Liberty & Power: Group Blog
Entries by Gene Healy
Friday, December 22, 2006
Seeing Calvin Coolidge as a Dream
I recently had an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times on the virtues of presidential inaction--and how the presidential scholars who participate in presidential rankings surveys tend to greatly overvalue imperial presidents. Excerpt:
Summing up the results of one of his surveys, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. -- who in 1948 introduced the practice of presidential rankings -- noted that "mediocre presidents believed in negative government, in self-subordination to the legislative power," while top-ranked presidents "left the executive branch stronger and more influential than [they] found it."
And scholars continue to see it that way today, favoring presidents who expand executive power and preside over major wars.
Thus, in a 1996 survey by Schlesinger's son and namesake, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., five of the top 10 presidents were war leaders, including James K. Polk, whose major distinction is an unconstitutionally begun war of conquest; Woodrow Wilson, who brought us into a war most historians view as pointless carnage, and Harry S Truman, who launched our first major undeclared war and was rebuked by the Supreme Court for claiming that his powers as commander in chief allowed him to seize American companies.
I also did a podcast on the subject, here (scroll down to December 19).
Monday, August 7, 2006
Libertarian Foreign Policy, Yet Again
So here, in pertinent part, is Tyler Cowen’s attempted smackdown of coblogger Alex Tabarrok's defense of libertarian foreign policy :
Had Alex his way, the first Gulf War never would have happened. Saddam and his sons would rule Iraq, owning both Kuwaiti oil revenue and nuclear weapons, and probably itching for a rematch with Iran. Sound like fun?
Had the first Gulf War not happened, there would have been no mass presence of US troops on Saudi soil, and a good chance the Trade Towers would still be standing. If you've read much at all about Al Qaeda, you're aware of how important the Gulf War was as a recruiting device for AQ. If you've read Peter Bergen's first book on Al Qaeda, for instance, you know that he says that for Bin Laden, the presence of American troops on Saudi soil launching an attack against Iraq "was a transforming an event as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan had been a decade earlier." The bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Bergen notes, were carried out on August 7, 1998 because the first US troops for Desert Shield arrived on August 7, 1990. And here's shrill Bush-hater Paul Wolfowitz on the topic:
Sustained U.S. bombing of Iraq over those years, and the stationing of U.S. forces "in the holy land of Saudi Arabia," were "part of the containment policy that has been Osama bin Laden's principal recruiting device, even more than the other grievances he cites," Wolfowitz said.
And as far as Cowen’s Iraq Resurgent nightmare scenario goes, I thought the current crisis was that an unchecked nuclear Iran was going to dominate the Middle East. If I start thanking God for the Gulf War and shivering about the counterfactual of a powerful Iraq facing off with Iran, I feel like that's only going to get me all confused and distract me from what NRO tells me I'm supposed to be worried about this week.
I’m not saying it’s a sure thing 9/11 wouldn’t have happened if we never fought the Gulf War. I’m just saying it’s not as obvious to me as it clearly is to Tyler Cowen that “the first Gulf War never would have happened” is such a showstopper, debate-wise. if you can think through the possibility of unintended consequences in domestic policy, it's worth giving it a shot when it comes to foreign affairs as well, where our leaders are generally no more enlightened and prescient than they are on the home front.
It's interesting: I'm a big fan of MR, and from what I can tell, Tyler Cowen is smart enough to kill me with his brain, a la Scanners. Yet from what I can tell from today's indignant post (and the few other times he's blogged about war), he doesn't apply much of that brainpower to foreign policy, preferring to rely on gut reaction. Which is better for this kind of thing.
Wednesday, July 5, 2006
"Wing" Nuts
I've got a post over at Cato@Liberty explaining why I hated NBC's West Wing and I'm glad it's gone. It was prompted by an Ezra Klein piece in the American Prospect that celebrated WW's passing for slightly different reasons. "Iron Lungfish," a commenter at Ezra's blog puts my complaint with the show perhaps more clearly than I did:
The show's default attitude towards politics - and the presidency in particular - is one of unabashed naivete, which most certainly is not a good thing to foster in American life. One of the greatest flaws in American politics is that we're not nearly skeptical enough of our leaders, that we're willing to see reelection of incumbents as the default instead of firing them for their incompetence and corruption, that most of us see the president as the whole world's commander-in-chief instead of as the whole country's public servant. The West Wing reveled in the power and ceremony of the executive branch, in the kind of stateliness and pageantry that built up George Bush's image over his first four years in office. For the most part I'd say the show was mostly harmless - it was a symptom, not a cause, but it wasn't a symptom of anything good.
Friday, June 23, 2006
Desperados, Why Don't You Come to Your Senses?
I have a post over at Cato@Liberty about the Right's attempt to justify the war on the basis of 500 pre-Gulf-War artillery shells with degraded mustard and sarin gas. I liked Clark Stooksbury's snark better.
I have a feeling that this war is going to be for the Right what the Alger Hiss case was for the Left. Twenty years from now, they're still going to be trolling through the online docs, occasionally seizing on one of them and screaming "You see? You see?!" to an audience of 12.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Official Secrets
Sunday's Washington Post has a fine piece by former Post managing editor Robert G. Kaiser explaining why papers like the Post publish official secrets despite government assertions that publication may be harmful to national security. Kaiser writes:
We avoid the gratuitous revelation of secrets. . . . [but] no single authority should be able to decide what information should reach the public. Some readers ask us why the president's decisions on how best to protect the nation shouldn't govern us, and specifically our choices of what to publish. The answer is that in the American system of checks and balances, the president cannot be allowed to decide what the voters need to know to hold him accountable.
Moreover, Kaiser notes that "labeling something 'classified' or important to 'national security' does not make it so. The government overclassifies with abandon." "Exhibit A" for Kaiser is the historic Pentagon Papers case, in which the Nixon administration, citing (you guessed it) the president's authority as Commander in Chief, attempted to enjoin publication of the Pentagon Papers, a classified Defense Department history of the Vietnam war leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
In a June 14, 1971 oval office meeting with the president, White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman discussed whether to file suit (and whether to steal the papers from the Brookings Institution). Haldeman described what he feared the effect of publication would be:
But out of the gobbledygook, comes a very clear thing: [unclear] you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgment; and the –- the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the president can be wrong. [Emphasis added].
That the "implicit infallibility of presidents" is no longer "an accepted thing in America" -- that the very phrase now causes any thoughtful American to smirk -- is one reason to give thanks that reporters no longer automatically wilt before government claims of secrecy. (Cross-posted on Cato@Liberty".)
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Oh, But They Will
Apparently, the latest issue of National Review has a piece on the "50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs of All Time," and "Won't Get Fooled Again" is number one.
Criteria for selection: "The lyrics must convey a conservative idea or sentiment, such as skepticism of government or support for traditional values." "Skepticism about government"?! Oh, my side...
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Cato Blogstorm
Also, L&P readers may want to check out the Cato Institute's new blog Cato@Liberty today. A ton of new material on the newly revealed NSA database, the Hayden nomination, endangered flies, British dentistry, and more.
War, Health, State
Bleg: I recall reading a few years ago an interview from Bill Clinton in the waning days of his presidency where he complained that he never really got the chance to be great because he didn't have a major war. I found that perverse. Can any of the fine historians and scholars at L&P/HNN point me to that quote? The closest I've come is the following:
“I envy Kennedy having an enemy,” Clinton said, thinking it must have been a good deal easier to sell programs and ideas negatively, just by shouting that the Russians were coming. “The question now is how to persuade people they could do things when they are not immediately threatened.”--Richard Reeves, “Why Clinton Wishes He Were JFK,” Washington Monthly September 1995
Monday, May 1, 2006
New from Cato
The Cato Institute's new blog, Cato @ Liberty, is live today.
Also, Tim Lynch and I have a new Cato study called "Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush."
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Quote of the Day
“Give me the order to do it and I can break up Russia’s five A-bomb nests in a week,” he said. “And when I went to Christ, I think I could explain to Him why I wanted to do it now before it’s too late. I think I could explain to Him that I had saved civilization. With it [the A-bomb] used in time, we can immobilize a foe [and prevent] his crime before it happened.”
--Major General Orville Anderson, commandant of the Air War College, telling a newspaper reporter in 1950 that, given the authority to do so, he would order a nuclear strike against fledgling Soviet atomic capabilities.
From Jeffrey Record's Cato Policy Analysis "Nuclear Deterrence, Preventive War, and Counterproliferation," [.pdf], which outlines several occasions during the Cold War when America considered and, thankfully, rejected preventive nuclear war in the name of peace.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Best Metaphor in a Political Science Paper
...perhaps ever. From "Musical Chairs: Pocketbook Voting and the Limits of Democratic Accountability," by Achen and Bartels:
First, the voters are poorly informed, as so many have noted. But second—and here we part company with the consensus—citizens cannot perform sensible retrospective judgments at election time. They reward and punish for events no administration can control. Moreover, while they know how they feel at the moment, they lose all track of how they have felt over the course of the administration’s term in office. Like medical patients recalling colonoscopies, their assessments of past pain and pleasure are significantly biased by “duration neglect” (Kahneman 2000; Redelmeier, Katz, and Kahneman 2003).
Friday, March 24, 2006
They Really Are the Heirs of T.R.
Many mainstream conservatives and neoconservatives admire Teddy Roosevelt. And they share a number of characteristics with T.R.: The incessant self-conscious blather about manliness. The warped belief that war is a wonderful tonic for what ails the national spirit. And a cultish devotion to presidential power inconsistent with free government.
I knew all that, but what I didn't know is that in their desire for a federal marriage amendment, they're following T.R.'s lead as well. Roosevelt was ahead of his time in proposing a constitutional amendment federalizing marriage, in his sixth Annual Message:
I am well aware of how difficult it is to pass a constitutional amendment. Nevertheless in my judgment the whole question of marriage and divorce should be relegated to the authority of the National Congress. At present the wide differences in the laws of the different States on this subject result in scandals and abuses; and surely there is nothing so vitally essential to the welfare of the nation, nothing around which the nation should so bend itself to throw every safeguard, as the home life of the average citizen. The change would be good from every standpoint. In particular it would be good because it would confer on the Congress the power at once to deal radically and efficiently with polygamy; and this should be done whether or not marriage and divorce are dealt with. It is neither safe nor proper to leave the question of polygamy to be dealt with by the several States. Power to deal with it should be conferred on the National Government.
T.R. also proclaimed that your care-free bachelor may look like a pleasant fellow, but he's really a race traitor:
When home ties are loosened; when men and women cease to regard a worthy family life, with all its duties fully performed, and all its responsibilities lived up to, as the life best worth living; then evil days for the commonwealth are at hand. There are regions in our land, and classes of our population, where the birth rate has sunk below the death rate. Surely it should need no demonstration to show that wilful sterility is, from the standpoint of the nation, from the standpoint of the human race, the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death; a sin for which there is no atonement; a sin which is the more dreadful exactly in proportion as the men and women guilty thereof are in other respects, in character, and bodily and mental powers, those whom for the sake of the state it would be well to see the fathers and mothers of many healthy children, well brought up in homes made happy by their presence. No man, no woman, can shirk the primary duties of life, whether for love of ease and pleasure, or for any other cause, and retain his or her self-respect.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Iraq, Three Years Later
I suppose there's no way to do this without looking graceless, but on the oped pages and the blogs, this is the week for looking back on the Iraq war and reevaluating or reaffirming your views. And with three years gone, this piece, which I wrote in December 2002 for Liberty magazine, holds up pretty well. Some excerpts:
Refusal to take administration officials at their word when they allege that Iraq had a role in September 11th or that the regime harbors Al Qaeda isn't paranoia: it's hard-headed realism, borne of experience. When you're listening to our leaders make their case for war, remember that--despite what they told you in civics class--the citizen's first duty is skepticism. ...The MacArthur Regency worked in Japan because the U.S. occupiers entered a country sick to death of war, with a tradition of deference to authority (encouraged by the Emperor's call to cooperate with U.S. authorities) and a monocultural middle class that could form the basis of a democracy. As historian John Dower puts it, "the ideals of peace and democracy took root in Japan—not as a borrowed ideology of imposed vision, but as a lived experience and a seized opportunity…. It was an extraordinary, and extraordinarily fluid moment—never seen before in history and, as it turned out, never to be repeated." That process is particularly unlikely to be repeated in Iraq, a fissiparous amalgam of Sunnis, separatist Shiites and Kurds. Keeping the country together will require a strong hand and threatens to make U.S. servicemen walking targets for discontented radicals.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger-—no dove, he—-noted that he was "viscerally opposed to a prolonged occupation of a Muslim country at the heart of the Muslim world by Western nations who proclaim the right to re-educate that country." As well he should be. Such a policy would be the most generous gift imaginable to the Al Qaeda recruitment drive. It makes Bin Laden's ravings about a Crusader-Zionist alliance to de-Islamicize the Middle East look half-plausible to the angry young men of that hate-filled, backward region.
Regrets? I have a few: I believed that Hussein had WMD, and placed too much emphasis on the possibility that an American invasion would encourage him to pass them off to terrorists, though I did note that "WMD" is a misnomer and the hysteria over chem/bio is unwarranted. I'm also deeply ashamed that I used the term "fissiparious amalgam" to describe Iraq's ethnoreligious makeup. What was it, Consult Your Thesaurus Day?
More generally, and more seriously, I regret this entire hideous mistake of a war, and I hope we don't have cause to regret it even more later.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
...Then the, uh, Hazards Win.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff coins a new one: the War Against All Hazards.
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Spacecraft as Soulcraft, Cont'd...
The latest idea for GOP dominance from the folks at "TCS Daily":
For the 2006 midterm elections, Republicans should propose an idea so big that it stretches to the stars. Republicans should commit the government to building a space elevator by 2020.
Awesome. And, as the author points out, a space elevator will allow us to drop freedom bombs on anybody that needs 'em.
Snark fails me.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Vegelibertarians
College friend Jerry Russello, a Brooklyn Burkean, favorably reviews Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons. I'm not so sure. I know a lot of conservatives, but I can't think of many, if any, who match Dreher's description. But if trend is the plural of anecdote, and you can build a book around it, then somebody should take a look at the growing number of animal-rights libertarians. Actually, animal "rights" is probably not the right term, but I know a lot more vegetarian libertarians than I do homeschooling, organic-produce-munching traditionalists. Three in my immediate circle of friends, influenced in part by Nozick's brief and compelling discussion of animal-welfare in Anarchy, State and Utopia. Maybe there's a book there for someone, but no guarantee it will be as trendy and popular as Crunchy Cons.
Other candidates drawn from personal experience: Irish American libertarians and Jersey libertarians.
Wednesday, February 8, 2006
Not Enough AUMF
People get nervous when the president says a la Richard Nixon, "when the president does it, that means that it's not illegal." And that is the theory behind many of the legal innovations we've been arguing about since 9/11. What the Bush White House has offered is essentially the Nixonian view of the Constitution, albeit with less sweating and twitching. But recognizing that people get a little queasy about this argument, they've moved "Congress authorized it" front and center. The argument is that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed before the war in Afghanistan, "all necessary and appropriate force" etc against Al Qaeda, voids (as they've said at one time or another) FISA, the Non-Detention Act, the Posse Comitatus Act, you name it. All of which is news to the people who voted for it.
But what a red herring when you consider their view that the president needs no authorization whatever to launch a war whenever he feels its necessary. They're not really saying Congress added to his power with the AUMF. Congress couldn't have added to his power. The AUMF has all the legal effect of a hortatory resolution from Congress declaring it international nurse's week. In their theory, the president already had the power to go to war with whomever he wanted. The president's leading theorist of the war power writes unabashedly of "the president's right to start wars." So these powers are incident to wartime. And the president gets to say when it's wartime.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Speech from the Throne
I have a piece on the Cato site today decrying the ridiculous ritual of the State of the Union. Excerpt:
Thus the State of the Union has settled into its familiar, modern incarnation: a laundry list of policy demands packaged in pomp and circumstance. And the content of the annual message has changed accordingly. In the journal Presidential Studies Quarterly in 2002, political scientist Elvin T. Lim tracked the evolution of presidential rhetoric through two centuries of State of the Union addresses. Lim notes "an increasing lack of humility" on the part of the president, as well as declining references to the Constitution, which were quite prevalent in the 19th century. By the late 20th century, it was "all about the children," with "Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton [making] 260 of the 508 references to children in the entire speech database, invoking the government’s responsibility to and concern for children in practically every public policy area." Granted, Washington did mention children in his seventh annual message, protesting "the frequent destruction of innocent women and children" by Indian marauders. But modern references to children have a different tenor, as when President Bush used his 2004 State of the Union to demand "drug testing [in schools] as a tool to save children's lives…[and] send them this message: We love you and we don’t want to lose you." In the same speech, departing from the constitutional injunction to address his recommendations to Congress, President Bush called on major league baseball and football to "get tough, and to get rid of steroids now."
Monday, January 30, 2006
Not All the King's Men
Very interesting article in Newsweek about bureaucratic infighting within the administration over the Bush doctrine of presidential absolutism. Best performances playing against type: James Comey and John Ashcroft. The NSA eavesdropping program was a bridge too far even for Comey, the former prosecutor who threw the book at Martha Stewart for covering up a perfectly legal stock sale and who considered prosecuting fabulist Jayson Blair for making stuff up in the New York Times. In other words, not someone averse to expansive legal theories.
Ashcroft had earlier body-blocked Cheney's plan to invoke the "enemy combatant" theory--i.e., president designates you as EC, you're stripped of all legal rights and thrown in the brig indefinitely, with no opportunity to contest your imprisonment--against all terrorist suspects on American soil, citizens or not. Here, even when cornered in his hospital bed by Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales, he refuses to sign off on the NSA program. He also prevented John "crush 'em" Yoo's ascention to head of the Office of Legal Counsel.
Also in a starring role, Jack Goldsmith, former head of OLC, who repudiated the torture memos, despite great pressure from leading Vulcan David Addington. Though I never had him for class, Goldsmith taught at U of C when I was there, and he always cut an appealling figure: sort of like a genteel, cleaned-up version of John Belushi. As the article makes clear, he's one of the good guys in this story.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Debating Surveillance
My colleague Bob Levy debates David Rivkin on NSA surveillance and the divine right of chief executives here (.pdf). Incidentally, I'll start to believe the scare stories about the Federalist Society taking over the world when they work out a way of getting new content on their website in some format other than .pdf.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
A Trillion Here, a Trillion There
Nobel prizewinner Joseph Stiglitz and coauthor conclude that Iraq war, all told will cost over a trillion dollars. I'm sure they'll be faulted in the troglodosphere for not taking into account the costs we've avoided by undertaking the war. Like the destruction Saddam's dread unmanned aerial vehicles were sure to wreak on America's cities.
Saturday, January 7, 2006
Warrantless Surveillance
Here (.pdf) is a copy of the new CRS report on warrantless surveillance by the executive that made the front page of the Washington Post today. According to the Post:
A report by Congress's research arm concluded yesterday that the administration's justification for the warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments.The Congressional Research Service's report rebuts the central assertions made recently by Bush and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales about the president's authority to order secret intercepts of telephone and e-mail exchanges between people inside the United States and their contacts abroad.
I haven't read it yet.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Clemency for Cory Maye
Cory Maye never wrote a children's book or caught the attention of Snoop Dog or Jamie Foxx. But from all appearances, he's a hell of a lot more deserving of clemency than Stanley "Tookie" Williams.
Maye is on death row in Mississippi right now for killing a police officer. From the new Wikipedia entry:
At 11 p.m. on the night of December 26, 2001, Jones accompanied a seven-member SWAT team from the Pearl River Basin Narcotics Task Force, a four-county police agency responsible for drug enforcement. He was not a member of the team, but had been invited along as he had passed along an confidential tip that large quantities of marijuana were being stored and sold in the apartment of Jamie Smith, who lived in the other half of the duplex. The officers had obtained search warrants for both apartments. Whether the warrants legally allowed for a no-knock entry is still not clear.While Smith was arrested without incident, and significant quantities of marijuana were found in his home, both Maye's current and former attorneys say Smith was never charged with drug possession or distribution. Jefferson Davis County District Attorney Clarence "Buddy" McDonald says he doesn't remember Smith being charged or convicted.
There is disagreement about what happened next. The officers then either served the warrant on Maye's half of the duplex, or entered what they thought was another door to Smith's in search of more contraband (later, prosecutors would say both were served simultaneously). Attorneys for Mississippi and Maye differ on whether the police clearly identified themselves. Maye, who was asleep at the time of the raid, retreated to his bedroom and readied a .38-caliber pistol. When Jones entered, Maye fired three times. Jones was wearing a bulletproof vest, but it did not cover the area where he was hit, and the injury proved fatal.
Maye had no criminal record, and there were no drugs in his apartment, where he lived with his 18-month-old daughter. This sounds like a case of mistake-of-fact--self-defense gone wrong--since it's hard to believe that a man in no legal jeopardy would decide to shoot one police officer and then surrender. At the very least, we know enough to say that this man should not be executed.
Radley Balko's the only reason we know about this case. His latest is here. And the work he's done on the case may just save a man's life. So spread the word. Saving a guy's life would be a whole lot more impressive and worthwhile than getting Dan Rather fired.
Wednesday, December 7, 2005
AEI Comix
Apropos of the post below, a reader informs me that since 2003, Marvel Comics has seen the light. They've contracted with AEI's Karl Zinsmeister to write a comic book about the Iraq War.
Marvel Comics (the people behind Spiderman and other pop icons) asked TAE editor in chief Karl Zinsmeister to write a true-life drama about our GIs battling in Iraq. Dan Jurgens, master illustrator for the Superman series, drew the classic comic-book images. !
Zinsmeister is new to the comic book format, but as the author of articles on the Iraq War such as "The War is Over, and We Won" (June 2005), somehow I think he'll get the hang of it.
Tuesday, December 6, 2005
Why Does Captain America Hate America?
I recently stumbled across an important paper by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies that identifies the latest threat to our nation's yout': comic books.
The Defense Department must face international terrorism without the aid of a celebrated hero of past victories – comics figure Captain America.Even after September 11th, Marvel Comics and other publishers are disseminating comic books that actively promote a destructive cynicism and mistrust of the United States Government.
They express anti-war sentiments, condemn America as a racist state, liken the actions of our Armed Forces to the murderous crimes of Islamic terrorists, portray terrorists as advocates for sympathetic causes, show others to be victims of U.S. aggression, and reveal our Government officials to be scheming, evil villains.
The last thing we need right now is "cynicism and mistrust of the United States Government," that's for sure. Taking a page from the EC Comics hearings of the '50s, Medved and the other guy note:
For nearly three generations, comic books have exploited dark, disturbing, and violent themes – painful transformations, isolated freaks and killers, corruption in high places, and criminal conspiracies. The new emphasis, however, goes further than ever before – imputing guilt not only to a few malevolent tycoons and their henchmen, but to the American military establishment and the nation at large.
I haven't read the comics assailed in the paper, but they sound kind of silly (surprise!) But at least Marvel Comics does its work without the benefit of government largesse, and without any grants from the State Department or US-AID.
Thursday, December 1, 2005
Watching You
Very interesting column by Bob Novak today on FBI abuses under Hoover. Novak recounts a speech by Judge Laurence H. Silberman, who as a deputy attorney general in the Ford administration reported to the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 on secret files kept by J. Edgar Hoover. His experience then was enough to give this FISA court judge pause about government surveillance. (Though he seems to conclude that the real problem was just that Hoover was a bad man).
Novak's piece has something for everyone. Conservatives will love this tale of liberal hypocrisy involving Bill Moyers:
When President Johnson’s aide Walter Jenkins was arrested for homosexual conduct in a men’s room during the 1964 campaign, Silberman said, LBJ aide Bill Moyers directed Hoover to find similar conduct on Barry Goldwater’s staff. “Moyers’ memo to the FBI was in one of the files,” he continued. An “outraged” Moyers telephoned Silberman, he said, to assert that the memo was “phony.” “Taken aback,” said Silberman, he offered an investigation to publicly exonerate Moyers. “There was a pause on the line, and then he (Moyers) said, ‘I was very young. How will I explain this to my children?’ “ “Silberman’s account of our conversation is at odds with mine,” Moyers told me when I asked for comment.
Liberals will read the reference to the MLK bugging, recall the history, and wonder how anyone can support enhanced surveillance power for the federal government... and they'll feel that way at least until 2008.
Libertarians will wonder why conservatives want to give the woman who brought you the Travel Office Scandal the ability to build a dossier on anyone in the country.
And libertarians who read the Washington Post every day will wonder why somebody as keenly aware of the potential for government abuses as Silberman apparently is could recommend an expanded surveillance role for the Pentagon:
CIFA's abilities would increase considerably under the proposal being reviewed by the White House, which was made by a presidential commission on intelligence chaired by retired appellate court judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.). The commission urged that CIFA be given authority to carry out domestic criminal investigations and clandestine operations against potential threats inside the United States.
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Jihadi Geniuses
A couple of days late, but one of the things I'm thankful for is that the people who want to kill us seem actually to be dumber than the people running American foreign policy, if such a thing can be believed. This, from Wed.'s NYT article about the Padilla indictment, is right up there with the fellow who thought he could cut down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch:
Although the indictment does not say so, officials confirm that the conversations are from wiretaps authorized by a special court that reviews law enforcement applications to eavesdrop on foreigners suspected of intelligence activities.In the indictment's recounting of the conversations, the principals converse in what officials describe as code, referring to arms shipments and attack plans as sporting events or, on some occasions, as vegetables.
But any such efforts to conceal the nature of the subjects discussed were seemingly clumsy. In one conversation, for instance, Adham Amin Hassoun talks with another defendant, Mohamed Hesham Youssef, about soccer equipment. The indictment says that Mr. Hassoun later told investigators he had indeed been referring to sports equipment, but that he was unable to explain why he had then asked Mr. Youssef if he had enough "soccer equipment" to "launch an attack on the enemy."
Monday, November 21, 2005
Begging His Pardon
George W. Bush pardoned the Thanksgiving Turkey, and he may eventually pardon Scooter, but other than that, he's not very interested in the presidential power to pardon. Here's a piece I wrote on that topic that ran in the Legal Times recently. Excerpt:
It's unfortunate that it takes the indictment of a high-ranking White House official to remind Washington that the president has the "Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States." In an era in which the federal criminal justice system is becoming ever more centralized and punitive, there are many federal prisoners who are far better candidates for a pardon than I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr. Yet they have gone unnoticed by a president whose exercise of the pardon power has been timid at best.At the end of September, with no more fanfare than a Justice Department press release, President George W. Bush announced that he had pardoned 14 people. Most had received minor sentences and had served their time—if any—more than a decade ago.
This was in keeping with Bush's long-standing reluctance to pardon: The president issued 31 clemency orders in his first term, far fewer than those granted by his father or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan. Indeed, along with the veto, the pardon seems to be the rare executive power that this president is reluctant to use....
Monday, November 7, 2005
"I can't stop. I don't have any legs."
"He literally said that," White recalled, adding that the Humvee came to a halt only after it rammed into a store....The explosion drilled a hole the size of a softball in the driver's door, he said. The red-hot shrapnel severed the driver's legs while the Humvee was still moving.
"He probably would have bled out except the shaped charge made [the metal] so hot it actually cauterized his legs as it cut his legs off," White said.
One minor grisly detail from a recent Washington Post story on IEDs and 2,000 gone.
The Humvee driver in that case survived as an unintended byproduct of insurgent innovation with IEDs. Many others survive because of innovations in battlefield medicine. As this article from the New England Journal of Medicine makes clear, we're getting better at saving soldiers' lives. In WWII, 30 percent of those injured in combat died. In Vietnam--and even in the Gulf War--it was 24 percent. Now it's 10 percent. That is unquestionably a positive development. But it also means that a great many of those we save are horribly maimed.
One airman with devastating injuries from a mortar attack outside Balad on September 11, 2004, was on an operating table at Walter Reed just 36 hours later. In extremis from bilateral thigh injuries, abdominal wounds, shrapnel in the right hand, and facial injuries, he was taken from the field to the nearby 31st CSH in Balad. Bleeding was controlled, volume resuscitation begun, a guillotine amputation at the thigh performed. He underwent a laparotomy with diverting colostomy. His abdomen was left open, with a clear plastic bag as covering. He was then taken to Landstuhl by an Air Force Critical Care Transport team. When he arrived in Germany, Army surgeons determined that he would require more than 30 days' recovery, if he made it at all. Therefore, although resuscitation was continued and a further washout performed, he was sent on to Walter Reed. There, after weeks in intensive care and multiple operations, he did survive. This is itself remarkable. Injuries like his were unsurvivable in previous wars. The cost, however, can be high. The airman lost one leg above the knee, the other in a hip disarticulation, his right hand, and part of his face. How he and others like him will be able to live and function remains an open question....Still, for many new problems, the answers remain unclear. Early in the war, for example, Kevlar vests proved dramatically effective in preventing torso injuries. Surgeons, however, now find that IEDs are causing blast injuries that extend upward under the armor and inward through axillary vents. Blast injuries are also producing an unprecedented burden of what orthopedists term "mangled extremities" — limbs with severe soft-tissue, bone, and often vascular injuries. These can be devastating, potentially mortal injuries, and whether to amputate is one of the most difficult decisions in orthopedic surgery. Military surgeons have relied on civilian trauma criteria to guide their choices, but those criteria have not proved reliable in this war. Possibly because the limb injuries are more extreme or more often combined with injuries to other organs, attempts to salvage limbs following the criteria have frequently failed, with life-threatening blood loss, ischemia, and sepsis.
Every other Thursday, surgeons at Walter Reed hold War Rounds by telephone conference with surgeons in Baghdad to review the American casualties received in Washington during the previous two weeks. The case list from October 21 provides a picture of the extent of the injuries. There was one gunshot wound, one antitank-mine injury, one grenade injury, three rocket-propelled–grenade injuries, four mortar injuries, eight IED injuries, and seven patients with no cause of injury noted. The least seriously wounded of these patients was a 19-year-old who had sustained soft-tissue injuries to the face and neck from a mine and required an exploration of the left side of the neck. Other cases involved a partial hand amputation; a hip disarticulation on the right, through-knee amputation on the left, and open pelvic débridement; a left nephrectomy and colostomy; an axillary artery and vein reconstruction; and a splenectomy, with repair of a degloving scalp laceration and through-and-through tongue laceration. None of the soldiers were more than 25 years of age.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Miers
The Miers nomination has managed to horrify almost every big-firm or ex-big-firm lawyer in the country. Because those of us who have been there all know/worked for someone just like her. Someone with such a vacuum of an internal life that they'd happily agree to write those insipid bar journal articles and sit on all those friggin' committees. It's atavistic ambition without even the touch of evil that might make it interesting. Tracy Flick without the spunk.
Those Texas Bar Journal articles Miers wrote (which can be found here) are about as badly written as David Brooks said they were, though I've seen much worse. The managing partner of my old law firm used to write free verse about leadership and service to the client. I remember talking to a colleague about having it translated back into the original German and posting it throughout the firm, but we were both too enervated to follow through.
But the Miers articles are bad nonetheless, as can be seen here [.pdf]:
Two years ago the name "Jim Parsons" became synonymous with "inclusion."
Which must have been confusing for old Jim.
He made specific, sweeping efforts to inform all Texas lawyers that the State Bar of Texas welcomed involvement by all its members, regardless of geography, area of practice, race, ethnicity, or gender.
Those efforts were both specific and sweeping, no mean feat. And one wonders what "area of practice" is doing there amidst "race, ethnicity, and gender," in this inspiring tale of triumph over intolerance, unless there's some longstanding legacy of prejudice against, say, real estate lawyers on the part of the Texas Bar Association.
The outstretched hands of Jim and his wife, Karen, spoke loudly to many lawyers who earlier felt excluded or who had been uninterested.
Why couldn't the talking hands keep it down and leave the uninterested lawyers alone?
But the sentence that makes me regret my pettiness comes a few paragraphs later. It suggests that the Aspens never turned, and the roots never connected, and that there was nothing, nothing ever, beyond the next meeting of the Professional Development Committee. It's a sentence that breaks my heart:
Several weeks ago I looked around the room at the Bar Leaders Conference and felt a great sense of hope.
That may be the saddest thing I have ever read.
Friday, October 7, 2005
Some of the People, Some of the Time?
A nice one-two from Harriet Miers' most brilliant man alive:
BUSH: Some have also argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals.I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001, and Al Qaida attacked us anyway.
....
The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet militants killed more than 180 Russian school children in Beslan.
Which do you find more troubling, the notion that he thinks you're this stupid, or the alternative?
Monday, October 3, 2005
Get Out Much?
This, from David Frum, tells me all I need to know about Harriet Miers:
[Miers] once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met.
Sunday, October 2, 2005
Banana Republicans?
Far more disturbing than the Bush administration's decision to give away the store with regard to Katrina relief are the increasing calls to weaken the Posse Comitatus Act, the longstanding federal statute that restricts the federal government's ability to use the military as a police force. That statute embodies the traditional American distrust of the use of standing armies to keep the peace domestically. But President Bush, Senator Warner, and others want to see it abrogated for the purposes of disaster relief. That could lead to collateral damage of civilian life and liberty. Worse, it could lead to further domestic militarization. Once we normalize the idea that when civilian institutions do a lousy job, the proper response is to call in the troops, we've undermined a fundamental principle of republican government. Small r, of course. For more on this issue, see here and here.
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Urban Planning Makes God Laugh
The Washington Post magazine has a travel piece on Brasilia, Brazil's capital, and a place that's always fascinated me even though I've never been there. Jane Jacobs offered it as the epitome of the modern, centrally planned metropolis--scientifically designed, rather than organically evolved. The results are hardly inviting:
The city of Brasilia, population 500,000, has never been known as a welcoming place. Reason, not human warmth, is the organizing principle here. The metropolis was born in the late 1950s, when Brazil's president, Juscelino Kubitschek, decided, with a conviction bordering on megalomania, that coastal Rio de Janeiro, with its choked, skinny streets and decaying vine-covered buildings, was unfit to be a capital. His impoverished nation needed to modernize. "Fifty years' progress in five," the right-leaning nationalist proclaimed, before enlisting thousands of peasants to transform Brazil's most uncharted, unpeopled hinterland into a grand city inside of five years....Kubitschek saw Brasilia as the beacon of a modernist world, and he hired a devoutly modern urban planner to make his vision a reality. Lucio Costa, a Brazilian, was a disciple of Le Corbusier, the influential mid-20th-century French architect/professor who eschewed all ornamentation as "bourgeois" and envisioned a high-tech egalitarian future in which all buildings were beautiful in their sleek simplicity. Corbusier famously decreed that houses should be "machines for living in." Costa, in turn, called for an "efficient" capital city in which the TV tower would be a monument, a downtown attraction occupying the same space, geographically and spiritually, that the Washington Monument does in D.C. The street grid in Brasilia would be shaped like an airplane, with two "wings" of avenues and a long thin spine -- the grassy Monumental Axis, lined with government buildings -- forming the core. The automobile, meanwhile, would spirit through the metropolis on its own uncluttered highways, and the open spaces would be protected in perpetuity, so that daily life could unfold in bucolic, pedestrian-friendly environs.
Brasilia did not turn out as planned. What I found was a city defined by its silences. Its core is a wealthy enclave in which building new structures is essentially outlawed. Few children play in the community parks -- they're too pristine -- and residents tend not to shop in their neighborhoods. In this spread-out car city, the shopping mall reigns supreme. A spirit of anomie enveloped the streets around me, and the suicide, divorce and pedestrain-fatality rates in Brasilia are longstanding sources of concern. Visiting there in the 1980s, Australian art critic Robert Hughes called the place "a museum of architectural ideas" and a "utopian horror."
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Cooking with L. Paul Bremer
Seriously. It's in the Washington Post Food section this morning. A little blue about the ghastly, gory mess you've made occupying a country that never threatened us? Spoil yourself with some "Fontainbleau, garnished with pomegranate molasses." Snark fails me. What a town.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
The Great Society War
I picked up George C. Herring's America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, which I hadn't read since freshman year of college, to refresh my memory about the other big muddy and the other big fool. It's a good basic primer, if a bit short. I picked up a few things from it, some of which apply to our current mess.
Tuesday, August 2, 2005
Al Qaeda's EMP "Threat"
Following up on threat assessment ace Frank Gaffney, I see that he gave a speech two months ago which dealt, among other things, with the possibility of Osama Bin Laden frying our collective circuitry with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon. Now, an EMP weapon, as I understand it, is a nuke that you set off in the upper atmosphere. So to start with OBL would have to have a ballistic missile, which is a step up from the dog poisoning technology and castor-bean weapons they've developed so far. But leave that aside. Can't Gaffney come up with a doomsday scenario that's remotely plausible? He quotes a blue ribbon commission set up by Congress to study the EMP threat to the effect that: "'some potential sources of EMP threats are difficult to deter.' This is particularly true of 'terrorist groups that have no state identity, have only one or a few weapons, and are motivated to attack the U.S. without regard for their own safety.'" But if Al Qaeda gets a nuke--and a missile to launch it with--I'd say the prospect of them knocking out our internet access is the least of our worries. (Oh, and by the way, it would be nice if we were doing much of anything to ensure that AQ never gets a nuke). But this EMP scenario is the most ridiculous thing I've heard of since the idea that Iraq was going to put its "UAVs" on merchant ships, get them close enough to the US mainland, and then rain chemical death down on American cities. But you never know what people are going to be dumb enough to buy, I guess.
Friday, July 29, 2005
China's Earthquake Weapon
Did anyone catch this line in Max Boot's recent "yellow peril" op-ed, warning that China may be looking into "creating man-made earthquakes" as a way of fighting an asymmetric war against the United States? Meanwhile, neocon national security maven Frank Gaffney warns of a Chinese Pearl Harbor attack on the US via electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon. It occurs to me, as it has before, that a capacity for embarassment is a severe liability for a D.C. wonk, especially when it comes to foreign policy. Having recently soiled the bed on the Iraq issue, one would think that Boot, Gaffney, Woolsey, Kristol, et al. would have the decency to maintain a studied silence on national security issues for a time. Or, failing that, to proceed soberly, cautiously into the discussion--rather than spinning doomsday-weapon scenarios drawn from a 1930's Buck Rogers filmreel. But D.C. is a town where you simply can't get laughed off the stage. Why bother to be careful and judicious?
Monday, July 25, 2005
Roberts
Back in '91 when Clarence Thomas told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he'd never discussed Roe v. Wade with anybody, it was pretty clear he was dissembling. With John Roberts, you could almost believe that it's true. According to yesterday's Washington Post, even folks who know him quite well have no idea what he thinks.
"You know, I must have had a thousand lunches with John, and I can't think of a single thing he's said that would specify his politics," says Prettyman, a World War II veteran who once served as an aide to Robert F. Kennedy. "We were all under the impression that he's a conservative, but he always talked generalities. He's not the type to lay it all out."
Great grades, stellar resume, nice posture, nice smile, no doubt a firm handshake. But where he stands on anything is anyone's guess. What we've got here is a guy who, apparently, was genetically engineered and grown in a vat for the sole purpose of getting past the Senate Judiciary Committee. I think it was P.J. O'Rourke who wrote that every American with any wit or spunk has done something to keep himself from becoming president. So too with the Supremes, I guess.
Monday, June 20, 2005
Sense and Sensenbrenner
I had a piece in the Baltimore Sun last week on what I guess you could call drug warriors on crack. Excerpt:
Drug warriors in Congress are considering a bill that would send parents to jail for at least three years if they learn of drug activity near their children and fail to report it to authorities within 24 hours.
One wonders if this a good idea, especially in areas such as Baltimore, where intimidation and murder of government witnesses are common. But when it comes to the criminal law, Congress rarely pauses for reflection anymore.
In April, the bill's author, Republican Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, floated what might be called the "Jail Janet Jackson" initiative. Instead of enforcing the Federal Communications Commission's indecency regulations with fines on broadcasters, according to Mr. Sensenbrenner, those who violate the regulations should be subject to arrest and imprisonment...
Wednesday, June 1, 2005
"Building" Nations
Here's what looks like an interesting paper on the real story behind America's postwar occupation of Japan. That occupation often gets flung in the faces of skeptics about nation-building: "Oh yeah? Well it worked in Japan!" Usually neither party to the argument knows much about the period. But Miwa (U Tokyo econ prof) and Ramseyer (Harvard Law prof) do. And they say it didn't work. Or, more specifically, it worked when the New Dealers running the occupation and their lackeys in the Japanese bureaucracy were forced out of the way by the Japanese voters, who were sick of the mess that crew had made of things. From the paper (spoiler alert!):
the story of the Occupation is firstly a tale of barely planned and badly executed American oversight hijacked by men (both Japanese and American) determined to impose on the country their private vision of the public good. It was a vision of government directives supplanting economic markets. It was a vision voters did not share. And it was a vision that failed. The story is secondly a tale of democracy working as it should. By 1947 Japanese citizens realized that this command-and-control approach did not work. They used their vote to retake the government. And they shut down the control apparatus. And the story is thirdly a tale of Washington leaders belatedly constraining the agency slack within their own Occupation. By reining in their New Deal bureaucrats in SCAP, the U.S. government gave Japanese voters the chance to implement the policies they wanted. They wanted a capitalist framework, and that framework became the foundation for the growth that followed.
Thus, "nation-building's" greatest success turns out to have been a self-help project. I guess none of this should be too surprising. You don't wrench liberal capitalist democracy into being through state policy unless less the preconditions are there already. If they're not, you may be in a hell of a mess.
Oh, and as a bonus, Soviet agent Harry Dexter White makes a cameo in the paper. Hat tip Peter Van Doren.
Monday, May 16, 2005
...And Another Thing: Those Jedi Children Were a Threat!
So George Lucas has admitted that "Revenge of the Sith" contains a (none-too-subtle, apparantly) critique of Bush administration foreign policy.
But the guys at the Weekly Standard knew that already, to judge from this May 2002 tongue-only-partially-in-cheek review of Attack of the Clones, which argues: "the truth is that from the beginning, Lucas confused the good guys with the bad. The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good."
More:
But look closer. When Palpatine is still a senator, he says, "The Republic is not what it once was. The Senate is full of greedy, squabbling delegates. There is no interest in the common good." At one point he laments that "the bureaucrats are in charge now."Palpatine believes that the political order must be manipulated to produce peace and stability. When he mutters, "There is no civility, there is only politics," we see that at heart, he's an esoteric Straussian.
Make no mistake, as emperor, Palpatine is a dictator--but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet. It's a dictatorship people can do business with. They collect taxes and patrol the skies. They try to stop organized crime (in the form of the smuggling rings run by the Hutts). The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen.
Also, unlike the divine-right Jedi, the Empire is a meritocracy. The Empire runs academies throughout the galaxy (Han Solo begins his career at an Imperial academy), and those who show promise are promoted, often rapidly. In "The Empire Strikes Back" Captain Piett is quickly promoted to admiral when his predecessor "falls down on the job."
But the most compelling evidence that the Empire isn't evil comes in "The Empire Strikes Back" when Darth Vader is battling Luke Skywalker. After an exhausting fight, Vader is poised to finish Luke off, but he stays his hand. He tries to convert Luke to the Dark Side with this simple plea: "There is no escape. Don't make me destroy you. . . . Join me, and I will complete your training. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy." It is here we find the real controlling impulse for the Dark Side and the Empire. The Empire doesn't want slaves or destruction or "evil." It wants order.
The writer even makes the case for the planet-destroying Death Star. Alderaan might have had weapons of mass destruction, after all:
The destruction of Alderaan is often cited as ipso facto proof of the Empire's "evilness" because it seems like mass murder--planeticide, even. As Tarkin prepares to fire the Death Star, Princess Leia implores him to spare the planet, saying, "Alderaan is peaceful. We have no weapons." Her plea is important, if true.But the audience has no reason to believe that Leia is telling the truth. In Episode IV, every bit of information she gives the Empire is willfully untrue. In the opening, she tells Darth Vader that she is on a diplomatic mission of mercy, when in fact she is on a spy mission, trying to deliver schematics of the Death Star to the Rebel Alliance. When asked where the Alliance is headquartered, she lies again.
Leia's lies are perfectly defensible--she thinks she's serving the greater good--but they make her wholly unreliable on the question of whether or not Alderaan really is peaceful and defenseless. If anything, since Leia is a high-ranking member of the rebellion and the princess of Alderaan, it would be reasonable to suspect that Alderaan is a front for Rebel activity or at least home to many more spies and insurgents like Leia.
Whatever the case, the important thing to recognize is that the Empire is not committing random acts of terror. It is engaged in a fight for the survival of its regime against a violent group of rebels who are committed to its destruction.
Is this satire? I really can't tell. It's pretty deadpan and earnest, and hell, Max Boot sang the praises of the U.S. counterinsurgency in the Philippines, with its 200,000 dead, so who can tell with these people?
Monday, May 2, 2005
No Nukes is Good Nukes
I have a piece up on Reason's site arguing that, in their quest to get the president's judges confirmed, the Republicans may just nuke themselves in the foot. Excerpt:
But the second possible endgame to the filibuster battle should worry you, unless you think too little legislation is a major problem in American life. There's a chance that the G.O.P.'s nuclear gambit could eventually lead to the death of the filibuster as a whole.That would be disastrous. The theory underlying the Constitution is that, in political life as opposed to economic, transaction costs are good. As James Madison explained in Federalist 62, the Senate itself was designed in part to curb "the facility and excess of lawmaking." The filibuster isn't part of the Constitution, but it helps augment some of the Constitution's checks on promiscuous legislating. Since many of the constitutional checks on legislative overreach have eroded over the years, the filibuster is even more important today.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Gun Self-Defense Blog
I recently discovered Clayton Cramer and Pete Drum's "Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog," on which they catalog news stories about defensive gun use around the country. It's full of fun little stories like this one:
Man Fights Back Against Would-Be RobberI found this one a little unsettling, though:A Montgomery man fights back against a would-be robber... and wins.
Police say a deacon from Mount Olive Bapist went to the Normandale Compass Bank to deposit the church's offerings when a man approached him. The man then allegedly knocked the deacon down, took the money and started running away.
The suspect, however, was in for a surprise. The deacon was carrying more than a money bag to the bank... he was carrying a loaded gun. He began firing at the suspect, who slipped, fell to the ground and dropped the cash. When the robber went to retrieve the bag, the deacon threatened to shoot him if he touched it.
The suspect ran away.
Police Look for Victim Turned Shooter in NortheastA would-be carjacking victim in Maryland turned the tables on his alleged attackers by pulling out a gun and shooting them.
The driver shot one teenager in the stomach, and had a bullet graze the face of the other.
Police in Prince George's County believe the carjacking attempt and shooting took place on Route 450. They believe the teens then drove to a Northeast D.C. housing project, where they claimed to have been shot during a robbery.
But investigators soon learned the truth.
Police spokesman Corporal Joe Merkel says both suspects are believed to be 16. A lot less is known about the shooter.
Among the things they want to know is exactly what happened -- and whether the gun is legal.
It seems to me that P.G. County cops--who until recently had the the among the worst records for police brutality and unjustified shootings in the U.S.--have better things to do than pursue a citizen who from all appearances, used a gun justifiably in self-defense.
Monday, April 18, 2005
They've Come to Suck the Blood out of the Constitution
I find complaints about media bias increasingly tedious and overworked. But here, in the midst of a generally fair NYT Magazine piece on libertarian constitutionalists, the Times' photog seems to have gone out of his way to make Epstein, Greve, and Mellor look like Johnny Cash in that "I'm-Almost-Dead" video he did right before he died. I've met all three of these guys, worked briefly for one of them, and had another as a professor. I can assure you that none of them have the zombie-like pallor the Times Magazine gives them. In fact, all three are very lively, happy guys. But the photos appear designed to confirm a cartoonish preconception that anti-government intellectuals are humorless, sinister prigs. Subtle.
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Understanding What You're Criticizing
It's kinda important.
For some reason, a number of smart people saw something interesting in this extended exercise in straw-man swatting by Robert Locke: "Libertarianism: The Marxism of the Right." It's made up of a bunch of unsupported assertions about libertarianism, written in the sort of exasperated tone you might expect from someone who just spent a long afternoon at the DMV in line behind a proselytizing teenage Randroid.
Now, it's quite possible that Robert Locke knows something about libertarianism that he actually read in a book. But you wouldn't know it from this essay. He's too lazy even to drop a few names of libertarians cherry-picked from the wider pantheon to support his points.
If I decided to write up an extended critique of conservatism, I'd bother to mention some, you know, conservatives. In any event, 40-some years ago, Ralph Raico had a pretty effective pre-response to some of the french ducks Locke trots out.
Here's another example: In Techcentralstation yesterday, neolibertarian Pejman Yousefzadeh threw down the gauntlet to libertarian opponents of the Iraq War, writing:
I hope to see a comprehensive attempt at a rebuttal of realist theory by the libertarian minimalist school. It will take the debate over the intellectual rigor of realism to a whole new level, and it will allow libertarians in general -- and libertarian minimalists in particular -- to find their own voices on foreign policy.The rebuttal PY hopes for would be an odd thing to see from libertarian "doves," given that they tend to operate within the realist tradition. (For those of you who don't speak IR--I'm just learning meself--here's a decent primer if you can get access to it, and here are definitions to more of the argot than you want to know).
Like the Framers, and in keeping with the earliest traditions of American foreign policy, most libertarian war-skeptics are realists. If you're not clear on this, you might try, say, going to the website of the leading libertarian think tank, typing in "realism" in the search window, and reading the first thing that comes up.
Friday, April 1, 2005
A Journal of Neolibertarian Thought
I was just saying to myself, you know, it's about time that somebody worked the insights of Irving Kristol about making peace with the welfare state into a flexible framework of pragmatic libertarianism. And presto, along comes the New Libertarian: a Journal of Neolibertarian Thought. Frankly, I like a journal whose inaugural essay begins "Frankly..." because then you know you're going to get some frank talk, like this, from editor Dale Franks: "Neos understand that a transformation towards what I like to call a Society of Liberty, will probably take a fair amount of time." I like to call it a "society of liberty" too. But it is better with the capitals.
As one of the editorials notes, "Doctrinaire hackles were raised recently" by Dale Franks' iconoclasm. And those are exactly the right hackles to raise. They'll probably even get some doctrinaire heckles, but I say that pomposity in defense of liberty is no vice, linguistic clarity in the pursuit of pragmatism no virtue.
Who is this "New Libertarian"? Contributor Max "Boil 'Em" Borders explains that, among other things, she "lives in a socio-political reality," and "is prepared to define her own rectitude." And how!
Monday, March 28, 2005
Libertarian Panics
A former law professor of mine, Adrian Vermeule, has a new paper on "Libertarian Panics." He offers the term in contrast to "security panics"--episodes in American history where a frightened populace supports unjustified crackdowns on civil liberties. As Vermeule explains, in the "standard model" these security panics recur periodically because of cognitive flaws in the way we assess risk. For example, we’re more likely to overestimate the prevalence of risks that are highly visible. Your kid may be far more likely to be hit by a car walking to school than get killed by a rampaging classmate, but given Columbine and what just happened in Minnesota, you probably spend more time worrying about guns in school. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine anything more “visible” than September 11th or Pearl Harbor, and the resulting fear can lead to reactions disproportionate to the threat.
But, says Vermeule, that cuts both ways. As he puts it, "panicked crowds may run in any direction." There's no reason to think that the mechanisms that lead us to panic about security threats can't also lead us to panic about "jackbooted thugs." The same biases and cognitive flaws that make Americans hysterical about the risk of terror can also make us hysterical about the risks of government abuse. If Pearl Harbor was highly visible, so too was Japanese Internment, the result of the security panic caused by “the day that will live in infamy.” Michelle Malkin aside, internment has formed part of a historical narrative that leads us to fear unjustified government crackdowns on civil liberties. The visibility of such examples may lead us to overreact to liberty threats from government in the same way we might overreact to terrorist threats to security.
And that’s just what’s happened, says Vermeule: "Libertarian panics have been a regular occurrence in American history[.]"
It's a plausible enough claim in the abstract, but when we get to the section entitled "Libertarian Panics in America," there's very little there there. That section consists of two examples, the American Revolution and the Patriot Act.
Funny as it may sound, he has a point on the first. Anybody who's read The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is struck by how thoroughly convinced the American Revolutionaries were that the British government wasn’t just trying to recoup revenue spent fighting the French and Indian War—it was trying to reduce the colonies to slavery. Much as I love the men who pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the cause of American Independence, they weren’t exactly reasonable people. Their behavior could have served as the first chapter in the Paranoid Style in American Politics.
The second example Professor Vermeule uses is the Patriot Act. I’m no expert on the Patriot Act, but I find his account of what it does pretty tendentious. To take one example, he writes:
Second, consider Section 215 of the Act, which allows courts to issue subpoenas for business records in national security investigations. Many have denounced the provision as a mechanism of governmental oppression. Yet the provision codifies a power that grand juries (typically dominated by prosecutors) have long exercised without judicial oversight. Measured from that baseline, as opposed to some imaginary libertarian one, the addition of judicial subpoenas looks no worse and possibly better, from the point of view of targets and defendants.
But isn't it a signal difference that, under the Patriot Act, you might never know whether a third party has been forced to disclose business records, medical records, or other personal information about you? As Dahlia Lithwick notes:
Downplaying the extent of these changes, the DOJ argued to Congress that 215 is no big deal, since grand juries could always subpoena private records in the past. The difference they don't acknowledge is that investigators may now do so secretly, and these orders cannot be contested in court.
Lithwick asks: "Would you know if Section 215 had been used on you? Nope. The person made to turn over the records is gagged and cannot disclose the search to anyone."
I’m not one to get hysterical over the Patriot Act. I’ve barely blogged about it, being more concerned with enemy combatant detention of American citizens, which many people wrongly associate with the act. The clever acronym has led to an Orwellian backfire. Very few people have any idea what's in it, but they're creeped out by the name. However, if I had to bet, I'd put money on its renewal.
But by far the limpest part of Vermeule’s argument is his discussion of “cost-externalization.” As he explains,
The literature on security panics often runs together the diagnosis of panic with a different idea: that democratic majorities will sacrifice the civil liberties of outsider groups—foreigners, resident noncitizens, illegal immigrants, and so on—in the interest of maximizing the majority’s security. This idea strictly speaking has nothing to do with panic. On the picture sketched by these accounts, a rational, albeit self-interested, democratic majority would sacrifice the civil liberties of outsider groups just because the majority captures the security gains while shunting the costs of its illiberal policies onto others.
But here again, Vermuele points out, this cuts both ways. Those with an overprotective attitude toward civil liberties might structure things so as to impose the costs of those liberties on others in the form of increased security risks. Vermeule writes:
it is quite possible that democratic majorities will externalize the costs of liberty onto minority and outsider groups, purchasing too little security because majorities do not bear the costs of insecurity.
Here’s his example:
the red-state voters who supported the Republican party in 2000 and 2004 might cause the national political process to provide too much liberty and inadequate security for blue-state urban centers.
The footnote to that passage cites a bunch of articles about how federal homeland security aid is going to Alaska, Wyoming, and suchlike states in greater proportions than it should if the risk of terrorist attacks was the guiding factor:
Dean E. Murphy, Security Grants Still Streaming to Rural States, NY TIMES A1 (October 12, 2004); Keven Diaz, Pork-barrel security; Federal money to protect Americans from terrorism may not be going to states that need it the most. Formulas and politics are behind the disparities, STAR TRIBUNE (Minneapolis-St. Paul) 1A, (September 11, 2004); Elizabeth Shogren, More Federal Aid Sought for Cities at Risk of Attack; Under the current rules, a large chunk of such funds goes to less vulnerable areas. Efforts to redirect money have stalled in Congress, L.A. TIMES A21, (August 10, 2004).
But what in the world does this have to do with libertarian “cost-externalization”? It’s typical porkbarrel politics. Vermuele may have noticed that New York and D.C. are “blue zones” that align themselves overwhelmingly with the political party currently (opportunistically) opposed to civil liberties crackdowns. He complains about communities passing resolutions against Patriot while failing to notice that New York and D.C. are two of those communities.
To recap: Vermuele suggests we should be concerned about civil-libertarian overreaction to perceived government abuses. Such overreaction, he claims, can lead a panicked citizenry to favor liberty over security. His two primary examples are the American Founding (a good thing, no?) and a law that got passed in the midst of a security panic, and that is likely to be renewed.
I'm not impressed. If he can come up with examples of this magnitude, I might be. Until then, don't panic about libertarian panics.
Thursday, March 3, 2005
Why the Worst Get on Top and Get Worse
Richard Cohen's space in the Post today is a mediocre column wrapped around a terrific quote.
"It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion," Coolidge wrote. "They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness. They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment."
Longer excerpt here:
Coolidge made remarks around this time, which would benefit anyone holding high office to consider.... "It is also difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are surrounded by worshippers... They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation, which sooner or later impairs their judgment. They are in grave danger of becoming arrogant or careless... the chances of having wise and faithful public service are increased by a change in presidential office after a moderate length of time... It's also a pretty good idea to get out when they still want you."
The system we've got for determining control over nuclear weapons and history's most powerful military already pre-selects for odd characters. Few of us would want to spend two or more years riding a bus around Iowa mouthing platitudes to people we've never met, and scrupulously self-censoring to avoid "gaffes," which Michael Kinsley famously defined as when a politician accidently tells the truth. Even fewer of us are so suffused with a sense of our own grandeur that we'd feel up to the job. I remember my first visit to Little Rock, Arkansas, which is distinctly less impressive than Red Bank, New Jersey, near where I grew up. Bill Clinton imagining he could be president struck me as about as outlandish as the mayor of Red Bank thinking he could be "Leader of the Free World."
If and when that sort of insane ambition actually pays off, and you win the presidency, it would be hard to avoid thinking you'd been touched by God, even if you aren't religious. Add to that the social environment the president moves in, where he's surrounded by people who treat him like a god and insulated from people who'll tell him he's full of crap. (It's probably worse if you don't read newspapers and the Secret Service cordons off protestors beyond your line of sight). I wrote more about this here, with just as little insight into what can be done about it.
Friday, February 11, 2005
Death of a Salesman
Contra Nick Gillespie, I never read Death of a Salesman as an anti-capitalist tract, though certainly Arthur Miller's political views would suggest he might have intended it as one. Willy Loman's failing is that he embraces, and teaches his sons, a phony approach to success. You need to be "well-liked." According to Willy, prosperity is the result of superficial qualities--if you're a backslapping, gladhanding schmuck, you'll go far in a free enterprise system. Contrast that to neighbor Charley, whom Willy has to sponge off of to pay his bills. Charley's an honest small businessman "who works hard and plays by the rules" as Bill Clinton used to put it. His son Bernard--"liked, but not well liked" in Willy's estimation--studies hard while Biff plays football. Biff steals himself out of every job he's ever had. Towards the end of the play, Bernard's getting ready to argue a case before the Supreme Court. Lesson? Smart guys who work hard get ahead. Clowns who care more about how popular they are, don't. Whatever Miller's intentions, this doesn't play well as an indictment of capitalism. Biff should have run for office.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Interesting Poll Results
According to Tuesday's Washington Post, the Pew Research Center recently found that "66 percent of Republicans agreed that 'We should all be willing to fight for our country, whether it is right or wrong.'" (Only 33 percent of Democrats agreed with that statement.) In a related poll, 98 percent of neoconservatives emphatically agreed that all those other guys should be willing to fight for our country.
Monday, November 29, 2004
Go Directly to Jail
Cato has just released a new book on the crisis of overcriminalization, edited by, uh, me. The book's called Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything. The criminal law used to be society's last line of defense--reserved for behavior that everyone recognized as seriously wrong. Now it's becoming Congress's first line of attack--a way for legislators to show they're serious about whatever social problem is currently making headlines, whether it's corporate scandals or email spam. The results are a burgeoning prison population, unchecked prosecutorial power, and a growing threat to the rule of law.
The book focuses on three trends in particular:
1. Overcriminalization: the use of the criminal law to punish behavior that used to be handled with civil lawsuits or fines, or even to cover behavior that's just none of the government's business.
2. Runaway federalization of crime. The Constitution leaves the ordinary administration of criminal justice to the states. Yet the federal government increasingly over the last 30 years has started to take over the prosecution of street crime. There are only three federal crimes in the Constitution. But today there are over 4,000 federal crimes. That in itself is a crime against the Constitution.
3. The use of heavy-handed criminal law enforcement tactics against people guilty of minor offenses at worst and in some cases people who aren't guilty of crimes at all.
The book has something for everyone. Conservatives will appreciate the focus on the rule of law and the dangers of leaving ordinary businesspeople at the mercy of prosecutorial whims. Liberals will appreciate the extended treatment of mandatory minimums and the impact of the drug war. Pick up a copy here. If you have a blog, I'd appreciate it if you would spread the word.
Incidentally, I'm upset that they cut the cigarette out of the cover photo.
Tuesday, November 2, 2004
Memo to the Proud Voters I Saw on My Lunchtime Stroll
Ahem. Can we agree on the following? You are an adult. You are a person, presumably with a job, a person who pays bills and perhaps has a pet or even a child dependent upon you. You are a person who reads the newspaper, and strives to form an intelligent opinion about public affairs. Given all of that, you should not be caught walking around with a vacant look in your eyes, a vaguely satified smile on your face and an "I Voted!" sticker on your shirt. A laudatory sticker is perfectly appropriate for six-year-old Timmy, who went to the dentist, didn't have any cavities, and didn't squirm at all when the hygenist cleaned his teeth. It is not appropriate for, as Martin Lawrence phrases it, "a grown-ass man."
Monday, October 25, 2004
Calm Down, Get a Hold of Yourself
Terrific article in the new Regulation magazine, putting the risks of terrorism in perspective. John Mueller collects the known knowns and the known unknowns about how much sleep we ought to be losing about dying in a terrorist attack. Mueller's answer: not much. And we ought to spend more time worrying about the risks of overreaction.
Here's Mueller:
Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.
Does 9/11 portend a sea change in the prevalence of that risk? Mueller sees no good reason to think so:
Although there have been many deadly terrorist incidents in the world since 2001, all (thus far, at least) have relied on conventional methods and have not remotely challenged September 11 quantitatively. If, as some purported experts repeatedly claim, chemical and biological attacks are so easy and attractive to terrorists, it is impressive that none have so far been used in Israel (where four times as many people die from automobile accidents as from terrorism).
More:
Accordingly, it would seem to be reasonable for those in charge of our safety to inform the public about how many airliners would have to crash before flying becomes as dangerous as driving the same distance in an automobile. It turns out that someone has made that calculation: University of Michigan transportation researchers Michael Sivak and Michael Flannagan, in an article last year in American Scientist, wrote that they determined there would have to be one set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out. More generally, they calculate that an American's chance of being killed in one nonstop airline flight is about one in 13 million (even taking the September 11 crashes into account). To reach that same level of risk when driving on America's safest roads--rural interstate highways--one would have to travel a mere 11.2 miles.
In that regard, John McCain has it right (the first and last time you'll ever read that sentence from me): "Fly on the damn plane! Calculate the odds of being harmed by a terrorist! It's still about as likely as being swept out to sea by a tidal wave. Suck it up, for crying out loud!"
All of us, post-9/11 have at one time or another, suffered from shameful bouts of Security Mom hysteria. But worst among us are the conservatives. I caught a snippet of Hannity on the way home the other day saying something like, whatever your position is on social issues, you have to vote for Bush, because without security, we won't be around to debate things like gay marriage. He may not be smart enough to know better, but the rest of us ought to be.
Friday, October 22, 2004
Acquired Situational Narcissism
Long-distance, pop psychoanalysis is the mark of a hack. It's also tons of fun. So I'm surprised nobody's mentioned "Acquired Situational Narcissism" in the light of Bush's peevish and immature performance in the debates. ASN first made it into the mainstream in a brief piece in the NYT magazine three years ago. In an age where everything has to have its own syndrome, ASN is psychiatry's answer to the question, "why the hell do celebrities behave like that?"
Because the onset occurs well after childhood, celebrity narcissism isn't covered by the textbook definition of the condition. ''Psychoanalytic literature is filled with jargon about how narcissism happens really early,'' says Millman, ''but I realized that given the right situation, it could happen much later.'' That's the Acquisition.
The Situation is fame, money and, even more, the pheromone-like power of fame and money. ''When a billionaire or a celebrity walks into a room,'' says Millman, ''everyone looks at him. He's a prince. He has the power to change your life, and everyone is very conscious of that. So they're drawn to this person. What happens is that he gets so used to everyone looking at him that he stops looking back at them.''
...the tension in the early-developing narcissist is more self-contained. In the acquired situational narcissist, it is also fed by people who surround him. Even worse, the view of the world the acquired situational narcissist is getting is, when you think about it, quite reasonable. ''They are different,'' says Millman. ''They're not normal. And why would they feel normal when every person in the world who deals with them treats them as if they're not?''
I'm only half-joking here. I don't think much of psychiatry in general, but even a pseudo-science can illuminate certain truths. And I think it's true that living in a social bubble where everyone treats you like a deity is bound to change your personality for the worse.
Most of us don't need anyone whispering in our ear, "you are mortal," to be reminded of our own unimportance. From the deli counter to the office, we're all confronted on a daily basis with people who don't consider us anything special and don't particularly care what we think.
The environment the superfamous live in is radically different. And it's very difficult to encounter anyone who's willing to tell you you're wrong or you're being a jackass or that maybe you ought to study up on that issue before you go telling people what you think about it, because you don't know what you're talking about.
Ron Suskind isn't the first reporter to notice that President Bush has deliberately isolated himself from dissenting opinions and voices. "Free-speech zones" keep protest signs out of his line of sight. And the President's refusal to read a newspaper means he doesn't regularly get a perspective on the news that wasn't prepared for him by his staff.
All of that may help explain why GWB seems visibly furious when called upon to explain himself in a neutral forum.
While this problem seems particularly pronounced in George W. Bush, it has to be a problem with every president. How to deal with it? We've invested an office with more power than any one man should ever be trusted to hold. And the environment that surrounds the man who holds that office virtually ensures that he'll become psychologically unhealthy.
Tuesday, October 5, 2004
Cato Conference on War: October 22nd
On October 22nd, the Cato Institute will be hosting an important event, which should be of interest to L&P bloggers and readers:
Lessons from the Iraq War: Reconciling Liberty and Security
At this conference libertarians (and Objectivists and free-market conservatives) will debate the principles that should guide foreign policy, the lessons of the Iraq war, and how freedom and foreign policy are related. Speakers will include Nick Gillespie, Deroy Murdock, James Robbins, John Mueller, Brink Lindsey, Robert Higgs, Ron Bailey, Shibley Telhami, Ed Hudgins, Chuck Pena, and Chris Preble. In this case, folks, when we say "debate," we mean it. Expect sharp clashes on every panel.
It will be webcast for you out-of-towners, but really, who wants to sit in front of a computer screen for 8 hours? Get on a plane already.
Details here.
Friday, October 1, 2004
The Debate
Al Gore wrote in the NYT the other day that this election shouldn't be about which candidate you'd like to have a beer with. Which is good, because I'd rather regrout my bathtub than tipple with either. George Jean Nathan said "I drink to make other people interesting." But drinking enough to make the candidates interesting could get you hospitalized.
But I watched the debate. And Kerry not only won on points, he won the personality contest. Bush started out shockingly coherent. But as Kerry began to score in the later rounds, the president grew increasingly indignant and petulant, and it showed in his body language: slumping over the podium, and grimacing at his opponent in a West-Texas version of Al Gore's eyerolling. When called upon to defend his record and his war, he looked as resentful as a guy getting written up for a parking ticket, and deciding whether it was worth the risk to get into it with the cop.
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Lacking Metrics
Here's a piece I had in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune last weekend on whether we're winning the war on terror. Registration's a pain, so I'll reproduce it here:
We're at war not with a state but an armed ideology
Gene Healy
September 12, 2004
Last October, in an internal Pentagon memo leaked to the press, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld hit on the key question in assessing U.S. progress in the war on Al-Qaida: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"
Three years after the destruction of the Twin Towers, that question is as vital as ever.
Rumsfeld's question is key because it recognizes the nature of the enemy: We're not at war with a state, but with an armed ideology with murderous adherents in more than 60 countries. Responses appropriate to a state-based threat will only rarely be effective against a private, self-organizing, adaptable enemy that can operate without state support or central direction. Indeed, such responses may exacerbate the problem, drawing new recruits to jihad.
Sept. 11, 2001, should have concentrated the mind wonderfully as to the type of enemy we're fighting. Too often, however, the administration has insisted on "fighting the last war." Having rightfully removed the one state that was directly related to the terror threat, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the administration continued on to Iraq, as if the war against terror was a war against states. But it's hard to understand how regime change in Iraq aided the war against anti-American terrorism. Iraq appears to have had few, if any, genuine Al-Qaida links and no WMD stockpiles to speak of, much less a plan to pass off weapons of mass destruction to anti-American terrorists.
"Anonymous," the author of "Imperial Hubris," a 22-year CIA veteran who ran the Counterterrorist Center's Bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999, is nobody's peacenik. But he says that "there is nothing Bin Laden could have hoped for more than the invasion and occupation of Iraq."
His assessment is echoed by former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who says that the war on Iraq "delivered to Al-Qaida the greatest recruitment propaganda imaginable."
Are they right? It's difficult to tell. As Rumsfeld put it in the October memo, "we lack metrics" to know whether the pool of anti-American jihadis is growing or shrinking.
But there are some indications that we are losing that battle of numbers.
On April 1, J. Cofer Black, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, testified before Congress that there are "growing indications that Al-Qaida's ideology is spreading well beyond the Middle East, particularly its virulent anti-American rhetoric. This has been picked up by a number of Islamic extremist movements which exist around the globe. This greatly complicates our task in stamping out Al-Qaida, and poses a threat in its own right for the foreseeable future."
A year after the start of the Iraq war, a Pew Research Center Poll revealed that "large majorities in Jordan (70%) and Morocco (66%) believe suicide bombings carried out against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq are justifiable. Nearly half of those in Pakistan agree (46%)." Sixty-five percent of Pakistanis and 55 percent of Jordanians have a positive view of Bin Laden.
More recently, polls conducted by Zogby International show that the Iraq war has contributed to near-universal hostility toward the United States in the Arab world, with, for example, 98 percent of Egyptians holding negative views toward America. The "radical clerics" that Rumsfeld worries about now have an even more receptive audience.
That's not to suggest that the war on Al-Qaida should be run as a global popularity contest. Far from it: We need to kill or capture those who mean us harm, and should make no apologies about it. But anti-American sentiment is the lifeblood of jihad. Needlessly increasing it through unnecessary wars in the Middle East nourishes the enemy and swells its ranks.
With the wisdom of hindsight, does the Bush administration fully appreciate this? Perhaps not.
Time magazine has reported that during "a private Aug. 19 conference call with Capitol Hill aides from both parties ... senior Pentagon policy official William Luti said there are at least five or six foreign countries with traits that 'no responsible leader can allow.' " There may be more Iraqs in our future.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, the periodic standoffs in Najaf, Sadr City, Fallujah and elsewhere put American servicemen in the untenable position of either having their hands tied in the face of aggression, or responding with overwhelming force, generating civilian casualties and film footage that will surely make its way into jihadist recruitment videos.
In the Defense Department memorandum leaked last October, Secretary Rumsfeld wondered, "Is our current situation such that 'the harder we work, the behinder we get'?"
Rumsfeld wasn't talking about Iraq specifically, but his words perfectly describe our current dilemma.
Thursday, September 2, 2004
Zell
From his speech last night:
Senator Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations.
Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending.
Me, I want Congress to decide--you know, like it says in the Constitution and everything. You'd think a United States senator might appreciate that distinction, but what can you expect from a screeching mediocrity whose previous claim to fame was spending taxpayers' money to distribute a free classical music CD to every new baby born in Georgia? Unprincipled, reflexively hawkish, and dim: Zell's found a home in the modern G.O.P.
Thursday, August 12, 2004
Al Qaeda at the Office
This is absolutely fascinating--almost too fascinating to make political points with it. It's an Atlantic Monthly article written by a WSJ reporter who lucked into buying Ayman al-Zawahiri's abandoned laptop in Kabul in Fall 2001 in the wake of the US invasion. It's just surpassingly strange to read Bin Laden's chief deputy bitching out a subordinate for abusing the company credit card:
6- Please explain the cell-phone invoice amounting to $756 (2,800 riyals) when you have mentioned communication expenses of $300.
7- Why are you renovating the computer? Have I been informed of this?
I said "almost" too fascinating to make political points with it. But not quite. So, for starters, "The computer did not reveal any links to Iraq or any other deep-pocketed government." What a surprise!
And, in the "calm down, get ahold of yourself" category, there's this:
In 1999 al-Zawahiri undertook a top-secret program to develop chemical and biological weapons, a program he and others referred to on the computer as the "Yogurt" project. Though fearsome in its intent, the program had a proposed start-up budget of only $2,000 to $4,000. Fluent in English and French, al-Zawahiri began by studying foreign medical journals.
Among those are such up-to-date tracts as "mid-twentieth-century articles from, among other sources, Science, The Journal of Immunology, and The New England Journal of Medicine, and ... such books as Tomorrow's Weapons (1964), Peace or Pestilence (1949), and Chemical Warfare (1921)."
Of all the things to keep us up at night, perhaps AQ's homegrown dog-poisoning arsenal shouldn't be one of them.
Of course, they do seem to have a decent grip on grand strategy:
Like the early Russian anarchists who wrote some of the most persuasive tracts on the uses of terror, al-Qaeda understood that its attacks would not lead to a quick collapse of the great powers. Rather, its aim was to tempt the powers to strike back in a way that would create sympathy for the terrorists. Al-Qaeda has so far gained little from the ground war in Afghanistan; the conflict in Iraq, closer to the center of the Arab world, is potentially more fruitful. As Arab resentment against the United States spreads, al-Qaeda may look less like a tightly knit terror group and more like a mass movement. And as the group develops synergy in working with other groups branded by the United States as enemies (in Iraq, the Israeli-occupied territories, Kashmir, the Mindanao Peninsula, and Chechnya, to name a few places), one wonders if the United States is indeed playing the role written for it on the computer.
Wednesday, August 4, 2004
"I'm David Brooks, and I'm Reporting for Duty"
I don't want to go all ad hominem here, but I tend to dismiss calls for national service from people who I'm morally certain couldn't do twenty consecutive pushups without a smoothie break.
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
Barnett on War and Liberty
I admire Randy Barnett tremendously as a scholar. But I'm not finding any of his recent posts on Libertarians and War convincing. There's a lot there to respond to, but to take one example:
But would the U.S. Army been acting unjustly on Libertarian grounds it it goes to the aid of innocent civilians in Somalia, the Sudan, or Iraq? I do not see why. If these people are indeed the victim of horrible rights violations a solder regardless of whether his uniform is American or Iraqi would be justified in going to the defense of the victim according to Libertarian first principles.
This is an odd way to frame the question--as if the soldiers simply happen to be in Somalia or Iraq on vacation or something and happen to witness a rights violation. But how did American soldiers get there? They got there as part of military operations funded by resources forcibly extracted from the American taxpayer. Properly framed, the question, then, is something like:
Does it violate libertarian principle for the U.S. government to wrest scores of billions of dollars from the American taxpayer (possibly as much as $3,000 per American family in the case of Iraq,) in order to address rights violations committed half a world away against people not under its protection?
I'd say it does. I have a right to come to the defense of others. I do not have the right to steal Randy Barnett's car in order to do so.
Now, few outside of Spooner have written more convincingly than Professor Barnett about how hard it is to justify the state. So he might say the argument above applies just as well to taxation for the defense of Americans--it says the U.S. government can't come to the defense of Californians if it has to tax Kansans to do it. After all, none of us signed any kind of "social contract" or consented to a Constitution that pledges us to the "common defence" of Americans. But if even that limited justification of the state-as-common-defense-pact is problematic, how do you justify the state-as-world-liberator? Where does it get the authority to carry out these missions, however benevolent they might be?
In any event, I think it's odd to proceed as if the only rights in question are the rights of those who are to be liberated.
Monday, July 19, 2004
Every Man Pharaoh
You know the pejorative phrase, "market worship"? Well, having just visited Wegman's, the temple of the great god Market, sign me up for the cult. As Tyler Cowen put it, Wegman's "makes Whole Foods look like a 7-11." The first 15 minutes in the store, I couldn't buy anything, my circuits were so fried by the obscene abundance around me. I wanted to jump through bins of sausage and bruschetta cackling madly like Scrooge McDuck. I wanted to make myself a hidey-hole behind some cereal boxes, and stay burrowed away until the store closed, and then eat myself sick all night like a dog.
And this being America, someone is going to outdo Wegman's soon enough, make it look like a 7-11. I picture a big box retailer so large that everyone gets an indoor RV with a GPS locator and a big cart at the back. There are indoor clouds, and you can see the curvature of the earth as you look down aisle after aisle of foreign delicacies as far as the eye can see. God willing, I'll live to see it.
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Bush LIED!!!!
Will the hawks give us this one, at least?
"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States."
--George W. Bush, October 7, 2002.
I'm not talking about the fact that the dread Iraqi fleet turned out to be a few ancient Czech training drones. Put that aside. Focus on what he said.
Was he, or anyone else in the administration, really "concerned" that Iraq might unleash a fleet of chem-armed UAVs on the US mainland (after, I guess, ferrying them most of the way across the Atlantic so they were in range)? How low an opinion of President Bush's intelligence do you have to have to believe that he believed that statement? How low an opinion does President Bush have of the public's intelligence to make that statement? Oh well, no one ever went broke, like Mencken said.
The point is, that was a lie. Right?
Wednesday, July 7, 2004
Antiwar Libertarianism, Cont.
Jacob Levy: "Now it's simply untrue that the Iraqi sanctions prompted 9/11. The sanctions were wrong; that doesn't mean that they were a wrong of any great importance to Bin Laden & co."
From the CFR's terrorism page:
The United Nations’ economic sanctions on Iraq are one of the grievances most frequently mentioned by Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al-Qaeda terrorist network.... in his 1998 declaration of war on America and its allies, bin Laden insisted that a “great devastation” had been “inflicted on the Iraqi people.” In a videotape released a few weeks after September 11, bin Laden said, “Millions of innocent children are being killed in Iraq and in Palestine, and we don’t hear a word from the infidels.”
Here's the 1998 fatwa:
Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.
Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
The (sadly) obligatory caveat: by pointing this out, of course I don't mean to suggest that Bin Laden is some sort of freedom fighter and America somehow deserved 9/11. I lack language sufficient to the task of condemning Bin Laden and his followers except to say they're sorts of people who make me wish there was a Hell.
But "know your enemy" has been sound strategic advice from Sun Tzu onward. Too many prowar libertarians have adopted a "they hate us just because we're beautiful" perspective on the relationship between American foreign policy and terrorist blowback.
Tuesday, July 6, 2004
Go Directly to Jail
If you'll forgive a little self-promotion, I had a piece in the Chicago Sun Times over the weekend on the problem of overcriminalization. Excerpt:
Last month, at the Port of Miami, federal agents rousted sleeping vacationer Hope Clarke from her cruise ship cabin, handcuffed her, and hauled her off to jail. Her crime? A year ago, while visiting Yellowstone National Park, Clarke had forgotten to put away her marshmallows and hot chocolate, and authorities cited her for "improper food storage." A Wyoming federal court issued a bench warrant for failure to pay the $50 fine, and Immigration and Customs agents enforced it last month during a security check when Clarke's cruise ship docked.
After seven hours in jail, enduring catcalls and vulgar propositions from male inmates, a weeping Clarke appeared before magistrate Judge John O'Sullivan in leg shackles. It turned out that she had already paid the fine. She had been required to before she left Yellowstone that day. When the assistant U.S. attorney protested that there might be some "discrepancy" between Clarke's story and the paperwork, Judge O'Sullivan responded tartly, "Seven hours in jail, I think, is a suitable punishment for leaving marshmallows out at a camp site."
I'm editing a collection of essays on overcriminalization for Cato. The book, called Go Directly to Jail, should be out this fall.
Thursday, July 1, 2004
Indeed?
It's not April 1, is it? No? OK then, you know that rhetorical scare tactic where you try to wake right-wingers up to the dangers of concentrating power in the executive branch by saying, "yes, I understand that you trust George W. Bush, but he won't be the last president to wield these powers. What if the next president is [pause for effect]... Hillary?" Well, I don't think that's gonna work anymore if Instapundit is any indication:
HILLARY AS VP? I'm hearing that again, though I'm skeptical. Personally, I'd rather see her at the top of the ticket. I told you that the war on terror is my number one issue, and I think she'd be tougher than Kerry. She certainly has been so far.
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
"A Heartbeat Away"
I don't have a problem with Dick Cheney telling Pat Leahy off on the Senate floor. Anything short of a Sumner-Brooks incident is preferable to the cloying bipartisanship that folks like David Broder advocate. And I think the phrasing with which the Washington Post chose to report it is odd:
The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice. "Fuck yourself," said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency. Wow, that is sobering, isn't it? George W. Bush is all that stands between us and a man who uses the kind of salty expressions that are utterly common among mechanics, bike messengers, lawyers, politicians, doctors, Washington Post reporters, and most other adults. If I worry about Dick Cheney being a heartbeat away from the presidency, it's not because he curses. It's because he's an enemy of the Constitution with a predeliction for lying us into war. If the Constitution means anything, it means that the president can't summarily declare American citizens outlaws to the Constitution, strip them of all rights to due process, and lock them up forever. But if Cheney has his way, that's exactly what will happen to anyone accused of plotting terrorism in this country. As Newsweek has reported, Cheney has pushed for much broader use of the "enemy combatant" designation: "They are the enemy, and they're right here in the country," Cheney argued, according to a participant. But others were hesitant to take the extraordinary step of stripping the men of their rights, especially because there was no evidence that they had actually carried out any terrorist acts. Instead, John Ashcroft insisted he could bring a tough criminal case against them for providing "material support" to Al Qaeda.... In the months after 9/11 there were fierce debates—and even shouting matches—inside the White House over the treatment of Americans with suspected Qaeda ties.On one side, Ashcroft, perhaps in part protecting his turf, argued in favor of letting the criminal-justice system work, and warned that the White House had to be mindful of public opinion and a potentially wary Supreme Court. On the other, Cheney and Rumsfeld argued that in time of war there are few limits on what a president can do to protect the country. It's really something when an executive branch official takes a position so far out there that it makes John Ashcroft into a defender of the Constitution. I wonder if Cheney told him to go fuck himself. As for "lying us into war," we can debate whether many of Cheney's misstatements in the run-up to the Iraq War were outright lies or Clintonian half-truths. But on Gulf War One, the Christian Science Monitor and the St. Peterburg Times have him dead to rights. Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid–September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier. But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border – just empty desert.... Shortly before US strikes began in the Gulf War, for example, the St. Petersburg Times asked two experts to examine the satellite images of the Kuwait and Saudi Arabia border area taken in mid-September 1990, a month and a half after the Iraqi invasion. The experts, including a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who specialized in desert warfare, pointed out the US build-up – jet fighters standing wing-tip to wing-tip at Saudi bases – but were surprised to see almost no sign of the Iraqis. "That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn't exist," Ms. Heller says. Three times Heller contacted the office of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (now vice president) for evidence refuting the Times photos or analysis – offering to hold the story if proven wrong. The official response: "Trust us." To this day, the Pentagon's photographs of the Iraqi troop buildup remain classified. As SecDef in that war, Cheney added to his long record of contempt for constitutional limits by trying to convince George H.W. not to go to Congress for authorization before invading Iraq. And we're supposed to be appalled because he throws the F-bomb around?Friday, June 25, 2004
It's Happy Hour in America
I really don't know about this new ad from CREEP. The dollop of Reaganite optimism, coming after interspersed images of a raving Al Gore, Hitler, Dick Gephardt and Michael Moore is jarring. And I object to the slogan, "this is not the time for pessimism and rage." Why not? When's a good time?
What's with this fascination with optimism anyway? It's dangerous. "As the British psychologist Richard P. Bentall has observed, 'There is consistent evidence that happy people overestimate their control over environmental events (often to the point of perceiving completely random events as subject to their will), give unrealistically positive evaluations of their own achievements, believe that others share their unrealistic opinions about themselves and show a general lack of evenhandedness when comparing themselves to others.''' Does that sound familiar?
I'd respect a politician who said, "My fellow Americans, now is the time for pessimism and rage. For bitter remarks and caustic sarcasm. Now more than ever. Cynicism in defense of liberty is no vice. Optimism in the pursuit of idiocy no virtue."
But for my money, the greatest campaign slogan ever remains the one from the Norman Mailer/Jimmy Breslin 1968 New York mayoral campaign: "No More Bullshit!" I want a bumper sticker.
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Wild Wild West
Like Radley, I'm a big fan of HBO's Deadwood. If you feel the same, you may enjoy this link, which has some information on the historical characters the show's based on, like Calamity Jane, above. Turns out Al Swearengen was a real guy, and about as vile as the character played by Ian MacShane: "Proprietor Al Swearengen recruited women from the States, assuring them of jobs in hotels or respectable homes, and the thrill of adventure on the Western frontier. When the women arrived in Deadwood they found that they were stranded, victims of a virtual white slave trade, forced to work in abominable conditions and perform disreputable acts."
However well-grounded in actual events, the cursing strikes me as anachronistic. Not because I think cowboys talked like Jimmy Stewart. But I doubt that a certain appellation peppered throughout the dialogue was really the curse of choice in the late 19th century.
Was life on the stateless frontier really so Hobbesian? Terry Anderson and P.J. Hill have argued otherwise. But human nature being what it is, it shouldn't surprise us that the state of nature is sometimes Lord of the Flies instead of Little House on the Prairie. And that's the way it goes when the state enters the picture as well.
Monday, June 21, 2004
Tear Down That, Er... War
Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft has a piece on the worst aspect of Reagan's legacy--the expansion of the drug war.
Thursday, June 17, 2004
WWRD?
I am doubtless blinded by ideology, but it seems to me that the case for war in Iraq doesn't come off any better when stated forthrightly by an advocate of that war than it does when I viciously caricature it:
Bush faced two realities: He was not dealing with a nation state that could be defeated by military force, and his attackers could not be deterred by fear of retaliation -- they had to be arrested and incarcerated for an indefinite period, or killed. Even this, however, would not be sufficient. The al Qaeda ideology springs from failed societies and a failed culture; as long as the conditions that produced this cancer continued to exist, it would not be possible to eliminate the threat of further attacks.
What Bush needed was a strategy that included both a military and an ideological response. The military response was to deprive al Qaeda of bases and training resources; the ideological response was to deprive it of support in Arab and Muslim lands. To accomplish this, Bush chose to use the idea of freedom and democracy -- the American ideology -- as a weapon. Iraq was a target not only because it was a potential source of weapons of mass destruction for the terrorists and a threat to the stability of the region, but because its population was well educated, relatively secular in outlook among the Arabs, and one of the Arab populations most likely to be capable of self-government.
That's from the American Spectator's running What Would Reagan Do? debate.
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Harding
Harding does get a bad rap from the historians, as do most of the presidents who don't "do anything," i.e., start wars or vast new social programs. A few years back, Harding made the list in Nathan Miller's book Star-Spangled Men: America's Ten Worst Presidents. Here's an excerpt from my review :of that book in the Freeman:
Warren G. Harding receives the most undeservedly rough treatment of any president examined. From a classical liberal perspective, Harding was arguably the greatest president of the twentieth century. He initiated the largest spending cut in history—a 40 percent reduction from Wilson’s last peacetime budget. And Harding’s good nature and liberal instincts led him to overrule his political advisers and pardon Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs. Debs had been jailed during Wilson’s jihad against opponents of World War I, but Harding turned him and other dissenters loose; “I want [Debs] to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife,” he said. The scandals surrounding Harding’s administration push him near the top of Miller’s hit list. But, as Miller notes, he never took “so much as a nickel” from any of his corrupt cronies.
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
R.I.P. R.R.
I know that Reagan left government bigger than he found it, but still, he was the only president of my lifetime that I actually liked. He had grace, charm, class, and most of the right enemies. I don't have anything to add to all the eulogizing going on, except the following cool story about the twentysomething RR from Edmund Morris's much maligned, but flakily interesting Dutch:
"Paul was talking about a nurse who had been held up beneath Dutch's bedroom window in Des Moines. A warm Sunday night; the time about eleven o'clock; suddenly the sound of a man snarling something, and a young woman's voice, high and panicky: "Take everything I've got but let me go" Reagan leaps out of bed, seizes his latest acquisition, a .45 automatic (unloaded), and in the glow of a street lamp outside sees one of the girls from Broadlawns General Hospital with her hands in the air. The man menacing her is stooping to pick up her bag, when a light baritone that carries well on the air rings out: 'Leave her alone or I'll shoot you right between the shoulders!'"
Monday, May 17, 2004
WMD Found.... Not to Be WMD
WMD found: Sarin gas causes mass destruction in Baghdad! Well, no, actually. A roadside bomb rigged with a sarin gas shell went off, and two U.S. soldiers were treated for "minor exposure." No casualties.
Warhawk triumphalism aside, this development hurts, rather than helps, the case for war. It underscores the point that, in the main, "WMD" is a misnomer as applied to chem/bio. Moreover, it shows that, if you are worried about so-called WMD, it would have been much smarter to leave them in the hands of the dictator who had repeatedly, exhaustively, despite every opportunity, demonstrated that he had no intention of using them on Americans. Like I've been saying.
Friday, May 14, 2004
"Exterminate All the Brutes"
Apropos of the war-and-human-nature discussion going on these past weeks, here's the Toledo Blade's four-part series on war crimes by "Tiger Force," an elite U.S. Army unit in the Vietnam War. (The series earned the Blade a Pulitzer this year). Links to the whole thing can be found here. There's so much in it that's horrific, it's hard to figure out what to excerpt. But here's the broad outline of the story, followed by some details:
The platoon - a small, highly trained unit of 45 paratroopers created to spy on enemy forces - violently lost control between May and November, 1967.
For seven months, Tiger Force soldiers moved across the Central Highlands, killing scores of unarmed civilians - in some cases torturing and mutilating them - in a spate of violence never revealed to the American public.
They dropped grenades into underground bunkers where women and children were hiding - creating mass graves - and shot unarmed civilians, in some cases as they begged for their lives.
They frequently tortured and shot prisoners, severing ears and scalps for souvenirs.
... William Doyle, a former Tiger Force sergeant now living in Missouri, said he killed so many civilians he lost count.
"We were living day to day. We didn't expect to live. Nobody out there with any brains expected to live," he said in a recent interview. "So you did any goddamn thing you felt like doing - especially to stay alive. The way to live is to kill because you don't have to worry about anybody who's dead."
Time and again, Tiger Force soldiers talked about the executions of captured soldiers - so many, investigators were hard pressed to place a number on the toll.
In June, Pvt. Sam Ybarra slit the throat of a prisoner with a hunting knife before scalping him - placing the scalp on the end of a rifle, soldiers said in sworn statements. Ybarra refused to talk to Army investigators about the case.
...
Former platoon medic Larry Cottingham told investigators: "There was a period when just about everyone had a necklace of ears."
Records show soldiers began another gruesome practice: Kicking out the teeth of dead civilians for their gold fillings.
As the Blade establishes, much of this was known--and known at the highest levels. The Army undertook a 4 1/2 year investigation--an investigation that the White House, including John Dean, received briefings on. But the Army purposely squelched any attempt at disciplinary action.
I keep hearing about what a disloyal jackass John Kerry is for telling lurid tales of wartime atrocities when he returned from Vietnam. But for all the tall tales and amplified rumors he traded in, it's worth remembering that things like this went on. If what we've seen so far at Abu Ghraib is the worst prisoner-abuse to emerge from this war, we can count ourselves and the Iraqis lucky.
I don't mean to wax Chomskyite. There's no military force on the planet I'd feel safer surrendering to in wartime. We are and have nearly always been better than our wartime enemies. But at bottom, we're made of the same raw material.
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
The Siege
I saw the 1998 movie "The Siege" on USA network last night. Pre-9/11, it's just another "Peacemaker" or "Sum of All Fears"--distinguished principally by the filmmakers' politically incorrect decision to cast terrorists that aren't some variety of Slav. Post-9/11, it's as close to prescient as Hollywood gets.
* Terrorism that's mostly low-tech, yet nonetheless terrifying; bus bombings, buildings levelled (including FBI counterterrorism headquarters) and no supervillain WMD;
* Terrorism that's decentralized and cellular, and that feeds off of military attempts to neutralize it: "Is this the last cell?" "There is no last cell!!"
* Terrorists that make no demands for concessions and no attempt to negotiate, but simply seek to kill as many Americans as possible, as visibly as possible;
* Calls to repeal the Posse Comitatus Act--opposed, but nonetheless acquiesced to, by the military establishment;
* Annette Bening protesting to bad guy Samir that "Islam is a religion of peace!" and getting punched in the face for her trouble;
By the time they show the Army interrogating a jihadist and having the Dershowitz debate with considerably less moral agonizing, I'd have been floored if I wasn't already couched. The guy's tied to a chair, naked.
Sure, the notion of the FBI as the guarantor of our liberties and the American way of life was tough to credit. But otherwise, I can't think of another major motion picture that got so many predictions so right.
One wrong note: In contrast with the events of 9/11, many of the terrorists are Iraqis, enraged by U.S. foreign policy. But here again, it may be prescient.
Sunday, May 9, 2004
Heaven
In his new book Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828, Walter McDougall describes Washington D.C. 200 years ago:
It is hard to imagine today, but in 1802 the entire federal headquarters numbered 291 people, of whom 138 comprised Congress itself. The executive branch totaled 132. The State Department had ten employees, the war and navy departments thirty, and the attorney general's office one: the attorney general. The government played no part in law enforcement, justice, agriculture, business, transportation, health, education, and welfare. Aside from 6,500 military personnel, the federal bureaucracy nationwide amounted to 2,875 people, and the only way it affected the lives of the vast majority of Americans was by delivering mail.
That sounds wonderful. Except for the delivering the mail part.
Thursday, May 6, 2004
The Tragedy of Colin Powell
I used to think pretty highly of Colin Powell. Sure, he annoyed me with his self-righteous speechifying at the 2000 G.O.P. convention. But I always admired him as a military man who knew the cost of war and fought against cocktail-party Churchills of left and right. I loved the story about him reacting with horror when Madeline Albright demanded “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it?”
But his career is winding down on a note of disgrace. He's done his last stint in government watching the death of the eminently sensible Powell Doctrine. He knew what we were getting into in Iraq. And yet, according the latest Woodward, he never made a concerted effort to stop it. Instead, he allowed himself to be used at the UN to pitch a policy he suspected would lead to disaster. He never even demanded a one-on-one with the president to try to talk him out of it.
Now, he tries to clear his rep through repeated, passive-aggressive sniping to reporters via subordinates, as the Post reports today. The story quotes a GQ reporter:
"It was really weird," he said. "I didn't have a particular hunger to interview these guys," but the State Department press aide working with him kept setting up interviews and insisting he meet with more people, he said.
It's just sad. He should have done a William Jennings Bryan and publicly resigned. Instead, Powell, a man with much to be proud of, a man who might have stopped the worst foreign policy disaster in 30 years, is reduced to defending himself through surrogates in the thinking man's Maxim.
Going All Wobbly
Andrew Sullivan writes:
BE AFRAID: Bio-chemical warfare from Islamist terrorists is, to my mind, inevitable.
and links this article from the Washington Post.
The article, about a sad-sack jihadi living with his Mom in France, and cooking up castor-bean poison in a coffee maker, is a good deal more pathetic than frightening:
Benchellali's mother, Hafsa, told police she became concerned after finding strange potions and liquids scattered around her sewing room following one of her son's all-night sessions. But when she confronted her son, he warned her to stay away. "He said it was dangerous," the woman said, according to the transcript, "and it was better if I didn't know what he was doing."
Mommm! I'm busy!!
Why is a smart guy like Sullivan buying into the sensationalistic and stupid notion that chem/bio agents are supervillain weapons that can "bring a day of horror like none we have ever known," to quote Bush? Such uncritical thinking is one reason we're subjected to the indignity of having the leader of the most powerful country in history whining at press conferences about Iraqi mustard gas shells.
Well, "be afraid" about this if you want to. I worry more about car bombs and other, conventional means of mayhem.
Sunday, May 2, 2004
How the Worst Get on Top
This is neat: a video archive of 50 years of presidential TV ads. Here's a Stevenson ad from 1952 ("Adlai, Love You Madly") that seems every bit as idiotic as anything that's running in the current campaign. And look at this one linking Eisenhower and Robert Taft. It's on the intellectual level of the Teletubbies.
Here's Jackie-O speaking Spanish in what seems to be an appeal to hispanic voters in New York. And here's the famous little-girl-nuked ad that Johnson used to beat Goldwater in 1964. I've never understood why that ad was supposed to be so unfair. Goldwater did call for the use of tactical nukes in Vietnam. However, hearing an amoral wretch like Johnson piously intone, "We mus' luv eech other, oar we mus' die" is enough to turn your stomach.
Hat tip: Neat New Stuff.
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
You Gotta Serve Somebody
I have a piece on the American Spectator online today that focuses on post-9/11 national service schemes. Among them is John McCain's. From the piece:
Sen. John McCain's vision for national service is somewhat closer to James's "moral equivalent of war." In October 2001 McCain called for a quasi-militarized domestic national service corps as a way to address a "spiritual crisis in our national culture." What Senator McCain envisions is, well, rather creepy -- a sort of jackbooted Politics of Meaning.
McCain praises City Year, an AmeriCorps initiative operating in 13 cities: "City Year members wear uniforms, work in teams, learn public speaking skills, and gather together for daily calisthenics, often in highly public places such as in front of city hall." He also endorses the National Civilian Community Corps, "a service program consciously structured along military lines," in which enrollees "not only wear uniforms and work in teams… but actually live together in barracks on former military bases." McCain calls for expanding these two initiatives and "spread[ing] their group-cohesion techniques to other AmeriCorps programs."
"Group cohesion" and calisthenics in front of city hall reflect a version of patriotism, to be sure, albeit one that seems more North Korean than American....
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Historical Analogies We're Condemned to Repeat
Shorter Iraq War Debate:
Doves: Vietnam.
Hawks: No, Munich.
Doves: Vietnam!
Hawks: MUNICH!!
Longer Iraq War Debate:
Some interesting historical examples of "successful" counterinsurgencies from Tacitus, the thinking man's hawk. Scare quotes are mine, not his, for reasons you can probably figure out for yourself.
Monday, April 12, 2004
Gasp!
The Vietnam analogy makes it onto the webpage of the American Spectator:
Close your eyes and you're back in Saigon in 1966 listening to Robert McNamara rhapsodize about the future of Vietnam. All that's missing is the body counts.
The piece makes some rather loopy assertions and slaloms in and out of running-off-the-rails stream-of-consciousness, but it's still more interesting and insightful than any war coverage you're likely to read on NRO these days. I can't wait to see the letters this generates.
Sunday, April 11, 2004
The Leadership Genius of L. Paul Bremer
You know, I wouldn't claim to know how to run an occupation properly, but neither should Paul Bremer. Between his decision to cashier the Iraqi Army and his ill-advised move to shut down Baby Sadr's paper, he's really making a hash of an already-bad situation. But that's not to suggest that this is a problem that can be fixed with better management.
Moratorium
I hereby request that Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy refrain from criticising the Iraq war. Not because I think it's unpatriotic while our troops are in the field, or anything. It's just that I have a lot of friends who are psychologically wedded to the logical fallacy that if Ted Kennedy says something, it has to be false.
Monday, April 5, 2004
The Sopranos and the Bush Doctrine
Fans of the HBO drama learned last night that young thug Christopher Moltisanti is a fan of the Bush Doctrine. As Chris-tah-fuh puts it, reassuring his fiance Adriana: "You don't listen to the president? We're gonna mop up the Middle East. The whole world's gonna be under our control. You got nothin' to worry about."
Thursday, March 25, 2004
Laff Riot
Bush put on a slide show, calling it the "White House Election-Year Album" at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association 60th annual dinner, showing himself and his staff in some decidedly unflattering poses.
There was Bush looking under furniture in a fruitless, frustrating search. "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere," he said.
Somewhere in the Starr Report, if I recall correctly, there's a section where Bill Clinton is on the phone with a congressman, trying to drum up support for putting troops in Bosnia. At the same time Monica is ministering to Bill under the desk. I remember thinking that that didn't really reflect the sort of moral seriousness and gravity that I'd like to imagine in a commander-in-chief putting troops in harm's way. The current CINC's WMD yukfest may make for a less lurid image. But it's just as repulsive and classless.
Hat tip Atrios.
Tuesday, March 9, 2004
Test Your Purity
Bryan Caplan's Libertarian Purity Test is making its way around the blogosphere again. I get anywhere from 105 to 111, depending on how I interpret the questions, which I bet is a pretty wimpy score in this crowd. But to add fuel to the Left-or-Right debates, here are some scores from NRO.
Sunday, March 7, 2004
Why They're Known as "the Stupid Party"
The GOP passes the biggest expansion of the welfare state since the Great Society, and they can't even get credit for selling out. George Will reports:
Regarding the drug entitlement, Bill McInturff, a respected Republican pollster, found that 49 percent of those polled had an unfavorable opinion of it. Just 39 percent viewed it favorably. McInturff says recent polling shows the law remains a net negative.
Friday, March 5, 2004
Can We "Privatize Marriage"?
I'm as sympathetic as anybody to the idea, often floated on this blog, of getting the state out of marriage. Consenting adults ought to be able to bind themselves into any sort of partnership they freely choose. But as long as there's a state, there will be a host of questions surrounding those partnerships that no contract can solve. Here, via Atrios,, is an interesting collection of legal consequences to marriage that can't be contracted into or around, among them:
Creating a "family partnership" under federal tax laws, which allows you to divide business income among family members.
Receiving Social Security, Medicare, and disability benefits for spouses.
Receiving veterans' and military benefits for spouses, such as those for education, medical care, or special loans. Receiving public assistance benefits.
Consenting to after-death examinations and procedures.
Filing for stepparent or joint adoption.
Receiving equitable division of property if you divorce.
Receiving spousal or child support, child custody, and visitation if you divorce.
Suing a third person for wrongful death of your spouse and loss of consortium (loss of intimacy).
Claiming the marital communications privilege, which means a court can’t force you to disclose the contents of confidential communications between you and your spouse during your marriage.
Note that some of these would be around even in a nightwatchman state, so the libertarian answer, "get the state out of marriage," doesn't settle the issue. Tax reform and privatization would get around the family partnership and survivors' benefits issues. But there would still be civil and criminal courts and questions of child custody even in a minarchist utopia, so the state by necessity would have to decide what counts as a marriage for those purposes.
A Good Man in a Bad Trade
Friend and former co-chairman (with me) of the Georgetown University Libertarians, Tom Jenney, is running for Arizona State House.
Thursday, March 4, 2004
Weary of Wolf
If escaping the charge of right-deviationism requires that I treat Naomi Wolf as if she’s the Rosa Parks of the unwanted come-on, well then, I’ll pass. Luckily, there are plenty of non-conservatives who see it my way: As Cathy Young summarizes in Reason:
What's more interesting than Wolf's motives, though, is the fact that the reaction to her charges -- from other women -- has been uniformly negative. So far, Wolf has been lambasted by Meghan O'Rourke in Slate, Zoe Williams in The Guardian, Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail, and Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post. The general consensus is that Wolf is giving feminism a bad name by using a petty charge of sexual harassment for a vendetta and perpetuating an image of women as helpless victims reduced to panic at the first sign of male piggery.
It’s pretty apparent from what she writes that Young inclines toward that view. (Is Reason--which listed Dennis Rodman and Madonna among its 35 heroes of freedom--getting its cultural marching orders from the Right these days?)
Not all women have cut Wolf loose, of course. Andrea Dworkin’s sticking with her. But for Andrea Dworkin, this is pretty tepid--I suspect her heart’s not in this one.
I'm up in the air as to the left-or-right question. There was a time when I was an "opening to the right" guy. Lately I incline toward an "opening to the left." But in any event, the fact that I think Naomi Wolf is--ah, how to put this gently?--overly dramatic and insincere--shouldn't be taken as evidence that I've been assimilated into some sort of right-wing hivemind. It's a conclusion that plenty of other reasonable people, thinking for themselves, have come to as well.
Friday, February 27, 2004
Self-Inflicted Terrorism
The NYT reports that a Japanese court has sentenced Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, to death.
He won't be missed. But his sentence is as good an occasion as any to ponder whether we haven't worked ourselves up into an unnecessary frenzy over the chem/bio threat.
I'm as guilty as anybody of that. Go far back enough in the archives of my blog and you'll find me talking about ordering a gas mask and staying off the metro in the run-up to the Iraq war. But the popular view of chem/bio as these sort of James-Bond-supervillain weapons is much overblown.
As wacky as the Aum cult was and is, they had over a billion dollars to work with and access to some highly competent scientists. Their biggest hit was the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995, which killed a total of 12 people. Their anthrax was a complete dud. Thus far, fertilizer bombs and car bombs are more worthy of the name weapons of mass destruction than chem/bio.
What we know of Al Qaeda's chem/bio capabilities does little to suggest that they'd do any better. Their programs seem to be entirely a homemade affair, capable of poisoning a few dogs, but little more. And there was never any evidence to suggest that Saddam Hussein contemplated passing off whatever he had to them.
It’s almost certainly not true despite what the president argued in his pre-Iraq state of the union, that “one vial smuggled in could bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.”
This isn't a counsel of complacency. It's a call for balance. Al Qaeda's in the business of terror. Terrorize yourself, and you're doing their job for them.
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Yet More Wolf
If Professor Long can't see anything self-dramatizing about statements like:
Twenty years on, I am handing over a secret to its rightful owner. I can’t bear to carry it around anymore.
and
I am not at peace when the sun sets and the Book of Life is sealed: I always see that soft spot of complicity.
Then I don't suppose I can argue him into it. To me it sounds like she's about to reveal her participation in a secret government experiment in biowarfare, rather than confess her refusal to publicly reveal the fact that a boorish professor put his hand on her thigh. As for "twit," well, that's another value judgment that doesn't seem worth the effort to justify. But I do apologize for having offended him. As it happens, I agree with his general point that an Ann-Coulterish desire to offend for the sake of giving offense is immature (for instance, I think those "affirmative action bake sales" are in rotten taste). But I thought I was well short of that line here.
Iron-Jawed Angel or Shrinking Violet?
If the story's true, then Harold Bloom's a common variety of pig, and Naomi Wolf is a self-dramatizing twit. I agree with Anne Appelbaum's take in today's Post:
But in the end, what is most extraordinary about Wolf is the way in which she has voluntarily stripped herself of her achievements and her status, and reduced herself to a victim, nothing more. The implication here is that women are psychologically weak: One hand on the thigh, and they never get over it. The implication is also that women are naive, and powerless as well: Even Yale undergraduates are not savvy enough to avoid late-night encounters with male professors whose romantic intentions don't interest them.
The larger implications are for the movement that used to be called "feminism." Twenty years of fame, money, success, happy marriage and the children she has described in her books -- and Naomi Wolf, one of my generation's leading feminists, is still obsessed with her own exaggerated victimhood? It's not an ideology I'd want younger women to follow.
Wolf and Wolf
Naomi "Beauty Myth" Wolf, last in the news for charging Al Gore like a million bucks for telling him to wear earth tones, is accusing literary heavyweight (really--even his "boneless [?] hand" is heavy) Harold Bloom of making a creepy and awkward pass at her two decades ago. She was a senior at Yale. He was her professor. He brought "a bottle of Amontillado" to her apartment. (A flask of Amontillado? You've got to be kidding me. I guess that like Montressor, she likes her revenge served cold):
The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh.
I lurched away. “This is not what I meant,” I stammered. The whole thing had suddenly taken on the quality of a bad horror film. The floor spun. By now my back was against the sink, which was as far away as I could get. He moved toward me. I turned away from him toward the sink and found myself vomiting.
I find the very last part of that story hard to credit, unless there was a lot more booze involved than she's letting on.
Then again, hmm. Maybe she's on the level.
I don't think I'm suggesting sexual harassment is no big deal if I say it's really not very iron-jawed-angel for Ms. Wolf to be typing breathlessly about this incident twenty years after the fact. But it probably is pretty tasteless for me to recount the first thing I thought when I read this story: there should be a Page Six or an US Weekly aimed at the pseudointellectual class, recounting the pecadillos of academics, jurists, authors, and suchlike creatures. I'd read it daily.
Monday, February 23, 2004
In Search of...
It is simply not true that the Iraq War siphoned off resources and personnel that could have been directed towards finding Bin Laden. And I'm not going to let those lousy Bush-hating pinkos at the Washington Times tell me different.
The Pentagon is moving elements of a supersecret commando unit from Iraq to the Afghanistan theater to step up the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
A Defense Department official said there are two reasons for repositioning parts of Task Force 121: First, most high-value human targets in Iraq, including Saddam Hussein, have been caught or killed. Second, intelligence reports are increasing on the whereabouts of bin Laden, the terror leader behind the September 11 attacks.
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Deployed in the USA
Yesterday, C-Span carried a Cato policy forum featuring former Congressman Bob Barr, Professor David Klinger, and myself debating the military's role on the home front in the war on terror. Here's a link to the forum and one to the paper that inspired it. It was a civil, and, I hope, informative discussion of some pretty frightening issues.
Shame Is for the Weak
Richard Perle says "heads should roll" over the Iraq invasion. No, not his:
Richard Perle, a chief proponent of last year's U.S. invasion of Iraq, yesterday called for the chiefs of the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency to step down because of their faulty conclusions that Saddam Hussein possessed mass-killing weapons.
Monday, February 16, 2004
Found in Translation
Professor Juan Cole is soliciting help on "The Americana in Arabic Library Translation Project," so the Arab world can, among other things, read Thomas Jefferson:
The project will begin with a selected set of passages and essays by Thomas Jefferson on constitutional and governmental issues such as freedom of religion, the separation of powers, inalienable rights, the sovereignty of the people, and so forth.
Obligatory snarky remark: Thomas Jefferson?! Are you mad, man? They already hate us for our freedoms. Now they'll hate us more!
But seriously, it's a worthy project, and anyone who knows Arabic or would like to donate money should drop him a line.
Sunday, February 8, 2004
Who Says Being a Hawk Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry?
In his latest, Victor Davis Hanson sets the bar for apology rather high:
If the United States went to war with Iraq only because of the threat of WMDs; if the mass murdering of Saddam Hussein was found on examination to be highly exaggerated; if we had some secret plan for stealing the oil of Iraq, if Saddam Hussein posed no future threat to the United States or its allies; if the war resulted in a worse future for Iraq, the United States, and the surrounding Middle East; and if the administration deliberately constructed false intelligence evidence to advance such an unnecessary war that resulted in misery rather than hope, then an apology is needed now.
In the piece, we also learn that Saddam Hussein was "the worst tyrant on the planet" (sorry Kim!); that Gulf War I was part of his "long history of aggression against the United States"; and that the war was justified in part because Hussein "destroyed the ecology of the Mesopotamian wetlands."
You know, as much as I opposed the war, as terrible a mistake as I think it was, I will admit under duress that you can construct a halfway decent argument for it if you put your mind to it. My friend Mark does this all the time. He says that, realistically the only political choices available were continuing the unconscionable slow grind of the sanctions, or ripping the band-aid off. That my preferred solution of ending the sanctions and focusing more directly on the Al Qaeda threat was not an option, and that regime change at the least offered the chance of removing two out of the three items in Bin Laden's recruitment talking points: the sanctions and the presence of troops in Saudi Arabia. And that defanging an enemy regime would afford us more freedom of action in eradicating Al Qaeda than we would have if we eventually had a nuclear-armed Baathist regime to worry about in the region. Now, for various reasons, I think he's wrong. I think we pulled one arm loose from the Middle East tarbaby at the expense of plunging three other limbs deeper in, and I suspect we're actually inadvertently aiding Al Qaeda recruitment, but I think he makes a serious, respectable argument--all the more worthwhile because he acknowledges the complexities of the situation and the lack of easy answers.
Contrast that to Hanson, whose response to the emerging problems with the administration's case for war seems to be to crank up "Ride of the Valkyries" and type harder.
"It's Essential That I Explain This Properly"
I didn't watch the Russert interview but I read the transcript. Russert quotes Paul Wolfowitz saying that Saddam's brutality toward Iraqis "by itself is a reason to help Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did.” Russert then asks the President, knowing what we know now, was it worth it? His answer starts out reasonably coherent, but then the train's gone off the rails by the last paragraph:
It's essential that I explain this properly to the parents of those who lost their lives. Saddam Hussein was dangerous, and I’m not gonna leave him in power and trust a madman. He's a dangerous man. He had the ability to make weapons at the very minimum. For the parents of the soldiers who have fallen who are listening, David Kay, the weapons inspector, came back and said, “In many ways Iraq was more dangerous than we thought.” It's we are in a war against these terrorists who will bring great harm to America, and I've asked these young ones to sacrifice for that.
A free Iraq will change the world. It's historic times. A free Iraq will make it easier for other children in our own country to grow up in a safer world because in the Middle East is where you find the hatred and violence that enables the enemy to recruit its killers.
And, Tim, as you can tell, I've got a foreign policy that is one that believes America has a responsibility in this world to lead, a responsibility to lead in the war against terror, a responsibility to speak clearly about the threats that we all face, a responsibility to promote freedom, to free people from the clutches of barbaric people such as Saddam Hussein who tortured, mutilated there were mass graves that we have found a responsibility to fight AIDS, the pandemic of AIDS, and to feed the hungry. We have a responsibility. To me that is history's call to America. I accept the call and will continue to lead in that direction.
If I was the parent of one of the soldiers who got killed in Iraq, and the President sets out to explain to me what he died for, my guess is I wouldn't be too happy with a sloppy, themeless pudding of an answer that ends with fighting AIDS and feeding the hungry. What in the world is he talking about?
Thursday, February 5, 2004
HALF A CHEER FOR HOWARD DEAN
A word for Howard Dean before he disappears entirely, his descent too abrupt and ignominious even to secure him a post at the Kennedy School. It's not that I liked him--not so much. He always struck me as a stubby arrogant schmuck, the kind of doctor who'd get a bitter thrill out of giving you the cold-rubber-glove treatment and shooing you out of the office before you got it entirely clear whether you were sick or well. No, I never much liked the guy, but I'm sorry to see him go. He was the least phony Democratic presidential candidate in my lifetime.
He was, for one thing, the only prominent Dem I can remember who wasn't compulsively confessional, letting his every, teary emotion well up so we could share it, as if electoral politics was some kind of big early-70s group encounter session. Dean's reticence is reflective of one of the few admirable traits possessed by New England WASPs--a sense that a person's inner life is his own business, to be shared behind closed doors with one other person at most, not broadcast to the world.
Beyond that, he was a guy who would say what he thought, even when what he thought was stupid or impolitic. You have to--or at least I have to--like a presidential candidate who when asked "do you ever think to yourself, what would Jesus do?" answers, gruffly "No!"
Even when electoral politics called upon Dean to be calculating, he'd botch it in an endearingly ham-handed way, letting everybody know the calculated move he was about to undertake: "I'm heading down South where they expect you to talk about God, so I'm getting all geared up to talk about God."
And another thing--I liked his wife. Or at least I liked her attitude. She took a lot of crap for not standing by her man throughout his year-long idyll through every Goddamned Arby's in Iowa, shaking hands with complete strangers and acting like he was happy to see them. There's something to be said for the idea that you support your betrothed wholeheartedly in whatever they do, but when your lawful wedded husband decides to dress up like a Klingon and head off to the Trek convention, the rational response--Judy Dean's response--is, "have fun honey--I'll mind the home front while you're gone!"
None of this is to say that Howard Dean would have been a good president. Far from it. But as others have pointed out, for most people, politics is about cultural cues. I'm probably not immune to that dynamic. And politics rarely throws up anyone that appeals to me culturally. The choice is usually between some glad-handing B-school jackass and some other guy whose nickname has been "Senator" since he was in prep school. Well, where's the candidate for people of my ilk, who've spent our whole lives making fun of the brownnosing twerps who run for student government? The good doctor was a far cry from my kind of guy, but in this kind of crowd, he was as close as they come.
Monday, February 2, 2004
OH BE-HAVE!
Dennis Kucinich talks dirty:
"As a bachelor, I get a chance to fantasize about my first lady... And I certainly want a dynamic, out-spoken woman who was fearless in her desire for peace in the world and for universal single-payer health care and a full employment economy. If you are out there call me."
PoliticsNH.com has decided to serve as Kucinich's personal Match.com. Click here to check out the 80 bachelorettes waiting for a chance at Dennis.
THE ERA OF BIG GOVERNMENT CONSERVATISM
Here's a piece I wrote recently about President Bush's increasingly flagrant contempt for limited government. It's already dated, due to the latest revelations: an extra $140 billion needed over the first 10 years of W's pill giveaway (which they've known about for months), and the funding increase for the NEA (if your only objection to coercive funding of the arts was "Piss Christ", then this is the administration for you).
It'll be interesting to see how the President plans to make headway on half-a-trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see by cutting nondefense, non-homeland-security discretionary spending--which is $362 billion, or less than 20 percent of the federal budget. There's some talk of program cuts, but my guess is that they'll boldly go after that old standby "waste, fraud, and abuse."
Thursday, January 22, 2004
NIXON IS TO CAMBODIA AS BUSH IS TO...
Lebanon. Noah Schactman at Defensetech sends along a report from Jane's Intelligence Digest about the next front:
US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld is considering plans to expand the global war on terrorism with multi-pronged attacks against suspected militant bases in countries such as Lebanon and Somalia...
Sending US troops into lawless Somalia would not be new, nor is it likely to cause serious diplomatic waves. Covert US forces have periodically infiltrated the country over the past two years in order to conduct surveillance and even snatch [Al Qaeda] suspects...
However, sending US special forces into Lebanon - and in particular an area like the Bekaa Valley (which is virtually Syrian territory) and where the bulk of Damascus' military forces in Lebanon are deployed - would be an entirely different matter. Deployment of US forces in the area would almost certainly involve a confrontation with Syrian troops.
DEAN'S "BARBARIC YAWP"
Can I get this as a cellphone ring?
Link courtesy of Alan Gura. Clever title courtesy of Max Sawicky, who proves that Walt Whitman isn't just for picking up interns anymore.
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
AN ARGUMENT FOR DENNIS KUCINICH
An Associated Press canvass of the candidates on what album they'd most like to pop into their CD players turns up gospel, opera, hip-hop, country and rock.
The rock fans are Wesley Clark, who likes Journey's "Greatest Hits"; Sen. John Edwards, "The Essential Bruce Springsteen"; and Sen. John Kerry, the Beatles' "Abbey Road."
Howard Dean singled out the music of Grammy-winning hip-hop singer Wyclef Jean. Rep. Dennis Kucinich chose country's Willie Nelson (who has endorsed him), and Al Sharpton favored gospel's Yolanda Adams. Sen. Joe Lieberman's favorite album is "Sueno," by classical Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli.
I've got this image of Wes Clark with that thousand-yard stare, hunched down in his bus seat, muttering to himself "wheel in the sky keeps on turning/wheel in the sky keeps on turning" on and on and on through the frozen wasteland of NH. [Link courtesy of Atrios.]
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
LIKE A LASER BEAM. OR SOMETHING.
Actual headline from the Christian Science Monitor:
As he bids for reelection, the president will focus on the terror war, jobs, outer space, and marriage.
PAUL O'NEILL'S BOOK OF REVELATIONS
Here's a revelation from the Paul O'Neill book that isn't getting nearly as much play as it deserves:
Mr. O'Neill also pushed the president to set aside $1 trillion of the projected surpluses to fund one of Mr. Bush's big ideas during the campaign: the privatization of Social Security. Allowing people to invest Social Security contributions into private retirement accounts would reduce the government's future retirement liabilities, but the government would need to cover obligations to existing retirees without the money coming in from existing workers.
Mr. O'Neill said that both he and Mr. Greenspan had estimated that $1 trillion over the next decade or so would be enough to finance the transition for everybody then under the age of 37.
But Mr. Bush "seemed to shrug it off,'' according to the book.
Sunday, January 18, 2004
REASONS TO LIKE HOWARD DEAN
Sure, he's an abrasive, stubby little guy with angry-short-man complex, but Howard Dean may not be all bad. For one thing, he doesn't like to talk about himself; for another, he won't return Maureen Dowd's phone calls.
Thursday, January 15, 2004
SPACECRAFT AS SOULCRAFT
I totally agree with Will's sentiments on the President's federal "couples counseling" initiative. Not only is it a risibly stupid idea, it illustrates the administration's utter contempt for constitutional limits.
Lately I've had my eye out for stories that illustrate what a collosal joke the Bush administration has been. Here are a couple:
Describing the president's plan to build a moon base, an unnamed administration official says: "It's a national unifying thing, it's a world unifying thing." Plus it's good for aerospace contractors, as Karl Rove, who was in on all these discussions, surely pointed out.
But probably my favorite is in the following profile of conservative guru Grover Norquist from Monday's WaPo, in which Norquist is seen pleading with the administration's budget flack for the daily spin:
When Joshua B. Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget, came, Norquist asked, "For those of us on the outside, when someone sticks a mike in our face and says, 'Spending is up! You guys on the right are failing,' what are the talking points?"
Bolten rattled off the budget statistics that he could use.
Yet under Bush, the largest budget surplus in history has become the largest deficit in history. In the past, Norquist has said he wants to shrink government "down to the size where you could drown it in a bathtub." Now, glancing up at Bolten, Norquist ventured politely: "Is there a single agency you want to get rid of? It would be really helpful for us to say, 'This administration wants to get rid of . . . ' "
It's pretty clear from the article that Norquist didn't get an answer.
Monday, January 12, 2004
THE UNTHREATENING STORM
Slate is featuring an online chat on second thoughts by liberal hawks. It features center-left pundits and analysts who backed Bush on Iraq and explores whether they're having misgivings. Participants include Jacob Weisberg, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, and Fareed Zakaria. So far only Weisberg and Pollack have weighed in--each with more self-examination and critical thinking than many of their right-wing counterparts have shown.
It would seem, though, that liberal hawks should have less buyer's remorse than conservative ones. The humanitarian justifications for war in Iraq haven't lost any strength 10 months after the war began. On the post-war evidence, Saddam Hussein appears to have been every bit the bastard he was said to be. It's the conservative, threat-based justifications that have failed to pan out. I'd like to see a similar discussion among right-wing hawks. But I'm not confident we'll see it.
Saturday, January 10, 2004
LIBERTARIAN INTERVENTIONISM PART IV: SKEPTICISM ABOUT POWER
[Note: this is the last in a four-part series arguing that libertarian interventionism is an oxymoron. For earlier posts, look immediately below]
Even if one believes that it’s moral to spill American blood and (forcibly extracted) American treasure to destroy evil regimes that do not threaten us, killing many of their innocent subjects in the process, one cannot embrace war-for-liberation without abandoning the libertarian’s skepticism about power. Libertarian interventionism—unlike libertarianism proper—depends upon a blithe trust in government’s competence and benevolence.
Libertarian interventionists trust the government to perform social engineering magic, transforming tribal despotisms into commercial republics. It’s surpassingly strange that many of the same people who think the federal government’s too ham-handed to run a retirement program, fight teen pregnancy or intelligently manage a war on poverty think the same government is capable of remaking whole societies and establishing limited, constitutional government and the rule of law where the necessary preconditions don't exist. (It would help, I suppose, if more than a handful of the nation-builders currently on staff spoke the nation’s language or even knew the alphabet.)
Libertarian interventionists trust the government to successfully manage the rights-maximization project abroad in the face of more uncertainty even than that which confronts a domestic central planner. The one certain thing about any war is that the unintended consequences vastly outweigh the intended ones. We can’t be sure that the bad unintended consequences will always outweigh the good, but the unplanned aftereffects of past crusades have been horrific enough to counsel against fighting unnecessary wars. Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, as he said in his 1917 war message to Congress, “to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life.” He ended up creating the conditions for a punitive peace that would help give rise to Adolph Hitler and the next “war to end all wars.”
Libertarian interventionists trust the government to remain faithful to the rights-maximization project across successive presidential administrations, and not warp the project to its own, unlibertarian ends. We ought to remember how quickly armed evangelism can turn into contempt when the objects of our charity resist. Speaking to a group of Methodist church leaders in 1899 President William McKinley explained his decision to annex the Philippines, saying he wanted “to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.” Soon enough, the United States was embroiled in guerrilla warfare that killed some 200,000 objects-of-uplift. Mark Twain suggested that the new Filipino flag should copy the stars and stripes, but replace the white stripes with black and the stars with skull-and-crossbones. Is it so far-fetched to envision a similar shift occurring in our current struggle to liberalize Islamic theology through force-of-arms?
Finally, libertarian interventionists trust the government to restrain itself at home while it’s unleashed abroad. But an outlook that says it's our mission to overthrow tyrants, regardless of whether they threaten us, is a prescription for permanent war and a recipe for state empowerment. “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other,” wrote James Madison in 1795. As Robert Higgs documents in Crisis and Leviathan, today’s enormous administrative state is largely a product of power seized under claims of wartime necessity.
Perhaps there are no immutable laws of history; perhaps we can have a nightwatchman state with a half a trillion dollar defense budget—a government big enough to liberate the world, yet small enough to mind its business at home. But taking that bet would reflect the triumph of hope over experience.
Libertarian interventionism is an oxymoron. Libertarianism views the state, in Washington's phrase, as, “like fire… a dangerous servant and a fearsome master." As David Boaz has suggested, the libertarian's rules for government echo Smokey the Bear's rules for fire safety: keep it small, keep an eye on it and keep it contained. Libertarian interventionism sets government free, hoping liberty will emerge from the blaze. But once you've stopped viewing war as--like the state--a necessary evil, and started to view it as a force for good, you're well on your way to getting burned yourself.
LIBERTARIAN INTERVENTIONISM PART III: THE NONAGRESSION AXIOM
Attacking regimes that don’t threaten us violates the libertarian prescription against the nondefensive use of force. I don’t mean to anthropomorphize states—to suggest that in the absence of a threat, attacking Iraq violates Iraq’s “rights.” “Iraq” is not a person and has no natural rights. But launching an assault against Iraq does violate individual rights on a massive scale. War--even modern war with laser-guided bombs and airdropped care packages--means rampant destruction and coercion. For that reason and others, libertarians have generally held that self-defense is the only legitimate reason for letting slip the dogs of war.
Even in a justified war of self-defense, innocents will die and rights will be trampled. In such a war—a necessary war—those deaths are unavoidable. If Saddam Hussein actually had the ability and the inclination to level an American city, then we'd have to regret the loss of innocent life, but recognize that we had no choice but to defend ourselves. We'd be in the position of the fellow in that "lifeboat ethics" scenario getting shot at by a madman with a machine gun in a crowd. We don't want to hit innocents when firing back, but in such cases, we’re following the first law of nature, self-preservation, and we didn't ask to be put in this situation. In the case of nondefensive wars of liberation, however, we're making a very different moral choice. We're saying, let's kill this group of people, so that this other, larger group of people may be free. Now, if group A is made up solely of Baath party higher-ups, then that sounds like a fair trade: killing the guilty to free the innocent. But our munitions aren’t nearly that accurate. The Associated Press reported in June that over 3,000 Iraqi civilians died in the month-long war against the Baathist regime. Civilian body counts are, of course, subject to manipulation by activists and advocacy groups. But one thing is clear—even a just war is a terrible engine of destruction and a threat to innocent life.
If individuals have rights, and if there are things no person or group may do to them without violating their rights, then how can it be legitimate for the United States government to "collaterally damage" hundreds or thousands of Iraqi civilians into oblivion because of the benefits our action will confer on the survivors? Who anointed us the world's God-like utility-maximizer--empowered to stride across the globe extinguishing some innocent lives so that other innocents might flourish?
LIBERTARIAN INTERVENTIONISM PART II: THE LOCKEAN BARGAIN
For libertarians, the first question of political philosophy is, why have a state at all? Can a coercive monopoly be justified, and if so, how? Non-anarchist libertarians usually follow Locke, Nozick, and the Declaration of Independence—answering that governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Legitimate government, the argument goes, is a protective association founded on a social contract.
In the American context, you can identify that contract as the Constitution of 1789. Because of it, we Americans are pledged to assist each other in the defense of our liberties from enemies foreign and domestic. Reflecting the Lockean logic, the Constitution empowers the federal government to provide for “the common defense” of the United States, not the defense or liberation of oppressed people throughout the world.
Thus, when the North Koreans land in San Francisco, those of us on the East Coast can’t say to California—“tough break, but you’re on your own.” We’re part of a mutual protection pact requiring us to be there for the Californians so they’ll be there for us when legions of crack Eurotroopers descend on Washington, bent on forcing us to take a month’s vacation every year and drive around in poky little fuel-efficient cars. We Americans pay into a common system for our mutual protection. We’re all in it together, in that sense.
But we Americans are in a different position with regard to oppressed citizens of other countries. We are not pledged to defend their lives, liberty and property—they’re not part of the pact. Consider Iraq: assume for the sake of argument what appears to be the case, that the Baathist Regime was no threat to American national security. If so, then going to war to liberate Iraq was an act of foreign policy altruism, coercively funded, like all acts of state altruism. Altruistic war has no more justification than any more conventional foreign aid program. We can speak out against the crimes of an oppressive regime, we can urge our fellow citizens to give to the cause of the oppressed—we can even join libertarian Lincoln Brigades and march to war (right behind Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and other neoconservative hawks, no doubt). But taxing Americans or otherwise restricting their liberty in order to protect those outside of the social contract violates our fellow citizens’ rights.
You can answer, with Lysander Spooner, “what social contract? I never signed any contract.” Which is fair enough. But that doesn’t get you to a libertarian justification for altruistic regime change. If anything, it proves too much by implying that even taxing Americans for the defense of America is illegitimate—let alone taxing us for the liberation and transformation of the Middle East. Having debunked the moral foundation of even a limited state, the libertarian interventionist can’t go from there to arguing for a more ambitious form of government bent on spreading liberty abroad. He'll need another justification for the state, and other reasons to say that nondefensive war-to-spread-liberty is libertarian. And there are powerful reasons to think it's not, such as the non-aggression axiom [which I'll discuss in the next post].
LIBERTARIAN INTERVENTIONISM: WILL IT LIBERATE?
Franklin Harris's recent post "Dictatress of the World" reminds me that I've been meaning to post an article I wrote a while back on the subject of libertarian interventionism. The article was for Liberty magazine which, sadly, doesn't have much of a web presence. But I'll put it up here, broken up into four medium-sized chunks. Here's the intro:
Despite the cliché, September 11th didn’t “change everything”; it did, however, change George W. Bush’s approach to foreign policy. On campaign trail 2000, Bush disparaged nation-building and called for a foreign policy based on the American national interest. But in the aftershock of 9/11, his administration embraced an ambitious set of foreign policy goals that goes far beyond eradicating the Al Qaeda threat. The National Security Strategy adopted by the Bush administration last year proclaims that “the United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe.” The war with Iraq, sold to the American people as a vital matter of national security, quickly morphed into “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” As evidence that Iraq had the means or the inclination to attack us has failed to surface, the administration has accordingly leaned ever more heavily on the benefits the war brought to the Iraqi people. And we now have 2,300 Marines poised off the coast of Liberia, where nothing resembling a national security interest presents itself.
Advocates and opponents of the new policy are calling it “imperialism,” but the irreplaceable Michael Kelly, killed in Iraq last April while working as an embedded reporter, coined a more accurate term. Kelly called the new approach “armed evangelism for the freedom of men.”
President Bush isn’t alone in his post-September 11th penchant for armed evangelism. Many libertarians are publicly and privately warming up to an aggressive foreign policy aimed at “building a free world sooner rather than later,” as Reason’s Ron Bailey puts it. It’s not hard to understand why armed evangelism might appeal to libertarians, or to any friend of freedom. If we hold it to be a self evident truth that all men are created equal, then why should some men have their faces ground into the dirt based on accident of birth? Even if, like me, you’re convinced that Saddam Hussein was never a threat to the United States, you’d have to have a cold, dead heart not to thrill when the bastard’s statues came down.
But even though armed evangelism aims at the freedom of men, it’s not libertarian, and libertarians should be loathe to embrace it. It departs from the libertarian tradition in several important respects. I’ll trace several of those departures, in ascending order of significance.
Thursday, January 8, 2004
THIS IS DISGUSTING
The Stupid Party and the Evil Party (which one's which again?) want the fuzz to pull you over if you're not buckled up. Hillary! Clinton and John Warner are cosponsoring a bill that will push the states to adopt "primary enforcement" seat belt laws. As Eric Peters explains on the American Spectator site today: "Primary enforcement means the police can screech out of alleyways, turn on their sirens and pull you over, hands on their guns, spotlight in your face -- simply for failing to wear your seat belt."
What's also disgusting is the Hillary-in-S & M-gear graphic that graces the Spectator front page today. Mmmm: thanks for that image, guys.
Wednesday, January 7, 2004
SKETCHES OF MASS DESTRUCTION
The Washington Post reports that "Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper." WMD hunter David Kay "declined to be interviewed."
Meanwhile, someone claiming to be Osama Bin Laden continues to spread disinformation about Al Qaeda's alliance with Saddam Hussein, calling the deposed Iraqi dictator the Gulf states' "comrade in treason and agentry to the United States."
Saturday, January 3, 2004
NEOCONSPIRACY THEORY
I sure wish we could get beyond this dishonest, debate-squelching notion that "neocon" is a code-word for "Jew." Folks on the political Right, veterans all of campus affirmative action debates where ideological opposition automatically prompts charges of racism, ought to know better than to engage in this sort of well-poisoning tactic. Yet it's increasingly becoming a favorite trick of conservatives, as witnessed by Joel Mowbray's recent column intimating that retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni is a closet brownshirt:
Discussing the Iraq war with the Washington Post last week, former General Anthony Zinni took the path chosen by so many anti-Semites: he blamed it on the Jews.
As Mowbray has it, Zinni has committed blood libel by charging that the President's foreign policy has been hijacked by administration neocons, whom Mowbray charges "everybody knows" are Jewish. Personally, I didn't know that Douglas Feith was Jewish and didn't care. Next thing you're going to tell me that Lewis "Scooter" Libby--Dick Cheney's chief of staff and a PNAC member who's usually ID'd as a leading neocon--is Jewish. Well, I don't believe it. No self-respecting Jewish man would adopt a WASPy moniker like "Scooter." He sounds like the preppy villain in a John Hughes film--you know, the kind of guy who tells Andrew McCarthy not to date Molly Ringwald because she comes from the wrong side of the tracks. Is State Department neocon John R. Bolton Jewish? Do right-wingers really expect war critics to go through the distasteful task of vetting last names like early 20th century Ivy League admissions officials before they dare to breathe the word "neocon"?
Anybody who follows politics can name a host of neocons who aren't Jewish: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak, Pat Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, Bill Bennett. But certainly there are many prominent Jewish neoconservatives. Name me an important intellectual movement of the 20th century where that's not the case. Do Nozick, Rand and Friedman make "libertarian" a code-word for "Jew"?
In any event, to the extent there's an ethno-religious component to the current debates over foreign policy, it isn't driven by Jewish Americans, who tend to have more moderate views on preemptive war and the Middle East than the country as a whole. The more interesting story is the apocalyptic vision shared by many on the Christian Right. I liked them a lot better when all they wanted was prayer in school.
Friday, December 19, 2003
DEAN: AN ECHO, NOT A CHOICE?
From Dean's major foreign policy address on Monday: "I have supported U.S. military action to roll back Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, to halt ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, [and] to stop Milosevic's campaign of terror in Kosovo...."
Now, I guess that's not surprising. But Dean's argument against the Iraq war has focused on the idea (I'd say, the fact) that Iraq was never a national security threat. Well, it wasn't a national security threat in 1991 either, and Clinton's half-hearted argument that we had national security interests in Serbia amounted to "well, World War One started over there somehow when somebody killed some archduke or something." And if ethnic cleansing and terror argued for war over Kosovo, it's pretty hard to see why they didn't in the case of Hussein, who made Milosevic look like Niles Crain.
There's nothing in the rest of the speech that provides any kind of bold new foreign policy vision either. Spend more on foreign aid. Do more to wipe out AIDS in Africa. Work with our allies and don't tick them off gratuitously. Snore.
I'm rooting for Dean because he seems angry about something, and I'd like to see a fight, rather than a Clinton-Dole 1996-style lovefest in 2004. But the idea that he'd be a marked improvement over Bush is tough to credit. As somebody put it once, government's a massive runaway freight train careening towards disaster. Every four years we have a big to-do over who gets to sit up in the front car and pretend they're driving. It's hard to get excited about that.
Sunday, December 14, 2003
SADDAM'S CAPTURE
It's about time this war saw a good day, and it's always a good day when you see a once-mighty tyrant looking like a bedraggled drunk rousted from the bus station. I hope we turn him over to the Iraqis and I hope they hang him high.
I also hope this improves our chances for a rapid and dignified exit. And maybe now we can work on capturing that other guy, you know, the one that attacked us. As former CIA counter-terrorism chief Vince Cannistraro told ABCNEWS in September, the hunt for Saddam was impeding the hunt for Bin Laden:
"'If you've drawn off many if not all of your Arabic language resources and sent them off to Iraq you're shorthanded in terms of dealing with intelligence collection problem of fixing bin Laden's location,' said Cannistraro. 'So there are fewer resources to deal with in trying to basically find and capture, the principal leader of a terrorist organization that's killing Americans.'"
Thursday, December 11, 2003
"THINGS NEVER WORK OUT QUITE AS YOU HOPE"
I'm informed by James Markels that in the foreward to The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader, James Q. Wilson defines the neoconservative persuasion as follows:
"Neoconservatism is an ... attitude that holds social reality to be complex and change difficult. If there is any article of faith common to almost every adherent, it is the Law of Unintended Consequences. Things never work out quite as you hope; in particular, government programs often do not achieve their objectives or do achieve them but with high or unexpected costs. ... [A] neoconservative questions change because, though present circumstances are bad and something ought to be done, it is necessary to do that something cautiously, experimentally, and with a minimum of bureaucratic authority."
Given our current plight in Iraq, the irony is painful. That appreciation of social complexity and human fallibility certainly seemed to desert the neoconservatives in the run-up to war. But now that we're stuck trying to engineer the Iraqi Great Leap Forward from a backward tribal despotism to a modern liberal democracy, we're learning a lot about "high [and] unexpected costs."
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
CONGRESSIONAL COWARDICE
David Broder had an interesting column in Sunday's Washington Post (did I really just type that?). In it, he explores who should get the blame for the post-9/11 growth of the Imperial Presidency. Through much of the 20th century, from Truman's "police action" in Korea, through Bill Clinton's "bimbo bombings," executive aggrandizement was the main cause. Presidential power in foreign policy grew as a result of unilateral action by the president, sometimes--as in the case of the 1999 Kosovo war--in defiance of Congress's refusal to authorize military action.
Broder cites constitutional scholar Louis Fisher, who says that over the last 2+ years, much of the blame for our current foreign policy dilemma can be placed on the legislative branch. He's right. Since 9/11, Congress has shirked its constitutional power over war and peace in a disgraceful orgy of buck-passing and ass-covering. When it comes to the war power, Congress has said to the president, in essence, "hey, it's your call!"
The use-of-force resolution Congress passed immediately after September 11, 2001, is a blanket delegation of authority to the president, authorizing him to make war on ''those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons'' [emphasis added]. By its plain terms, the resolution leaves it to the president to decide when the evidence that a target nation has cooperated with al-Qaeda justifies war. It's an invitation to abuse, and it's amazing that it hasn't been abused thus far, to justify war with other nations on the neocon hit list.
Similarly, after voting for the Iraq war resolution, which gave the president all the authority he needed to attack, prominent members of Congress insisted that they hadn't really voted to use force. To this day, John Kerry justifies his vote for the Iraq war by saying he wanted to empower the president to end the impasse peacefully--even though the resolution authorized military action and would be used by the president as the equivalent of a declaration of war. Luckily, Kerry seems to be paying a political price for his gutlessness.
There's been executive aggrandizement aplenty in the last two years--this is, after all, a president who claims the right to summarily declare American citizens "enemy combatants" and lock them up forever. But as Fisher notes, much of our current predicament can be blamed on congressional cowardice and dereliction of duty.
Tuesday, December 9, 2003
GUEST BLOGGER GREETINGS
Thanks to Professor Beito for the invitation to guest-blog at L&P. I'm honored to share a space with so many libertarians I admire, not least for their recognition of the centrality of the war issue and their refusal to drop libertarianism at the water's edge.
I suppose I should say a word or two about myself. I work quite happily as senior editor at the Cato Institute, though in anything I write here or on my own website, I'm speaking for myself, not my employer. I also live inside the Beltway, though my neighborhood looks more like El Salvador than K Street. I prefer it that way.
I know, I'm supposed to say how awful it is to live and work in Washington D.C. But I like it. If you've got a sense of humor and a taste for the grotesque--which you'd better if you make your living following politics--living in D.C. gives you ringside seats. Besides, liberty isn't totally dead in the nation's capital. We still allow smoking in bars.
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