upon presidential hubris?

Democracy is famously inefficient, yes, but it is also famously useful when it comes to curbing latent tyrants. And democracy -- unimpeded democracy -- is the best safeguard against executive incompetence. Should America find itself in the hands of, say, a raving presidential version of King George III, are we sure we want this man to have unfettered extra-legal privilege? Impeachment is always an option (until declared illegal, or rendered impossible -- generally the next quiet step in a creeping tyranny); but do we really want this to be the only option?

And there is little reason to believe, despite Mansfield (and his mentor, Leo Strauss, and his mentor, Carl Schmitt), that a plodding democracy is incapable of pulling itself together to act brutally and efficiently during wartime. America, Canada and Australia -- to name a few reasonably democratic nations -- were crucially effective in the last century's complex wars. On the other hand, an incompetent absolute leader in the same situation (see under "Mussolini") might well be brutal, but is unlikely to prove even remotely effective.

Time For Andrew Sullivan To Come Out Of The Closet

2007-02-08T12:25:00.002-06:00

This is an open letter to Andrew Sullivan:

Sometimes, when a man is consistently correct in his moral thinking, he is forced to change his language. Some words will no longer do. Believe, me, I admire the stance you've taken; I'd go so far as to say that I agree with ninety percent of what you say on your blog. You've held a merciless mirror to this administration, and it can't have been boundless fun: you've predictably lost a few friends in the process. No, I have no argument with the essence of what you do. My complaint is that you continue to cloak yourself in disreputable adjectives.

Andrew, you're not "conservative". Or rather, that word no longer describes anything you remotely want to associate yourself with.

Full disclosure: I once called myself a conservative. My change of language (but not of heart) was in response to rancid harpies like Ann Coulter and lying ideologues of the Limbaugh flavor -- any foul club with that title wasn't going to include me as a member.

I once drew a fanciful distinction between "conservative" (a word I associated with the British Tory tradition) and "right-wing" (more appropriate to American bigotry). Which led me to perhaps the stupidest argument I've ever made (and there have been many): many years ago, I tried to convince David Frum that he was "conservative," but not "right-wing." The dialogue ended with David laughing, "Doug, I'm very right-wing."

What he meant (and he was correct) is: "Doug, you're a fool."

(And yes, since I enjoy fool's errands, I'm now engaged in a similar -- if not precisely analogous -- effort to persuade. That's okay: I once spent an entire drunken night in a Newfoundland bar trying to persuade a US Marine to vote for John Kerry, war hero. I'm fairly sure he ended up pulling the lever for the empty flight suit, poor bastard. I hope he's still alive. I liked him.)

David is right-wing. He is also -- since the word is synonymous, in America -- conservative. You, Andrew, are neither. What you are, in fact, is what the loathsome Christopher Hitchens is dying to be: the heir to George Orwell. It's crucial to remember that Orwell was not, finally, an ideologue of any stripe -- he famously came to reject all "smelly orthodoxies." He was, fundamentally, a truth-teller. And it may seem tautological, but to tell the truth requires two distinct steps, both in the correct direction: you must first identify the truth, and then have the courage to announce it.

(Hitchens has the courage, but not the intellect: Orwell, when he abandoned his benighted leftism, immediately came to devastatingly lucid moral conclusions; whereas Hitchens' drunken path away from Trotsky has put him into bed with such wondrous buffoons as David Irving and George Bush. Where Orwell identified Stalin as the enemy, Hitchens finally determined that the real Satan was... Cat Stevens.)

As the heir to Orwell, your duty is not to any one party or position -- quite the opposite. Your duty is to language. Orwell (although he consistently rejected Toryism), stopped using revolutionary rhetoric when he recognized the enormity of Stalinism. The first generation of neocons, likewise, stopped calling each other "comrade" -- and had a long run on the decent side of history, until they sold their souls to George Walker Bush.

I know that you're celebrating the publication of a new book, Andrew -- and that the word "conservative" appears in the title -- but it's no longer your word. It's not a question of whether you still own it -- you don't -- it's a question of whether you finally have the will to disown it.

I know how hard this is. It's a matter of radical public redefinition. Imagine, if you will, a gay man coming out of the closet.

It means leaving behind more than a few friends (although, as I mentioned before, they already seem to have left you). I understand how you wanted to love the movement -- I did -- but let's face it, American conservatism has been a piebald mongrel from the start.

The libertarian stream has a particularly vulgar intellectual pedigree: as many have pointed out, trace New World libertarianism back far enough and you'll always find, standing ignorantly at the wellspring, Ayn Rand. A proud and talentless semi-intellect, whose sole claim to perspicuity was recognizing the evils of collectivism. The objectivist recipe for the atomic self should have been, from the start, anathema to any serious conservative agenda.

The Straussian stream (which we've both lilly-dipped in, at one point or another), is infinitely less vulgar; after seeing what that way of thinking has accomplished for this administration, however, it deserves no claim on your soul. The last few years in Washington have been, in fact, an almost scientific test of the Straussian thesis, and the results are not impressive.

Bush, unknowingly, was utterly faithful to Leo Strauss, whose work is the modern statement of a certain radical moral stance: hypocrisy reinterpreted as virtu. I am not being even slightly sarcastic here. The Straussian hermeneutic claims this as its greatest insight -- the necessity of the lie. (Second greatest would be the necessity of cruelty: if you think Allan Bloom would have abhorred waterboarding, then we'll have to sit down some day and discuss some of his lectures on Machiavelli.)

Libertarianism has never really had much legitimate claim to the word "conservative," but Strauss owns that word. And from Strauss, via hypocrisy, you get the theocons. The word "conservative", as it is understood today, means this: trumpeting God and family, even if you secretly believe in neither. Doing whatever it takes to prevent the evils of pacifism and collectivism from polluting society -- lie, cheat, war and waterboard. The ends will justify even the most sordid means.

Strauss has been soundly refuted by Bush: even if you swallow the means (and I don't), the ends are a disaster.

And the means have long featured, prominently, a deliberate employment of what Orwell in 1984 termed "Two Minutes Hate." Leo Strauss (via the Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt), recognized the importance of having an Enemy, always. Constant threat from a well-defined "other" is the only way to unify a polity. And so you have the Republican bogeymen, trotted out and burned in effigy -- with breathtaking hypocrisy -- whenever fealty to the administration develops cracks: the dread atheist (Strauss was of course an atheist) and the dread homosexual (Bloom was gay).

This is final, irrevocable, and central to the definition of the word "conservative" in the wake of George and his advisors: in a conservative world, you, Andrew, are the Enemy. And even if your book sells a million copies -- I hope it does -- you won't alter the lexicographical truth one iota. Actually, you won't find this particular definition in the dictionary; you'll have to turn to, well, reality: as the later Wittgenstein taught, "the meaning of a word is its use in a language."

Even before you took on this administration, the unpleasant truth is that Republicans -- this generation of Republicans -- defined you as the Enemy. It's not that, as a gay man, they disagreed with you, or disliked you: they hated you, with loud and useful passion. And that hatred is no longer separable, practically or theoretically, from the word "conservative."

Words are not wholly ours to define in the public sphere. The editors of Marxism Today, after years of trying to square that name with increasingly Thatcherite beliefs, finally realized that "Marxism" means what it means. Some historians are trying to quasi-rescue the word "fascism" from conflation with Hitlerism: they argue that the movement founded in Italy may be repulsive, but it's nowhere near as evil as its Austrian counterpart. Frankly, these academics don't have a hope: nuanced or not, "fascism" is wedded to Hitlerism in the English language.

And "conservatism," no matter how you dress it up, is dining on barbecue with George Bush.

It won't be easy to embrace redefinition. Although, as I say -- given your admirable crusade to deliver mis-defined men from the closet -- you're in a unique position to wrestle with the complex psychology of the matter.

The first step is to recognize that your fellow Enemies -- as defined by Bush, freerepublic.com, and Strauss -- are not really so vile. Nobody's asking you to become a leftist -- in fact, were you to choose to do so, I don't know where on this side of the Atlantic you'd turn. Certainly not to Daily Kos, where I've never seen a single post in favor of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky or Mao -- where I haven't even encountered arguments for socialism (unless you disingenuously conflate the New Deal with revolutionary collectivism -- a favorite trick of the right). Kos himself, in fact -- the demon leftist, the benighted moonbat pacifist -- is, oddly enough, an Army veteran, and a prime mover behind James Webb's campaign in Virginia.

Ah, Webb. Those who call themselves "conservatives" (and who currently lament having sold their souls and good names to a big-spending, tariff-loving, combat-dodging plutocrat) are drooling with envy at the Democrats' latest faithful conscript: a Reaganite, a (benign) neo-Confederate, an actual warrior. And Webb would not have stood a chance, had he not been relentlessly championed, from the start, by one Markos Moulitsas.

No, you won't find much support at Daily Kos for John McCain (a man I admired hugely up until a couple of weeks ago); but you're much much more likely to find praise for James Webb than you are for Sacco, Vanzetti, or Kropotkin. (True, Moulitsas probably thinks more highly of the late Archbishop Romero than you do, but that's not quite the same thing as advocating gulags.)

So. "Conservative." I'm not entirely sure what I'm suggesting you embrace, linguistically, once you've burnt that wart from your profile. I've danced with the world "liberal" for a while, but let's face it: it's an almost meaningless term these days. I'm hardly the first to point out the various ironies: that "neoliberalism" is what Europeans call "neoconservatism," that "liberal" is what freepers call Stalinists. I'm wary of the word, for this reason, although it reeks far less than "conservative," and in fact can be defined to mean all of the things that used to be respectable about conservatism.

Obviously we can't embrace a "third way." In their Orwellian simplification of political terms, the right has managed to damage this term beyond repair: thanks to their rigorous contempt, it means something like "self-loathing closet fellow-traveler."

I wish I could be happy with "The Radical Center." A solid construct, with Aristotelian nuances. Unfortunately, those agitating for a political party under that name are viciously anti-immigrant.

Perhaps it's time to dispense with the geometric metaphor entirely. The insistence upon a linear graph -- left, center, right -- has become nothing more than stubborn faith in a Euclidian absurdity. (Just as an "axis" cannot have three endpoints, unless you're cross-eyed.)

There are those who believe in torture, and those who do not. Those who promote a unitary executive, pace Schmitt, and those who do not. Those who are willing to cover for hypocrites, thugs, and profiteers... and those who are not. The rest of it -- from government spending to abortion to affirmative action -- is negotiable. Tyranny is not.

The place you want to stand -- the place where you do stand -- is that place of negotiation. (It's hard to escape from topographical metaphors.) It's not a bad place to be: where red Tories and blue Democrats can establish common ground with various congenial allies -- classical liberals, actual Christians, self-critical modernists. You'll meet some accomplished people there (Bob Dylan recently expressed his admiration for Barry Goldwater!) I'd go so far as to say that this is the domain now occupied -- as defined at the voting booth -- by mainstream America.

You've given a voice to this group for some time now: all I'm saying is that it's time to recognize your constituency, and give it a name. The word you finally choose is your call -- I give up -- but I'm sure you can find us something that doesn't start with a "c."

There are LAWS against this?

2006-12-07T12:42:00.000-06:00

From the LA Times:

"The son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor was indicted in Miami on U.S. charges of committing torture as chief of a paramilitary unit during his father's regime...

"...The indictment marks the first time a 12-year-old federal anti-torture law has been used, U.S. officials said.

"Charles McArthur Emmanuel, 29, also known as Chuckie Taylor Jr., was charged with committing torture overseas as a U.S. citizen as well as conspiracy. He could be sentenced to life in prison.

"Suspects who face the torture charges must either be U.S. citizens or be caught in the United States; in this case, Taylor was both."

Last I heard, retired torturer Donald Rumsfeld was a U.S. citizen, and I suspect you could find him skulking somewhere in that very country.

Filibuster Alito, You Cowards

2006-01-26T13:15:00.001-06:00

Alito is a menace. Friends, this is no time to invoke the Powell Doctrine. Sometimes you have to enter a battle without overwhelming force and without the assurance of victory: that's what's known as "courage." Conservatives are salivating for a reason: Samuel Alito's succession to the court would render the Bush era permanent. Even those who have quietly abandoned their feckless leader, are thrilled that what he stands for will live in the person of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

It's hard to align yourself with, much less love, a party that hasn't the guts or the sense to fight the one necessary battle. I hope this doesn't describe the Democrats, whom I otherwise think very highly of. If I am to believe the mainstream media, however, the most courageous statement we've yet to hear from a Democratic senator is something along the lines of: "Well, yes, in a remote corner of my mind I'm thinking that I might possibly entertain a tiny little filibuster notion, kind of, except that it would be silly, really, and after all nobody wants to, and that's a good thing, and anyway I'm busy."

This battle is everything. If you believe in a tripartite government, in checks and balances... in short: if you are committed to the Founders' wise provisions against an emerging tyranny, then you simply cannot permit this man to sit on the highest court in the land. The New York Times, bless them, has finally acknowledged this. In a negative fashion, and with great subtlety, so has Harvard's wily Straussian, Harvey Mansfield: read this article to understand some of the thinking behind the administration's hubris. Mansfield, a theorist suspicious of democracy, has nicely reinterpreted the Framers' intent to justify a Hobbesian supreme executive. And many of the thinking members of this administration (yes, they quietly exist), were influenced by Mansfield's mentor, the closet Nietzschean Leo Strauss.

Mansfield and his school of thought deprecate liberal democracy as inherently weak and potentially self-destructive: in times of war, you want a proud leader who will circumvent the vulgar rule of law in order to act decisively, with cruel Machiavellian virtu. You want a president who is not squeamish about torturing captives, denying habeas corpus, quietly ignoring the quaint fetters placed upon the executive by the masses (read: Congress).

The Straussians, if you're not familiar with them, stress the necessity of esoteric writing: read this article carefully, with an eye to the hidden "dark teaching." Andrew Sullivan, who studied with Mansfield, nails the pivotal assertion (without fully taking Mansfield to task for his pernicious intent): with this ill-defined War on Terror, the state of war is now permanent, meaning that the Executive's unrestricted power to act efficiently is now -- if you believe this perverse reading of the Framers -- a permanent fact. In short, the United States has become a benevolent tyranny.

(For a nice refutation of this reading -- one that concentrates upon Madison's profound fear of arbitrary powers in a time of war -- read John Nichols' superb article Samuel Alito v. James Madison.)

Alito's confirmation is an absolutely crucial step in the completion of this new regime. (And a new regime it is: we will have passed out of an era of pure liberal democracy, into something which looks similar, but is in fact horribly different.) Mansfield does not address Alito specifically, but it is clear that the redefinition of the executive requires the Supreme Court to retreat behind a screen of quietism. As the New York Times points out, Samuel Alito's entire career points towards a strategy of castrating the judicial branch, in favor of a Brave New Presidency. In particular, the tactic of "signing statements" -- in which the president is encouraged to take acts of Congress as pleasant advice, rather than binding legal stricture -- is Alito's personal contribution to the decline of a free republic.

I want to call myself a Democrat; I really do. Decency has long pooled almost exclusively in the center; the Republicans have become as vicious and unprincipled as the far left. The problem -- and Mansfield's thesis is unfortunately dead accurate here -- is that the vicious and unprincipled tend to be much more effective. I'm not calling for the abandonment of principle, of course: I'm insisting that principle be pursued, now, with ruthless conviction. Filibuster this dangerous man. Just do it. Even if you have become utterly infected by the weeping defeatists -- even if you buy the (by no means certain) inevitability of failure -- do not go gentle. Everything that we believe in depends upon this. And history demonstrates that many battles fought in this way -- in the teeth of almost certain failure, by virtue of the absurd -- prove our finest hours.

An Image

2006-01-08T02:32:00.000-06:00

Now Here's Intelligence

2005-12-17T20:01:00.000-06:00

It would be difficult to quantify how much I love this piece:

Everything the NSA Needs to Know About My Indian Mother (But Was Afraid to Ask)
by Sandip Roy, in New America Media

"The National Security Agency is listening in on international calls without warrants, says the New York Times. Just in case their eavesdropper's Bengali is a little rusty, here is what I talked about with my mother last week. I am putting this down to save them the money needed for translation and transcription, and also because when it comes to my filial calls to India, my mother and I pretty much have the same conversation every weekend.

"My mother is doing OK after her recent cataract operation. She is needing drops less frequently in her eyes. If the NSA likes, they could send her a get-well card. She would love that, and would tell all the neighbors.

"Another cousin just got married. A major part of the conversation listed the biryani, fried and curried fish, three kinds of sweets and every other item on the menu at the sit-down dinner for 500 of their closest friends and families. Yet another cousin is going to get married at the end of December. Forecast: more menu details, what-to-wear dilemmas and what-to-give predicaments coming up.

"My nephew has done very well in his school finals. My niece has her exams coming up. I wish the NSA fortitude and patience as they listen to a fond grandmother gushing about her grandchildren's endless achievements. Did you know the little boy once played a snowflake in a dramatic rendition of Oscar Wilde's "The Selfish Giant" at school? That might have been before the spying order went into effect, but it's a useful backgrounder for the NSA...."

I heart Mr. Roy. A candidate for extraordinary rendition, if ever I spied one.

How You Know You've Been Kidnapped by the CIA

2005-12-04T16:29:00.000-06:00

At last we have details regarding "special rendition" (or, if you prefer, "extraordinary rendition" -- a phrase which is even more doubleplusgood). This is important. If you are mistakenly kidnapped and tortured by the CIA, it's useful to know what to expect. The intrepid Dana Priest (WaPo's new star, now that Woodward has become Dubya's pet hack), has written yet another remarkable exposé of the Cheney/Bush reign of (t)error -- Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake. Don't read this simply because it's fascinating, and nauseating. Read it because it may come in handy:

"Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe."

Right. So, let's say you've just had a spat with your wife, and you take a spontaneous trip across the border to "blow off steam" -- oh, and you happen to have an ordinary Arabic name -- then this is a possible outcome. It is in fact what happened to Khaled Masri, an innocent German citizen.

Let's try to picture this. You've taken a quick trip to clear your head, and suddenly you're surrounded by guys dressed like ninjas, who blindfold you, cut off your clothes, give you an enema, and put you in a diaper. Which is, okay, sort of humorous. Right? Until they take you to a cell and torture you.

"Masri said his cell in Afghanistan was cold, dirty and in a cellar, with no light and one dirty cover for warmth. The first night he said he was kicked and beaten and warned by an interrogator: 'You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know.'"

Now, it's hard to argue, in this case, that the coverup is worse than the crime, but it sure competes. And the suggested coverup is nothing short of mind-boggling -- by comparison, enough to render credible any conspiracy theorist at his most paranoid. When the CIA recognized that they'd kidnapped and tortured the wrong man -- something they've done a fair bit of, recently -- it was crucial to figure out the PR ramifications. (Perhaps they consulted Rove.)

"At the CIA, the question was: Now what? Some officials wanted to go directly to the German government; others did not. Someone suggested a reverse rendition: Return Masri to Macedonia and release him. 'There wouldn't be a trace. No airplane tickets. Nothing. No one would believe him,' one former official said. 'There would be a bump in the press, but then it would be over.'"

Unbelievable. (Perhaps they consulted Ludlum?) Ah, but it didn't happen. Well, not quite. It's true that when Masri was released -- after five months in isolation -- they told him "that he would not receive any documents or papers confirming his ordeal. The Americans would never admit they had taken him prisoner." The compromise, however, is that the German interior minister was told about Masri's case. Of course, this polite tip came with a specific request: "that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public."

I hope you're taking notes. This is what can happen to you, at the hands of the Bush administration (let's remember that this is policy): you can suddenly, for no reason, find yourself bound and stripped by masked men, drugged and imprisoned, held for an unspecified period of time -- during which you will be tortured -- then released with the suggestion that you keep this unfortunate business to yourself, because nobody's going to believe you if you try to complain.

The problem is that this kind of story is no longer incredible. We do believe you. I can't imagine that anyone seriously questions whether Masri's tale is true -- in the Age of Cheney, this is how the United States is expected to act abroad. (Not at home. If the masked men pick you up here, you'll be shipped off to a "black site," perhaps in Romania, where they cannot hear you scream.)

Remember when fatuous Republicans were constantly huffing, "where is the outrage?" I believe that the most fatuous of them all, the swinging gambler Bill Bennett, wrote an entire book with a title something like that. Well, I think it's time to revive that question. Where, for Christ's sake, is the outrage?

The Poetics of Jake

2005-11-25T16:35:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I stumbled upon an entirely new genre of literature. While searching for a Sonny Rollins disc on amazon.com, I happened upon the following customer review of Saxophone Colossus:

"Among the finest jazz works ever. Typically, I order mayonnaise as my condiment of choice on a sandwich. But after my cat's death, I can't seem to come to terms with mayonnaise anymore. Silly right? It's not like I blame mayo for my cat's death -- I think it has something to do with the opening of the jar. "Buttons" would always run into the kitchen if she heard me opening the mayo jar. But now, I open the jar and there's nothing. Just me and my empty apartment. My life didn't realy end up how I thought it would. I thought for sure Sonja would say yes when I asked her to marry me and I'd have a better job. But she looked so disappointed when I asked that I knew that she was going to choose Greg instead of me. He was already successful and had his own car. I was an aspiring writer, not much to bank on there. Now years later, I'm still aspiring, while she's driving a big Mercury SUV. Sonny Rollins rocks."

Now, I was not entirely sure that this customer, Jake, hadn't perhaps had a small psychotic break in the midst of assessing Rollins for Amazon; nevertheless, I was impressed. I began to wonder about Jake. Has he finally published outside of amazon.com? Well, this I don't know, but what I do know is that he has published considerably more within amazon.com. When I clicked on "see all my reviews," I found that Jake had, as I say, created an entirely new genre of literary text: the small confessional narrative, hidden within the Amazon merchandise review. The following small masterpiece appears on the page devoted to Welding Metallurgy by Shinto Lu.

"But don't most of us already know the basics of metallurgy? It reminds me of the time I saw my brother smoking cigarettes behind the garage. He had stolen them from my mother and didn;t really seem to be enjoying himself. But he smoked the whole pack. As he finished, I thought to myself, "what a loser." But the fact was I had sat there for 45 minutes watching him smoke all those cigarettes. So, I guess I was even a bigger loser. A moniker that stayed with me most of my teenage life. I didn't dislike school, I got to see a lot of pretty girls that would never have sat next to me anywhere else. I didn't get good grades, as I was addicted to after-school cartoons like Tom & Jerry. Even well into my teens. If I see them now, I watch them in totality looking for what appealed to me when I was younger. I can't find it. "

While Jake's Welding Metallurgy review is to be commended for having attached itself to such an inspired book, I do find that it represents a decline in structural nuance: Jake's Saxophone Colossus review returns, in the final sentence, to the actual merchandise at hand -- if nothing else, this is a more successful attempt at hiddenness, which is the essence of all esoteric writing. And the Jakean narrative is, most certainly, esoteric.

Perhaps Jake's most successfully esoteric piece is the tender Stiletto T114MC Titanium, Milled Face, Curved Handle Framing Hammer. Here Jake employs the circular structure so powerful in Saxophone Colossus, yet -- in a subtle twist -- makes the deviant narrative relate, tangentially, to the merchandise reviewed:

"Great hammer. Makes me yearn for the days when putting up drywall and drinking brew were a carpenter's obligation as much as his desire. Nowdays, you get these wannabe carpenters staying lucid and not double charging. Frankly, they've ruined the industry. I mean, I try to keep an open mind and all, but there comes a time in a man's life when he has to look in the mirror and take stock of himself. I don't judge a man by his choice of friends or what he does when he's not at work. But golly, if you're a carpenter, be one. Great hammer."

For a moment, the reader believes that he or she may have just read an actual review of the Stiletto T114MC Titanium, Milled Face, Curved Handle Framing Hammer. (Which is $69.99, and ought therefore to be a pretty fine hammer indeed.)

I must confess, however, that I found the actual sentiments expressed in Stiletto T114MC Titanium, Milled Face, Curved Handle Framing Hammer a touch less moving -- less deeply considered, in fact -- than those apparent in Jake's finer efforts. While it stands as a superb example of hiddenness, Stiletto T114MC Titanium, Milled Face, Curved Handle Framing Hammer remains a slight opus -- a triumph, finally, of mere technique. Compare it with the delicate Massacre ~ 50 Cent, surely the most affecting piece in the Jakean ouvre:

"50-Cent is the grooviest. Early in my life I thought for sure I'd find someone who'd love me and I could love back. It hasn't worked out that way. I've had a spell of bad luck that seems to have lasted for years. I hate my boss and I have thoughts about quitting, but fear grips me and I can't do it. My gosh, what a failure I am. Working 35 hours a week, going home to an empty apartment, no friends. Heavy debt. My only outlets for creative expression are my synthesizer and watching late-night TV. Though I always wake up in a bad mood 'cause I stay up watching 1980s sitcoms that I didn't even like the first time I saw them. 50-Cent is the real deal."

It is impossible to overstate the importance of this body of work. Jake (who goes by the name "Jake," mystery augmented by quotation marks) has issued in a new era -- not simply in genre, but in means of publication. We may soon see entire epic poems lying coyly hidden within CNET reviews; picaresque novels masquerading as users' comments at various software sites; haiku inserted into responses on this very blog.

While We're Fighting Terror, We May As Well Take Down A Few Artists

2005-11-17T22:53:00.000-06:00

This is a story that gets little play outside the insular world of tech artists, but it remains one of the most egregious abuses of power in the War Against Criticism. For months, the Department of Justice has been ruining the life of a respected artist and professor who employs scientific equipment and (harmless) biological samples in his work. Steven Kurtz, whose use of bacteria is in fact a pointed critique of American biowarfare, was initially arrested and charged with terrorist activity. When those charges proved ludicrous, government zealots hit him with mail fraud, arguing that he had mishandled specimens. It is mind-boggling to see how far the DOJ is willing to go in the harrassment of a citizen (a critic of the administration) who is no longer remotely suspected of terrorism. Note that these bastards pressed mistaken charges against Professor Kurtz on the day that his wife died, and have refused to acknowledge their error. Below is the press release from a group involved in his defense:

November 17, 2005
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contacts:
Edmund Cardoni 1-716-812-9237
Gregg Bordowitz 1-312-420-6092
Lucia Sommer 1-716-359-3061
mailto:media@caedefensefund.org

ARTIST RELEASED FROM PRETRIAL SUPERVISION OVER DOJ OBJECTIONS
Supervisor requests release, prosecution attempts to block

Buffalo, NY - Artist and University at Buffalo professor Steven Kurtz has been released from pretrial supervision despite strong objections from US Department of Justice prosecutor William Hochul.

Kurtz's case has not yet gone to trial and motions for its dismissal are pending, but until last week the artist was subject to random house searches and drug tests, was limited in his ability to travel, and had to report regularly to a probation officer. (See "Summary of Case" below for background.)

Last week, arguing that there was no hint of criminality or risk of flight, Zenaida Piotrowicz, Kurtz's pretrial supervisor, motioned afederal court to release Kurtz from supervision. Despite vigorous and exceptional objections by Department of Justice prosecutor Hochul, Magistrate Judge Kenneth Schroeder agreed there was no reason not to release Kurtz on his own recognizance to await trial.

Kurtz's Defense Committee believes that the prosecutor's unusual and fierce opposition to the pretrial supervisor's motion to release Kurtz from probation is yet another example of the extreme prejudice with which the Department of Justice has approached the case. The Defense Committee believes the case in fact represents a deliberate attempt to intimidate and silence artists and scholars critical of US government policy, and that the DOJ's extreme prejudice is further suggested by the following facts:

* This is the first time the Department of Justice has ever tried to prosecute the alleged breaking of a material transfer agreement as federal mail fraud. In the prosecution's radical interpretation of mail fraud law, incorrectly filling in a warranty card would be grounds for federal criminal prosecution. Last July, at a hearing on the case, Magistrate Judge Kenneth Schroeder noted that such an interpretation would be akin to opening a "Pandora's box."

* The Department of Justice is completely outside its own guidelines for prosecution on this case ("9-43.100 Prosecution Policy Relating to Mail Fraud and Wire Fraud"). According to these guidelines, an alleged infraction involving $256 worth of harmless bacteria should be left to the relevant state agencies, i.e. those of New York and Pennsylvania; these, however, have declined to take action in the case. (The alleged victims of the "fraud," American Type Culture Collection and the University of Pittsburgh, have likewise declined to take any action, either criminal or civil.)

* The substances Kurtz allegedly received are harmless and are not regulated by any law or government agency (EPA, FDA, etc.), as prosecutor Hochul was forced to admit at a hearing last July. Furthermore, they are legal for any citizen to buy and possess. Their intended use was very obviously in bonafide creative work and research by a well-known artist and university professor with a long and institutionally validated record.

Kurtz is currently awaiting a ruling on motions to dismiss the entire case filed by his attorney Paul Cambria.

SUMMARY OF CASE

Almost eighteen months have passed since Kurtz awoke to find that his wife of twenty years had died of heart failure. He called the police, who, upon noticing lab equipment that Kurtz used in his artwork and teaching, contacted the FBI. The FBI detained Kurtz as a potential "bioterrorist" and initiated an investigation involving the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Department of Homeland Security, and numerous other federal and international law enforcement agencies, at an estimated cost to taxpayers in the millions of dollars.

Kurtz was finally indicted not for bioterrorism, but for "mail and wire fraud" - charges traditionally brought in weak cases when no other charges will stick. (These charges still carry a possible sentence of twenty years in prison.)

###

For more information, please contact Edmund Cardoni (716-812-9237), Gregg Bordowitz (312-420-6092) or Lucia Sommer (716-359-3061), or send email to mailto:media@caedefensefund.org.

The CAE Defense Fund website is http://www.caedefensefund.org

What "Torture" Is

2005-11-13T20:10:00.000-06:00

If you're not reading Andrew Sullivan's blog, you're not fully aware of what this administration's doing to untried prisoners in the name of The War Against Other People's Terrorism. Some technical details:

"TORTURE AND WATER: One of the experts on torture, especially that practised in Iran, professor Darius Rejali of Reed College, emails an exhaustive account of the various techniques involved, including their gruesome nuances:

This specific water torture, often called the "water cure," admits of several variants:

(a) pumping: filling a stomach with water causes the organs to distend, a sensation compared often with having your organs set on fire from the inside. This was the Tormenta de Toca favored by the Inquisition and featured on your website photo. The French in Algeria called in the tube or tuyau after the hose they forced into the mouth to fill the organs.

(b) choking - as in sticking a head in a barrel. It is a form of near asphyxiation but it also produces the same burning sensation through all the water a prisoner involuntarily ingests. This is the example illustrated in the Battle of Algiers movie, a technique called the sauccisson or the submarine in Latin America. Prisoners describe their chests swelling to the size of barrels at which point a guard would stomp on the stomach forcing the water to move in the opposite direction.

(c) choking - as in attaching a person to a board and dipping the board into water. This was my understanding of what waterboarding was from the initial reports. The use of a board was stylistically most closely associated with the work of a Nazi political interrogator by the name of Ludwig Ramdor who worked at Ravensbruck camp. Ramdor was tried before the British Military Court Martial at Hamburg (May 1946 to March 1947) on charges for subjecting women to this torture, subjecting another woman to drugs for interrogation, and subjecting a third to starvation and high pressure showers. He was found guilty and executed by the Allies in 1947.

(d) choking - as in forcing someone to lie down, tying them down, then putting a cloth over the mouth, and then choking the prisoner by soaking the cloth. This also forces ingestion of water. It was invented by the Dutch in the East Indies in the 16th century, as a form of torture for English traders. More recently it was common in the American south, especially in police stations, in the 1920s, as documented in the famous Wickersham Report of the American Bar Association (The Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, 1931), compiling instances of police torture throughout the United States.

Perhaps the main thing to remember here is that all these techniques leave few marks; they're clean tortures and so people who are unfamiliar with them are in genuine doubt as to whether there is much pain. In the absence of a bloody wound, who is to say how much pain there was?

"It seems the method that the U.S. has authorized is closest to c), the Nazi one, or d), the one developed by the Dutch and deployed in the American South. Remember that this is authorized for use in the secret black sites, exposed by Dana Priest. It is this CIA-directed torture that Dick Cheney is so adamant on retaining and codifying into law."

***
Andrew Sullivan's blog is heroic: it singlehandedly kept Captain Ian Fishback's testimony from disappearing (until Senator McCain weighed in, at which point the soldier could no longer be ignored/smeared); Sullivan in fact may well have kept Fishback himself from being disappeared. (I don't usually go in for this kind of conspiracy theory, but Cheney was reliably quoted as having said, with regard to Fishback: "Either break him or destroy him, and do it quickly.")

Something not stressed in this account of waterboarding, by the way, is the subject's firm belief that he is about to die. When Dostoevsky was led out to be executed (a "hoax," much like waterboarding), it was the most brutal psychological event in his life, and changed him forever; the condemned man standing with him, in fact, went incurably mad.

That this kind of psychological torture is not regarded as "torture," per se, says something about the shallowness of this administration. George Orwell understood (as he understood so much about today's White House) -- in 1984, the protagonist is ruined not be physical pain, but by the manipulation of his mortal phobia of rats. Gerard Manley Hopkins also understood:

"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there."

What Left-Wing Loons Were Saying In The Fifties

2005-11-07T23:26:00.000-06:00

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 11/8/54

America's Secret Dungeons: The "Black Sites"

2005-11-02T00:18:00.000-06:00

The single most important piece I read today had nothing to do with Alito or Plame. Dana Priest's astonishing feature in the Washington Post (an extended report which I'd be inclined to call a "major scoop," if the subject matter weren't so grave), reveals nothing less than a complex network of CIA-run secret prisons, strategically scattered across the globe. These so-called "black sites" would be illegal even in most of the host countries: they are places where barbaric interrogation techniques -- "water-boarding," for instance -- are standard practice. In short, the United States is running an archipelago of torture centers, in secret, on foreign soil. (And no, it's not the Gulag system -- and yes, it is an archipelago -- and no, it's nowhere near the scale of the Gulag -- and yes, the treatment of the prisoners is approximately as repulsive.)

Read this piece.

As the Buck Screeches to a Halt

2005-10-24T20:04:00.000-05:00

"He's a vile, detestable, moralistic person with no heart and no conscience who believes he's been tapped by God to do very important things."

No, that's not an assessment of George W. Bush. It's the beginning of the smear campaign against the prosecutor: the quotation is from a "White House ally... referring to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald."

I'm not the first to note the irony that the White House, which is being prosecuted for a smear job, is beginning to resort to just that tactic in response. They have to; they're not much good at anything else. But a smear campaign without Rove is like the Astros sans Clemens -- here you have a talent that comes along maybe once in a generation. Rove is the Great One, the Gretzky of Libel; can you imagine anyone else cooking up that bit about McCain's illegitimate black child? Perhaps he'll continue to orchestrate the slander from his cell, but it won't be easy.

I took that quotation from the New York Daily News, by the way, and it's a fine time to be reading the tabloids. The best sports writing is always found in the tabs; and now that Washington politics is beginning to resemble Mexican wrestling, these are the go-to papers for jazzy political coverage. (I've been getting a huge kick out of over-the-top Sox metaphors -- will get to that in a moment.)

You won't find this kind of opera in the sober, serious, unreliable New York Times; time to turn to the Daily News: "Facing the darkest days of his presidency, President Bush is frustrated, sometimes angry and even bitter, his associates say....

"Bush usually reserves his celebrated temper for senior aides because he knows they can take it. Lately, however, some junior staffers have also faced the boss' wrath.

"'This is not some manager at McDonald's chewing out the help,' said a source with close ties to the White House when told about these outbursts. 'This is the President of the United States, and it's not a pleasant sight.'"

(No, it's not the manager of your local McDonald's. If it were, the franchise would be in the red, the Freedom Fries soggy, and the burgers tainted with salmonella.)

"Presidential advisers and friends say Bush is a mass of contradictions: cheerful and serene, peevish and melancholy, occasionally lapsing into what he once derided as the 'blame game.'"

Speaking of tabloids, the National Enquirer reported recently that George has begun drinking again. Now, the National Enquirer is only marginally more reliable than the newspaper of record, but that Jekyll/Hyde description sure fits the profile. (Actually -- contrary to popular belief -- the Enquirer gave up on "Space Aliens Ate My Baby" stories a long time ago, and has an admirable record when it comes to fact checking. If they reported it, then it's likely true. Slate has a good piece on the surprisingly high standards at the tab.)

"Bush is so dismayed that 'the only person escaping blame is the President himself,' said a sympathetic official, who delicately termed such self-exoneration 'illogical.'"

Illogical, perhaps, but utterly consistent. (For a rigorous psychological assessment, read "The Children's Hour.") The president has simply never been able to take a hard look in the mirror. And do you blame him? What he would see there, especially now, is what many of us have always seen: he's a little man. A blustering peevish martinet.

In the absence of an honest mirror, I sometimes wonder which image of George Walker Bush he retains in his head: the magnanimous, folksy Texan that he puts on in front of the cameras, or the vicious bully that's emerging at the office. I suspect the former, augmented with all sorts of hilarious martial and religious virtues, too wacky even to insert in scripted speeches.

Let's face it: "not pleasant" is an understatement. Imagine some poor earnest Republican intern, straight out of a small-town Midwestern college, having to hold back tears as the most powerful man in the world dresses him down in front of his friends. (I'd be no good in that situation. I'd be inclined to say, "Get out of my face, clown." Hello, Gitmo...)

How did this happen? American historians will be pondering this for decades. How did a man with these qualities -- which were never a secret -- rise to the most important office in the land? Nixon was a dark figure, to be sure, but he was a giant relative to George. Reagan, even if you thought him asleep at the wheel, was a monument of competence beside this fumbling zero. Even Bush Sr. looks almost presidential in retrospect.

What's interesting to me is that you're hearing just this sort of talk these days from the far right. As the Harriet Miers wrecking ball smashes holes in the false front, suddenly hard-core Republicans are describing the president in terms that I could have written. God bless them.

--------------------------------

So, anyway, how about them Sox. Humble people finding unexpected success is a bit more uplifting than faux cowboys predictably biting the dust. And those hyperbolic sports metaphors -- damn. My favorite trope isn't actually from the tabs, but from John Donovan at Sports Illustrated, in his description of Joe Crede's glorious glove-work:

"Not since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a man with leather made so much noise."

Dances With Death

2005-10-17T15:20:00.000-05:00

(from Los Locos, the annual celebration of madness in San Miguel de Allende)

In Which Harriet Miers Disrupts My Sleep

2005-10-13T20:47:00.000-05:00

I had a dream about Harriet Miers the other night. (Yes, yes, I know: Cooper, get a life.) The dream -- not my narrative unconscious at its most exciting, I'm afraid -- involved George Bush withdrawing her nomination. That's all I remember. However -- and here is where this transcends a dreary "I had a dream that had nothing to do with sex" anecdote -- I woke up in a bad mood. (You think I'm making this up. I assure you, if I were making this up it would be way less banal.)

Why, I wondered to myself, would such a dream be a bad dream? After all, I've already weighed in on the Miers question -- I believe I dubbed her a "joke."

Well, upon reflection, I've decided that she's a good joke. A joke that deserves to be told. A joke at which, I strongly believe, we shall laugh last.

First of all, let's consider what would have been the least funny nomination. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Janice Rogers Brown, very much on the shortlist, who is quoted as deprecating Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal as "our own socialist revolution." (I often wonder what people who hate the New Deal think of fondly. The Great Depression? The age of the robber barons?)

It's worth concentrating upon those words, which would have done McCarthy proud. Now, the thing about a "revolution," when appended to the word "socialist," is that it tends to imply barricades and streets awash in blood. Especially in America, where the word "socialist" really means "communist" to the average non-socialist. The New Deal was, of course, bloodless, not a revolution, and not really socialist. It was, however, civilized.

For originalists like Judge Brown, of particular interest is "freedom of contract" -- which, though not in the Constitution, is treated as if it were not only there, but a very pillar of our civic structure. The notion of freedom of contract comes from the Lochner decision of 1905, in which the Supreme Court decided in favor of a bakery owner, Joseph Lochner, who felt that a New York law limiting his bakers to a sixty-hour work week was unconstitutional.

"Lochner challenged the constitutionality of his conviction on the grounds that it violated his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In a 5-4 decision, a majority of the United States Supreme Court agreed with him, ruling that the New York law interfered 'with the right of contract between the employer and employees concerning the number of hours in which the latter may labor.'

"This 'freedom of contract' is contained nowhere in the Constitution."

The New Deal was predicated on a 1937 decision, West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, which effectively put the last nail in the coffin of this putative freedom. All seems a bit dull, doesn't it, but the implications are huge. The Lochner court, which Justice Brown remembers with such nostalgia, was an enemy of many things much cherished by most Americans (not just by, you know, those revolutionary socialists):

"If 'freedom of contract' had still been important to the Court in 1937, laws like the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act (which protects the right of workers to organize into unions) and the Fair Labor Standards Act (which includes the first minimum wage and bans child labor) would likely have been ruled unconstitutional violations of this right."

This is the woman we might have had instead of Harriet Miers: a judge who explicitly endorses what many suspect that Bush has always wanted -- it's never been a question of "reforming" Social Security; it's a question of destroying Social Security, and all of its attendant "socialist" baggage. The New Deal, for Bush and his ilk, was a raw deal; and those of you who own oil companies (or sweat shops) probably agree.

So, if you're in favor of deep-sixing Social Security, demolishing the minimum wage, banning unions, and bringing back child labor, then Brown's your woman. (I like to think that even the most hardcore so-called conservatives would balk at the notion of child labor, but what I like to think has proved astonishingly ineffective when it comes to circumscribing their actual beliefs.)

Now, contrast Janice Rogers Brown with Harriet Miers. I have no doubt that Judge Brown is the superior intellect, with far far greater expertise in the area of constitutional law. In a debate, I suspect she could make puppy chow of poor Ms. Miers. But ask yourself: who would you prefer to have deciding cases on behalf of the average American?

Miers, unlike Brown, is nicely mushy. Think of those cooing love letters to George Bush, the best governor ever and the most brilliant man she's ever met. Yes, I'm fairly certain Harriet comes from the "poor Joshua" school of jurisprudence.

(Justice Harry A. Blackmun famously wrote "Poor Joshua!" in a dissent, when the Supreme Court refused to find state officials responsible for not removing four-year-old boy Joshua DeShaney from the custody of a father who beat him so badly that he was permanently brain-damaged. This is often held up as an example of judicial "sentimentalism.")

Call me sentimental: but mush trumps steel, sometimes, when it comes to justice.

While everyone is obsessing over Roe v. Wade, it's worth noting that Miers has taken distinctly liberal positions on all sorts of fetus-neutral matters:

"As the first woman president of the State Bar of Texas and the Dallas Bar Association, Harriet Miers pushed for inclusion of women and minorities."

Even though Janice Brown is both female and African-American, I suspect that's not a very Janice Brown thing to do. And there's this:

"When a black county commissioner was arrested after a physical altercation with an off-duty police officer who allegedly had spat a racial slur at him, more than 1,000 demonstrators marched on City Hall. Many feared violence until Harriet Miers, a first-term City Council member and local lawyer, spoke to the crowd. 'If it means anything to you, I want to apologize,' Miers said in her native Texas drawl. 'I want to apologize to the African American community of this city for an unprovoked and unexcusable attack on one of their elected leaders.'"

In order to wring that kind of apology out of any of the other candidates on Bush's shortlist, you'd probably have to resort to extraordinary rendition.

As for Roe v. Wade, that seems to be one area in which Harriet might actually have her mush under control. There's one person who knows Harriet even better than Handsome George does: Justice Nathan Hecht, her occasionally romantic friend. And let's look at what Hecht -- himself an arch-conservative -- has to say:

"'What they really want to know is how's she going to decide Roe v. Wade if it comes again,' Hecht said of the case that led to legalized abortion nationwide. 'And the answer is you cannot extrapolate (legal decisions) from religious feelings. If you could, the right wouldn't be as nervous as it looks like they are.'"

And this:

"'Yes, she goes to a pro-life church,' Justice Hecht said, adding, 'I know Harriet is, too.' The two attended 'two or three' anti-abortion fund-raising dinners in the early 1990's, he said, but added that she had not otherwise been active in the anti-abortion movement. 'You can be just as pro-life as the day is long and can decide the Constitution requires Roe' to be upheld, he said."

And this:

"When asked if her personal opposition to abortion would give her sufficient cause to overturn the Supreme Court's abortion precedent, Hecht said, 'I think she'll say they won't.'"

Lastly, Your Honor, I'd like to present this summary of Harriet's Collected Works:

"As president of the Texas bar, Miers also published regular columns about her priorities, offering some of the few glimpses — albeit vague ones — into her approach to the law.

"A common theme was her belief that the legal community should do more to assist people who feel shut out of the legal system, or who can't afford to break into it.

"She pressed for more money to improve legal representation for indigent defendants and said root causes of crime — poverty, lack of mental and other health care, inadequate education and family dysfunction — must be addressed."

Not only is that last bit not very Janice Brown, it's not very George Bush. It's what you'd call compassionate -- a word that actually has meaning when liberated from the slogan "compassionate conservatism."

This perhaps explains my dream. I don't admire this woman, particularly; I certainly don't respect her, intellectually; but I'm starting to like her. No, she may not have the nutcracker intellect of Janice Brown or Michael McConnell or Michael Luttig. In fact, I suspect she may well prove to be quite the opposite: a sentimentalist in the mold of Harry Blackmun. Which is fine by me. And, evidently, fine by my subconscious.

McCain Hauls America From the Abyss

2005-10-11T11:27:00.000-05:00

Remember when public figures were impressive? It's a dim, distant memory, but not a nostalgic hallucination: once there were good men, and we'd occasionally elect them.

This desiccated memory crawled back to mind a few days ago, when John McCain rammed an anti-torture bill through the Senate. Now, there are those who would dismiss McCain as a foaming imperialist: James Wolcott in particular, whose reliable judgment seems to lose its compass whenever a pol or pundit refuses to insist upon an immediate retreat from Iraq. Wolcott has denounced McCain as a "choleric hawk," borrowing his words from his good friend Camille Paglia. And Paglia derives her opinion from McCain's face, believe it or not:

The TV camera does not lie: Just as it showed from the get-go that ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was a nervous, shifty, sweaty, petulant mental adolescent, so has it exposed McCain over time as a seething nest of proto-fascist impulses. Despite his recent flurry of radiant, P.R.-coached grins, McCain has the weirdly wary and over-intense eyes of Howard Hughes and the clenched, humorless jaw line of Nurse Diesel.

Well, the television does lie. It's what it does best. The television has, for instance, on occasion portrayed Camille Paglia as sane.

Yes, McCain's a warrior. But that's not quite the same as a bloodthirsty chickenhawk. In fact, it's pretty much the opposite. Yes, he supports the current war in Iraq, but I'd be interested in knowing what that really means. He's also on record as supporting George Bush, a man he patently despises. My sense is that McCain is triangulating (even the greatest men do that, when thrown into the cesspool of Realpolitik): he needs to stand elbow to shoulder with Bush, in order to have any chance at the Republican candidacy in 2008; and I suspect he has very complex reasons for supporting the war.

Those reasons? Well, let's face it: have you heard any coherent plans for dealing with the Iraqi toxic waste dump? Those who loathe the war (and I'm one) are inclined to say "cut and run" -- but that is probably not the most intelligent strategy. The current poisonous mess could grow even more lethal: imagine a former Iraq, split into a democratic Kurdistan (nice, but the ensuing war with Turkey could prove ugly); a rogue Sunni state, constituting little more than a base and spawning ground for terrorists; and a Shiite theocracy, now tight with Iranians fellow travelers, and sitting on at least 112.5 billion barrels of oil -- the second largest pool in the world, after Saudi Arabia.

Not a pleasant thought. And no: I haven't the faintest idea what to do about it, except that "cut and run" may not be the most realistic option. If anyone in America does know what to do in this situation, it will be someone like McCain or Kerry: a proven military leader, with a long history of successful diplomacy. McCain, in particular, is as much a skilled and principled diplomat as anything else -- this is a man who went out of his way to forge peaceful relations with a nation that imprisoned him for years, and tortured him for much of it. If McCain says that we need more troops on the ground, for the moment: well, I'm inclined to value his opinion. That does not make him a "choleric hawk" -- it simply makes him a guy who recognizes the importance of cleaning up Bush's mess properly.

Which brings us back to the current bill. Christ, finally someone has had the courage to stand up to this administration's shameful embrace of utter barbarism. And McCain has done it in language that will stand up well in the history books: "The enemy we fight has no respect for human life or human rights. They don't deserve our sympathy. But this isn't about who they are. This is about who we are."

Absolutely right: it's about the soul of America. And I mean that in the full religious sense, which someone like Bush ought to comprehend (if his religion were about something more than sentimental self-esteem) -- it's about the Good, and it's about damnation.

And I Thought He Was One of the Three Stooges

2005-10-06T23:23:00.000-05:00

I find the British press particularly entertaining these days. The Independent, for instance, offers a Bush quotation from a BBC series about to air:

"I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,' and I did."

No, that doesn't make him a prophet. It makes him one of the Blues Brothers.

Come On... All She Has to Do Is Wear a Black Robe and Look Stern

2005-10-06T01:36:00.000-05:00

From The Times: "The temptation is to wonder whether Mr Bush will nominate a loyal savings bank manager from rural Texas to succeed Alan Greenspan later this year as Chairman of the Federal Reserve."

Harriet Miers: Good Joke or Bad Joke?

2005-10-03T13:55:00.000-05:00

That Harriet Miers is a joke, we have no reason to doubt. David Frum reports that Miers "once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met." David -- whatever you may think about his views; he's a very swift guy -- must have choked. I mean, it's one thing to argue that Bush is the Right man, but I can't imagine that David seriously considers him a Bright man. Either Miers doesn't get out much, or -- more likely -- she's a besotted groupie, and an intellectual lightweight. In fact, when David first floated her name, he admits, "I have to confess that at the time, I was mostly joking."

Can anybody be thrilled with this nomination? The right wing is weeping into its collective beer. The liberal center is scratching its collective head, feeling that it may have dodged a bullet, only to be slapped in the face with a wet fish. Come on folks: this is funny. The woman is not second-rate; she's not third-rate; she doesn't even rate. Harriet Miers is a nice woman, who graduated from an obscure law school, and "rose" through the Texas ranks (in other words drifted sideways and slightly downward). Here we have a candidate only marginally more impressive than the president himself. I suspect this is the problem: Bush, who has managed to convince himself that overcoming alcoholism is sufficient reason to deserve the presidency, has no concept of mediocrity. He just doesn't get it. The Roberts appointment was not about excellence (and I do believe, as I have argued below, that he is a truly impressive man): Bush accidentally chose a man with demonstrable virtues, while doing an entirely incidental calculus.

One huge supporter of Ms. Miers is none other than Joseph Allbaugh, that towering figure of competence and objectivity, who installed his good buddy at the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. So, Michael Brown bagged FEMA, and Harriet's off to the Supreme Court. We may even witness the odd sight of Democratic senators filling out the majority in support of this nomination, in the absence of full support from the right. I'm wondering, in fact, whether we'll see this appointment deep-sixed by Republicans.

So, where does this leave those of us who don't want to see the court turned into a playground for hillbilly activists in constructionist drag? Well, for one thing, I'm not too happy about becoming a cheerleader for the bozocracy. And let's not get too comfortable here: the last mediocrity appointed by the right was Clarence Thomas. It's not entirely clear that liberals should be celebrating.

On the other hand, she's sixty years old. So we're only stuck with Harriet Miers for a while, and there's a good chance the president who chooses her replacement will be a Democrat. (Republicans look as if they're not likely to have a lock on power in the foreseeable future: I never would have expected it, but Americans seem to have at last overwhelmingly recognized their shameful error in voting for this administration.)

My advice? Let the GOP hang itself. This is hardly worth wasting a filibuster on: if Republicans choose to approve this non-entity, then that's their funeral -- further proof that this clan is about little more than cronyism and myopic allegiance. If they choose not to let his choice pass, then we can sit back and watch the right wing shoot their own buffoon in the foot: the last thing George needs is to be abandoned by his loony core at this precise moment in his decline.

William Bennett, Cheerleader for Abortion Rights

2005-10-01T00:53:00.000-05:00

Aren't these people special?

"George Bush has distanced himself from comments made by a leading Republican crusader on moral values who declared that one way to reduce the crime rate in the US would be to 'abort black babies.'"

I suppose I'd distance myself too. Although it would be easier for me to do, given that I don't head up a party which once saw fit to make this drooling, crypto-genocidal caricature of a human being secretary of education. That's right, our special man of the day is William Bennett, not only secretary of education under Reagan, but also chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He conducted a little "thought experiment" on his radio show, in which he demonstrated -- convincingly, I imagine, to the kind of people who listen to Bill Bennett -- that all you'd have to do was abort every single one of those black kids, and you'd sure clean up the streets.

Bill's precise words: "If you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose; you could abort every black baby in this country."

He followed that up with the suggestion that this would be "impossible." Also "ridiculous." Thanks Bill. It would be kind of silly, wouldn't it. And so difficult to pull off.

Finally, he suggested that it would be "morally reprehensible." Well, yes.

He was careful, however, to cap this probing moral distinction with the reminder: "but your crime rate would go down." Which is what really matters, if we're going to be all daring and philosophical.

Equally deep thinkers could well argue that this intriguing hypothesis be more fully investigated. Why not abort all children? And just to be, you know, intellectually rigorous, murder their parents as well? I guarantee -- and this is incontrovertible -- that crime would be completely and permanently eradicated. (To give Bill credit, he did include in his thought experiment the race-neutral abortion of all children: yes, even those that aren't black. But he didn't properly examine the efficacy of lining up their parents and shooting them.)

Bill has a problem, though, mathematically speaking. Given that he's "a leading Republican crusader on moral values," surely he must insist -- or he'd lose this honorific -- that abortion itself is a crime. So, let's see: by aborting all black children ("murder," I believe, is how leading Republican crusaders on moral values see it), Bennett would be causing a huge spike in the murder stats -- the assumption being that this brief genocidal spike would be more than compensated for by all those murderers that wouldn't get born.

Let's do the math, however: in order to balance the books, murder-wise, this would mean that each of those aborted black babies would have to have become -- had he or she not been murdered by a leading Republican crusader on moral values -- a murderer. Or you're still seeing a bit of an uptick in crime, statistically speaking. Every murdered murderer would constitute a murder. And the murdered non-murderers... well, you see the problem. Hm. I guess it would even out if we assumed that a lot of those unborn murderers were in fact latent serial killers. I mean, the aborted murderers would have to do a fair bit of murdering in order to make up for the aborted innocents.

Luckily, the media has accustomed us, in the past couple of weeks, to think of most black Americans -- poor ones, anyway -- as rapists of babies, so I suppose it's not too hard to make this mental leap: sure, hell, they're all basically serial killers. The thought experiment works! Right? I think... Okay, I'm not so good at thinking this way. Which is why they pay people like Bennett the big bucks -- I'd make a lousy secretary of education.

Yes, I defer to the expert. Bill Bennett -- with his "multi-million dollar gambling habit" -- clearly knows a lot more about morality than I do. I mean, I have opinions, but he's written whole books about this stuff: The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals; and Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism.

Moral clarity. If I had some of that, I suppose I'd be outraged that we weren't taking clothes hangers to black children in the womb.

The Conquistador's Daughter

2005-09-29T16:25:00.000-05:00

I have yet to post anything remotely photographic on this blog; even more scandalous, I have yet to post anything remotely Mexican. I've now been in San Miguel de Allende for well over a year, and have well over a thousand images catalogued. And so I am in the midst of constructing an illuminated manuscript (all illumination, no manuscript) called "The Conquistador's Daughter."

(Note: I live in the state of Guanajuato, which was home to the semi-nomadic Chichimecas before the Conquest, and in which some 1400 of the indigenous people still speak the Chichimeca-Jonaz language, and a smaller group speak Náhuatl, the language of the Aztecs. As in most of Mexico, the religion is nominally Catholic, but in fact utterly syncretic: you don't have to look very deep to find pre-Hispanic iconography and rituals.)

Dismal Science, Abysmal Conclusions

2005-09-28T13:15:00.000-05:00

I'm no economist. Thank God. Which means that I haven't had my veins pumped full of economism (a religion that is very much the opiate of the academies, and a much more effective soporific than Christianity, Islam, or Judaism).

"I never met a tax cut I didn't like," said the Nobel-winning Chile-miraclizing Milton Friedman. Yeah? Well I've met a few. For instance, every single one of George's gifts to the ultra-wealthy. I know, I know: "a rising tide raises all boats." Which is great if you own a yacht. If you don't own even a dinghy, then a rising tide merely destroys your home and drowns your neighbors, as we've just witnessed in New Orleans. If those tax cuts (along with the Iraq war) hadn't gutted FEMA's budget, then perhaps we might have seen an adequate response.

Even Reagan met a few tax cuts he didn't like, which is why he raised taxes during his administration. Not to mention George's Dad, who read his own lips, carefully, and discovered that they in fact whispered: we need more revenue.

Nevertheless, mainstream economists (not those Krugman firebrands) will tell you that the economy cannot withstand a high tax rate. The economy. Not the wealthy -- who cannot stand a high tax rate -- but the nation's economic health, and competitive edge, require taxes to be mean and lean. Since I never took ECON 101, let me detour around those damned statistics and turgid prose, to present an interesting little fact:

Finland has the world's most competitive economy. Finland. Edging out even the United States. This from a survey of 11,000 business leaders, in the Global Competitiveness Report, released today by the World Economic Forum.

Augusto Lopez-Claros, chief economist and director of the Geneva-based institute's global competitiveness program, "said the Nordic nations were disproving the common belief that high taxes hinder competitiveness:

"'While the business communities in the Nordic countries point to high tax rates as a potential problem area, there is no evidence that these are adversely affecting the ability of these countries to compete effectively in world markets, or to provide to their respective populations some of the highest standards of living in the world,' he said. 'Indeed, the high levels of government tax revenue have delivered world-class educational establishments, an extensive safety net, and a highly motivated and skilled labor force.'"

Damn. And if I had a PhD from Chicago, I'd know that was false. I could marshal impressive models and statistics (and some truly bad writing -- ever read Friedman?) to demonstrate the counterfactual nature of that, um, fact. I might even win a Nobel Prize for my tendentious special pleading.

I have a friend who did a PhD in subatomic physics, and worked on string theory with the great Witten at Princeton -- who is, in short, rather good at the hard sciences -- and he becomes apoplectic when you mention the Nobel Prize in economics. That Alfred Nobel instituted a prize for these "crystal ball gazers," and not for mathematicians, drives my friend to Job-like cosmic rage. (The rumor is that Nobel's wife was seduced by a mathematician, which is why he slighted the discipline.) Another friend, whose graduate work is in economics, insists that you can rig any economic model to demonstrate vastly differing conclusions, depending upon how you arbitrarily design the parameters. This hardly surprises me: the soft social sciences have been abusing statistics for years -- why should economics not engage in analogous bafflement?

Let me say, before you pounce, that I am not in fact innumerate. I was first in calculus and physics in architecture school, and every standardized test I've ever taken has indicated that I should have been a mathematician, not a novelist. (Now there's fuel for the literary critics.) So I did not avoid ECON 101 for reasons of math angst, but simply because My Eyes Glaze Over when you ask me to spend more than thirty seconds on figures relating to agricultural production in the Midwest. It's abysmally dull stuff, the dismal science.

That said, I value what certain free-thinking non-aligned economists have to say. St. Paul, for instance, at the New York Times -- the great Krug- (as opposed to Fried-) man; I take him pretty seriously. Why? Because I'm going to have to lean on authority, here, and simple psychology suggests to me that Krugman is trustworthy, since he is manifestly one of the few truly distinguished economists who does not have his lips glued to the butt of the plutocracy. His arguments do favor the free market, but only because he has demonstrated (in academic work that has short-listed him for the Nobel), that free trade benefits poor countries.

I sense the right wing despises Krugman for this as much as anything: the ideologues require his work on the fragmentation of markets to prove some of their own sacred theories. You'll hear a lot of mumbling about how he is no longer taken seriously in the academy, etc., which is of course canard al'orange: Fareed Zakaria -- hardly a Maoist -- has championed Krugman; and Jeffrey D. Sachs -- a liberal, but one whose academic credentials are pretty hard to smear -- is also a fan. I suppose you could argue that the Nobel Prize for economics -- and yes, Krugman is a front-running candidate -- is only given to leftwing ideologues. You know: Friedman, Hayek and comrades.

Krugman tells us that you have to do the math in order to have a full, perspicuous understanding of economics, which is fine by me. That level of expertise is not something I intend to achieve -- life is too short. (If I had three more lives, I'd devote them to theoretical physics, chess, and number theory, long before I'd wade into the swamps of Chicago.) I'll simply take his word for it, read his layman's version, and note the occasional indisputable fact:

Such as that embarrassing detail regarding Finland. The most competitive economy in the world. Oh, and Sweden, which is third after the US; Denmark, which is fourth; Iceland, which is seventh. The lowest ranked Scandinavian country is Norway, at ninth.

We're talking stratospheric income tax here. To rival Finland, Bush's friends would have to kick in money to fund FEMA, build a few roads, even help out the poor. Which is not to say that the Nordic countries endorse high levels of taxation across the board:

"The governments' philosophy is to leave businesses alone, taxing them at some of the lowest levels in the world so they are competitive and efficient. They then levy the high taxes on personal incomes to pay for those social services that underwrite their labor force, according to Simeon Djankov ( who co-authored a 2004 World Bank study that -- yes -- also placed Finland at the head of the pack, with Sweden third, Denmark fifth, and Norway sixth).

"'You have to look behind the numbers, ignore the Nordic reputation for tax burdens and you'll see they have established a system that does not distort production, that gives people an incentive to invest in businesses and in stocks because the taxes are so low,' he said."

So we're hardly talking about Stalinism here. In fact, we're barely talking about socialism (in the way that the word is endowed with cellulite and fangs by Republicans -- many of whom sport cellulite and fangs).

Did Bush permit the City of Voodoo to drown, so that embarrassing documents regarding voodoo economics would disappear in the flood? Okay, that's a bit silly. But you can bet that he'd love to see a hurricane take out the World Economic Forum, and shred that incriminating survey.

Now, those 11,000 business leaders, you could argue, are biased. I mean, perhaps they're anti-business. Or, unlike economists, they just don't know real wealth when they're looking at it. Or... anyway, choose your lie.

Let me end this by suggesting that you all hie yourself over to one of the more interesting documents of the last few years. It probably seemed dull at the time, but here's the full text of Joe Albaugh's testimony in front of the Senate Appropriations Committee. (Joe being, um, Michael Brown's roommate in college.) A few words from this inspiring document have become famous in the wake of Katrina: Albaugh worried in 2002 that FEMA had become an "oversized entitlement program." No matter how you dress that one up, you can't take it out to dinner. (You especially can't take it out to dinner at Antoines in New Orleans, which lost a wall when those underfunded levees broke.)

Some of Albaugh's blather is prophetic blather: "Faith-based groups at the community level, like the Salvation Army and the Mennonite Disaster Service, play critical roles in disaster relief, as does the American Red Cross." Well, yes they do, Joe -- even more critical when they are required to replace incompetent, cash-strapped federal agencies.

My favorite paragraph in this rousing document: "President Bush's compassionate conservatism is a hallmark of his core philosophy. The President is promoting faith-based organizations as a way to achieve compassionate conservatism. Not only does FEMA work with the faith-based organizations that I mentioned, but FEMA's Emergency Food and Shelter Program is the original faith-based initiative and is a perfect fit with President Bush's new approach to helping the poor, homeless and disadvantaged."

Such compassion. Such faith. Indeed, our man Joe wasn't lying when he said that FEMA was "a perfect fit with President Bush's new approach to helping the poor, homeless and disadvantaged."

So there we have it: the original faith-based initiative -- operating on a wing and a prayer -- turned out to be the single most incompetent program cooked up by an administration famed for its glorious incompetence. Take your angels' wings and your mawkish prayers, George, and let's have a fully funded initiative -- one that may, yes, require you to raise your friends' income taxes back to civilized levels. While we're pushing aeronautical metaphors: call me reckless, but I'm willing to risk the possibility that repealing those tax cuts might send the economy into a tailspin.

Just like Finland's.

--------------------

(CORRECTION: The prize for "economic sciences" was not in fact instituted by Alfred Nobel. From nobelprize.org: "The Economics Prize is not a Nobel Prize. In 1968, the Bank of Sweden (Sveriges Riksbank) instituted the "Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel", and it has since been awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm.")

So Low That You Can't Really Call Them Expectations

2005-09-23T23:49:00.000-05:00

According to our British allies, here's what the White House now hopes for.

The Guardian quotes an unnamed source in the Foreign Office: "Before the war, Washington saw Iraq not only as a likely beacon for democracy but also as potentially a stable source of oil and a well-positioned strategic base. Reflecting lowered expectations, the source said the priority for withdrawal was merely that George Bush is not seen to have failed."

At last, a realistic priority. Maybe you could put him in a flight suit on the last retreating aircraft carrier, with the words "Mission Accomplished" on a glorious banner behind him. Just a thought.

Remember What "Procurer" Means...

2005-09-20T16:30:00.000-05:00

Finally, somebody has been frog-marched out of the White House. And not just anybody:

"The man who up until Friday was overseeing contracting policy for the multi-billion dollar relief effort has now been charged with lying and obstructing a criminal investigation."

That would be the very special David Safavian. When he was appointed in December last year as the new administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, Washington Technology called it a "welcome turn of events." And I quote:

"Safavian will face many challenges, including difficult issues such as competitive sourcing, business ethics and the future of the General Services Administration's Schedules and Governmentwide Acquisition Contracts."

Challenging and difficult, aren't they, those business ethics. Especially the "competitive sourcing" bit. Now, it's important to stress that the fraud in this case is not related to Iraq or New Orleans, and in fact dates from before Safavian's term at the White House. But there are interesting family values involved:

"His wife, Jennifer Safavian, is chief counsel for oversight and investigations on the House Government Reform Committee, which is responsible for overseeing government procurement and is, among other things, expected to conduct the Congressional investigation into missteps after Hurricane Katrina."

That would be the very special independent inquiry, which cynical Democrats have been complaining about. Not to worry: justice will be served. (It would be nice if she were served on the steps of the White House.)

The Vulture Need Not Bid

2005-09-19T18:51:00.000-05:00

The vulture need not bid, nor -- apparently -- pay minimum wage:

"Already, (in the wake of Katrina) no-bid contracts have been awarded to major Republican contributors including Kellogg, Brown & Root, the subsidiary of Vice President Dick Cheney's old company Halliburton. President Bush has unilaterally lifted a protection law that makes it possible for contractors to pay sub-minimum wage rates to reconstruction workers."

Yes, I've heard the argument: Dick Cheney does not receive compensation from Halliburton, etc. First of all, given the complex deferment arrangements Dick has with his old pals, nobody can say this with any certainty: if Halliburton does well, at this time, does that really have no effect upon Dick's income in the future? Let's take the VP's word that it does not (although why we would want to take his word for anything, given the Enron disgrace, is beyond me) -- then this is still rank cronyism of the most repulsive variety. Bush, remember, didn't make money from Michael Brown's appointment to the head of FEMA, but it was astonishingly sleazy nevertheless, and the consequences were very very ugly. If Dick makes nothing -- not a penny -- from Halliburton's predations in Iraq and Louisiana, then that hardly makes the practice anything but despicable: folks, he is procuring no-bid contracts for his friends.

And yes, I've heard the second argument: Halliburton is the only company with the resources to handle this sort of vast project. Now, by all accounts, this is a crock (and it assumes, to begin with, that Halliburton is both competent and honest -- difficult premises to endorse in the wake of their egregious behavior in Iraq), but let's take the argument seriously for a moment. Perhaps they are sui generis in their ability do work on this scale. Here's how you find out: you allow bids from other companies, then assess those companies -- in an objective, bipartisan fashion -- to determine whether they are up to the task. Pretty easy. And kind of, well, conservative -- given their free-market posturing, you'd think Republicans would be in favor of that most basic mechanism: competition.

This Halliburnt-Earth Campaign is nothing short of Stalinist central planning in free-market drag: it assumes that the government, and its favorite corporation, are best able to make decisions regarding the efficient allocation of resources. Any principled economist (and there are at least three, I'm told) should be screaming.

What We Really Heard George Say, If We Listened Closely

2005-09-15T22:06:00.000-05:00

The full subtext of President Bush's address Thursday, as leaked by an unnamed source at The White House:

Good evening. I am speaking to you from the former city of New Orleans, which is rendered even emptier by my presence, and which waits in despair for my term to grind to a merciful close. Eastward from Lake Pontchartrain, across the Mississippi coast, to Alabama and into Florida, millions of lives were changed in a day by a cruel and wasteful administration.

In the aftermath, we have seen the people who voted for me left stunned and uprooted, and looking for meaning in a democratic process that seems so blind and random. We have also witnessed the kind of desperation no citizen of this great and generous nation should ever have to know -- fellow Americans denied food and water, raging in tears at the federal government; vulnerable people left at the mercy of cronies who had no experience; and the bodies of the dead lying uncovered and untended and carefully unphotographed in the street.

And tonight I offer this pledge to the American people: throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes. We will spend money that we do not have, just as we have in the great Iraq War, and we will see to it that your grandchildren bear that onerous debt. We will stay as long as it takes to get my ratings back into the fiftieth percentile.

This administration is largely finished; although we are moving forward with our extensive spin campaign. All major gasoline pipelines are now in operation, preventing the supply disruptions that my friends in the oil industry greatly feared.

The breaks in the levees -- which nobody anticipated -- have been closed, the pumps are running, and the water here in New Orleans is receding by the hour. Environmental officials are on the ground -- don't you just hate those flakes? -- taking water samples, identifying and dealing with hazardous debris, and spreading their vile hippie ideology amongst the poor.

The Department of Homeland Security is desperately covering its tracks, both in the Gulf region and far away. I have signed an order preventing reporters, at the pain of rendition, from investigating the resumes of any acting officials.

Evacuees who have not yet registered should contact FEMA or the Red Cross. Okay, the Red Cross. FEMA is busy, and besides, it doesn't exist. The Department of Labor is helping displaced persons apply for temporary jobs, at just slightly less than minimum wages, and unemployment benefits -- which will be eliminated next week, along with the estate tax, in order to, you know, balance the budget.

Speaking of which, to carry out the first stages of the relief effort and begin the rebuilding at once, I have asked for, and the Congress has provided, more than $60 billion -- which we don't actually have, but what the hell. This is an unprecedented response to an unprecedented crisis, which demonstrates the compassion and resolve of our nation, and the folly of having spent more than three times that on an unnecessary war.

When Trent Lott's house is rebuilt, it will be even better and stronger than before the storm, as befits a good segregationist. We will also build waterproof shacks for the four black people in New Orleans who voted Republican.

After four years of milking the experience of September 11th, I am beginning to sense that Americans expect a more effective response in a time of emergency. When the federal government fails to meet such an obligation, I, as President, am responsible for the problem, and for the solution, and I fucking hate it. So I have ordered every Cabinet secretary to participate in a comprehensive review of the government response to the hurricane, in an effort to thwart an independent inquiry. This government will bury the lessons of Hurricane Katrina. We are going to whitewash every action and impede necessary changes, so that Halliburton remains poised to exploit every challenge of nature, or act of evil men, or any other lucrative threat to our people.

In this country, there is a custom following the mass death of citizens. The funeral procession parades slowly through the streets, followed by a band playing a mournful dirge as it moves to the cemetery. Once the casket has been laid in place, Halliburton breaks into a joyful "conga line" symbolizing the triumph of money over death. Tonight the Gulf Coast is still coming through the dirge, yet we will live to see the conga line.

Thank you, and may God bless America.

In Which the Blogger Steals Whole Paragraphs From Bill Maher

2005-09-15T15:33:00.000-05:00

I got such a kick out of this that I'm willing to risk copyright infringement by posting half of it up here. Worth going to prison for. (Do they send people to prison for exceeding fair use? I mean, it's not as if I look Islamic or anything.) Ladies, and gentlemen, Mr. Bill Maher:

"Mr. President, this job can't be fun for you anymore... Now it's time to do what you've always done best: lose interest and walk away. Like you did with your military service. And the oil company. And the baseball team. It's time. Time to move on and try the next fantasy job. How about cowboy or spaceman?!

"Now, I know what you're saying. You're saying that there's so many other things that you, as president, could involve yourself in...Please don't. I know, I know, there's a lot left to do. There's a war with Venezuela, and eliminating the sales tax on yachts. Turning the space program over to the church. And Social Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote. But, sir, none of that is going to happen now. Why? Because you govern like Billy Joel drives. You've performed so poorly I'm surprised you haven't given yourself a medal. You're a catastrophe that walks like a man.

"Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire metropolis to rising water and snakes.

"On your watch, we've lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two Trade Centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of New Orleans...Maybe you're just not lucky!

"I'm not saying you don't love this country. I'm just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side. So, yes, God does speak to you, and what he's saying is, 'Take a hint.'"

Draft the John Wayne Dude

2005-09-14T13:16:00.000-05:00

The question that should be on at least the occasional lip: is the Ragin' Cajun a Democrat? Can you imagine a better presidential candidate than Lieutenant General Russel Honore, the cussin' stogie-chompin' pitbull hero of this post-Katrina hell? First of all, he's not really Cajun: he's Creole, and he represents, in one person, almost the entire American electorate: he's white, black, Native American, probably Hispanic.

Now, the chances of his being a Democrat are, I'd say, about fifty percent. Generals are more likely to think like Republicans, certainly (although we have Wes Clark); but a guy raised in poverty on the Delta is way more likely to vote Democrat -- especially someone who's gone through life identified as African-American (in that charming, time honored American tradition, whereby if you have a nano-drop of black blood, it trumps every other aspect of your identity).

And consider this: "He admits he was one of those angered when the federal response to the emergency appeared to be slow in coming. "These are families that are just waiting to get out of here," he said of people in the New Orleans convention centre and Superdome. 'They are frustrated. I would be, too.'"

Even more to the point: "Army insiders say he is among the last of a dying breed in the US military, the type of commander who would not have any soldier do anything he would not be prepared do himself."

In short: he's the Anti-Bush.

And the man comes with an instant legend: born in a hurricane; reborn to battle the hurricane that destroyed his people. Honore's one of the few potential candidates who could take out any of the Republican heavyweights: Giuliani, McCain, Condi Rice, Colin Powell (not that we're likely to see Powell in the ring).

If you want to enjoy a pleasant daydream, try this scenario: Russ Honore in a presidential debate, torching the tail-feathers of some Bush-like Republican chickenhawk. If only we'd had him in the last round. Remember when W. expressed sincere, compassionate, heartfelt concern that drugs imported from Canada (the very same drugs that are sold in America) might kill you rather than cure you? Don't you wish that Kerry had unclamped a stogie from between his teeth and growled: "You know as well as I do, 'soldier' -- that's bullshit."

The Taking Responsibility Thing

2005-09-13T15:29:00.000-05:00

Oh to have been a fly on the wall:

GEORGE W. BUSH: You want me to take responsibility?

KARL ROVE: George, the numbers are a problem. 42 percent. 38 percent. I figure "taking responsibility" puts you back up to, say, 49 percent. I can work with that...

GEORGE: But... Brownie fell on his sword. I have to fall on my sword?

KARL: It'll only hurt for a minute...

GEORGE: I don't like it. If I take responsibility for this, they're going to want me to take responsibility for everything. Every time I screw up, they're going to say "take responsibility."

KARL: No, no... I think we can deal with that. We get capital out of this. You screw up next time, we can say: look, he took responsibility for New Orleans; what do you want? Don't get greedy...

GEORGE: So, what does this involve?

KARL: Well, you go out in front of the cameras, and you say: "I take full responsibility."

GEORGE: That's it? I don't have to do anything?

KARL: No, that's it.

GEORGE: That's not a lot of work.

KARL: No work at all.

GEORGE: Well, I don't like it. But if you insist...

KARL: I insist.

GEORGE: Okay. Okay. "I take full responsibility." That's how you say it?

KARL: Perfect.

GEORGE. Gotcha. (pause) Um, Karl?

KARL: Yes, George?

GEORGE: This "taking responsibility" thing. What does it actually mean?

KARL: Nothing, buddy. Nothing. Just words. I suggest you practice in front of the mirror.

How To Protect Yourself From This Administration

2005-09-11T13:17:00.000-05:00

Perhaps it's time to ask for your civil rights back. Many intelligent, well-meaning people argued that the Patriot Act was a necessary bargain: we gave away crucial freedoms, so that the government could ensure our safety. The premise here was that the government was competent to ensure our safety.

We now know, in the wake of Katrina, that this administration can't hope to keep their side of the bargain -- that they don't know the first thing about keeping the populace secure. Are we still willing to offer up our liberties?

Now you're welcome to argue that the same department that messed up so badly in New Orleans is more efficient when it comes to infinitely more difficult matters: anticipating and preventing terrorist attacks. I look forward to hearing that argument.

Meanwhile -- as you're preparing that argument -- let's explore reality.

Recognizing that these aren't the most talented people, we might still insist that the Department of Homeland Security needs expanded powers to accomplish anything whatsoever. But considering what we've learned about this group in the last few days, can we even have faith in their calculus? How can we trust that they've made the right decision -- that they're capable of making the right decision -- regarding which essential freedoms to restrict?

Better safe than sorry, I suppose... except that we're manifestly anything but safe. So perhaps it's time to be sorry. Sorry that we tossed aside the very foundation of our judicial system -- habeas corpus -- in order to give arbitrary powers to incompetent guardian angels. Sorry that we've locked up God knows how many innocent "enemies," on the grounds that Mother Knows Best.

I allow that some of these detainees may or may not pose a great threat to the nation. The point is that we do not know. We are trusting that the people who are detaining them know -- which is to say, the good people who know all about homeland security, and hurricanes.

Believe me, I'm not arguing that we should just open the prison gates, apologize, and wave goodbye. I'm simply suggesting that perhaps it's time that we allowed these people lawyers, that we allowed them to know what they've been charged with, and that we tried them properly.

We should not put anybody's fate in the hands of these all-knowing supra-legal inquisitors. They have been horribly wrong before, not simply regarding hurricanes, but terrorists: very recently -- under similar "laws" -- an innocent Afghani taxi driver was detained and tortured to death in an American-run prison.

Perhaps self-preservation is still what's foremost in your mind -- you're willing to sacrifice the occasional innocent foreigner for the sake of national security (I'm not). Then let me remind you: if deemed an "enemy combatant" by one of these discerning arbiters, an American citizen can rot away for years in an American prison with no recourse to any form of due process. Even if you think that's an acceptable way to treat foreign nationals, it might give you pause to consider that -- given the competence of this administration -- it's only by the grace of God that one of those prisoners isn't an innocent friend of yours, or a member of your family. Or you.

This is not an abstraction. It's important to get a concrete mental picture of this. Somebody in this administration gets to make arbitrary decisions regarding the indefinite detention of American citizens. Try this little thought experiment: what if that somebody were Michael Brown, the director of FEMA? Or Michael Chertoff, his equally sagacious boss? Have that picture in mind? Good. Then consider this: it's almost certainly a person much, much lower on the security totem pole. Which is to say, even less qualified.

While it does not favor the administration, this is hardly a partisan argument. If you are truly suspicious of swollen government powers and an intrusive judiciary -- in short, if you are any sort of principled conservative -- then this is your fight.

We erred on the side of safety: a commodity this government has proven itself incapable of purveying. Perhaps it's time to err on the side of liberty.

The Vulture Is Feasting

2005-09-10T19:25:00.000-05:00

From those ornithologists at Reuters:

"Companies with ties to the Bush White House and the former head of FEMA are clinching some of the administration's first disaster relief and reconstruction contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

"At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast.

"One is Shaw Group Inc. and the other is Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton.

"Bechtel National Inc., a unit of San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp., has also been selected by FEMA to provide short-term housing for people displaced by the hurricane. Bush named Bechtel's CEO to his Export Council and put the former CEO of Bechtel Energy in charge of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

"Experts say it has been common practice in both Republican and Democratic administrations for policy makers to take lobbying jobs once they leave office, and many of the same companies seeking contracts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina have already received billions of dollars for work in Iraq.

"Halliburton alone has earned more than $9 billion. Pentagon audits released by Democrats in June showed $1.03 billion in "questioned" costs and $422 million in "unsupported" costs for Halliburton's work in Iraq."

For a truly magnificent show, the committed amateur birder will keep those binoculars focused!

One Day Lost. How Many Lives?

2005-09-10T17:03:00.000-05:00

I've seen a lot of sneering in the right-wing media at the popular notion that the deployment of the National Guard in Iraq somehow impeded the ability to mobilize in the wake of Katrina. I don't have a lot of faith in my ability to wipe sneers from faces trained in that art by the virtuosic Commander in Chief; so I'll leave that to a senior military officer, who presumably knows something about this stuff:

'Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said that "arguably" a day or so of response time was lost due to the absence of the Mississippi National Guard's 155th Infantry Brigade and Louisiana's 256th Infantry Brigade, each with thousands of troops in Iraq.

'"Had that brigade been at home and not in Iraq, their expertise and capabilities could have been brought to bear," said Blum.'

Of course, one battle-scarred warrior disagrees, and perhaps we should defer to his expertise, given how much time he's spent in harm's way:

'Asked Tuesday about critics who said the commitment of large numbers of troops to the Iraq conflict hindered the military's response to Hurricane Katrina, Rumsfeld said, "Anyone who's saying that doesn't understand the situation."'

Katrina's Diaspora

2005-09-09T18:14:00.000-05:00

Future historians will regard the destruction of New Orleans as something significantly more than the single most costly natural disaster in the nation's history: it marks the beginning of an entirely new form of American culture.

Every major diaspora in history has resulted in radically new hybrid cultures of dislocation. In the United States, for instance, the exodus from the Mississippi Delta at the beginning of the twentieth century caused seismic alterations in the fundamental nature of life in Chicago, in New York, and in political, literary and musical culture across the nation. The Great Migration was "one of the largest mass movements in American history:

"Beginning in 1913, a series of calamities devastated the cotton crop. First, world cotton prices plummeted, then boll weevils infested huge areas, and finally in 1915, severe floods inundated the Mississippi Valley.

"Already suffering under racially discriminatory Jim Crow laws, many black sharecroppers and tenant farmers fell deeply into debt or lost everything. At the same time, World War I had slowed foreign immigration to the cities of the North while increasing demand for industrial goods. The result was a severe labor shortage in many northern and western cities.

"In what became known as the Great Migration, blacks poured off the farms in search of urban jobs. Between 1915 and 1920 as many as one million African Americans moved to northern cities. Nearly another million joined them in the decade that followed. In addition, tens of thousands of blacks went west, especially to California, while several hundred thousand moved to southern cities."

And America became an entirely different, and I would argue much greater country. Now the last thing I wish to do is to put a Panglossian spin on this hideous tragedy: the changes, then and now, rest on a mind-numbing substrate of destroyed and displaced lives. I simply wish to point out that this new diaspora -- and that is what it is; a vast number of the homeless will not return to New Orleans -- will change the nation in ways that we cannot imagine. Although we can try.

Imagine if Maine, the whitest state in the union, were to take in a significant number of black refugees from Louisiana. (This would be an interesting irony, given that Cajun culture grew out of the expulsion of the Acadians from the North East.) I wouldn't want to predict the precise shape it would take, but I guarantee we would see a culture undreamed of. You're not alone if you find it hard to imagine jazz funerals in Rockport, but being hard to imagine has never deterred reality.

Easier to picture will be the ensuing tensions. And you don't in fact have to strain your imagination too hard. Oddly enough, Maine became a favorite place for Somalian refugees to settle in the last decade: there was a deliberate "sahan" -- an internal migration -- from initial settlements in places like Atlanta, Georgia.
The xenophobes weighed in immediately, and still do: consider this charming conversation at Free Republic. Lewiston suffered neo-Nazi demonstrations -- and equally fervent counter-demonstrations on the part of locals.

Refugees from Louisiana do not have a lot in common with Muslims from Somalia, but I suspect the racial tensions will be depressingly similar. I'm certain that future historians of Lewiston, however, will look to the Somalian influx as a turning point in the culture of that stagnant mill town, and I have a strong liberal faith that their assessment, in retrospect, will not be entirely bleak.

The Louisiana Diaspora will dwarf this micro-experiment, and will have radical repercussions throughout American culture. If I tend in one direction, I suppose it's more towards Pangloss than towards Barbara Bush (whose genteel pessimism is really just Free Republicanism in drag): for those of us who see the great immigrant/migrant narrative as the shape of American renewal, there is at least some hope to accompany today's horror.

And a Big Ole Texas Welcome to You Too, Babs

2005-09-08T19:29:00.000-05:00

It is of course unfair to compare Barbara Bush to Marie Antoinette: unlike the queen, George's mother actually said the noxious things attributed to her.

"What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this (chuckling slightly) is working very well for them."

Much has been made of that last clause: how Barbara sees this catastrophe as kind of a lucky break for these people, who otherwise wouldn't get out much. Had Marie Antoinette actually said, "let them eat cake," it would have been relatively sensitive.

Not enough, however, is being made of the slight chuckle. It's the little laugh that indicates to me, more than anything, the rank condescension: the suggestion that these people might not actually deserve the fortuitous bump in status that they've received at the hands of those hospitable Texans. The suggestion that it's a bit like, you know, welfare: you wouldn't want these people to start feeling as if they're entitled to a nice cushy life in a filthy ad hoc emergency shelter.

Jane Austen was particularly good at calling attention to those little class tics which speak so eloquently. By far the most repulsive figure she ever cooked up was Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park, who had to constantly remind Fanny Price, the poor relation, that the girl was overwhelmingly lucky to have secured a third-class citizenship in such a grand house. Mrs. Norris had all sorts of little mannerisms, like the Barbara Bush Chuckle, to indicate her amazement at the undeserved change in state enjoyed by that ungrateful wretch.

In that exquisite comment by Mrs. Bush, however, even more sinister than the chuckle are the first two sentences. "What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality." Remove the "sort of scary," and it's a big ole big-sky welcome, isn't it: so great to see y'all enjoying our hospitality so much; love it when our best new friends appreciate the family-sized Texan heart. But no: this, for the mother of the president of the United States, "is sort of scary."

Now, what precisely is so scary? That Texas might suddenly have a permanent increase in black residents? That Texas might suddenly have a permanent increase in poor residents? I suspect it's the latter: they're loving our hospitality so much, they might just hang around for good and apply for welfare.

There's a temptation to say: I hope they do. Let George's state pay compensation for the callous crimes of her ex-governor, and the equally callous words of his magnanimous mom.

Except that Texas would likely gain a lot more from the experience than would the new residents. Imagine if Texan hillbilly culture were infused with the gorgeous depth and energy of New Orleans. Imagine if all of Texas started to look a little bit like Austin (as opposed to Austen).

I mean, let's face it: culturally, most of the state's always been a little underprivileged. So this -- this (chuckle) might work out very well for them.

The Children's Hour

2005-09-07T15:13:00.000-05:00

I do not believe that George Bush is, in any clinical sense, insane. He is rational; when he opens his eyes, he sees the same world, to an extent, that everybody else does. That tree in front of him is the same tree that his wife sees. On the other hand, something is desperately, desperately wrong.

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

Now, a psychotic break is an actual break with reality: a man literally no longer inhabits the same world of sense data that we do. We're not talking about mere differences in perspective, which are sometimes radical: I accept that Tom DeLay, for instance, looks at the same scenario that I do, and sees something utterly alien from what I see. But if we were to put a drowning man in the water in front of us, both of us would say: there is a man, who is drowning.

George Bush does not see the drowning man. He just doesn't see him. He sees a man, thrashing in the water -- as I say, he's not in any clinical sense psychotic -- but the fact that a man is drowning simply does not register.

Actually, the symptoms are more subtle and constrained. If the drowning might somehow implicate him, only then does he cease to perceive the essence of what is happening before his eyes.

I am not being sarcastic. I honestly believe that this man has an internal mechanism, whereby the world in front of him cannot be apprehended, should there be some sense in which reality reflects badly upon his actions. It is a kind of selective blindness, exacerbated no doubt by his choir of rigorous sycophants -- "no sir, you're absolutely right sir, everything's just fine sir" -- but it's more than that. There is something wrong with this man.

I first became aware of this during the last presidential debates: that astonishing moment in which Bush could not identify a single thing that he had mishandled as president. And, when pressed to produce some kind of answer, the result was utterly revealing: he regretted a couple of appointments he'd made. In other words, he regretted that other people, beneath him, had made errors.

We have seen this automatic response repeatedly in the past few days: somebody has made mistakes, perhaps, but not me. "The results are not acceptable." George, people's actions are what produce results. Where is the first person in that statement? When at last he produces the royal "we," it's in the context of Reagan-like platitudes regarding the American way: "In America we do not abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need." Well, this is America, George, and you, George, have done just that.

This character flaw (that term seems somehow inadequate) was already fully evident in the debates with Kerry. The sheer petulance with which George denied that there was any misjudgment in going to war with Iraq -- the child-like annoyance with the possibility that anyone might even imply such a thing -- was not simply appalling, it was amazing. There was no hint of dishonesty in that display (and believe you me, I have no illusions regarding George's pathological mendacity) -- no, he really meant it. He was truly annoyed. The suggestion of misprision drove him, almost, to a tantrum.

At the risk of being charged with vulgar sexism, it is not surprising that in recent days the most pointed critique of Bush's mindboggling immaturity has come from women. Mary Landrieu, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton: George's behavior brings out an archetypally maternal response -- the urge to say "for god's sake, grow up." This urge is, in fact, the potential salvation of the Democratic Party. Men tend to treat George as a man, to evaluate him as they might themselves: as an adult, who is making bad decisions. These women, on the other hand, have nailed it -- it does no good to treat him as a responsible grown-up. The problem is precisely this: that he is not an adult. Children may not be psychotic, but they do not see the world in the same way as adults; when they screw up, they have to be forced to recognize culpability, and to accept blame.

You would have expected Senator Landrieu to take a lot more heat when she finally said, in exasperation, that she would "punch" Bush if he did not finally accept that this disaster was the responsibility of his administration. Yet few but the most craven ideologues criticized her remark: because most of us, I suspect -- Republicans included -- felt precisely the same way. You wanted to slap him until he recognized that he was expected to behave as a grown man. I happen to be strongly opposed to corporal punishment, but I cannot deny the strong urge to use it, when children simply refuse to acknowledge and take responsibility for egregious misbehavior. (Luckily, corporal punishment will not be necessary in this case. The constitution provides effective alternatives to a rap on the knuckles.)

Here is what common sense sounds like:

'At a news conference, (Nancy) Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush's choice for head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had "absolutely no credentials."

'She related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Michael Brown.

'"He said 'Why would I do that?'" Pelosi said.

'"'I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.' And he said 'What didn't go right?'"

'"Oblivious, in denial, dangerous," she added.'

Yes, I am being deliberately provocative (I believe the chic expression is no longer "sexist," but "essentialist") -- a few men too have had the good sense to recognize what's going on here -- but women have been by far the most eloquent in recent days, and have become the credible voice of the Democratic Party. It is a question of behaving like adults, and insisting that others do the same.

Of course, there are dangers in this analysis: if you infantilize the president, you are in some ways excusing his behavior. But I remind you that -- strictly speaking -- we are not dealing with an actual child here. George is, physically and mentally (if not psychologically) a fully grown man. My intent is not to excuse his behavior, but to stress that these women -- may one of them become president -- have precisely the right approach: just don't take any nonsense from this petulant, obnoxious child. Simply refuse. It's time to grow up. You're going to have to take responsibility, George, and yes, you are probably going to be punished.

Bloody Poetry

2005-09-06T13:37:00.000-05:00

Who knew that Percy Bysshe Shelley had written such a prescient critique of the Bush response to Hurricane Katrina? James Wolcott takes a prize here: surely the most elegant (and vicious) use of hypertext footnotes since the launch of Mosaic.

Viscount Castlereagh, Wolcott's stand-in for Michael Chertoff, was loathed by Shelley primarily for his part in the Peterloo Massacre, but he was also -- interesting coincidence -- linked to an incompetent military expedition that left thousands wasting away in a swamp.

For the record, Castlereigh/Chertoff was also eulogized by Lord Byron:

Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss.

Stripping Naked the Dead

2005-09-05T11:38:00.000-05:00

Never speak ill of the dead... unless they make you ill. Let us observe a moment of silence for Judge Rehnquist, during which we ponder, with appropriate sobriety, the words "good riddance." Now, until today I was under the impression that the good judge was a decorous, principled man, who only once -- in the single most important judgment of his career -- threw his principles to the wind, and made what can only be considered an utterly corrupt decision. Long an outspoken advocate of states' rights, Rehnquist decided that the Supreme Court of Florida did not have the right to mandate a recount of the contested electoral results in 2000. In short, he betrayed everything that he believed in, for the sake of rigging an election in favor of his favorite. Until this morning, as I say, this was my understanding of Rehnquist: a man who, with this single act, vitiated a life of otherwise rigorous principle. And then I read this astonishing piece by Alan Dershowitz on Yahoo:

"When (Rehnquist) was nominated to be an associate justice in 1971, I learned from several sources who had known him as a student that he had outraged Jewish classmates by goose-stepping and heil-Hitlering with brown-shirted friends in front of a dormitory that housed the school’s few Jewish students. He also was infamous for telling racist and anti-Semitic jokes."

Okay, we have unnamed sources, always an issue in today's climate. Except that Dershowitz -- and I am not an unalloyed fan -- has an unimpeachable reputation when it comes to the truth. He may be many things, including a disgraceful apologist for torture, but he's a straight-shooter. Still, this part of the story is almost too grotesque to believe, so for the sake of argument, let's assume that those sources are unreliable. We would nevertheless have the fact, also helpfully chronicled by Dershowitz, that Rehnquist committed perjury to land his position on the court. Perjury regarding, no less, his own segregationist track record:

"As a law clerk, Rehnquist wrote a memorandum for Justice Jackson while the court was considering several school desegregation cases, including Brown v. Board of Education. Rehnquist’s memo, entitled “A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases,” defended the separate-but-equal doctrine embodied in the 1896 Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Rehnquist concluded the Plessy “was right and should be reaffirmed.” When questioned about the memos by the Senate Judiciary Committee in both 1971 and 1986, Rehnquist blamed his defense of segregation on the dead Justice, stating – under oath – that his memo was meant to reflect the views of Justice Jackson. But Justice Jackson voted in Brown, along with a unanimous Court, to strike down school segregation. According to historian Mark Tushnet, Justice Jackson’s longtime legal secretary called Rehnquist’s Senate testimony an attempt to “smear the reputation of a great justice.” Rehnquist later admitted to defending Plessy in arguments with fellow law clerks. He did not acknowledge that he committed perjury in front of the Judiciary Committee to get his job."

So, enjoy the tender obituaries. Meanwhile, let's take a look at his probable replacement. What to think about John Roberts?

I'm almost afraid to voice this, as it's an opinion that may well turn around to bite me in the ass, but... I like him. I don't like everything that he stands for, but I like him, as a human being. Sure, it's distressing that he looks like a cross between Alan Alda and Robin Williams -- two nice-guy actors who have specialized, recently, in portraying the crawlingest of creeps -- but that's no reason for a filibuster. The fact is, the guy's impressive. He's more than impressive: John Roberts clearly has the capacity to become a truly great jurist. And he knows this.

In pragmatic terms, what this tells me is that Roberts has an eye towards history: whatever the pressures, he would not squander his reputation the way that Rehnquist did in 2000. He is apparently principled; and even better -- he has to appear consistently principled, for the sake of his immortal reputation (never mind his soul).

Okay, as Aristotle pointed out, rigorous consistency in the application of bad principles is the opposite of virtue. Yet -- and yes I'm taking a big gamble -- I suspect that Roberts will ultimately prove to be a voice of quiet sanity: Souter on Steroids. He is humble. He has great respect for precedent. He's clearly capable of bringing out the big guns, intellectually; but as cannons go, he's anything but loose. Overturning Roe v. Wade, for instance, would be an act of rank judicial activism, and he knows it; I just don't think he'll go there, whatever his personal convictions.

It's worth revisiting the old paradox here: a principled judge, like a principled lawyer, will disregard his personal convictions. Roberts has already demonstrated his ability to do this, on numerous occasions, and it's why we know so little about him, as opposed to the positions he's taken on the part of his clients.

Also, and here's where I'm potentially blinded: I'm just overjoyed to see Bush -- who's expressed admiration for Clarence Thomas, and all things mediocre -- appoint somebody competent. Not simply competent, but apparently brilliant. Politics is no place for intellectual elitism (which is why I'm not in politics), but I love that John Roberts insisted upon learning Ancient Greek in high school even though it wasn't on the curriculum. Call me a rank aesthete -- I'll take a judge who quotes Homer in his decisions after reading it in the original. In short: I'm slightly infatuated with the guy, and I'm not sure you should take my opinion seriously. But let's face it, at a time when the greatest American institutions have become little more than squat-houses for stumbling simpletons, it couldn't hurt to have an exceptional mind at the head of the Supreme Court, if only for the sake of nostalgia.

The Vulture Has Landed

2005-09-04T17:33:00.000-05:00

"The Navy announced yesterday that Vice President Cheney's former company, Halliburton, which has handled much of the repair work as well as support services for the U.S. military in Iraq, was hired to restore power and rebuild three naval facilities in Mississippi that were wrecked by Katrina." - New York Daily News

It Ain't Race

2005-09-03T15:00:00.000-05:00

Kanye West has it wrong: Bush does not have contempt for black people. He has contempt for poor people. Once again I quote Yoshi Tsurumi, who taught the carefree young drunk at Harvard Business School: our future president firmly believed that "people are poor because they are lazy." George, then as now, was "opposed to labor unions, social security, environmental protection, Medicare, and public schools." (Okay, these days he's not foolish enough to oppose public schools. At least not publicly.)

It's too bad we can't demonstrate this class distinction with regard to New Orleans. Say, through a pointed counter-example to Louisiana... what if a major urban disaster had befallen a crucial financial district, as opposed to a tract of dirt-poor neighborhoods? Would our brave leader have taken four days to notice, and to gear up a rescue operation? Hang on: we don't have to hypothesize. I seem to remember that on September 11, a few years back, a group of terrorists took out some of the most expensive real estate in the country. And George was on it. Yes, he spent a few hours dithering, first in a classroom, and then on Air Force One, but that was cowardice and confusion, not contempt. He cared. He sent in the cavalry, pretty damn quickly, and followed up himself, in a daring photo op, complete with megaphone.

Sure he's now out there hugging the ruined. He's all teared up (real tears, I sense -- George is sentimental), and the cameras are carefully placed to show him backed by a column of ready soldiers, locked and loaded. But that's after four days of desperately trying to ignore this unfortunate situation. (Actually, not so: he was pretty quick to address the pending oil crisis.)

Nixon had it right: no racist himself, Dick noted that black people are poor, and hence tend to vote Democrat. Which was his rationale for devoting electoral energies elsewhere. George reasonably extrapolates, and decides that humanitarian efforts are best not wasted on the irrelevant.

Desire Drowns

2005-09-02T14:43:00.000-05:00

New Orleans is no more. Whatever they manage to dredge out of that cesspool will look nothing like what the city once was: architecturally, one of the most important cities in the country; culturally, without parallel.

It is one of the hideous ironies of this hideous time that a spoiled white frat boy is responsible for the death of this particular city -- in which desperately poor black citizens, one generation removed from slavery, gave rise to America's most important art form. And let's not fool ourselves: this disaster can be laid at the doorstep of the White House. Of course even the most competent president could not have thwarted a hurricane; but a less ignorant leader could have ensured that such a storm -- long anticipated -- would not have meant the gruesome demise of a great city.

George W. Bush cut funding required to shore up the levees protecting New Orleans -- the money was diverted to Iraq. Fully one third of the National Guard in Louisiana and Mississippi are not available to rescue New Orleans -- they have been diverted to Iraq. The president's limited attention, in short, has been diverted, from day one, to Iraq. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." No, George: you didn't anticipate this, and only because you weren't listening. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Task Force emphasized that the most likely disasters to occur in American were a terrorist attack in New York, an earthquake in San Francisco, and a hurricane-triggered flood in New Orleans.

And so ends the city that gave us jazz. I'm waiting for some fat, pompous preacher to remind us that Gomorrah too disappeared beneath a lake. I'm sorry, but nothing -- nothing given to this country by the bloviating moralists on the right -- has ever come remotely close in importance to an art form dreamed up in the dens of an iniquitous city now drowned.

Louis Armstrong's image has been whitewashed, but the fact is that he got his start in the brothels of New Orleans. (And -- this is another conversation -- his first horn was given to him by a Jewish employer: perhaps the first symbolic portent of the greatest partnership in the history of the American civil rights movement. Of course the alliance between blacks and Jews is no more alive than New Orleans itself; the finest Jewish minds in politics are now bent towards advising a murderous clown.)

Without jazz, we would not have had F. Scott Fitzgerald. Or the Harlem Renaissance. Or Gershwin. Without the steaming culture of New Orleans we would not have had the best of Tennessee Williams. Not to mention the Meters and the Neville Brothers, Professor Longhair and Allen Toussaint (who is new rumored to be stranded in the fetid hell of the Superdome). And for you righteous, wrist-slapping, faith-based fools: sorry, bubba, but Gomorrah also gave us Mahalia Jackson.

It's impossible to imagine what America would look like if it hadn't been for the contribution of New Orleans.

It's true that in recent years the French Quarter had been pretty much reduced to a theme park for Bush-colored party boys, but history remained, in built form, and has now been erased. Do you honestly think that Preservation Hall -- a tiny dilapidated room, through which generations of great musicians passed -- will be restored? And what will it look like if it is?

I keep searching online for news of A Gallery For Fine Photography -- America's most important private photo gallery, which I imagine is now swimming in poisoned water.

The bodies of the drowned are now floating over the city of America's greatest cemeteries. The mayor is alternately screaming and in tears. Refugees are being starved and raped in a decayed sports stadium. This is a reality-based scenario: it is a picture of what a country looks like when it lacks a president.

Nobody Here But Us Pond Scum

2005-08-10T21:34:00.000-05:00

If you were convinced that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, you were an idiot. You were also correct. On the other hand, if you were certain that he did, you were level-headed, perspicacious, and wrong.

Let's try that again. If you were convinced that Saddam did not have weapons, and had either evidence or compelling reason to believe this, you were either in the loop, or a genius, or Saddam Hussein. If you were convinced that he did, despite strong evidence to the contrary, then you were self-serving, self-deluding scum, and perhaps president of the most powerful nation on earth.

Okay, here's where it begins to get complex. If you did believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, yet opposed the war in Iraq, you did not stand on particularly elevated ground. Especially if it can be demonstrated (as it can with much of the far left), that you were indifferent to the possibility of Israel disappearing beneath a mushroom cloud, or a haze of toxin. And if it can be demonstrated that you were pleased by that possibility, then you are a mensch on the order of Saddam himself.

On the other hand, if you were pretty sure that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, yet you leaned on WMDs as an argument in favor of the war, you have a fair bit to answer for, and you may well have to when Patrick Fitzgerald releases his report. Now, with respect to you fine members of the current administration, whether you fall into this category is a subtle call: it depends not only upon your degree of access to intelligence, but your own ability to interpret that information, and your contrasting ability to deny what's sitting in front of your very eyes.

All of that is perfectly clear. Here's where it gets confusing. If you did believe that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and on the basis of this supported the war in Iraq, then you were morally justified, and epistemologically screwed. I fall into this doomed category. On the basis of false information, which I had every reason to believe, I made a decent judgment call, which put me in bed with the devil.

If on the other hand you did not believe that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and had strong reason for this conviction, and on the basis of this opposed the war in Iraq, then you were a scholar and a saint. And, I suspect, very very rare.

I write this in response to James Wolcott's Manichean distinction on his blog: if you supported the war, then you're right-wing pond scum; only if you did not, can you properly call yourself a liberal.

This simple taxonomy works in retrospect, certainly. If you now support the war with full-throated bloodthirsty squeals of uncritical delight, then yeah, you are scum, and perhaps an anchor on Fox News. But things change when you step back to the period before the actual invasion, as I have demonstrated above, with blinding clarity (if you could see straight before reading it, I doubt you can now).

But let's pretend we don't have perspicuous hindsight. What kind of reasoning strikes you as, well, reasonable, when it comes to deciding (before the war) that Saddam does not have weapons of mass destruction? You're dealing with two known liars, Saddam Hussein and George Bush. Both are doing their level best to convince you that such weapons exist. Saddam, the only one with certain knowledge, tells you that they do not. Hence, given his history regarding the truth, they do. George Bush is telling you that they do exist, hence they do not.

Okay, that's simplistic. Liars do not always lie. And -- here's where things get truly interesting to you paradox connoisseurs out there -- liars sometimes tell the truth, hoping that you'll interpret it as a lie. Which is precisely what Saddam Hussein did. Anyone with a lick of sense knew that he was lying. He wanted you to know that he was lying. Except that he wasn't.

Also simplistic is the assumption that someone who has only partial possession of the truth will be able to determine that he is lying. George Bush, although he can be demonstrated to have lied on numerous occasions, may not actually have been lying regarding the putative weapons in Iraq. In fact, I am fairly sure that he wasn't. He wanted those weapons to exist. He had been convinced, by smarter people than himself, that the existence of those weapons was a slam-dunk (Republican-speak for "apodictic"). He knew that, should those weapons prove not to exist, he would Not Look Good. Hence, I truly believe that he truly believed they were there. Which is why I believed him when he told me they were there. I deduced, quite logically, that the liar was not lying at this time. And I was wrong.

Except, as I say, there is the strong possibility that he was not lying. That he was simply wrong. Which is not to say that a lie doesn't enter into it. What is quite probable is that George was lying to himself. Which is to say, he was telling the truth as he saw it -- a truth which was factually incorrect -- only because he was not being honest with himself. If he had not lied to himself, he would not have lied to us. Perhaps.

I know, I know. You think I'm trying to make things needlessly difficult. That's unfair, and untrue: what I am demonstrating is that, in order to be morally and factually correct from the start, you'd have to be a superlative psychologist. Actually, the word "superhuman" comes to mind.

You'd have to have known that those weapons were not there. For most of us, who were not in the loop, this would have meant knowing that one liar (Saddam) was telling the truth, in hopes we would interpret it as a lie. It would have also meant knowing that another liar (Bush) was telling what he thought was the truth, even though it was not only a lie, but a lie that he should have recognized as such.

After determining this (a mundane act of transcendent genius), you would then be in a position to make a relatively simple moral judgment: we should not go to war with Iraq.

Perhaps. In fact, no. Things are still complicated. If you knew (or had strong reason to believe) that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction, you could still argue that removing a genocidal dictator might be the right thing to do. This would have to be predicated on the (false) assumption that the war would not turn into a bloody quagmire. It would involve the delicate business of weighing evils: sanctions that were killing children, versus violence that would kill perhaps fewer children. I found myself in this ugly position, after the war had begun and the weapons had proved unlikely to exist. A quick, efficient removal of Saddam -- who had gassed his own people -- would have been a good thing; and since it would have ended the brutality of sanctions, it would have been an even better thing. In this matter, I was not so much evil, as a chump. (Of course we were going to enter a bloody quagmire.)

That said, my reasoning was not quite that distorted. I in fact did not fully support the current war. As I wrote then, getting rid of Saddam would have been a much more worthy (and less suspect) undertaking, if it had been done by another administration, at another time, for better reasons, in a less mindless fashion. (A variant of Kerry's "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.") I was sort of for the war, before I was pretty much against it, after which I was very much against it. And at no time in this evolving process did I have anything but contempt for the current administration. Even if it meant semi-supporting them in a war against weapons that surely existed, except that they didn't.

In short: Wolcott, do I get to call myself a liberal?

The Blood-Brain Barrier

2005-07-12T16:09:00.000-05:00

Watching the Rove kettle boil, it has increasingly astonished me how long it takes for serious information (and discussion) to seep from the blogosphere into the professional media. Even more appalling is how thin the stuff has become when it finally filters through to those nuanced, chin-stroking pundits.

Google News offers a nice positivistic measure of a story: how close to Peoria it is beginning to play. Every article excerpted on the front page at Google News is followed by a number, suggesting how many quasi-respectable news outlets have picked up on the meme: e.g. "all 449 related." Now this is far from scientific, in that all sorts of peculiar and suspect web sites are thrown into the mix (along with parodies); also, that figure will include examples of the same story repeated numerous times through syndication. Still, I've found the Google News Quotient (GNQ) a useful barometer. Once a story reaches a certain critical mass, it gets the door prize: the protagonist gets listed under the "In The News" heading.

Last week, amazingly enough, Rove was not "In The News." Rove stories, if they made the front page of Google News at all, rarely managed a triple-digit GNQ. Isikoff's revelations on Sunday elevated the Google News Quotient to a solid three figures, but you still got better numbers for the as-yet-unreleased Harry Potter. (God I love how Newsweek scooped Time on this; yes, Norman Pearlstine decided to turn those history-making notes over to the special prosecutor; but he made the ludicrous error of withholding them from his own readers.) The ritual humiliation of Scott McClellan sent the GNQ into competition with Harry; and today they're into the four figures.

A synchronized dance happens online with the mainstream media. First, Rove appears deeply buried somewhere in the virtual bowels of the web site. Then he emerges on the front page, as a squib, somewhere towards the bottom. As far as I can tell, the Google News Quotient has to hit the triple digits before a story floats above the fold.

This is nicely analogous to the Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB) -- a neurological term to describe the ingenious way in which the brain shields itself from things it doesn't like. "The blood-brain barrier prevents many low-life forms, such as toxins that make it into the blood stream, from tainting the brain's pristine nerve cell habitat." Couldn't have put it better myself. The mainstream media (which is neither liberal nor conservative, I'm sorry -- just moribund) views everything in blogland as a low-life form, probably toxic. It takes a long time for an echt pundit to screw up the courage to close his eyes and swallow the stuff, all the while praying it doesn't come back to take revenge, à la Montezuma.

To further mix this metaphor: perhaps this is why the story tends to look like regurgitated pablum once it's been given the imprimatur of, say, the Washington Post. I have read nothing in any of these carefully considered official news articles that I hadn't discovered long before -- in greater detail, and much more intelligently parsed -- via the usual informal sources on the web. (The Washington Post online, in a hilariously protracted bout of overweening vanity, still gives more play on its front page to Deep Throat nostalgia than it does to the even bigger story blossoming turd-wise beneath its nose.)

Yes, if you want any sort of actual thought or news concerning the scope and depth of Rove's crime, you have to dive back into the blogosphere, or turn to distinctly unconventional sources.

Okay, I suppose there are those who don't consider the National Review Online unconventional, but let's agree that it's at the very least disreputable. And here I find the following extremely useful tidbit: 'Luskin declined to say how Rove knew that Plame "apparently" (to use Cooper's word) worked at the CIA. But Luskin told NRO that Rove is not hiding behind the defense that he did not identify Wilson's wife because he did not specifically use her name. Asked if that argument was too legalistic, Luskin said, "I agree with you. I think it's a detail."'

(Hold that quotation! I suspect it's going to blow up in Luskin's face like a clown's cigar.)

If I were an editor at a major broadsheet, here are some questions I'd like to see addressed, if not fully answered, in feature articles. I'd dearly like to know what it means, in terms of real damage, to out an undercover operative. How much does it cost to train one? How many joes does the average Langley spy have working for them in the field? How many of those hapless sub-spies are likely to be offed thanks to Rove's petty revenge?

Wouldn't you like to know some of this? Well, you're going to have to go pretty far afield. In fact, I find myself repairing to -- don't laugh -- John Le Carré, to get any sense of what this means in real terms. If you want to understand the relationship between a spook and his contacts -- and what it means for that cover to be blown -- you'll find nothing in the literature remotely as thorough as Le Carré's early novels: especially The Karla Trilogy, and A Perfect Spy. What I gather from these books -- unless the spy culture has changed substantially since the Cold War, and I suspect it hasn't -- is that the outing of Valerie Plame is making life hell for all sorts of hapless Nigerian contacts. Thanks to Rove, simply having had tea with the Ambassador's wife may well be grounds for torture or execution.

I said, don't laugh. Now stop it. Appealing to John Le Carré is as respectable, I'm sorry, as turning to Graham Greene, or Joseph Conrad, or any of the established literary figures who has given thought to the complexities of modern intrigue. He is canonical. John Updike did literature a serious disservice by classing Le Carré with Ludlum and the like: the proper spot on the bookshelf is beside our very greatest political and psychological novelists. Funny how even a whiff of genre skews the critical sensibility -- yes, he wrote spy novels. Get over it. (I have at least two heavyweights on my side in this battle: both Graham Greene and Philip Roth have testified to Le Carré's genius.)

This digression is simply to demonstrate how little we know about how this case plays out within the culture of post-Cold-War espionage. And we'll continue to know far too little if we lean solely upon the Timeses of New York and L.A. Read Le Carré, if only to understand, approximately, the magnitude of Turd Blossom's Treason.

I know that these questions will get addressed, and that they will be addressed first in the blogosphere. Experts will weigh in, beside the usual loons (one of Lyndon LaRouche's cover publications, the lofty-sounding Executive Intelligence Review, has entered the fray; beware -- this is not, despite the name, the spy-lover's equivalent of Jane's Defence Weekly). Facts will be gathered, opinions collated and weighed, and then the GNQ will gradually register that an excruciatingly tepid version is beginning to osmose through the barrier into the "pristine nerve cell habitat" of the guys who are actually paid to do this stuff.

Ribbit

2005-07-10T20:53:00.000-05:00

Okay, tadpoles, time to strike up the March of the Frogs! (That would be the under-rated amphibian passage in Beethoven's Pastoral.) I suspect I'm not the only one, in my Rove reveries, to look up the origins of that exquisite expression: "to frog-march." Now my friend Jesse Sheidlower -- North American editor of the OED, and The Guy Who Knows Shit About Slang -- is liable to spank me for this, but as far as I can discern the "frog" bit comes from the fact that the marchee was originally held upside down, giving him a frog-like appearance. Also (and this has no linguistic significance) it was common for the police, while frog-marching a perp, to beat a tattoo on his butt. When Karl Rove is frog-marched, as per the wishes of Wilson, do we dare hope that he will be held upside down, while a drum solo is paddled with Keith-Moon-like abandon upon his oft-kissed rump?

He deserves no less.

"What's that, Karl? Got a frog in your throat?"
"Yes, but last night it was a prince..."
(rimshot)

Oh, it's a glorious image to be sure. Even a modern frog march would be a treat. In fact, I don't care if they pin his arms -- it might be nice to see him holding up his jacket, in an effort (finally!) to get that loathsome puffy face out of the media.

And I love how the information is being pieced out to the public: today anonymous sources, highly placed, gave Newsweek the full text of Matt Cooper's notes on Rove. Live by the leak; die by the leak.

Much is being made of the fact that Rove appears not to have mentioned Valerie Plame's actual name to Cooper. Bleateth the Washington Post: "Rove Told Reporter About CIA Role But Gave No Name, Attorney Says." Excuse me? He identified her as Wilson's wife! What kind of third-rate reporter couldn't take this information, and -- with a couple of phone calls -- attach a name to the woman?

Here, now is the fact: Rove told Cooper that Wilson's wife was with "the agency." In short, he outed Valerie Plame as an agent with the CIA. Fact. Ain't no way around it. Sure... did Rove know that she was undercover? That will matter a great deal. But whether or not, he outed Valerie Plame as an agent with the CIA. I suppose I could repeat that a third time, but you'll be hearing it a lot in the days to come, so I'll curb the pleasure.

Yes, there are details to be worked out. How much did he know? How much did the president know? How much did Ashcroft know before recusing himself? Should Rove be held upside down? What precise rhythm should be paddled upon his butt?

Meanwhile, I'm going to curl up with my translation of Aristophanes' The Frogs. (Favorite line: "O, dear! O, dear! Now I declare, I've got a bump upon my rump.") Then I intend to cook up a mess o' frog's legs. After all, I live in the state of Guanajuato ("Hill of Frogs").

And I quote from the (fabulously obscure) Odis Bird:

"Froggy went a courtin' and he did ride
Rolly-bob-rinktum-kimo
And took miss Mousey by his side
Rolly-bob-rinktum-kimo
Kimo-karo-captain-karo
Bombineeshee-kimo
Shim-a-nicki-bombinicki
Rolly-bob-arinktum-kimo"

Can you tell I'm in good mood?

Nominate the Thug. Please.

2005-07-06T17:53:00.000-05:00

Let's be clear: Alberto R. Gonzales is not a good person. He is, at best, a second-rate human being -- a generous assessment, and one that brings me close to choking (see "George Walker Bush and the Torture of the Innocent" below). Even before becoming Attorney General, Gonzales was the administration's poster boy for the brutalization of prisoners -- the man who provided the rationale for Bush's most repugnant policy (and it is a policy): the 'rendition' of suspects, whereby they are handed over to our more barbaric allies to be tortured. Alberto Gonzales has turned Americans into thugs by proxy, which makes him a particularly repulsive thug himself, in the mold of Brecht's Mac the Knife: the sort that hides behind an amiable smile, a nice business suit, and the veneer of legal respectability.

That said, I support Gonzales as Sandra Day O'Connor's replacement on the Supreme Court.

Why? Because he is almost certainly the most palatable candidate we're going to see. Do you honestly think that any Friend of Bush is going to be queasy about torture? Or have anything but contempt for habeas corpus when it comes to strangely-dressed people accused of terrorism?

Gonzales, on the other hand, is feared by the right-wing fringe for a reason: he is a pragmatist, and may well have a decidedly liberal bent when it comes to issues like abortion and affirmative action. If he weren't so keen on extracting fingernails and kicking testicles, he would in fact look like O'Connor herself: a Reagan appointment who has been a great disappointment to Neanderthals.

Gonzales might even move further away from the Rancid Right, when it begins to sink home how "The War Against Terror" (read: the burnt-earth campaign against dark-skinned people who look vaguely like terrorists if you squint) is causing great suffering to, for instance, Mexicans at the border. Yes, once on the bench he could always prove a traitor to his own people -- Clarence Thomas is widely acknowledged to be a disgrace to his. But we knew this about Thomas from the start, whereas Gonzales has an entirely different reputation: he is admired by Hispanics, and the raw-steak Republicans are particularly nervous about his ideas concerning minorities (how some of those people might have, for example, the right to be educated).

Bush may well appoint Gonzales, and I suspect the nomination would be approved quickly. We are not going to get a better option. Support the thug.

A Turd Blossoms

2005-07-04T00:48:00.002-05:00

Bush's brain just got a terrible headache. Not the organ protected by that amazing skull -- no, that brain has never known a moment's doubt, much less dolor -- but the guy who is generally regarded as W.'s Real Brain: that Svengali of smear, Karl Rove. Even Krafty Karl may not have the genius to spin his way out of this one.

Let's see now. Karl Rove spoke to beleaguered reporter Matt Cooper, a few days before Valerie Plame was outed as an undercover operative, but he did not actually leak anything. No, he had a little chat with his buddy at Time Magazine, during which he... what? Advised him that a leak was on its way? Suggested that, should there be a leak, Cooper might wish to write it up in the following interesting manner? Discussed the weather? I mean, what did they talk about?

Robert Luskin, Rove's lawyer, is doing his best to imply that the Time reporter initiated the conversation: "What I can tell you is that Cooper called Rove during that week between the Wilson article and the Novak article..." Call me a stickler for details, but note that this statement does not rule out the possibility that Rove nevertheless called Matt Cooper first, in a prior conversation. Or that somebody else -- say, Rove's secretary -- suggested that Cooper call Rove. And we should be stickling for details, here -- Robert Luskin sure seems to be. Detail afficionados are already taking tweezers, for instance, to Luskin's comment that his client "never knowingly disclosed classified information." Lawrence O'Donnell, for instance, stickles:

"Not coincidentally, the word 'knowing' is the most important word in the controlling statute ( U.S. Code: Title 50: Section 421). To violate the law, Rove had to tell Cooper about a covert agent 'knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States.'"

Note that our man Karl has already been bear-trapped by a lie, even if he did not knowingly commit a felony. Rove's name was bandied about from the start as a possible source, but he insisted that, prior to the leak, he had never discussed this matter with the press. Okay, now we know that this isn't precisely true. That it is, in fact, precisely false.

So, here we go... Rove's pants are on fire. Those natty cuffs, at any rate. The fun question, of course, is how far does the fire climb? Well, let's say that his crime proves more than simple perjury (already a felony) -- that's at least a pair of fried kneecaps. Ouchers. But the flames could rise a bit higher. What if he mentioned this indiscretion to his boss, his buddy, the guy for whom he functions as a higher intelligence? Then, by not sacking Rove, the President was explicitly covering up a pretty serious felony (or, if you will, "treason"). That's a thigh-roaster, for sure. Now, what if it can be determined that George Bush approved the leak in advance? Then, my friends, nothing but an asbestos-lined teflon-coated kevlar athletic cup with its own integral missile defense system will do, and George had better be wearing one as well.

While we're discussing localized warming (we'll get to Kyoto next week), one of the heartwarming -- okay, nauseating -- details regarding the Bush/Brain relationship, is that W. has blessed his advisor with an affectionate nickname: Karl Rove is known, to the Commander in Chief, as "Turd Blossom." (I'm not making this up.) I'm hardly an expert on Lone Star perennials, but I take it this refers to a flower that blossoms in the midst of a cow pie. (Which leads one to ponder: what, in this literary device, acts as the turd? The White House? The Bush skull?) Anyway, I assume that this is the botanical metaphor intended. What I suspect George did not have in mind is the current situation: that Karl Rove would himself be the turd, blossoming in front of the cameras, blooming in blogs, efflorescing like Rafflesia arnoldii, the largest flower in the world, which when in bloom "emits a repulsive odor, similar to that of rotting meat."

I say: let a thousand turds bloom. Let them multiply and grow and blossom in the Oval Office, until they fill the room and hit the fan.

The Empire of Lesser Evil

2005-06-26T17:27:00.000-05:00

Man is an imperial animal. Michael Ignatieff, no saber-rattling American jingoist (it helps that he's a Canadian, living in London) proposes just this: empire is an ineluctable fact. Whether or not you agree with him, and I'm only reluctantly coming around to his conclusion, it's worth examining the consequences of that premise. If true, it's a bitter pill: the hatred of imperialism unites a vast swath of believers in progress. To fight for the end of empire is admirable, however, only if the end is possible. If it is not -- if the imperial condition is an inescapable constant, entailed by human nature -- then the anti-imperialist battle is driven by utopian delusion. And modernity is nothing if not proof that those delusions can be horribly dangerous.

What if the choice is not between empire and no empire, but between good empire and (sigh) evil empire? It's unfortunate that the latter formula comes to us from George Lucas, via Ronald Reagan, as it's undeniably an accurate assessment of various historical regimes: the Belgian, Portuguese, Spanish... and, yes, Soviet empires. All of these were utterly barbaric, relative to -- for instance -- the British model. The excesses of British empire cannot be dismissed, but empire by its nature is brutal, and the choice -- if we accept Ignatieff -- is between greater and lesser brutality.

Many will find this an intolerable proposition: that empire is like war -- appalling, but with us forever. Those who deny the necessity of war range from the admirable (Gandhi) to the despicable (Chamberlain); but they are tragic utopians, always. And if empire is a fact, then it is very much like the fact of war: to be abhorred, perhaps; but reckoned with, not simply railed against. Unless you admire King Canute. (And the sea is very much an empire.)

How would you define a good empire? One measure would be shame. If an empire can be shamed by, for instance, the massacre at Amritsar, or My Lai, then it is clearly a more noble political entity than the Japanese Empire (whose complete lack of shame with regard to the Rape of Nanking carries over into the current, very different regime). This distinction, in fact, describes the limits of Gandhian tactics: if an empire can be shamed, then it can be conquered by passive resistance. Although it is rarely discussed -- for obvious reasons -- Mahatma Gandhi did explicitly address the question of the Holocaust: what should the Jews have done? His answer, and George Orwell points out that this is consistent, was that the Jews should have committed suicide. Gandhi proposed that this suicide would have shamed the German people into action. And here is where Gandhi, and his worldview, are brutally refuted by historical reality.

The suicide of the Jews would have delighted the Nazi regime. It might have shamed FDR into an earlier intervention, but it certainly would not have worked in a manner analogous to Amritsar: Germany under Hitler proudly defined itself as an empire utterly incapable of pity, much less shame.

It is always unfortunate to have to bring up National Socialism -- Godwin's Law suggests that this rhetorical gesture ends (and loses) the debate. Here we do not have much choice, however. As Orwell stresses, this question is the crucial one if you wish to determine the reach and power of Gandhi's example. It is the hard wall against which Gandhi breaks. Nobody should be surprised that Churchill had contempt (initially) for Mahatma Gandhi: they were two archetypal men, facing two utterly irreconcilable forms of empire. Gandhi, had he been entrusted with the task of defeating Hitler, would have been a well-meaning accessory to genocide.

This is the litmus test, perhaps, of empire: the question of conscience. And conscience is not to be confused with a sense of being right -- every empire feels, at base, that it is on the side of the Good. (It is legitimate to anthropomorphise a regime; empires do have sensibilities.) No, conscience is a form of self-reflection which permits self-regulation: it is an ability to question that drunken sense of manifest destiny. Those who hate Israel, and conflate it with the most appalling regimes, have to ignore a glaring contradiction: the fact of the Israeli conscience. When the country is responsible for an atrocity -- or even apparently responsible, by association -- the streets inevitably fill with angry dissidents, outraged and ashamed. The massacres at Sabra and Shatila were not merely condemned by the outside world; they were condemned even more fiercely by a huge proportion of Israelis. When Baruch Goldstein murdered worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, the entire nation (with the exception of a small faction of poisonous extremists), was ashamed.

What then to make of the American empire? Certainly it is an entity capable of being shamed; it is an empire with a conscience. You can argue (and I would) that it is not shamed easily enough, and that it sometimes takes a combination of true horror and journalistic virtuosity to finally turn the face of the nation towards the mirror; but you cannot deny the fact of the American conscience. This is a country in which Martin Luther King -- explicitly invoking Gandhi -- did manage to effect a fundamental sea change in national mores through the invocation of shame. And this self-reflection -- slow, inefficient, often hideously late -- is no less evident in the matter of external politics. My Lai and Abu Ghraib are prominent examples of the American capacity for conscience; Guantanamo and the Downing Street Memo are prominent examples of how that conscience is glacial in its movement towards self-condemnation.

There are many who argue that America is not an empire, but this really does come down to semantics. If you insist that "empire" refers only to the Roman model of brute colonial occupation, and is a term insufficiently flexible to accomodate the American sphere of influence, then you are welcome to your definition. If, on the other hand, you wish to include subtle forms of domination -- economic, cultural, with only the occasional thwack of Teddy Roosevelt's big stick -- then you have a perfectly good case to make as well.

I prefer the latter definition, courtesy of Ignatieff (even if it is shared by all manner of anti-Americans, some of them pretty sordid). This definition, as a category for the comparison of different forms of political octopus, provides a useful framework for the evaluation of American foreign policy. The American empire looks different from the Roman or the British because it is, well, American. A good analogy is the United States themselves: just because America is a coalition of relatively autonomous political entities, does not make it any less a nation than the centralized Old World model. The American empire, if you will, looks a lot more like the American nation. And in this empire, America itself stands in for Washington: the powerful but not all-powerful center.

Which brings us, of course, to the Iraq War. Michael Ignatieff argues that the impulse to inculcate democracy in Iraq is fundamentally Jeffersonian: as imperial urges go, it is literally idealistic -- the confident imposition of a transcendent idea. He suggests that to reduce this war to mere economic causes is a sorry form of crypto-Marxism. In short, according to Ignatieff, Bush's war is a relatively benign imperial act. If democracy succeeds in Iraq, Bush will be rewarded by historians; if it fails, then he will be dismissed.

Many would suggest, however, that there is a third interpretation. The Bush initiative in Iraq is not high-minded -- Bush is no Jefferson -- nor is it a cynical economic ploy. Here the political really is personal: the assault on Saddam is nothing more than the hammer of empire swung as a weapon to settle a family feud. Bush, for all of his education on the East Coast, retains the soul of a hillbilly, and the Bush-Hussein grudge goes back many years.

Were the assault on Iraq a matter of Jeffersonian universalism, Bush would not have chosen Iraq. It is, as Kerry rightly pointed out, "the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time." Simply to finish the war in Afghanistan, properly, would have been profoundly Jeffersonian: the founding of a Western democratic state in place of an ugly theocracy. That it was begun as an act of self-defense (and vengeance) is hardly out of keeping with Jeffersonian idealism: most American territory was conquered on considerably more flimsy pretexts -- Texas, in particular, was nothing short of a vicious, opportunistic land grab. No, if Bush were committed to the cosmopolitan ideals of the Founders, he would not have left Afghanistan an unbalanced mess on the verge of teetering back into theocracy.

In fact, if this administration's true urge was towards the imposition of democracy, they might have chosen a number of nations more promising than Iraq. Burma, for instance: while regime change is a dodgy and treacherous proposition at best, Myanmar would have been a much more promising adventure than Iraq. We already have proof of vast local support for a democratic alternative; we already have a beloved charismatic leader ready to take up the reigns of government. I'm only half-serious, of course -- it would be impossible to sell Congress on an invasion of Burma, and no amount of lying could convince the American people that SLORC was in any way a threat to America or its allies. Still, the purely Jeffersonian urge would have taken us to Burma long before it would have pushed us into Iraq. On a much more serious note, we are faced with Darfur: here is a situation crying out for the intervention of a benign empire. Bush will not touch it, of course.

Finally, Bush will never be Jeffersonian for the simple reason that he is, at heart, a theocrat. Jefferson, if he was not an atheist (and a tiny Straussian voice whispers in my ear that he was), surely stands out as one of history's most committed enemies of theocracy. Nothing appalled Jefferson more than the spectacle of religious fever sickening the body politic. It is difficult, in fact, to imagine a president less like Jefferson than Bush, the pious anti-intellectual.

The war in Iraq is an act of empire; here Ignatieff has convinced me. Should it turn out to be a benign act of empire, however, this will not be primarily a consequence of Jeffersonian ambitions: it will be what we might call "blowforth" -- the antithesis of blowback -- which is to say, accidental good fortune, in the wake of nefarious objectives. (Yes, this example of blowforth would not be strictly speaking "unintended" -- as blowback is by definition -- but it would nevertheless be incidental to the main impetus for war.)

I am beginning to think that Michael Ignatieff has correctly reframed the argument: that we should now be evaluating empires, instead of quixotically wishing them not to be. Whenever there is a political void, a strong power grows imperial in order to fill it. And yes, we should expect empires to operate in brutal and self-interested ways: the nature of empire is extension, and the tree of empire is, to repurpose the words of Jefferson, watered by blood. We should hardly be surprised when an empire goes to war on cooked evidence (the Tonquin Resolution was formulated months before the actual skirmish which gave it a name; Pearl Harbor, or something like it, was long anticipated by FDR) -- but we can certainly register disgust when that literally Machiavellian act takes us into unnecessary, ill-considered, and ultimately failed enterprises.

George Walker Bush and the Torture of the Innocent

2005-05-20T14:21:00.000-05:00

In February 2002, President Bush announced that the Geneva Conventions would not apply to prisoners associated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. In December of that year, an innocent Afghan taxi driver was tortured to death, mostly for the sake of entertainment, in an American detention center.

Many will argue that these facts are not connected. After all, what does the Commander in Chief have to do with the behavior of a handful of sadistic underlings thousands of miles away? The answer, of course, is: everything.

Soldiers are killers, by definition, and a good soldier is a good killer. On the battlefield, this is a virtue; in the prison system, it is a recipe for barbarism. History tells us, again and again, that the only reliable way in which trained killers can be prevented from abusing captive enemies, is through rigorous and responsible leadership.

The sad truth is that unsupervised prison guards -- even if they are not professional killers -- tend to become sadistic, very quickly. This was demonstrated by the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971, in which ordinary university students -- mostly peaceniks, in fact -- were given the opportunity to run a mock prison. Within days they were abusing their wards to such an extent that the experiment had to be called to a halt. (The process was dramatized to stunning effect in Das Experiment, a German film released in 2001.)

What does this mean? Well, apart from everything else, it means that many of the unspeakably brutal prison guards in Afghanistan -- and yes, there were many -- became sadists as a direct consequence of the Bush administration's failure of leadership. And this failure can be linked, directly, to the president's own public renunciation of basic principles of decency: specifically those outlined by the Third Geneva Convention, which governs the treatment of prisoners of war.

Tim Golden in the New York Times reported at length today (May 20) on the torture which was daily fare at the US detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan. If you can read this article without experiencing palpable nausea, then I suspect you would be very much at home in the ranks of those prison guards.

The details are appalling. They make Abu Ghraib seem a minor infraction by comparison.

The taxi driver's was the second death by torture in December 2002. It was distinguished, however, by the fact that the victim, known by the single name Dilawar, was widely assumed by his torturers to be innocent. Dilawar was 5' 9". He weighed 122 pounds. To take this man to the extremes of excruciating pain, it was hardly necessary to bring in Specialist Damien M. Corsetti - a tall guard known generally as "Monster," and affectionately referred to, by his superior officer, as "the King of Torture." It's a reasonable bet that even the sadistic woman assigned to interrogate Dilawar weighed more than her victim. He was described as "shy" and "unadventurous." His family had bought him a used Toyota sedan only a few weeks before, which he was driving as a taxi. He made the fatal error of driving three passengers past an American base which had been targeted by a rocket earlier that day.

Even though there was scant reason to believe that he or his passengers had anything whatsoever to do with that assault, the three fares were shipped to Guantánamo, where they spent over a year before it was decided that they would not be charged; and Dilawar was tortured to death.

The favorite technique at Bagram seems to have been the "common peroneal strike." This common practice - clearly outlawed by the Geneva Conventions (which were deemed not to apply) involved striking a prisoner on the side of the leg, in a particular place above the knee. Golden reports: "The M.P.'s said they were never told that peroneal strikes were not part of Army doctrine. Nor did most of them hear one of the former police officers tell a fellow soldier during the training that he would never use such strikes because they would 'tear up' a prisoner's legs." Surely they must have got some sense of this, however, when Dilawar's orange prison pants repeatedly fell down while he was chained: one guard noticed, for instance, that the bruise on his leg was "the size of a fist."

Why would guards torture a man they considered innocent? At first it was all in fun: M.P.'s would drop by to give him common peroneal strikes just to hear him scream, "Allah! Allah! Allah!" This was done to him perhaps 100 times, according to one of his tormentors, Specialist Corey E. Jones: "My first reaction was that he was crying out to his god... Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny."

It gradually progressed to something I don't particularly want to detail. However miserable it will make you, it's every American's civic duty to read Tim Golden's exhaustive treatment of this in the Times.

I hope that explicit pictures from Bagram surface, even though they are bound to fill the Afghan streets with anguished fury... because perhaps they'll bring out Americans in equal numbers. Even Republicans. I do not expect Bush to take any responsibility for this -- which is very much the low point in a uniformly wretched administration -- but perhaps the public will at last hold him responsible.

America is filled with absolutists. Some of them are admirable; some plagued by hobgoblins; but they are everywhere, on both the right and the left. If you're an economist, chances are you have a religious allegiance to the free market. If you're a civil libertarian, you're not likely to countenance a single instance in which free speech is abridged.

Yet none of these absolutes -- these supposed bottom lines -- have anything like the moral urgency of the absolute proscription against torture. Decent men can disagree with aspects of free market theory, or certain applications of the First Amendment; but no decent human being can endorse torture. It is what separates good from evil. A good person from an evil person. If anything constitutes the line which should not be crossed -- which cannot be crossed, for the sake of our collective conscience -- it is this.

And yet one of the most vocal defendants of the First Amendment, Alan Dershowitz, has notoriously outlined circumstances in which torture would be permissible. God help you if you silence a man; but to make him scream is negotiable.

I have a great deal of sympathy for free speech absolutists -- I am close to one myself. But to worship at this altar, yet shrug off the prohibition -- the absolute prohibition -- against torture, is beyond shallow. One is an important practical necessity: insurance against tyranny. The other, however, is so much more than this: it is the litmus test of the soul.

George Walker Bush -- the man elected to embody the soul of the nation -- has personally endorsed torture as an acceptable American practice. Personally, and more than once. It is President Bush personally who insisted upon denying prisoners rights under the Geneva Conventions. It is President Bush personally who insisted that the next Attorney General be Alberto R. Gonzales: the administration's most prominent advocate of torture. This was a hugely symbolic act, as Gonzales was known by the public for almost nothing but his advocacy of torture.

Alberto Gonzales famously wrote to Bush, in January 2002, that the current war should be considered unique when it is necessary to "quickly obtain information" from captured combatants: "In my judgment this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners." It is a historical fact -- perhaps the central moral fact of his presidency -- that President Bush weighed this judgment, and came out unambiguously in favor.

And by the end of that year, a shy, innocent taxi driver would be tortured to death in an American dungeon, solely for the pleasure of hearing him cry out to God.

Is the President, Properly Speaking, a Chimp?

2005-05-04T16:52:00.004-05:00

In today's lesson, we examine whether it is appropriate to refer to the Commander in Chief as a "chimp." Now, surely we do not mean that George W. Bush is literally "a gregarious anthropoid ape, Pan troglodytes." (Absent DNA tests, of course, we cannot absolutely reject that possibility). No, in this popular phrase -- "smirking chimp" being perhaps the most common variant -- the word is intended as a metaphor. I would like to argue, however, that it is not a simple metaphor. It is not merely a reference to his brutish mind, his stunted soul, his chest-thumping buffoonery: it is, in fact, a theologically profound observation.

C.S. Lewis, a superb Christian thinker, offers a deep and horrifying parable in the final volume of his Narnia series (nominally for children, but aimed equally at presidents). In this book, The Last Battle, a wily chimp decides to present himself as a creature with unique access to God. The chimp, of course -- being a repulsive, cynical chimp -- has no relationship with God whatsoever, so he has to cook up his own idolatrous stand-in: in this case, a donkey dressed in a lion's skin. (The lion -- Aslan -- represents the true Christ figure in the novels.)

To be precise, Lewis does not identify his ape as a chimpanzee, but given that bonobos, gorillas and orangutans are not generally imputed Bush-like characteristics, I think we can assume that this particular great ape is of the type universally associated with the Commander in Chief.

Lewis's chimp is unique in his ability to commune with the spiritual -- just as the Chimp in Chief can actually "feel" people praying for him. (I was praying that he might be fully revealed, just before the election, as a butt-naked imperial ape -- wonder if he felt that.)

The chimp in The Last Battle is unique in his ability to determine what his faux god desires and decrees -- just as our posturing chimp knows that divine will propels his agenda: God has told George Bush that he must prolong the life of a brain-dead woman, at all costs! (Well, okay, not all costs: the chimp signed a bill -- with God's approval, no doubt -- permitting insurance companies to pull the feeding tube, against family wishes, should that whole life business start to get pricey.) It is not George W. Bush who wants to stuff the courts full of foaming, barely competent ideologues: it is God who wants this, and the chimp is merely a conduit.

What is crucial to note, when we examine this parable, is that good people get sucked in by the chimp-and-donkey act. It is all too easy for liberals to paint the chimp's Christian followers as uniformly vicious, but I simply do not buy it. For every vainglorious creep like Randall Terry, there are a thousand humble believers. For every loathsome hate-monger like Pat Robertson, there are ten thousand decent citizens devoted to being good. That they have become accessories, in this case, to evil, is a product of devious chimp-work.

My friend once bought a brand-new DVD player on the streets of New York, only to discover when he returned home that it was a boxed and shrink-wrapped rock. The Christian Americans who supported Bush in the last election were sold a rock. Or, if you prefer, a donkey wrapped in a lion's skin. There is nothing remotely Christian about George Bush, or his more chimp-like advocates. Is Tom DeLay, for instance, essentially a Christian, or a thieving howler monkey? Polls suggest that devout Americans are beginning to lean towards the latter interpretation. How long will it be before they begin to recognize that their pious president does not advocate Christianity, so much as a banana republic?

The president, I am fairly sure, sincerely thinks of himself as a Christian (if not Christ Himself). Of course, theology is not George Bush's strong point. George Bush, in fact, does not have a strong point, but among his weaker points, theology is prominent. Note his choice of Jesus Christ as his favorite "philosopher." All right: we can hardly expect a chimp to nominate, say, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, but nevertheless, he might have chosen an actual philosopher. In fact, Christ represents the precise opposite of philosophy: He embodies Revelation, as opposed to Reason. That's fine, however: in today's parlance, anybody who says anything even remotely inspiring is deemed a philosopher, and Christ is certainly an infinitely more worthy candidate than, say, Jerry Falwell. It might be worth investigating, then, whether George Bush lives in accordance with the precepts of his favorite philosopher.

Full disclosure: I am a Jew, and not a particularly good Jew, but I have studied a fair bit of Christian theology -- certainly a good bit more than George Bush -- and have a decent grasp of the basic principles. We don't even have to go into theology, however, to demonstrate the chimp's deviation from sound Christian principles: well-known passages from the Bible, taken literally, provide more than enough evidence.

Christ said to the rich young ruler (an early incarnation of our chimp): "And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." (Matt. 19:24)

Now, various ass-kissing theologians (disciples of Karl Rove) have tried to justify their wealthy rulers by putting a peculiar spin on this passage: the "Eye of the Needle" is a reference to a small gate in the wall of a city -- for example the Jaffa Gate to Jerusalem -- which is opened after the larger gate is closed for the night. Getting a camel through this small gate is difficult, yes, but not impossible. (What the Karl Roves of the academy gloss over, needless to say, is that a camel laden with jars of precious oil would probably have to be unburdened before you could squeeze it through that gate.) Bush and his followers are literalists, however, and this kind of metaphorical spin is just not possible. We're talking a real camel, here -- the kind owned by the chimp's chums in Saudi Arabia -- and a real needle, of the sort Betsy Ross employed to sew the flag our chimp has disgraced.

Of course, you don't need much in the way of high technology to get a real camel through a real needle: a mortar and pestle would do the trick. Presumably, however, Bush's favorite philosopher was talking about a live camel. (Perhaps the chimp ought to divert research funds towards the creation of nano-camels?)

To be honest, sometimes official doctrine does appear to favor the frat chimp. In 1323, for instance, Pope John XIII pronounced the doctrine of Christ's poverty heretical. An appalling judgment, but not surprising: that particular article of faith, taken to an extreme, was making it difficult to justify the wealth of the Church. One stubborn heretic, Brother Michael of Florence, was dealt with by the Pope in a manner the chimp would have (quietly) enjoyed: his fingertips were cut off. (Although this was done in Florence -- our chimp would probably have advised rendition.) Pope John's decree, however, does not let the simian off the hook. No matter how you interpret this heresy, there is no way to construe Christ as anything but a fiercely loyal friend to the poor.

"If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me" (Matt. 19:21)

George Bush, putative Christian, is the most cynical enemy of the poor ever to sully the Oval Office. Yoshi Tsurumi, one of his professors at Harvard Business School, clearly remembers the young chimp opining that "people are poor because they are lazy." (But George: if this were true, surely your well-documented sloth ought to have landed you in a trailer park, rather than the White House.) According to this professor, the callow chimp was also "opposed to labor unions, social security, environmental protection, Medicare, and public schools." (Public schools? Unbelievable. What a great guy.) I'm not precisely sure how Christ would have weighed in on these issues, but it's worth pondering. How would George's favorite philosopher have felt about those special tax cuts, I wonder? Or the Bush policy of ensuring that veterans and their families are reduced to eating cat food?

The donkey in a lion's skin, however, is not given to saying uncomfortable things about camels and needles. No, George's god, whom he has created in his image, recognizes the sanctity of the free market. (While simultaneously blessing steel tariffs -- for he is a forgiving god, and understands that wealth and power may require the occasional inconsistency. Especially when it comes to the sacred business of pandering to those unions you don't believe in.)

The essence of the chimp, as proposed by C.S. Lewis, is hypocrisy. And, to be specific, a particularly malevolent form of religious hypocrisy. Within this parable, can we interpret George W. Bush as anything less than the very soul of chimpdom? The chimp par excellence? The chimp who outchimps every chimp who has ever sold a donkey to the American electorate?

It is unfortunate, needless to say, that the donkey is not a symbol of the Republican Party. If we wish to keep our metaphors clean and precise, however, we might note that the Babylonian Talmud offers a nice variant of the camel story: in that version, it is easier for an elephant to go through the eye of a needle, than it is for a chimp to con his way into heaven.

A Faith-Based Torture Initiative

2005-01-07T15:29:00.000-06:00

Torture is good policy, but lousy politics. If we are going to rehabilitate the concept of officially sanctioned torture, is it really wise to have it associated with the active military? The real lesson to be learned from Vietnam (as opposed to this "quagmire" silliness) is that soldiers must be seen to operate cleanly. The public wants to see blissful, instantaneous death on the battlefield; that's how video games work, and that's how God would want it.

Which leads us to an obvious solution to this problem. To win the public relations battle concerning torture -- and our very civilization depends upon it -- all we need do is ally the concept with unambiguously good people. I am speaking, of course, of the clergy.

We forget that western religion has a proud history of groundbreaking advances in the field of torture. Interfaith torture was in fact pioneered by the medieval church, and methods investigated and perfected some thousand years ago prove remarkably effective even today. Have we really improved upon the thumbscrew? The rack? Vivisection? The frescoes in the waiting room of any Byzantine chapel are nothing less than a textbook for the modern torturer. Even the illiterate can follow these simple instructions: everything from the technology to the proper stance and demeanor of the professional is illustrated in depth.

Best of all, faith-based torture is inexpensive. It need not add a penny to the deficit; the tools are simple and ready to hand; the manpower is already in place. Consider how our terrorist dungeons are squandering, for instance, the time and energy of fine Christian chaplains. Also those Hebrew gentlemen now most welcome in our fully integrated army. What good are these holy professionals to Islamic prisoners? Do we really imagine that the Lord's faithful presence in these prisons -- at great cost to the public -- is going to move those heathen souls one inch closer to salvation?

No, these God-loving Christian (and, of course, Hebraic) men should be retrained to express American valyooze in a manner consonant with this administration's new priorities. Many of them are already well-versed in the subtleties of medievalism, and those that are not can be educated quickly. How much study does it require to become proficient in the near-drowning of suspects? Even modern technology is quickly mastered: the most intellectually challenged chaplain can be taught, in a couple of lessons, how best to apply electricity to an accused man's testicles; how with semi-automatic weapons we can bring gang rape into the 21st century; even how to use the latest surgical instruments in the extraction of information.

Some will argue that this policy is by its nature discriminatory, but this suggests a lack of creativity. Faith-based torture can provide opportunities for clergy of all creeds and colors. Yes, even Islamic chaplains can be retrained, most effectively through full immersion in the program itself.

This is an idea whose time has come. We will soon have an attorney general with profound experience in these matters, who will be able to creatively rewrite the law -- and the constitution, if necessary -- to prevent atheistic opposition to this initiative (and the program itself will prove useful when dealing with the most intransigent opponents). The administration has a powerful mandate -- a full one percent! -- and now is the hour to introduce ambitious and revolutionary policy. Let faith-based torture reinvigorate the War on Terror, and revive the sullied reputation of America abroad, where we have come to be seen as a country no longer capable of traditional Shock and Awe.

I, Resolute

2005-01-04T15:03:00.000-06:00

All right, all right: I am a disgrace to the Blogosphere. Yes, it has been a month since the last entry. I'm going to plead moral paralysis -- that same nervous condition that has shut down the entire Democratic Party -- but this is hardly an excuse. In fact, it's deplorable. It's rank defeatism. It's cowardice. Still, I find it hard to see any point to political speech when the collective American skull is too thick to permit anything but the most ham-fisted valyooze-bloated propaganda to penetrate. (Well, let's be precise: the collective skull of the slight majority... that jolly headbone with its impressive, cantilevered brow.)

I'll probably continue to make the the occasional impotent observation -- say, that we are about to make Tomás de Torquemada the attorney general -- but I no longer expect the universe to respond with anything stronger than "whatever."

Hence you can expect less in the way of political Cassandra-speak here, and more in the vein of pretentious commentary on the arts -- assuming I can overcome my current aesthetic paralysis. The following has already been written, for the Village Voice, so it is not much of an effort to haul it into the blog. (The questions in boldface are theirs.)

_____________________________________

What were your New Year’s Resolutions for 2004?
I resolved to move to Mexico and finish a novel.

Did you follow them?
I did.

What were your results?
I laughed, I cried. I fired my agent. I got a contract. It's coming out in June.

What are your resolutions for 2005?
1) To finish the second book. (I foolishly sold them two, one of which is still far from bookish.) 2) To cure myself of my internet addiction. 3) To stop hanging out with gringos, so that my Spanish will flower into existence. 4) To conquer apathy, purge lethargy, terminate the brute procrastination.

Let me expand upon number 4. When Samuel Beckett read a typically bleak entry in Kafka's diary -- "Gardening. No hope for the future." -- his retort was: "At least he could garden."

I want to garden. I have never gardened. In my life, I can count the number of plants I have planted on the toes of one hand. On the fingers of one elbow. No shrub claims me as midwife. No tree will send flowers to my funeral.

Okay, to be honest, I have no desire to actually garden. It's a grimy, uncomfortable business, and the results are just too far removed temporally and causally from the labor. Until the advent of DNA testing, men always wondered whether children were really theirs; surely gardeners have even less certainty regarding flowers. Any hardy airborne spore could have fathered that thing -- are you sure you should be feeling so good about it?

No, gardening is a sterile and joyless task. Ask Kafka.

I do however want to do whatever it is that gardeners are said to do in suspect Zen parables. ("Give a man a garden, and he'll spend the rest of his life howling at weeds.") I want to be fully and inextricably engaged in the act of making. I want to want to make things. I hate writing, for instance, and that has to change. When Beckett -- I like to quote Beckett -- was asked why he wrote, he answered, "Bon qu'a ca" -- i.e. good at nothing but that. Well, that's not true of me: I'm also extremely good at snoozing. And watching dry paint desiccate. And ranging the internet like some blighted Byronic thing, pregnant with self-loathing. This has to change.

2005 is the year in which I become a willing artist. I am going to stop sneering at Anthony Trollope and Joyce Carol Oates, and will instead worship their obscene ability to churn it out. And if this complete overcoming of self proves impossible -- and it will -- then I'll look to the example of Victor Hugo: I'll burn my modem and hire a man-servant to lock me naked in my room, allowing me to leave and dress only when I have slid a certain number of pages under the door.

A resolution is worthless without the deeply held conviction: "I am absolutely certain this cannot be achieved."

A Wolfowitz in Sheepish Clothing

2004-12-02T13:33:00.000-06:00

I am getting a hardish time from old friends, recently back in touch, who knew me long ago as a conservative. They're amused to see my (admittedly pathetic) defense of liberalism. I thought it might be worth revisiting that former self, and where he came from. Apostasy is a perfectly legitimate choice, of course, and some of the world's finest liberals (and neocons, for that matter) were once in the opposite camp. So then: this is why I chose to go camping where I did...

I went to university at the height of academic Stalinism. And I use that term quite literally: one of my philosophy professors headed up the Communist Party of Canada, and subscribed to Stalin's omelet theory: that it's worth breaking a few eggs (read: a few million lives) in order to make the perfect omelet (read: an unspeakably vicious dictatorship). His coterie included, of course, mostly blank thugs. In fact, it was interesting to see how Marxism worked on campus: it was very much like Scientology in how it preyed on the weak and the lost. If you were an emotionally disturbed student, a couple of steps away from a psychotic break, you were a prime target for the Marxist-Leninists, or the Trotskyites, or the neo-Shining Bolshevik-Gang-of-Path, or whatever faction happened to get to you first. And the end result was not pretty: I remember a renowned Israeli theorist (ironically, a Marxist) whose lecture was drowned out by a small mob of these recruits, who disagreed with a couple of the man's conclusions -- that Marx was, for instance, something of an imperialist. They stood at the door with eyes somehow both feverish and glazed, and shouted automatic slogans while handing out the usual numbing pamphlets. It was meta-embarrassing: hard for a Marxist to criticize a sociopathic clique whom his favorite thinker was responsible for creating in the first place.

These were the worst of the bunch, but there were plenty of other reasons to loathe the left. Political Correctness had just begun to rear its pimpled head, and the level of dialogue in student meetings was rapidly becoming benthic. I was dating a proud feminist who specialized in this brand of "discourse" (a popular word at the time, which roughly meant "saying the same thing, or else"). I recall a student politician trying to explain at a meeting that he had the students' best interests at heart, to which my girlfriend hissed, "then why don't you shut up." I remember being impressed by this -- what, chutzpah, fortitude, backbone? -- but I've since come to see her type as repulsive. To be honest, I found the species repulsive even back then, but you go out of your way to admire somebody you're dating. This was, I suppose, the Second Wave of feminism, which was something of a toxic tidal wave. (I quite like the current crop of feminists on campus, the Whatever Feminists, who don't need to be shrill, because they're actually confident; who find those early ideologues excruciating; and who would rather sport hip shoes than jackboots). When my university was surfing the Second Wave, I remember one meeting of the philosophy department where a three-hundred-pound woman sat glowering at the back of the room, prominently sporting a copy of "Fat is a Feminist Issue," just daring anyone to say something inappropriate. In short: the left was a nasty bank, back in those days.

On the other hand, the conservative political theorists who dominated life at the University of Toronto were among the most beguiling figures I have ever met. I have since come to realize that he was a perilous demagogue, but Allan Bloom -- who was in exile in Toronto at the time -- was hypnotic. He had not yet written The Closing of the American Mind, but on campus he was already much much larger than life, either reviled or adored.

It's easy to see the attraction. Before encountering Bloom, I don't think I had really encountered thought. Most of my friends in high school imagined themselves intellectuals, and spent their stoned hours finding profundity in the lyrics of (Christ!) Genesis and Gentle Giant; whereas suddenly I was confronted with a man who was capable of presenting philosophy as a worldhistorical drama, as a terrifying battle whose stakes were immeasurable. Things mattered. Later I read Hannah Arendt's letters, in which she spoke with awe about her first encounters with Heidegger, about her astonishment that such a man could even exist: "There is a teacher!" Bloom was not Heidegger, but he was a superb rhetorician, and he effectively channeled far more intelligent men (including his own teacher, Leo Strauss.)

The decision to move to the right was not difficult. The left was vile, and the right was seductive. I don't remember there being much of a middle at the time -- the only people championing liberalism were analytic utilitarians, bores to a man. While I never became a Straussian (I have come to suspect that you had to sleep with Bloom to enter the inner circle), I was very much a fellow traveler. Bloom -- and Emil Fackenheim, and Thomas Pangle -- rescued me from the banal.

I remember one of my high school friends picking up a copy of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling which I had on my desk -- he read the first few sentences and tossed it aside with contempt: "This doesn't even make sense." And this philistine was of my more intelligent acquaintances. I quickly extricated myself from that ludicrous posse, and have never looked back. (Hilariously enough, many of them have since become the most shallow brand of economistic neocons.)

And so that is why I found myself a conservative. And I might have stayed that way forever, if I hadn't finally met equally intelligent people who addressed the same great books, with the same sense of drama, but who didn't carry the same political baggage. None of these people were in the philosophy department. When I think about it, I was probably cured of Bloom by architecture school.

The approach to theory which finally made sense to me was aesthetic rather than political. Looking back, I guess my attraction to the Straussians was always primarily aesthetic: they told a great story. The greatest story I had ever heard. And now I realized that there were architectural theorists, and film makers, and literary critics, all telling the same story. As one superb thinker told me, "There are many doors to the Large Room."

(This was Robert Jan van Pelt, who teaches in the architecture department at Waterloo, and who has become the world's leading authority on Auschwitz.)

Many aspects of Straussian thought bothered me from the start. It required an approach to texts which was very much like an atheist brand of Christian fundamentalism: an exegetical insistence upon The One True Reading. Nothing is multivalent. Single words are always philosophical terms. "Virtu" in Machiavelli means virtue, even if it is translated as "cunning" or "wiliness." (In fact, I agree with this particular instance, because the other translations are simply euphemistic, but in many cases the Straussian way involves making a text into a petrified textbook.)

Even more disturbing was the insistence that all metaphysical reasoning was simply a smoke-screen, set up to hide the inner meaning of the text, which was always political. Some smoke screen! You had to suppose that entire books were written simply to lead lesser readers down the wrong path... and some of those books were rather large and impressive. Are we really meant to believe that Aristotle's Metaphysics was a calculated red herring? It's kind of ludicrous, when contemplated from a distance, but I was hardly distant. In fact, from my brush with the Straussians, I've begun to see how radical Marxists, for instance, are capable of feverish loyalty to the most patent absurdities. It's the cult dynamic. It's the excitement of belonging to a select group, the only ones who have access to the narrative.

The final break with the Straussians came when I recognized how inept they were when operating in the actual political sphere. A crucial tenet of Strauss's doctrine is that the philosophers must ally themselves with the gentleman class, in order to preserve and safeguard their own subversive activity. This involves subtle manipulation: the philosopher is an atheist, but he must suck up to dominant politicians, however pious. The philosopher is intelligent, but he must ingratiate himself with the powerful, however ignorant. In short, Wolfowitz must manipulate Bush. Unfortunately, the first pol that the Straussians prominently identified as a crucial figure, the linchpin to the gentleman class, was Dan Quayle. Oops.

Repeatedly, when the Straussians step down from the ivory tower, they just get it wrong. Wolfowitz is certainly doing an effective job as the Machiavellian advisor to princes, but Jesus: look at his advice! Everything he has done has simply served to cause America terrible grief abroad, or to undermine the foundations of democracy at home. Hannah Arendt has pointed out that philosophers almost always get it wrong when they enter the real world -- and in fact generally end up in support of tyranny. She wrote this in defense of Heidegger's flirtation with Hitler, and she referred back to Plato's embarrassing attempt to become math teacher to the tyrant of Syracuse.

The walking disaster that is George W. Bush is responsible for my final break with ideological conservatism. It is impossible to support this man, much less admire him. He proudly flaunts the worst of human attributes: avarice, numbing piety, slack-jawed stupidity wedded to absolute certainty. To remain a conservative, with this dangerous buffoon stalking the planet, is to abandon self-respect.

And so I have become, a bit late in the game, a liberal. I don't regret the detour. It has been, if nothing else, a truly fascinating road. My liberal friends seem to have forgiven me (with attendant mockery); my conservative friends indulge me (while patronizing); and even I am amused by the transformation.

A Toothless Manifesto

2004-11-21T12:19:00.000-06:00

The fence is sometimes a painful thing to sit on. Trust me: it's much easier to be anything but a liberal these days. When I say liberal, I mean something different from what George. W. Bush means -- he clearly intends the word to suggest something like "closet Stalinist who performs back-alley abortions for kicks, while fisting."

No, I'm using the word in a slightly more traditional sense. Although it still requires defining. "Neocon," for instance, means something like "classical liberal." Yet I am not a neocon (even though otherwise beloved friends are). "Ted Kennedy" means something like "American liberal." And yet I have never left a girl to drown in a car.

I guess the closest thing to my definition of "liberal" would be the term as currently employed on campus. Which is to say: it designates a person reviled by the left, and despised by the right. Or, in geographical terms, it designates -- for Americans -- a Canadian.

I am, nominally, a Canadian. I was born there -- in Toronto to be precise -- although I have spent most of my life running like hell from the place. I am currently a resident alien stationed officially in Manhattan, and if I had to define myself in terms of geography, I would call myself a New Yorker. When you think about it -- despite obvious differences -- New York occupies pretty much the same political ground as Canada. Occasionally New Yorkers and Canadians hold their noses and vote Tory, or Giuliani -- generally when the left is getting a bit too anarchical. Occasionally they drift towards actual socialism, but get stopped short by concerns about fiscal responsibility. Both places often fall prey to Political Correctness, but here New York puts Canada to shame: my country of birth has nothing remotely like the First Amendment. (Some day I'll write about the recent pogrom at Concordia University, as a result of which the administration decided that Jews should be seen and not heard.) Still, despite our differences regarding the joy of censorship, there's a reason why 200,000 Canadians live in New York.

If you want to continue to define my brand of liberalism in terms of geography, you could point out that I am in semi-exile in Mexico. This is something liberals are doing a fair bit these days -- or at least talking about doing: since they can't seem to get their votes counted by hand, they end up voting with their feet.

In many ways I am not happy to be a liberal. Let's face it, in terms of political theory, we have to make do with the least interesting, and by far the least poetic thinkers. We look enviously at nihilists (like Leo Strauss) who are defined essentially by Nietzsche, and can pretend to believe in Plato. These last are the two most beautiful writers in the philosophical tradition, and arguably the most interesting. No, we have to make do with John Stuart Mill, who is -- despite being a bit dull, and considerably less profound -- one of the only truly decent guys wandering the canon. (At least we're spared the tedium of Marx.)

Luckily, you don't have to read a lot of liberal theory to be a liberal. You can read the essential texts, which are vaguely unsatisfactory, and get it over with. Then you can spend all your time reading those great illiberal works, in order to define what you aren't. I once asked Rabbi Fackenheim, a philosopher of the Holocaust, how a Jewish atheist might find God. He told me to read Nietzsche. The same is true with liberalism: if you want to find your way there, read Strauss. Or Heidegger. Or any of the great Haters of Liberalism. They're fascinating, and frightening, and will ultimately lead you to a variant of Churchill's Theorem: mine is the the least satisfying flavor of political theory, except for all of the others.

As far as poets and playwrights and novelists, liberals truly get the short end of the stick. Neruda, the greatest poet of the century, was an unrepentant Stalinist. Yeats occasionally wore a brown shirt. T.S. Elliot was an antisemite, and Nabokov, while an admirable foe of antisemitism (and Eliot), embraced McCarthy. Celine was a collabo. Goddamn.

So who do we end up with. Slim pickings, really, in terms of greatness. (This is unfortunate, and by no means consonant with John Stuart Mill's theory. While Straussians and their ilk criticize liberalism as a recipe for mediocrity, Mill in fact intended his ideas to clear a space for great men to achieve.)

We do have a couple of shining lights. Philip Roth, perhaps the greatest living American novelist, is one of us. In fact, The Human Stain pretty much defines what I consider true liberalism: Philip Roth rightly conflates Political Correctness and Republican censorship, and cleaves to the sacred middle ground occupied by Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. By all means let presidents fuck their interns, as long as they remain decent men and fine leaders. Celebrate the fucking of interns! Better a man who loves life and thongs than a pinched censorious pornographer like Kenneth Starr, or a vicious hypocrite like the home-wrecking Senator "Mr." Hyde. Better a cigar-wielding Bubba than a cigar-slicing Catherine MacKinnon. They say that Roth is not the most lovable guy on the planet, but I love him.

Mordecai Richler, Canada's greatest novelist, was the country's Philip Roth -- and the uncomfortable center can lay claim to him as well. Everybody hated Richler, from leftist séparatistes to bootlegging plutocrats. A very great artist, and my kind of liberal.

The man who makes me happiest to be sitting here on my pointy fence is, believe it or not, Samuel Beckett. Beckett of course would have loathed the liberal badge, and considered his writing completely without moral content (he sometimes insisted it was without meaning at all); but Beckett the man was very much one of the good guys. While many of those who joined the Resistance (or cheered it, wall-eyed, from the safety of the sidelines) were really dying to replace Nazism with their own brand of vicious tyranny, Beckett was no Stalinist. He was no anything. He simply decided it was time to fight the Nazis because they "were making life hell for my friends." When James Joyce, an almost-good-guy, was too busy fretting about the acceptance of his most recent masterpiece to be concerned about the slaughter of the Jews, Beckett was appalled. Samuel Beckett may not have called himself a liberal, but he was my kind of nihilist. A truly decent man. (With the good taste to keep his decency out of his art.)

No, we liberals get to count few of the greatest writers among our own -- and we're saddled with a whole raft of soggy moralists -- but the few that we do get are enough to make the stigma bearable.

It's not a glamorous thing to be, liberal. We don't get to sport berets or boaters. We don't get nifty armbands with sickles or swastikas. Let's face it: chicks dig leftists. Except for the few who love a man in a uniform. If you wanted to get a liberal tattoo, what would it look like?

Liberalism is not sexy; it's not comfortable; it's not fun. It's like Mormon underwear. We're not talking hair shirts, however: liberalism doesn't even offer the masochistic thrill of true suffering. It's just not attractive. Hell, I wouldn't want to sleep with me.

And yet I am a liberal. I am happy to be where I am, even if it doesn't make me happy. I shall remain where I am, even if I can't quite identify the topography except in terms of the much more interesting sights to either side. And I welcome you to join me, even if I know it's an invitation to a dull party, where all you're likely to meet are tedious and unpleasant people who are, even worse, essentially decent.

The GOP Racist?

2004-11-19T11:28:00.000-06:00

I thought I'd move this comment onto the front page, as it deserves a proper response:

G. Blagg comments: The GOP is racist? What about a party who believes a group of people, purely because of their color, needs government help to compete in higher education? What about a party who, for merely the fear of losing power, has nearly ruined an entire culture through their love of the welfare state? What about a party who believes, only because of ones ancestry, they must vote Democrat or they are an Uncle Tom? What about a party whos love affair with abortion which affects the African American community most of all? Really, who's party looks down on blacks as persons who cannot do for themselves? Look inside for once.

Oh, I´ve looked inside. The truth is that for many years I flirted with conservatism -- not so much American right-wingery, but the British/Canadian Tory tradition, and Continental classicism. I bought into most of the above arguments. But what has moved me solidly into the liberal camp (and I don't consider myself a leftist -- the mainstream American left is approximately the Canadian center) is an unavoidable sense that it is almost impossible to espouse many conservative arguments without allying yourself with the racist right.

(The radical left seems to have appropriated antisemitism, and I have a severe allergy to Political Correctness, which is why I cleave to the center.)

Are all Republicans racists? Not by a long shot. The neocons -- the traditional neocons, who began as liberals and were mugged by reality -- tend to believe sincerely in the above arguments (and Mr. Blagg strikes me as in no way racist himself). And I believe I made the point below that George W. Bush seems genuinely without racial animus.

However... let's turn a cold eye to the recent history of the GOP. Senator Trent Lott, whose past as a foaming segregationist was no secret in the party, was accepted as majority leader for over half a decade -- until 2002, to be precise. Senator Strom Thurmond, the one who turned Lott to a pillar of salt, found it necessary in 1964 to cross over to the Republican party, where his special thoughts about race were now welcome... and remained welcome for 39 years. (His private family values resemble those of a slave-owner shamed by miscegenation.) Senator Jesse Helms, before Bono converted him to the cause of African AIDS (through subtle references to the eternal barbecue that awaits the old bastard), was notorious for his contempt for the black race. And let's face it, we're not talking about wallflowers: those three were for ages prominent and typical representatives of the GOP. Okay, so much for the Senate.

Let's talk campaign tactics. Willie Horton's efficacy as bogeyman had more than a little to do with the color of his skin. Do you think Republican voters would have scurried as quickly from the face of a white criminal? And the careful disenfranchisement of voters in Florida so recently was hardly a race-neutral affair.

Again, I'm not saying that all Republicans are racist. But most racists are, unfortunately, Republican. It's a sorry syllogism. The proud tradition of Democratic racism seems to have come to a symbolic end in 1972, with the paralysis of George Wallace. Come on: the Deep South moved over to the Republican party for a reason. And it was not a sudden passion for fiscal responsibility (remember when that used to be a credible Republican plank?) Those fine scholars at Bob Jones University -- how many of them do you think vote Democrat?

Lastly, let's talk about "family values." Surely no other phrase in recent years has been more prominently identified with the core of Republican beliefs. But very few remember that "family values" was, not so long ago, notorious racial code. I happened upon an old edition of Harper's Magazine -- and if any reader here can dig it up, I'd be grateful (I believe it was from the late seventies or early eighties) --which featured a roundtable of campaign strategists from both parties. At one point, the question to a Republican strategist was whether -- should a campaign be going poorly -- he would resort to such loaded racist terms as "family values." Without denying that this was indeed anti-black code, the strategist cheerfully said he would not hesitate to do so.

Yes, Mr. Blagg, you can be in favor of welfare reform without being a racist. In fact, you can be pro-reform without being Republican -- I seem to remember that it was Bill Clinton who overhauled the welfare system. And you can be against affirmative action without being a racist. For a long time I bought into the argument that this policy was misguided, because it stigmatized those who achieved. I've changed my mind because of George W. Bush, who was very much a product of affirmative action, and has done quite well for himself. Do you honestly think the Frat Boy in Chief would have been accepted into Yale in the absence of a policy to accept wealthy sons of prominent graduates? Do you think his mediocrity would have been overlooked? If a guy of Bush's caliber is permitted to rise to president, helped greatly by a policy which can only be termed affirmative action, hell -- we have to implement affirmative action for minorities with actual talent, or they have absolutely no chance to compete.

Finally, Colin Powell's support for this policy was instrumental in changing my mind. When Henry Louis Gates, Jr. interviewed him in the New Yorker, Powell had this to say: "It's amazing how affirmative action has suddenly become Issue No. 1. One of my Republican friends had the nerve to send me one of their newsletters a few weeks ago saying that we had to get rid of affirmative action because we couldn't keep putting these programs in place for allegations of 'vague and ancient wrongs.' I almost went crazy. I said, Vague? Vague? Denny's wouldn't serve four black Secret Service agents guarding the President of the United States. The Chicago Federal Reserve Bank just told us something that any black could have told you—that it's harder to get a loan if you're black than if you're white. And we got Pete Wilson out there saying that affirmative action is bad because there are eight-tenths of one per cent more black students in the University of California school system as a result of fifteen years of affirmative action. This is the worst problem the country has?"

Even Condi Rice, hardly a Ted Kennedy liberal, personally (if quietly) supports affirmative action. These people are far from racial ideologues, yet they see the necessity of these policies, and let's face it: they know a lot more about the reality of being black in America than you or I do.

Yes, Mr. Blagg, I have indeed looked inside myself. And have decided that many of the conservative opinions I once held are simply unconscionable when I look at the world outside myself.

With Neither Fear Nor Loathing

2004-11-18T15:28:00.000-06:00

Republicans -- once the Party of Lincoln, but for years the Party of Lott -- are doing a pretty bang-up job of shoehorning minorities into positions of maximal exposure. The general tendency, of course, has been to troll each ethnic group to find the single most noxious representative -- Clarence Thomas, anyone? -- then pat themselves on the back for having taken care of the Racism Thing.

Condi Rice, however, is nowhere near as repulsive as Clarence Thomas. In fact, I have to admit to a grudging admiration for the woman: she's as smart as they come, and has managed to consort with cannibals for years without being lunched upon. (Yes, she's had a few chunks taken out of her by ravenous hawks, but she's alive to tell -- well, hide -- the story.)

Something I've never seen remarked upon: Condoleezza Rice is the most powerful black woman in history. Not just in the Republican Party; not just in current American politics; but in all of human history. Nobody else comes remotely close. This makes her a truly significant figure, however much you may loathe the machine that made a place for her.

(Come to think of it, with the departure of Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas is now the most powerful black man in the world. So much for Martin Luther King's dream. "I have a nightmare...")

It pains me deeply to say anything positive about George W. Tartuffe, but the fact is that he does not seem to share his party's most delightful attribute: he is not a racist. I mean, he's no Bill Clinton -- you can't imagine George choosing to relocate to Harlem -- but he genuinely seems to harbor no secret Elephantine loathing for blacks or Hispanics, and he has an admirable concern for Mexico (if a deplorable record when it comes to fulfilling his promises towards that country).

The choice of Alberto Gonzales may or may not be an attempt to pander to the Hispanic vote, but I suspect Bush made the decision for the most part based upon the man's merits (which decent people consider liabilities). Gonzales is nicely soft on civil liberties, and -- most important -- he is a loyal Friend of Bush. Which is to say, not the kind of guy likely to appoint an Independent Counsel when embarrassing facts come to light. (And they shall, oh yes. Those Cheney Papers are still glowing in the dark.)

No, it's clear that Condi Rice is where she is because of who she is. Nothing affirmative about this action: her race is entirely incidental to her appointment. (I'm a half-hearted supporter of affirmative action in general, but when practiced by the Republican Party it gives me the creeps.) Is it possible that Bush, who has made a specialty of encouraging the very worst aspects of his party, is in this case setting a quasi-positive example?

Let's face it: the GOP is for the most part still a vicious enemy of everyone remotely unwhite or unwealthy. But you can't help but laud a history-making instance of colorblindness at the top.

Slouching Away From Bethlehem

2004-11-17T16:21:00.000-06:00

When Yeats wrote, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," I'm fairly sure he was channeling news of the current Bush administration. Now, assuming that Colin Powell jumped and was not pushed (I don't believe this, but let's assume it anyway), then we have a gruesome scenario: one of the last decent guys on the good ship Exxon W. Valdez has taken to the lifeboats.

I remember thinking that Powell's internationalism was a touch naive at the beginning of the current war -- and I was distressed at his refusal to storm Baghdad during the prequel -- but I was wrong on both counts. Entering this great sucking cesspool without significant allies has only served to make the world's most powerful army look kind of feeble, and the world's most nonsensical deficit tumesce. And while I'm more than pleased to see Saddam prevented from dropping any more enemies into shredding machines, it was hardly worth it at the price of dropping his entire nation into the shredder. Should we have taken out Saddam? Given the right situation, yes. The right situation being one concordant with the Powell Doctrine of assured success. And the right timing being just about any period other than the immediate wake of September 11.

(I may be alone in thinking that sanctions were, quietly, far more brutal than war. Certainly a hell of a lot more children died as a result of that benevolent policy. But civil war, or a decades-long American occupation, may prove sanctions a relative blessing.)

Certainly Powell embarrassed himself when he went before the UN to make a case for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Note, however, that few people seem to think he was actually lying. The presumption is that he was duped, and was arguing from faulty information (probably fed to him by people who were in fact lying through their dentures). If it had been Bush himself, or any of his inner circle of raptors, we'd be dead certain that the performance was slick fraud. But it's almost impossible to imagine Powell as having been anything but honestly outraged.

Why? Because, pretty much alone in this administration, Powell is quite obviously (as opposed to ostentatiously) a man of principles. (Not a man of "values." Christ, Saddam has "values." He just values different things from, say, family.) I know it's easy to get overexcited by an actual human being in that hornet's nest, but think about it: who else in the cabinet ever inspired the presumption of honesty?

See James Wolcott for a lovely, if slightly less misty-eyed farewell. Particularly affecting sentence: "Yes, he was bummed by years of being backstabbed by the neocon hawks, most of whom spent Vietnam masturbating in their dorm rooms."

An Obscene Thesis

2004-11-14T13:18:00.000-06:00

So here I am, sitting in the mountains of Mexico, obsessing about... the burning of the Reichstag. Two nights ago a cable station aired Hitler: The Rise of Evil, a remarkable TV film from 2003 about the formation and early history of the Nazi Party. Robert Carlyle's portrayal of Hitler is truly impressive, not the least because he resists the temptation to paint Hitler as insane -- a common misdiagnosis, which of course simply serves to mitigate the dictator's responsibility for his decisions. No, Carlyle's Hitler is obsessive, demonic -- with moment of twitching excess that we might designate 'insanity' -- but he is for the most part utterly rational and lucid.

The first draft of this script was denounced by the Anti-Defamation League, primarily because it insisted upon drawing parallels between the rise of Hitler and the rise of George W. Bush. The ADL was dead on, of course: the reduction of the Holocaust to a merely corrupt administration is an obscenity. George W. Bush is hardly demonic, and -- despite the consequences of his misguided war -- not actually murderous. He is simply a mediocre, lying plutocrat: throw a stick at a Halliburton board meeting and you'll hit twelve of him. Even the more obviously calculating members of his administration -- Ashcroft, Cheney, Wolfowitz -- represent a dime-store variety of evil, relative to the crimes of the Nazi party. Rove is not Goebbels (although the sorry truth is that virtually every modern campaign steals techniques from that pioneering propagandist).

On the other hand, it is worth studying the greater evil to elucidate the lesser -- this is a principle championed by the scholar Leo Strauss (one of Wolfowitz's mentors). Keeping in mind the vast differences, we can learn from the modest similarities. In particular, the gradual erosion of liberal democracy is an archetypal process: Strauss himself stressed that this form of regime contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The great paradox of democracy is that it permits, if unchecked, the possibility of citizens voting themselves into slavery.

Of course Hitler's Germany cradled a fragile, nascent form of liberal democracy -- as the film nicely explicates -- relative to America, the most robust democracy in history. It would take an army of Ashcrofts to gut the American regime.

Still, the pattern of gradual subversion does offer useful parallels. In particular, the Enabling Act of 1933 has certain crucial details in common with the Patriot Act -- an intelligent examination of the similarities between the two can be found at www.furnitureforthepeople.com/actpat.htm. This site is for the most part careful to avoid the moral equivalence argument -- it stresses that we're hardly comparing Bush's actions to the Holocaust, but simply pointing out similarities between early political strategies used by the National Socialists, and legislation promoted by the Bush administration. (Towards the end of the page, I do think the rhetoric gets out of hand: the temptation to employ the word "fascism" to current tactics is too, well, tempting -- but it's still far from accurate.)

The most disturbing similarity between both laws is the rationale behind stripping civil liberties: both Acts are deemed necessary to secure national safety in a period of terrorism. Of course, the Nazis themselves burned down the Reichstag, whereas only the looniest conspiracy theorist (or the average European) maintains that Bush was behind the attack on the World Trade Center. Nevertheless, it is worth examining the content and immediate consequences of these legal documents. I urge you to visit the above URL for a detailed point-by-point comparison, in particular how both Acts effectively ended up eviscerating constitutional rights to privacy and protection from search and seizure. Both laws resulted in the widespread arrest of suspected enemies of the regime, and ensured that these detainees were exempt from due process. Etc.

These documents are subtle. The notorious Article 2 of the Enabling Act ingeniously subverts the constitution while retaining the semblance of deep respect for established political institutions and the constitution itself: "Laws decided upon by the government of the Reich may deviate from the provisions of the constitution as long as they do not affect the institutions of the Reichstag and the Reichsrat as such. The constitutional rights of the Reichspräsident shall remain intact." (translation from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act.)

I very much expect that the much more deeply entrenched American Constitution will save the American people from their rash support for George W. Bush and his assault upon basic civil rights -- the Patriot Act will never have anything like the catastrophic effect of the Enabling Act. Comparisons of the Bush legislative measures and the early Nazi tactics point out more in the way of radical differences than they do similarities. Still, leaning on Leo Strauss, it is always crucial to remind ourselves that every regime, even if it possess the historical strength and longevity of Rome or America, comes to an end. And that every regime prefigures the natural foundation and decline of every other -- especially in the case of regimes which are generically alike: tyrannies, oligarchies, liberal democracies.

No, that television film is not yet prescient: America will survive George W. Bush, and he'll end up rusting in the junkyard of history along with every other middling corrupt buffoon. But it's not unreasonable to assume that some day America will give birth to a man of Hitler's vicious cunning, and that -- when that day comes -- today's farce will repeat itself as tragedy.

Dear John

2004-11-10T12:24:00.000-06:00

Johnny, we hardly knew ye. In four years, I suspect we never fully plumbed the depths of the very special Ashcroft mind. From the beginning, you bore an uncanny resemblance to George C. Scott's demented General Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove (even though I suspect you thought you looked a lot more like Patton.) We know how you feel about naked statues -- how do you feel about bodily fluids?

No, I sense that you never fully detailed your plans for the republic. Perhaps if you run for President -- won't that be a treat? -- we'll find out more about what you really feel about decadent liberal notions like due process, habeas corpus, and the Constitution. Do you believe, for instance, that non-Christians should have the vote? (Come on, John, you can tell us now that you're a private citizen.) Is it okay for Christians to torture their non-Christian neighbors? (Oops... sorry, you've already weighed in on that issue.)

We'll miss your special prayer circles in the White House. We Jews in particular. It made us feel good that at least somebody understood how the iron division between Church and State was a non-issue: State is Church.

Dearest John. I truly agree with you that, thanks to your bold interventions into our civil liberties, "the objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." Yessir. And we both know that this places you, historically, in that tiny pantheon of legal and moral icons in America who did the job and were above reproach. I'm thinking of such luminaries as J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn. In fact, I think you can rest assured that historians will often place your name in that august company.

We'll miss you John. After all, what is the Axis of Evil without the Statue Draper? All we're left with is Cheney and Rumsfeld, and everyone knows that a proper Axis requires three.

I do have great hopes for your successor, however. The Axis may yet ride again. Yes, he has a Spanish name, but he seems to think like a proper white man: pro-torture, anti-Geneva-Conventions, etc.

Goodbye John. Don't let the door hit your fundament on the way out.

Those Pesky Geneva Conventions

2004-11-09T12:23:00.000-06:00

How very unfortunate that Bush's efforts to sidestep the Geneva Conventions are being called into question by those irritating liberal judges. ("Judge Halts War-Crime Trial at Guantánamo.")

Surely his war should be exempt from European constraints. I mean, don't they speak French in Geneva? Do we want to turn our legal process over to Frogs? More evidence that the judiciary has to be reformed. Would the great Clarence Thomas insist upon enforcing this patently liberal treaty? I don't think so.

At least they're not pressing for a return to habeas corpus. (That's a Latin phrase, right? Do we want Latin Americans dictating how we should treat our criminals? I happen to have personal experience of Latin America, and I'd like to stress that cocaine is immoral.)

Poor George. It remains possible that even the most righteous appointment to the Supreme Court will insist upon upholding, well, the law. Remember Dr. C. Everett Koop, Reagan's surgeon general? Appointed to uphold principles of morality, and ended up acting like a doctor. Wanted to do something about AIDS, for chrissake. Is it possible that future Bush judicial appointments will start to behave like judges?

Not a good day for the newly minted President. Surely those election results signified that he was now prepotent, not impotent. Since when is the judiciary supposed to check the presidential Will to Power?

Freedom is supposed to be on the march in Iraq. Okay? When freedom marches in America, it just makes a lot of noise, and interrupts the political process. And steps on presidential toes.

Average IQ of States Voting For Kerry vs. Bush (Unfortunately Bogus)

2004-11-06T15:04:00.000-06:00

I have no great love for the concept of IQ (a statistic heavily employed in the justification of eugenics.) My own IQ has varied by a factor of 70 points depending upon my mood when taking the test -- which does not speak well for the accuracy of this supposedly immutable characteristic. Nevertheless, the following chart is just too amusing not to be true.

(Oh, and even though I have the greatest faith in the sacred truth of this chart, I still recommend you read The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould, in case you have any creeping doubts about the scientific merit of phrenological trash like The Bell Curve.)

(UPDATE: I have since learned from the venerable snopes.com that this is indeed too accurate to be true. It seems this chart is simply a variant of an old and gorgeous hoax. Which is not to say that it doesn't reflect reality. And even if it doesn't... hell, "reality" is nothing but a quaint misconception -- nobody outside of the reality-based community still believes in it. I intend to leave the chart up here: call it a literary device.)

Winners and Losers

2004-11-05T13:36:00.000-06:00

America loves a winner. (I remember my father telling me this over the dinner table in Toronto, and I was astonished: Canada loves a loser. ) Simply because George W. Bush has won the election, he is immediately judged, even by a number of embarrassed Democrats, a better man than John Kerry. Well, perhaps it's time to to lay that little prejudice to rest. John Kerry, despite the Swift Boat Liars, remains a war hero. George W. Bush won this election (as he did the contest with the hugely admirable John McCain) because he is a veteran basher. These facts are not altered one iota by the electoral results.

In fact, it might be good to analyze John Kerry's honorable defeat, to remind ourselves (and I use the middle-class "we") why we supported the man in the first place. Why did he lose this election? Well, first of all, he refused to stand up in front of America to justify -- to plead for -- the medals that he was justly awarded while George was stumbling drunk between physicals. No veteran should ever be pressured to lower himself in that way, and it is to his great credit that John Kerry refused. McCain understood this, and I am sure the episode sealed his contempt for the Combat Dodger in Chief. (Does anyone in America honestly believe that the Swift Boat Sleazebags were not intimately connected to the official Bush campaign?)

By the way, it's useful to examine the distinction between "draft dodger" and "combat dodger." Draft dodgers suffer for their decision: they are forced into exile; they are execrated back home. Combat dodgers, on the other hand, get to swan around in flight suits, like real live soldiers, and burble patriotic blather to universal acclaim. Whether George Bush is an actual coward we may never know, but he certainly never did anything as brave as to dodge the draft (much less sign up for the war).

Another aspect of John Kerry's honorable defeat: he never used the L word. Something in him -- probably a sense of decorum -- prevents him from calling a sitting president a liar. Yet remember the opportunities he had. A personal favorite: George insisted during a debate that he was opposed to importing drugs from Canada, only because he wanted to make sure that they would "cure you and not kill you. " John Kerry refuted this, politely, but he did not say, "Mr. President, you are a liar. You know as well as I do that these drugs are precisely the same as those available here at a much higher price. You are lying, Mr. President, because you know fully well that permitting imports would hurt your friends and donors in Big Pharma. And worse: you are lying under the guise of compassion. Have you no decency?"

No, we never heard anything this blunt. The Smear and Sneer President was never shy about insulting his opponent -- never shy about resorting to outright slander -- but John Kerry was simply too decent to reply in kind. Does this make him a loser?

The Sophists were reviled for their ability to make the weaker argument seem the stronger. Bush -- though nowhere near as intelligent as any of the Sophists -- has a unique talent: he is always capable of making the worse man seem the better. But if we judge this president by his merits, rather than his ill-gotten election returns, it remains simply impossible to put him in the same league as John Kerry or John McCain, two of the most impressive men serving the country today. George Bush could win the title of Holy Emperor, and rule entire galaxies, and he would still be nothing more than a rank mediocrity -- one of life's losers.