Signing off.
Well, folks, it's time for me to go and head off for a long weekend on the North Carolina coast. Hopefully Josh will return from his vacation with a post or two for you later today. It's been a real pleasure to write for this audience, read all your emails, and even get a chance to respond to a few of them. Apologies if I didn't manage to get back to you on something or other -- the volume of correspondence TPM generates gets a bit frightening at times and I've been trying to hold down my day job.
Ordinarily, you can find me both at The American Prospect in various forms and TPM Café.
To sum up my main points over the past week -- peanut butter is bad, invading Iran would be bad, all these dudes telling lies to try to get us to go to war with Iran are bad, global warming is bad, exaggerating the difficulty of stopping global warming is bad, the government of Tunisia is bad, nativists are bad, and letting telecoms run amok is bad. Massive corruption is also bad, but we leave that up to Paul and Justin.
I'll try to return from vacation with some local color from Red America. I hear they hate George W. Bush down there, too, these days.
--Matthew Yglesias
Give Jamison Foser's long, well-argued rant about the media a read.
Via Greg Sargent.
--Matthew Yglesias
To talk, or not to talk? Apparently, at least some members of the administration are contemplating a rational Iran policy, though naturally Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are opposed.
--Matthew Yglesias
As a relatively junior member of our fair nation's punditocracy, I face these little dilemmas in life. Jacob Weisberg is the editor of Slate. I see myself as the kind of guy who might write for Slate. Do I point out that he's being ridiculous here? I think that I do, but how's that going to work out for me in the long-run?
Let me also note that the basic premise of all these politicians' iPod articles is pretty odd. There are 5,171 songs on my iPod at the moment -- I couldn't possibly name them all in an interview, nor could anyone else using their device properly. For the record, though, I have Rolling Stones songs and Beatles songs, which Weisberg appears to believe could not possibly represent anyone's authentic tastes. Intriguingly, Tim Lee points out that according to the RIAA President Bush, Senator Clinton, and everyone else who's ripped a Beatles CD and put it on their iPod is a criminal.
--Matthew Yglesias
Rep. William Jefferson's (D-LA) former aide sentenced to eight years in prison.
--Paul Kiel
Congress v. FBI, Round 2.... Despite Bush's intervention yesterday, it looks like this is a fight that's going to go on for a while.
--Paul Kiel
Karl Zinmeister, until recently editor of The American Enterprise magazine and just hired as a White House domestic policy advisory caught doctoring his own quotes.
--Matthew Yglesias
Excellent. Krugman to the rescue! Some people have been understanding me as trying to make an anti-environmentalist point about global warming, arguing that it's no big deal or something. On the contrary, what I've been trying to say is that while global warming is a big deal, taking action on carbon emissions would actually be significantly less costly than most people seem to think. But don't take it from me -- listen to Paul Krugman: "There's some dispute among economists over how forcefully we should act to curb greenhouse gases, but there's broad consensus that even a very strong program to reduce emissions would have only modest effects on economic growth. At worst, G.D.P. growth might be, say, one-tenth or two-tenths of a percentage point lower over the next 20 years."
That's not nothing. One tenth of a percentage point of growth over 20 years adds up to a lot of money. But it's not a crushing burden, either. People 20 years from now would still be significantly wealthier than people today. And it's not as if our current policies are perfectly growth-maximizing anyway, so doing better on other fronts (health care, say) could easily pick up the slack caused by the negative growth effects of tackling global warming. What's more, the economic consequences of warming itself could be extremely dire and even under optmistic scenarios would cause at least some costly problems so it's not as if there's some free ride alternative option.
--Matthew Yglesias
In the spirit of self-promotion, I have a new (and short) BloggingHeads.tv segment up here talking with Julian Sanchez about immigration and network neutrality.
--Matthew Yglesias
That whole thing about Hastert being investigated by the FBI? It could "wash out" and "be nothing," says ABC News' Brian Ross, who broke the story. Ross isn't a lesbian -- but the radio personality who interviewed Rep. Bob Ney's (R-OH) Democratic challenger is, and Ney wants the world to know. This and more, in today's Daily Muck.
--Justin Rood
I'm in some ways not an objective source, but the new issue of The American Prospect has a fantastic story about Iran 2003 diplomatic initiative toward the United States in which they made a very favorable offer and expressed willingness to at least talk about anything in exchange, basically, for the United States agreeing to halt various efforts to overthrow the Iranian government or impoverish the country. Needless to say, the administration rejected the opening.
As Jim Henley observes, "If the United States goes to war with Iran, it will be because the White House really wants a war with Iran."
It's still not clear exactly what the White House does want, but Charles Krauthammer most certainly does want a war with Iran. One thing that's notable, I think, is that Krauthammer's wracking up a real record of misleading his readers on the Iran question. Consequently, while it's obvious to me that he wants a war, I genuinely can't tell why he wants one. The arguments he offers all depend on falseholds at crucial steps.
--Matthew Yglesias
Time for another blogger ethics panel?
Two days ago, TownHall.com published a column by Elliot Peace supporting Ralph Norman's campaign against Democratic Rep. John Spratt in the South Carolina fifth. Peace is identified as "a Townhall.com political reporter and a Project Manager for Starboard Communications, a conservative political marketing and strategy firm in Lexington, South Carolina."
Laurin Manning points out that they don't tell you about the 13 grand the Norman campaign has paid to Starboard.
--Matthew Yglesias
Doug Feith is apparently having some trouble fitting in on the Georgetown faculty. I don't really understand why you would hire the single most discredited official from an administration full of discredited officials. Maybe the idea was that at least Feith excels as something.
--Matthew Yglesias
I noted this in an update to my earlier post, but a good deal of the work on the bogus yellow star story has been done by Taylor Marsh as you can see here on her site. As she says, the question still remains: "Who started the Iranian badge story?"
--Matthew Yglesias
There’s a terrific discussion going on over at the TPMCafe Book Club about Michelle Goldberg’s provocative new book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. As Jeff Sharlet observes:
We often produce smart, sometimes difficult books but not often smart books that are also short, pithy, and two-fisted. We need both -- the dense works of theory and history and the brave books such as this, rooted in reporting that attempts to understand fundamentalism on its own terms rather than dismissing it with either hysteria or condescension. Fundamentalism is real, and it's too popular to simply loathe it away -- that would mean loathing a significant portion of the nation.
--Kate Cambor
Rep. Jane Harman on Iran: "We have little clarity on Iran's capability and intentions. This is not the time to talk of war." Good for her.
Yesterday, Frank Foer semi-reported that "people who have talked this over with top administration officials say that the administration still dismisses the possibility of strikes against Iranian facilities--at least in the short term. These top administration officials, at least in private conversations, continue to profess faith in the Security Council sanctions."
This seems a little naive to me. The option of attempting to negotiate a diplomatic settlement with Iran exists. It's existed at least since the 2003 peace feelers, its existence has been reemphasized lately, and it's an option that the administration keeps rejecting. At the same time, the administration has been at pains to emphasize publicly that military options remain "on the table," and Dick Cheney and others have been describing the nature of the Iranian threat in the most hyped terms possible. Administration allies in the press have been beating the drums of war, and there's no indication that the White House is trying to get them to stop. The President clearly isn't prepared to start a war tomorrow but the logic of his policies leads to war, and he's not doing any of the things that would disabuse me of that notion. This weekend is Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer. As Andy Card would tell us, you don't really need to start marketing the war until Labor Day to use it as a campaign issue.
--Matthew Yglesias
Breaking: Murray Waas reports that Karl Rove, Robert Novak's source for learning Valerie Plame's identity, may have collaborated with the columnist to cover up his leak. Upon first learning of the federal probe into the Plame leak, Rove and Novak spoke and invented a "cover story" to hide the truth about the leak, Fitzgerald's investigators believe.
--Justin Rood
More on the peanut butter issue. Reader P.B. remarks: "I'm glad to hear that someone else out there hates peanut butter too. Everytime I tell someone that I hate peanut butter they look at me like I was dancing in the streets after 9/11. That's all." A colleague describes his own distaste for the stuff as "a great black mark on my life." My roommate loves the brownish goo, though, and will wash it down with copious glasses of stomach-churning milk.
At any rate, none peanut butter eaters of the world, unite! You are not alone, and you have nothing to lose but your chains.
I remember the first time I spent a significant period of time outside the USA. It was the summer of 1997 in Telc in the Czech Republic. An entire town without peanut butter. I was in heaven. The town square is nice, too. The world being flat and all, though, it may be available over there by now. At any rate, back to serious issues later.
--Matthew Yglesias
Here's a curious story:
A 26-year-old college dropout who carries President Bush’s breath mints and makes him peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches will follow in his boss’s footsteps this fall when he enrolls at Harvard Business School.Though it is rare for HBS—or any other professional or graduate school—to admit a student who does not have an undergraduate degree, admissions officers made an exception for Blake Gottesman, who for four years has served as special assistant and personal aide to Bush.
Now this got emailed to me from, shall we say, anti-Bush quarters. But is it really so crazy to make an exception for someone with four years' work experience as a personal aide to the President of the United States? Perhaps I've been unduly influenced by Charlie on The West Wing but this actually seems like a non-trivial job to me that he's been doing. On a personal note, I should say that I don't like peanut butter, with or without jelly, which most people regard as freakish and un-American (and I'm not sure they're wrong).
--Matthew Yglesias
Strangely, while Gregg Easterbrook's evil twin was penning churlish reviews of An Inconvenient Truth the genuine article wrote a pretty smart op-ed on global warming for The New York Times. The stuff near the end is, I think, really crucial:
Scientific substantiation of a warming world is not necessarily reason for gloom. Greenhouse gases are an air pollution problem, and all air pollution problems of the past have cost significantly less to fix than critics projected, and the solutions have worked faster than expected.During the 1960's, smog in America was increasing at a worrisome rate; predictions were that smog controls would render cars exorbitantly expensive. Congress imposed smog regulations, and an outpouring of technical advances followed. Smog emissions in the United States have declined by almost half since 1970, and the technology that accomplishes this costs perhaps $100 per car.
Similarly, two decades ago a "new Silent Spring" was said to loom from acid rain. In 1991, Congress created a profit incentive to reduce acid rain: a system of tradable credits that rewards companies that make the fastest reductions. Since 1991 acid rain emissions have declined 36 percent, and the cost has been only 10 percent of what industry originally forecast.
Environmentalists, for obvious reasons, tend to emphasize the problematic elements of the current state of the environment. One unfortunate cost of this is that it sometimes leads the public to forget just how successful past interventions on behalf of the environment have been. On the global warming front, I think the biggest challenge to action hasn't actually been all this pseudo-scientific controversy about whether the problem is real. Rather, what needs to be overcome is the widely held vague view that there's nothing we can really do about it, or that anything we do do will be so catastrophically expensive as to be hopeless.
What people need to hear is that we've reduced emissions of all kinds of stuff in the past, the affected industries have always screamed doom, but it's always worked out fine.
--Matthew Yglesias
Senator and presidential aspirant John McCain (R-AZ) gives back $20,000 in donations from two brothers who once bankrolled "dirty tricks" against him. The Congressional Black Caucus is "on the verge of open revolt" because the House Democratic leadership is "picking on" Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA), whose offices were raided last weekend by the FBI. And Cheney may testify in the Scooter Libby Trial. We're firing on all cylinders in today's Daily Muck.
--Justin Rood
Credit where due! One of Andrew Sullivan's correspondents is impressed with Tunisia, leaving "with a strong sense that this is a country headed in the right direction, a place the US should be actively supporting as an emerging model in the region." He further notes, "Fortunately, it looks like we may be doing just that, thanks to Rumsfeld no less." Sullivan remarks, "Credit where it's due."
But how much credit is due? According to the State Department, "Zine El‑Abidine Ben Ali has been the president since 1987. In the October 2004 presidential and legislative elections, President Ben Ali ran against three opposition candidates and won approximately 94 percent of the popular vote." Must be a popular guy! What's more:
The government's human rights record remained poor, and the government persisted in committing serious abuses. However, the government continued to demonstrate respect for the religious freedom of minorities, as well as the human rights of women and children. The following human rights problems were reported:
- torture and abuse of prisoners and detainees
- arbitrary arrest and detention
- police impunity
- lengthy pretrial and incommunicado detention
- infringement of citizens' privacy rights
- restrictions on freedom of speech and press
- restrictions of freedom of assembly and association
You can read more here from Human Rights Watch. Tunisia's certainly a model for something, and in light of the country's long history with torture and arbitrary detention you can certainly see why Rumsfeld is a Ben Ali fan. Me, not so much. France has historically been the Tunisian regime's main backer in the West, though, so one might think American hawks would dislike it purely out of spite.
--Matthew Yglesias
Take a look at this excellent story by Larry Cohler-Esses in the Jewish Week about the bogus yellow star story. Kudos to the Anti-Defamation League for demonstrating some caution and good sense in this matter. AIPAC's been trying to get the United States to go to war with Iran for some time now, so it's hardly a surprise to see them acting in the maximally alarmist way. Nobody really expects lobbying organizations to be anything other than dishonest in pushing their agendas. The National Post, The New York Sun, and The New York Post are all supposed to be outlets for actual journalism, albeit of a conservative brand, but obviously they've decided not to go in that direction.
Late Update: Taylor Marsh also did reporting for that article, which was apparently reflected in the original version of the story and not in the one I saw online.
--Matthew Yglesias
Once again, our cynicism has been rewarded.
ABC News is reporting that Dennis Hastert is under investigation by the FBI.
--Paul Kiel
Satire is a concept that a lot of people have trouble grasping. Tom DeLay, it seems, is no exception.
--Matthew Yglesias
The trial of David Safavian began this morning, and TPMmuckraker was there. He's accused of lying and obstructing investigations related to his relationship with Jack Abramoff. What did we find? Golf, golf and more golf.
--Justin Rood
John McCain's victory strategy for Iraq: "One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit.'"
Takes one to know one, I guess.
Spencer Ackerman and Ezra Klein offer further remarks.
--Matthew Yglesias
Nathan Newman raises what I think is a weirdly neglected issue in the United States -- our artificially low supply of skilled professionals, particularly in the health services sector. Lots of qualified applicants can't get spots at nursing schools, medical schools, etc. simply because the number of places at these schools (or the number of schools) hasn't increased proportionately to growth in demand and the overall population. Training more doctors and nurses would hardly single-handedly solve the country's health care problems, but it would be helpful in implementing almost any approach one might care to try.
--Matthew Yglesias
Ed Kilgore, writing about the immigration bill wending its way through congress remarks: "While I personally favor most of those Democratic amendments that are being defeated, the compromise is worth supporting, if it could actually become law."
That seems wrong to me. The odds are overwhelming that six months from now there will be more Democrats in both the House and the Senate than there are today. That means that for the price of a small delay in time of passage, Democrats should be able to get a more progressive bill through in the next congress if nothing passes this year. If something does pass this year, a lot of the pressure for immigration reform will fade away and it'll be hard to revisit the issue. Maybe the next congress would only let us get a slightly better bill or maybe it will let us get a much better bill. It's hard -- impossible, really -- to know for sure. But it's very unlikely that we'd get a worse bill. Under the circumstances, Democrats seem to have a lot of leverage and every reason to take a hard line in negotiations.
Am I wrong? Perhaps Ed can explain his thinking in greater detail.
--Matthew Yglesias
Tim Berners-Lee, original author of many of the basic World Wide Web protocols, speaks on network neutrality at a conference in Edinburgh:
It's better and more efficient for us all if we have a separate market where we get our connectivity, and a separate market where we get our content. Information is what I use to make all my decisions. Not just what to buy, but how to vote. There is an effort by some companies in the U.S. to change this. There's an attempt to get to a situation where if I want to watch a TV station across the Internet, that TV station must have paid to transmit to me.
One of the moves in this debate is a certain amount of back-and-forth as to what the status quo is. Neutrality partisans portray themselves as trying to block a new initiative from the telecom companies. Neutrality opponents portray themselves as trying to block a new regulatory initiative. In the abstract, there's a case to be made for both characterizations of the situation, but it's hard to miss the fact that almost all (or maybe liberaly all -- I'm not quite sure how to do a precise head count) of the internet's technical pioneers see neutrality as preserving the longstanding rules of the road.
--Matthew Yglesias
Under investigation for bribery and corruption, Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) takes time out of his busy schedule to help raise money for the good-government watchdog group that's been giving him headaches. That and more in today's Daily Muck.
--Justin Rood
It seems to me that this has been pretty clear for a while, but now it's explicit -- the Iranian government wants to engage in talks about the various US-Iranian issues, including Teheran's nuclear program. If you're concerned with things like America's interests, not getting lots of people killed, and preventing Iran from going nuclear you'd take them up on the offer. I honestly don't think this is even remotely a hard question. It might not work, of course, but even that would leave us better off than we are now as the weird kid sulking in the corner refusing to talk to Billy.
Nevertheless, there's no mistaking the fact that just as Iran has been trying to at least set the stage for possibly ratcheting tensions with the United States down, there's been a fairly concerted effort in the American press to ratchet things up. The folks doing the ratcheting have, it's clear, some friends and some influence inside the administration.
People need to understand this and be clear with themselves. This is not a group of people primarily concerned with Iran's nuclear program -- anyone who thought that would be open to some negotiating. This is a group of people primarily concerned -- for whatever reason, no doubt the reasons are mixed and vary somewhat -- with continuing and intensifying US-Iranian conflict. It's not clear how influential this faction is or will be in the president's decision-making, but those of us on the outside are either with them or against them.
As recent posts from Ivo Daalder and Michael Levi indicate, there's no reason to think Democrats have anything to fear from standing up for engagement rather than war. The real political risk is that staying silent lets the other side shape people's understand of what's happening so deeply that it becomes harder to speak up later. The odds that this whole situation somehow won't come up in the midterms are low. Democrats are going to have to deal with it, and it's better to start sooner than later.
--Matthew Yglesias
All right. Looks like we're getting to the bottom of this Goebels-the-filmmaker business. Reader EF notes:
He did get involved and resented the fact that the Nazi movies lacked the snap of the Hollywood product. He desperately wanted a Nazi answer to “Gone with the Wind” and pushed for the production of “Kolberg”, a turgid depiction of a heroic siege in the Frederick the Great era (I believe). And getting involved in the UFA productions gave him a chance to hang around with and sleep with actresses. Interestingly, just about all of the major mid-century leaders were big movie fans, and most preferred the Hollywood product – including Hitler and Stalin.
Curiously, there was an “American Experience” documentary last night on PBS in New York on Goebbels, with Kenneth Branagh reading from the Goebbels Diaries. How this constituted part of the “American Experience” is a mystery even stranger than anything on “24,” the competition over on Fox.
IMDB says the heroic seige depicted in Kolberg took place during the Napoleonic Wars. The city of Kolberg is now known as Kołobrzeg after the Potsdam Conference moved Poland's border west to the Oder.
--Matthew Yglesias
Found at last -- the legendary conservative civility. Not at all like those nasty bloggers: "You don’t go see Joseph Goebbels’ films to see the truth about Nazi Germany. You don’t go see Al Gore’s films to see the truth about global warming."
Did Goebbels even make movies? He must have meant Leni Riefenstahl, right?
--Matthew Yglesias
I've been looking for a pretext to plug Greg Sargent's new blog, The Horse's Mouth, over at my other employer's growing blog empire, so let me say I liked his post on Patrick Healy's bizarre inquiry into the state of the Clintons' marriage.
Let me just also note that I find the all-too-American combination of prurience and puritanism really tiresome. Every three grafs or so you get to some point where Healy won't just say what he means. In theory, I suppose, this is to guard the delicate sensibilities of New York Times readers. In reality, it's a way for Healy and his editors to hide -- much more from themselves than from their audience -- what it is they're doing.
I don't have a problem with tabloids and celebrity gossip pages. And politicians are a kind of celebrity, after all. But real gossip sheets don't display all this shame and self-loathing. They are what they are and they just put it out there. Most of all, US Weekly doesn't pretend that its celebrity gossip is actually highbrow film criticism.
--Matthew Yglesias
Common Cause requests an investigation into links between Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) and Mitchell Wade.
--Matthew Yglesias
There's been a wave of Congressional outrage over the FBI's raid of Rep. William Jefferson's (D-LA) congressional office - yesterday Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) even promised that he'll "seek a means to restore the delicate balance of power among the branches of government that the Founders intended."
High-minded defense of the Constitution? Or Congress, with an eye toward other creeping investigations, just protecting their own?
--Paul Kiel
Via Mickey Kaus, watch Jackie Shire catch Judith Miller hyping the WMD threat from Libya. I think she just can't help herself.
--Matthew Yglesias
CIA briefer Craig Schmall and Robert Grenier a former Islamabad station chief and CIA Counterterrorist Center director to testify against Scooter Libby.
--Matthew Yglesias
Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) is the #1 recipient of lobbyist cash, according to a new report. And according to local Dems, he doesn't live in the Pennsylvania house he calls his primary residence. That, plus more reactions to and analysis of the Jefferson raid than you ever thought possible, in today's Daily Muck.
--Justin Rood
This has been implicit for some time, but Carl Hulse in The New York Times brings it to the surface -- the Democrats' efforts to run on ethics and a "culture of corruption" are, apparently, undermined by William Jefferson's transgressions. Obviously, we are seeing what everyone already knew -- that the Donkeys aren't pure as virgin snow. Certainly, Jefferson been up to no good and richly deserves punishment.
But there's no serious comparison here.
Jefferson was a corrupt freelancer . . . a more-or-less random member of congress abusing his office for personal gain. Compare this to the case of Tom DeLay, the key mover-and-shaker in the Republican caucus for many years and an important one for years before that. His muck-worthy activities not only accrued to a more significant player, but also bore a direct relationship to the creation and sustenance of the GOP machine.
Beyond DeLay, the salient point about, say, the Dukester is that his cash-for-contracts scheme was in many ways continuous with standard operating procedure for the Republican Party. It was different. But a difference of degree, not of kind. Normally, the cash comes in as campaign contributions or lobbying jobs for yourself and your retainers rather than pocket money or boats. But the public policy auction is happening at all levels. Look at the energy bill, or the farm bill, or the Medicare bill. Legislation is for sale to the highest bidder in all cases. That -- and not the fact that this or that Republican may or may not be under indictment -- is the point. And it connects up with the pattern of executive branch lawlessness and malfeasance. The overall attitude is that the institutions of government are the property of the people who happen to be holding power; power that can be deployed without constraint on behalf of its holders or their paymasters.
--Matthew Yglesias
E.J. Dionne has a great column on the endlessly annoying movement to declare English our 'official language' in some way. I would only re-emphasize that not only is it the case that "the evidence is overwhelming that Spanish speakers and their kids are as aware as anyone of the importance of learning English" but the evidence is also overwhelming that the kids of Spanish speaker do, in fact, learn English and that linguistic assimilation is total in the third generation.
--Matthew Yglesias
Fake but accurate redux? Good posts here and here on the postgame spin from the right on the yellow-stars-that-weren't-there.
--Matthew Yglesias
On the whole are illegal immigrants like slaves things, a lot of you are pointing out that many if not most illegal immigrants face serious mistreatment at the hands of their employers due to their lack of meaningful legal rights. Wholly agreed. It's worth noting, though, that Rep. Sensenbrenner doesn't propose to do anything about it. An enforcement-only approach to immigration will take current illegals from being in a bad situation to a worse one. Redressing very legitimate concerns about the treatment of otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants is one reason to support the approach Sensenbrenner rejects -- one that would make it relatively easy for illegals without criminal records to get on the path to citizenship with appropriate payment of back taxes and some kind of fine.
At any rate, Sensenbenner's one of the good guys on the net neutrality issue, so maybe he wants to bust out with an inappropriate analogy in that regard.
--Matthew Yglesias
From the annals of irony:
Bush said he would remind Western Hemisphere nations such as those that ''respect for property rights and human rights is essential,'' that ''meddling in other elections ... to achieve a short-term objective is not in the interests of the neighborhood,'' and that the United States expects other nations to stand against corruption and for transparent governance.''Let me just put it bluntly: I'm concerned about the erosion of democracy in'' Venezuela and Bolivia, he said.
I wonder what it would be like to live in a country with a corrupt ruling party and a secrecy-obsessed president who liked to meddle in other countries. How do the Bolivians put up with it?
--Matthew Yglesias
The Los Angeles Times reported some days ago that the Justice Department was investigating ties between House appropriations chief Jerry Lewis (R-CA) and his lawmaker-turned-lobbyist pal Bill Lowery. We've taken a closer look at one of the employees the two men shared -- Letitia White -- and found she has some questionable ties of her own.
--Justin Rood
It bears mentioning that Amir Taheri is an affiliate of Benador Associates, the same firm that brings you the wit and wisdom of such neocon worthies as Meyrav Wurmser, Jim Woolsey, Michael Ledeen, Victor Davis Hanson, etc. They call themselves "a highly qualified cadre of inspiring, knowledgeable speakers," I would devise a less charitable characterization.
At any rate, the curious thing about Benador is that, as the site says they are "the only public relations firm in the United States that doubles as international speakers' bureau for the experts we represent." I have no idea if they're actually the only firm that does this, but it's certainly on odd set-up in that normally we pundits are just assumed to be speaking our minds on the issues of the day. People who work at PR firms, by contrast, are doing paid advocacy for their clients, which is a different kind of thing. Did somebody hire Benador to push this story?
--Matthew Yglesias
I read this Jackson Diehl column late last night, and my first instinct was to believe he'd been sitting around, deliberately trying to figure out what would maximally infuriate me. Then I decided I must have been asleep already and it was all a bad dream. Then I got to the office this morning and it was still there, real as the pile of books on my desk. There on the stack in With All Our Might which, like Diehl, I would recommend. But Diehl doesn't actually seem interested in recommending it, instead he's using the recommendation as a pretext to engage in a lot of unsupported slurs about "Internet noise" and people who want to withdraw from Iraq. He quotes the following from Will Marshall and Jeremy Rosner as his big, substantive rebuttal to us silly Internet noise makers:
The fact that President Bush and his team have mismanaged virtually every aspect of postwar reconstruction does not justify an immediate or precipitous withdrawal. Instead we should rally the American people for an extended and robust security and reconstruction presence.
Let me be blunt: This is not an argument. This is cant. It's silly and it's insulting. If you're going to spend your time, as Diehl does, sneering at the Internet for not being substantive then you might want to put an actual substantive argument down on your precious newsprint. Where is the evidence, for example, that this plan is feasible? For that matter, what's the plan? And if President Bush and his team have mismanaged virtually every aspect of postwar reconstruction then why on God's earth would we expect them to suddenly implement a brilliant plan?
Nobody doubts that the best thing to happen for Iraq would be for the United States to put together a crackerjack "stability and democracy and ponies" plan and then put it into place. Iraq would end up stable, democratic, and everyone would have ponies. It'd be great. The trouble is that it's become very clear that nobody actually has such a plan on hand. And not, fundamentally, because they aren't thinking hard enough. The issue is that there are actual limits to what our troops can accomplish. They're soldiers, not magicians. They can't conjure up a sense of national identity or widespread social support for liberalism.
What Iraq needs is a political settlement among the important factions such that everyone would prefer living under the terms of the agreements to fighting with each other. Absent such an agreement, the American military can't "fix" Iraq. Given such an agreement, the American military would be superfluous.
--Matthew Yglesias
New York Post relays the already debunked "yellow star" story. Jim Henley remarks:
They made it up. Taheri and The Post ran a provably false report, on their own initiative or at the behest of some publicity-shy agency of some government or other, played in as inflammatory way as possible. Why? So that months from now, someone hearing about plans to bomb Iran, or seeing footage of bombing on TV, will say to themselves, “Didn’t I read that Iran was going to round up all the Jews and make them wear yellow stars like the Nazis? Something like that. Well, good riddance.” All the story had to do was live long enough to get into circulation.
Can't have a war without a good disinformation campaign.
--Matthew Yglesias
Dinners at Washington, D.C.'s Citronelle, one of the nation's top restaurants, should be memorable -- especially when they're shared by a guy who passes you $32,000 in bundled campaign contributions. So why does Rep. Katherine Harris keep forgetting about them? That and more in today's Daily Muck.
--Justin Rood
All the mucky details from the FBI's case against Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA).
--Paul Kiel
Jim Sensenbrenner on Face the Nation: people who hire illegal immigrants are "21st century slave masters . . . just as immoral as the 19th century slave masters we had to fight a civil war to get rid of."
Mark Kilmer at Red State calls it "a dangerous analogy." John Podhoretz sees "insane moral equivalence." Even John Derbyshire thinks it's "dumb."
But this isn't a new kick for Sensenbrenner. Here he is in March 2006: "Those who hire large numbers of illegal aliens are the 21st-century slave masters. And in my opinion, that's just as immoral as the 19th-century slave masters we had to fight a civil war to get rid of."
Has he said it before? Has he even thought for a minute about this analogy? As Jonah Goldberg ("absurd and more than a little depressing") observes, the only way this could begin to make sense is if someone's covered up "some sweeping historical episode in which millions of Africans snuck into the country for the 'opportunity' to be slaves." Now anyone can say something thoughtless, but as I say Sensenbrenner's used the analogy previously. And he's the House GOP's lead guy on immigration issues.
--Matthew Yglesias
During the current immigration debate, a lot of conservatives have suddenly discovered that the president sometimes uses deception as a public relations tactic. Jonathan Chait observes:
This outbreak of unflattering conservative insights suggests two possibilities. The first is that, until this moment, Bush never used dishonest tactics to frame his views and those of his critics, and conservative activists never displayed a fanatical aversion to compromise. Somehow, though, Bush and the conservatives are suddenly using tactics against each other that they were too honest and thoughtful to use against the Democrats.The second possible interpretation is that they've been like this all along, and the conservatives are only starting to notice because for once they're on the receiving end.
I know which interpretation I'm going with.
It sure is hard to decide.
--Matthew Yglesias
Wow. Fred Barnes' role as a press aide for Karl Rove masquerading as a journalists is well known, but this is absurd: "a national consensus has formed around what the president calls "comprehensive" immigration reform--that is, impenetrable border security plus earned citizenship and a temporary worker program." Anyone who's been paying the slightest bit of attention to American politics would know that's wrong; all three of those things, either alone or in combination, remain deeply, deeply controversial.
For what it's worth, my view is that Democrats ought to be doing their best to ensure that intra-GOP divisions prevent a bill from passing this year. Nobody knows exactly how the midterms will play out, but Dems are all-but-certain to pick up some seats and be able to pass a bill in 2007 that's better than any possible compromise in the current congress.
--Matthew Yglesias
More Gore. The email is pouring in! I have, in fact, been able to locate some Gore haters. A larger number of emails, however, are strongly pro-Gore. An even larger, however, tell a narrative of intense disappointment at Gore's performance during the 2000 election campaign and, especially, bitterness about his failure to more vigorously contest the results in Florida followed by a period of re-enamorment over the past several years. I think I would put myself into this latter camp, so combining personal sentiments with anecdotal evidence, I conclude that Gore would have no serious bitterness-and-anger problem would he choose to run. Rather, the challenges a Gore campaign would face are about what one would expect -- he's not a great public speaker, the press seems to hate him, and it's not clear how much money he could raise.
I've been a bit surprised, however, to see how prominent a role complaints about the Parents Music Resource Center have played in statements by anti-Gore people. I've expended many pixels over the past couple of years defending indecency and so forth, so that business definitely annoys me. I can't say, however, that I find it especially significant. The censorious impulse lamentable but not, fundamentally, of the same order of importance as questions like war, health care, global warming, etc. I also don't think we're going to see a non-busybody candidate in this regard emerge, since one of the things Hillary Clinton's been up to recently is pushing for regulation of video games and so forth.
Late Update: See further remarks from Reed Hundt and Todd Gitlin.
--Matthew Yglesias
Things just got unbelievably worse for Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA), whose Washington office was raided last night.
Hint: the FBI has disclosed portions of "coded" conversations that Jefferson had with their informant.
Update: More details from John Bresnahan at Roll Call.
--Paul Kiel
I'm certainly not prepared to make an endorsement at this point, but let's just say that I like Al Gore a great deal and especially the things he's been doing over the past several years. Various people are talking him up as a potential 2008 presidential candidate (see my colleague Ezra Klein's American Prospect article in this regard) which seems sensible to me.
Now, along comes Mark Leibovich in The New York Times with a piece on Gore arguing that if he runs, he'll be "deeply stigmatized" in the eyes of many Democrats because of his loss in 2000. The curious thing is that he can't seem to find anyone who actually feels that way. Elaine Kamarck says she's "always been puzzled by all the hostility to Gore, especially after he was essentially robbed of the election" but nobody quoted in the article expresses any hostility to Gore, only puzzlement at the hostility that allegedly exists and belief that said possibility might be defused.
Now, to be clear, I don't want to be doing one of these blogger slams on someone in the MSM. For all I know, there's a deep wellspring of anti-Gore sentiment lurking out there someplace. But I haven't stumbled on it, and I don't see it in the Times piece. Are there Gore-haters out there? Are you one? Inquiring minds want to know.
--Matthew Yglesias
I don't really believe that "incompetence" -- as opposed to the invasion being a fundamentally unsound idea -- has been the source of our problems in Iraq, but if it's evidence of incompetence and bungled you want, this New York Times article about Iraq's police has it in spades. Bernard Kerik tells us he was given ten days notice and no guidance before being sent to Iraq to head up the creation of a police force. "Looking back, I really don't know what their plan was," Kerik says, and he apparently 'prepared' for the job by watching shows about Saddam on A&E.
And of course why was Kerik given the job in the first place? Even if you want to be give maximum credit to the Giuliani administration for reducing New York City's crime level, Kerik obviously wasn't the key figure there. And even if you do somehow want to give Kerik credit for the whole thing, this experience had literally nothing to do with the job at hand. Most people, of course, have no experience whatsoever with training and building foreign police forces. But some people do! This wasn't a task that had never been attempted before, the administration just decided to go with a crowd-pleasing, headline-making pick rather than doing something boring like finding someone who might have some idea of how to do the job.
--Matthew Yglesias
The six months itch. You may recall having seen something about the FAIR report into how whatever day it is, Tom Friedman always thinks the next sixth months will be the decisive ones in Iraq. Atrios reminds us that he's hardly the only one who's been pulling this kind of thing. Will Marshall said, 28 months ago, that "America has about six months to break the resistance and give the new Iraqi government a fighting chance to survive. It would help if our leaders stopped casting anxious glances toward the exits." When that didn't happen, though, he didn't change his tune.
Beyond poking fun at people, there's a serious issue here. Voters are upset about how things are going in Iraq. So Democrats want to criticize the Bush Iraq policy. This means they must agree that things are going very badly in Iraq. But the consultant class along with various others has determined that calling for withdrawal is a losing strategy. Consequently, Democrats find themselves arguing that Iraq is perpetually on the brink of total disaster as a result of Bush's policies, but never, ever, ever actually goes over the tipping point of becoming the sort of lost cause where the main American goal has to be cutting our losses.
The resulting rhetoric is deeply, deeply foolish.
I don't know if the contradictions it leads to are a political problem, per se. What it reflects, however, is precisely the reflex that's been crippling Democrats ever since 9/11 -- a refusal to step back and figure out what they really think before calling in the pollsters and so forth to figure out what to say about it. This is a policy that's driven by a weird combination of timidity and partisanship and that's precisely the thing voters doubt about Democrats' ability to run the country. But the big, bad scary Bush of 2002 is gone. The new unpopular Bush won't even be on the ballot again. Everyone needs to take a deep breath and start saying what they mean, and offering some arguments in good faith.
--Matthew Yglesias
