This piece blasting Frank Rich for being insufficiently anti-war illustrates the aggrieved attitude of frustrated entitlement on the left. Its message is: We've been right all along. We ate it when Kerry ran. Never again.

Yes, let's trash Frank Rich. No columnist has except Paul Krugman has so consistently devoted himself to ripping the Bush presidency, week after week, with a gusto that was quite entertaining before it got so repetitive. Rich's focus has gotten so laser-like he has even dropped the forced, framing pop cultural allusions (low point: The Day After Tomorrow captures the national mood) in favor of all-out scornful invective!

Rich is accused of "triangulation," the worst of Clintonian sins in the eyes of both hardcore liberals and conservatives - making this a shot across Hillary's bow as well. But triangulation is the only thing that might save the Democratic Party here - and the U.S. effort in Iraq. If some sensible pullout plan can be engineered that holds some promise of self-government and stability, it is the best course between the Bush's mindless "stay the course" and the left's strategically dangerous "get out now." But as Rich notes, the right will tag any such policy, no matter how sensible, as cutting and running. How can the Democrats address this problem? With some grownup Republicans fretting over this, bipartsanship holds the most promise both for an actual withdrawal policy and for a political way forward for Democrats. Unless the left, flush with Sheehanesque righteousness, makes that impossible.

Wash Your Bowl

Lemann's point of view is of the thoughtful, fair minded liberal intellectual meeting a man and a cultural phenomenon. Hewitt's point of view (at least as Lemann presents it) is that Lemann's approach is essentially dishonest, masking a tissue of political biases and attitudes.

Of course there is no real comparison between these takes. Hewitt is a hack whose political agenda determines everything he does. Lemann's journalism is interesting because it's unpredictable.

Lemann portrays Hewitt as unencumbered by reflection or doubt, genially multitasking his way through the day, spreading conservative memes via radio, the web and TV. But he bends over backwards not to condescend or dismiss - at one point going a bit too far in insisting on Hewitt's independence from the conservative echo chamber.

In most interesting part of the piece, Lemann watches Hewitt grill Dana Milbank of the Washington Post on his radio show. Hewitt is right about one thing: the MSM does tend toward self-deception. It purports to be fair and politically detached, but attitude - especially anti-Bush attitude - seeps into the coverage, which journalists then preposterously deny. Hewitt delights in exposing this, twisting his prey - even the redoubtable Milbank - into knots.

But if the piece illustrates one thing, it's the essential rigidity of the conservative media enterprise - something that will one day be its downfall. Hewitt's belief that politics determines everything - that it is everything - sounds little different from the guiding principals of various Marxist-Leninists and ivory tower liberals he despises. They had their day, he'll have his. With luck the Lemanns of the world will survive them all.

washyourbowl.blogspot.com

The conservative media machine has opened up a new front: children's books. There's a real book debuting called Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under my Bed!

From the press release:

The full-color picture book tells the story of two brothers who open a lemonade stand only to encounter a Kennedy-esque mayor determined to tax away their profits while a pants-suit clad Hillary outlaws sugary drinks and an ACLU lawyer confiscates their picture of Jesus.

"With left-wing books like 'Rainbow Fish' and 'King & King' flooding our nation's classrooms, 'Liberals Under My Bed' lets conservative parents share a story with their kids that reflects their values, while having fun doing it," says [publisher] World Ahead president Eric M. Jackson. "Not only is it important to teach kids about the American Dream, they must also understand that there are people out there who don't believe in freedom and traditional values."

Rainbow Fish a liberal plot to destroy America? Who knew?

washyourbowl.blogspot.com

Kevin Drum gets at a central failing of the Bush presidency (I know, there's a lot to choose from, bear with me) in this post about David Frum's critique of the mind-numbing repetitivenss of Bush's Iraq speeches.

Drum suggests several modest but substantive things Bush could do - encourage people to enlist, let gays serve openly in the military, come up with a real energy plan. Of course, none of these things will happen because each disturbs some segment of Bush's carefully-assembled, Rove-approved 51 percent majority (which ceased to exist not long after election day, but never mind that now):

If Bush isn't willing to take even a single one of these modest steps and run the risk of annoying even a single one of the interest groups that support him, why should any of the rest of us take his "central front in the war on terror" seriously? Obviously he doesn't.

True leadership sometimes means rising above politics. That confers credibility in tough scrapes like the Iraq war - a sense that the leader in question can see the world in three dimensions. But Bush is so vested in not doing anything that suggests political weakness or doing something his political enemies might want, he's trapped. It's bad news for Iraq, and for us.

Since before the whole Iraq mess began, the right has held a near-monopoly on emotion in the public sphere in the form of chest-thumping patriotic anger about 9/11. For a brief period that anger was a truly unifying national sentiment, but then Bush ... well, you know the rest. His politicization of 9/11 and the Iraq war has been both cynical and, well, sentimental to the core. Strip away all the arguments about WMD or terrorism or democracy and the whole Iraq war is just an emotional, gut-response by Bush&Co. They wanted to kick someone's butt, and Saddam was available. Their mastery of this post 9/11 psychological landscape - even in the face of their Keystone Kops performance in an actual war - has helped the GOP maintain its grip on power.

But politically speaking, do liberals really need or want to go head-to-head with Bush in a contest of righteous anger? As a short-term tactic, maybe it works because it does crystallize a lot of disquiet about Iraq. And as a genuine expression of grief it is entirely legitimate. But what does it really mean? Not much, Jonathan Chait argues:

The left seems to be embracing the notion of moral authority in part as a tactical response to the right. For years, conservatives have said or implied that if you criticize a war, you hate the soldiers. During the Clinton years, conservatives insisted that the president lacked "moral authority" to send troops into battle because he had avoided the draft as a youth or, later, because he lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

So adopting veterans or their mourning parents as spokesmen is an understandable counter-tactic. It was a major part of the rationale behind John Kerry's candidacy. The trouble is, plenty of liberals have come to believe their own bleatings about moral authority. Liberal blogs are filled with attacks on "chicken hawk" conservatives who support the war but never served in the military. A recent story in the antiwar magazine Nation attacked my New Republic editor, Peter Beinart, a supporter of the Iraq war, for having "no national security experience," as if Nation editors routinely served in the Marine Corps.

The silliness of this argument is obvious. There are parents of dead soldiers on both sides. Conservatives have begun trotting out their own this week. What does this tell us about the virtues or flaws of the war? Nothing.

The Defense Department could respond to widespread abuse of its detainees by putting a stop to torture and holding the brass who enable it accountable. Instead, it's decided the way to go is to crack down on adulterers.

What else to make of the strange case of Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, whom the Army pulled from duty because he had an extramarital affair with a civilian:

Having an extramarital affair can be deemed adultery and a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. But such cases rarely go to court-martial and usually end in administrative punishment such as a letter of reprimand, according to military lawyers. Relieving a general of his command amid such allegations is extremely unusual, especially given that he was about to retire.

The Army has been hurt over the past year by detainee-abuse cases and has been accused of not going after top officers allegedly involved in such abuse. Army officials said relieving Byrnes was meant to show the public that the service takes issues of integrity seriously.

"We all swear to serve by the highest ideals, and no matter what rank, when you violate them, you are dealt with appropriately," said one Army officer familiar with the case. "Relief of command is a huge consequence. He's had an extraordinary career, but at the end of the day, the Army has to hold people accountable for their conduct."

Josh has been focusing on the latest Abramoff scandalette, especially his Guam clients' unorthodox method of paying him $326,000 in $9,000 increments, apparently to avoid IRS reporting requirements.

Abramoff's activities recall an episode from season 4 of The Sopranos. Carmela, fearing for her own financial security, swipes $50K that Tony has stashed in a backyard bin.

Here's how TWOP describes it:

Anyway, now we go to Carmela, who is counting out cash at her local bank. She's investing precisely $9,900, and the broker is nice enough to inform her that he's required to tell the IRS about any transaction of $10,000 or more. "Oh, really?" wonders Carmela, before opening her notebook to reveal that she's made four other identical deposits. "I want it in something safe," she adds. "Something old economy."

See also this recent story from USA Today:

BUFFALO — Bill Herberger, an 80-year-old former American Legion commander, didn't vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton when she won a Senate seat in 2000.

But when Clinton finished her pitch to save the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station from closure before the federal base-closing commission last month, the Swormville, N.Y., man and hundreds of other veterans, reservists and military family members roared their approval.

"I will tell you that I didn't support her, because I didn't think she'd be supportive on issues like this," Herberger says. "And I will tell you that I will vote for her next time. She's been absolutely marvelous."

Hillary and her people are really smart. At a time when the political center is up for grabs, they are seeding the media with messages linking her to the center. Will it work?

washyourbowl.blogspot.com

One of the striking things about Bush's Supreme Court choice is that he tends to tolerate, if not outright dislike, people with CVs like Roberts' – establishment types who followed well-trod paths to success, covering their walls with Ivy League diplomas, Phi Beta Kappa keys and the like. Bush has all but shut them out of the upper levels of the executive branch, surrounding himself instead with killer political operatives, loyalists and movement conservatives.

Bush has always been viscerally at odds with the Republican wing of the Eastern Establishment embodied by his father and grandfather. Roberts is one those guys that Bush would have resented in college and mistrusted afterward: the kind of man his family wanted him to be, when of course he wasn't. Of course this is the familiar psychodramatic explanation for the entire Bush 43 presidency.

Cliched as it may be, that explanation has been a pretty reliable predictor of Bush behavior - up to now. So what's going on here? Why is Bush acting reasonably rather than provocatively, and seemingly going against his own instincts – both his yen for ideological/political confrontation and his disdain for the establishment? Could the long-term necessities of establishing a legacy finally be trumping Bush's gut?

If she is indeed Bush's choice, Edith Brown Clement appears to be pretty un-Bork-like, and more Souter- or Kennedy-like - on other words, someone Democrats would find it hard to oppose. But she could also turn out to be a right-wing Souter. In any case nominating her would be uncharacteristically non-confrontational for the Bush White House. I thought they wanted a huge partisan nuclear conflagration. Though wearying, that usually seems to work for them, and they really need something right now to distract the masses from Rove, Iraq et al. So not clear what's going on here. Is Bush actually going to do something subtle?

Rove partisans are exploiting what appears to have been a round-robin of dishing between reporters and the White House over Plame and her role in shipping her husband off to Niger, and today's spin and leaks are weaving a giant fuzzball around it. Did Novak reveal Valerie Plame's name to Rove? Did he call Rove not vice versa? Were Cooper and Rove talking welfare reform or Niger? Was Karl just helpfully waving Cooper off the misperception that Wilson was believable? Did Judy Miller spill the beans or did someone spill them to her?

On the other hand, the liberal/Democratic line (i.e., Rove is a criminal/traitor) is premature. We don't know if he will be charged or someone else - or anyone. We don't know to what niche in the upper echelons of government Fitzgerald has traced the Plame gossip. We don't know what statutes are involved, or if the potential crime is revealing her identity or a subsequent cover-up or perjury - or something else.

Beyond the fact that this is a serious investigation that will likely end with someone being charged or copping a plea, there just isn't enough information publicly available to make a judgment from the outside on legal culpability. This basic absence of hard information is feeding the spin.

Does that mean Democrats should stand down in the face of furious Rovian spin? Well, no. But in their quiet moments they should take a step back and contemplate what we do and don't know, because there are probably more surprises ahead.

Daniel Drezner notes that with the disappearance of traditional forms of bipartisanship – and their replacement by occasional alignments between ideologues of both parties - it was inevitable that the open trade agenda would be undermined:

The shifting politics of trade and immigration are another, more prenicious example of this new bipartisanship, by the way. Trade was your classic centrist issue that generated support from centrists on both sides of the aisle. Today, liberal Democrats oppose trade expansion and relatively open immigration because they fear the effects on unions and the working class. Conservative Republicans oppose trade expansion and relatively open immigration because of fears about global interdependence and the loss of sovereignty.

The result: a weakening Congressional support for an open economy.

How can Democrats recapture the initiative on trade and put a progressive stamp on the issue? I don't mean blocking all trade agreements, but finding a way to incorporate progressive concerns into an open trade agenda. This is one of the biggest emerging issues of global governance for the next century - how do we encourage both open markets and better labor and environmental standards abroad, and transition affected communities at home?

Right now, options are limited. One way might be to defeat CAFTA in hopes of forcing the Bushies to the table the next time around (though that scenario is hard to imagine). In 2008, a Democratic presidential nominee will be obliged to elaborate a stand on the issue. But in the meantime, I don't think the issue should simply be ceded to the GOP.

And a tactical policy to oppose the most important agreements – those with developing nations – for all the usual reasons is no policy at all. That's not to say that these aren't genuine issues, just that their die-hard opponents in the Democratic camp don't really have workable solutions to them - except to kill trade agreements.

In the long run, that's a losing electoral strategy as well. Opposition to free trade is heavily interest-group driven, and the traditional urge to throw bones to dozens of groups is something the Democrats should think twice about before they make it a centerpiece of their economic policy. As Kerry found out, it's hard to integrate the anti-trade position into a forward-looking message for the Democratic Party.

Is Plamegate turning into Bush's obligatory Watergate/Iran-Contra/Monica second-term scandal? If Fitzgerald is targeting Rove, almost certainly, and depending on the timing it could consume the already apocalyptic Supreme Court fight as well.

Act like you’re winning no matter what. Then the perception may become the reality. Rove took Bush to campaign California the week before election day 2000 to try to create the perception he was comfortably ahead. When this works, Bush looks like a master. When it doesn't, Bush looks the fool.

But a war doesn't easily lend itself to such callow political tactics. The White House approach appears to be based on faith that left as they are, things will not go totally to hell in Iraq – not a concerted attempt to actually prevent things from going to hell.
Ed Kilgore elaborates on this point:

It's troublesome to learn that the White House thinks presidential spin on Iraq is more important to public support than the actual facts on the ground. All the "resolve" in the world won't help Bush if the insurgency cannot be quelled, and if the Iraqis cannot achieve a political settlement that will make it possible for a stable government to function.



washyourbowl.blogspot.com

The questioner implicitly equates criticism of our effort in Iraq and of U.S. actions on the world stage with the disastrous appeasements of the past. It’s a sly twist of the knife – Rove couldn’t have phrased it better. Who is this questioner, anyway? Needless to say, the ability to debate ideas and question the decisions of those in power is one of the core strengths of our democracy, not a weakness. Expunging self doubt is a dark road. A little self-doubt can come in handy when you are otherwise intent on driving yourself over a cliff.

Rumsfeld doesn't take this bait, and doesn't need to - the question says it all. His answer is sort of nonsensical. He basically says, Americans shouldn’t be swayed by emotional reactions and they will keep their eyes on the ball:

SEC. RUMSFELD: ... If you think about it this way, we have staked everything on the idea that people, given sufficient information -- accurate information; inaccurate information; good, positive things; terribly negative, worrisome things -- people, given sufficient information, will find their way to reasonably right decisions over time. They may move off for a period, but they'll come back.

This is a good, if inadvertant, distillation of Bush administration philosophy: Give people both accurate and inaccurate information and they'll come to the right decision.

washyourbowl.blogspot.com

-There’s the 9/11 reason. But no direct connection between al Qaeda and Saddam.

-There’s the WMD reason. But no WMD.

-There’s the Saddam-killed-and-tortured-people argument. No comment.

-There’s the Saddam-might-have-gotten-WMD-at-some-point-in-the-future argument. Maybe, but weapons of mass destruction program-related activities do not a strategic threat make.

-There’s the “flypaper” argument. This has some intuitive appeal. It is possible if would-be terrorists view Iraq as the place to be, then the United States itself is less likely to be targeted. But this is virtually impossible to analyze or evaluate. And if our national security strategy is to create more insurgencies and terrorist havens, we’re in deeper trouble than I thought.

-There’s the democracy argument. This also has intuitive and some logical appeal, and is in fact the best reason to stay with the Iraq project right now. But logically speaking, we arrive at the democracy argument only after having discarded all the above arguments and knowing that democracy was way down Bush’s original checklist of strategic reasons for the war, and that we will not be birthing more democracies in this manner.

Iraq is a rabbit hole for all debate. There is no way to have a reasonable discussion about it because there are no reasons. Even now, we really don’t know why we went into Iraq. Sure, the idea was floating around out there in neoconland, but the impulse to pull the trigger seems mainly to have sprung direct from the Bushian id. This is one reason why Democrats wanting to debate facts and make rational arguments – about training or troop levels or whatever – have been so easily mau-maued these past few years. Iraq is about instinct, not facts or strategy. Of course, a policy based on instinct alone is no policy at all.

She is many things to too many people, some good things, some bad, and that makes sliming her harder than you’d think. It’s a positive feedback response: Hit her hard enough and the resulting earsplitting cultural noise will fry your brain. Remember that Rick Lazio tried various attacks in her 2000 Senate race and it helped her. David Brock was a conservative journalist/hit man until he tried to write an anti-Hillary book – then switched sides.

Bill drove conservatives nuts in part because of his protean ease as a politician. He could mold his persona at will, be anything to anybody. But Hillary has had to suffer and work to win support, and this struggle has played out in the public eye. She really was a victim of a bad marriage who has moved past it. She has worked for votes and won them. She is a good politician, but the mask doesn’t quite fit. This is not Bushian “authenticity” – that brush-clearin’, nucular-pronouncin’, thinkin’ ‘bout Iraq every day, every day kind of persona. But even more so than Bill Clinton, Bush glided his way to the top. In 2008, Hillary’s more workmanlike brand of authenticity could have more endurance than most people think.

Of course, I could be wrong. Additional suggestions on why it's been hard to make slime stick to Hillary are welcomed. 

washyourbowl.blogspot.com

Republicans ran away from Brown's ideas as fast as their legs could carry them. [Sen. Arlen] Specter listed, approvingly, government regulations she has upheld. [Sen. Jeff] Sessions: "She has ruled on hundreds of cases affirming government regulations, for heaven's sake." Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.: "While she would likely describe herself as a person who believes in small government and limited regulations ... Justice Brown has voted consistently to uphold economic, environmental, consumer, and labor regulations." [Sen. Trent] Lott: "She has consistently voted to uphold regulations in every walk of life." You would almost think she was Walter Mondale.

This reflects several, none-too felicitous trends for present-day conservatism. First, in spite of all the bile heaped upon it, the modern regulatory state is pretty popular. Most people don’t want to go back to the pre-New Deal days of unregulated workplaces, unmonitored pollution, etc. Various interest groups, however, do – or at least they want to roll back the rules that individually constrain them from making more money. So Republicans must advance this agenda not on principle but by stealth or misrepresentations.

Rauch focuses something another problem: In the latter-days of the Bush administration, conservatism’s intellectual coherence continues to break down. Small government conservatism is dead. Plutocratic, nanny-state, big government conservatism is alive and well and growing every day, but in many ways isn't conservative at all. Republicans can’t make a credible argument for small government, in part because it would sound ridiculous in an era of massive government expansion, in part because they just don’t believe in it any longer.

Finally, the last trend is cynical identity politics, something Republicans once deplored but now use shamelessly. The White House picked Brown as one of its “nuclear option” test cases in part because she is a black woman whose race and inspiring life story could be used to flog Democrats as racists or worse. Something we were mercifully spared when the nuclear countdown was stopped.

All of these things point to underlying political weaknesses in the Republican monolith.

Anyway, the College Republicans have gone from being a farm team to being a high-rolling GOP fiefdom. How did they do it? By defrauding grandma and grandpa:

The current chairman, Eric Hoplin, and [chairman candidate] Gourley have been attacked by critics for allowing Response Dynamics, the company doing fundraising, to use questionable methods. These tactics included repeated solicitations using letterheads and language suggesting that money donated would go directly to the Republican Party or to the Bush campaign. Some of the recipients of the appeals were elderly men and women suffering from dementia.

As they say, read the whole thing. At least these methods appear to be causing some controversy within the organization, though they will probably just adopt subtler approaches that accomplish the same thing.

washyourbowl.blogspot.com

The Democrats cannot avoid this issue, as they tried to in 2002. Nor can they be all over the map, as Kerry was in 2004. He made some headway by attacking Bush’s sunny optimism on Iraq as wildly out of touch with reality – something both politically resonant and true. But sometimes Kerry seemed to be protesting too much, as when he pointed to the flag during his convention speech and basically said Democrats were patriots too, the flag shouldn’t be used as a wedge, etc. Well, duh. Complaining about mean Republicans being divisive, as Chuck Schumer does in response to Rove, is an inadequate response, like saying “Take it back! And please don’t hit me again – nobody wants to see that.”

Democrats need to present a credible, consistent vision for defending the country from terrorists and for handling Iraq and the broader issues in the Middle East – ideally, one that can be expressed in a sentence. At the same time, they need to keep criticizing and mocking the more absurd statements and rationalizations coming out of the White House – the stuff (“last throes,” “I think about Iraq every day - every day”) that is self-evidently ridiculous. These are gifts, and criticism of them is harder to tag as somehow harming the troops.

One key tactical question is how to address the torture issue. It’s an extremely important issue. More light needs to be shed on it. But I wonder if in the context of the 2006 campaign cycle it is too politically hot to handle for Democrats, too easy for the Republicans to demagogue – something that could make a genuine political debate on it impossible, and spill over into other issues.

Are the Democrats up to facing down Rove & Co.? They smell weakness from the White House. But I worry that will only make them less willing to engage on security issues. Of course, it would help to be interested in those issues, and some Democrats are – Joe Biden and Hillary among them. But many would rather focus on traditional domestic concerns and those low Bush approval ratings could be a siren song of complacency.

I don’t really think Democrats should do this when they're just beginning to get their mojo back. But it’s an interesting thought experiment. Democrats have little real power, and in some ways their recent successes on Bolton, Social Security and other things may be creating the impression that they have more power than they really do. In perverse ways this may actually be helping the Bush administration, which of course is still going to do most of the things on that list (except Social Security). Democratic opposition is a kind of safety valve – it tempers the political landscape and the news cycle, at times making it appear that a genuine debate is taking place when in fact it’s not.

Here’s another, more fanciful thought experiment. Modern conservatism is largely parasitical – it depends on maintaining a state of permanent political warfare. For that, it needs liberal enemies to attack. If liberalism and liberals disappeared tomorrow, Hannity, Coulter and the rest of the VRWC would have nothing to say. You can only take up so much time attacking John McCain. More generally, the emptiness and venality at the core of the Bush plutocratic state would be revealed.

It’s a common TV and movie trope to fake someone’s death in order to fool his enemies and get them to drop the pursuit. In the season finale of 24, they did this with Jack Bauer – his heart was stopped and his body shown to the guy who came to arrest him, who then left to tell the Chinese who wanted to put him on trial they were out of luck. Then he was revived and slipped out of the country, to return next season. If liberals could do the same thing – trick conservatives into believing that liberalism is dead – they would throw the whole right-wing project into disarray just long enough to lose an election or two. As a practical matter, I'm not sure how you do this, though. Send Hillary to Canada for a couple of years?

washyourbowl.blogspot.com

It is a great American myth, voiced by John Kerry last year, that the nation goes to war only when there is no question about the necessity of going to war. There's always a question. Even if the Iraqi insurgency disappeared tomorrow, George Ibrahim al Washington became president of Iraq and every liter of Saddam Hussein's onetime stockpile of chemical and biological weapons suddenly appeared in the desert, historians would still spend the next century debating whether the war was "worth it."

Wars remain subjects of debate not just because their "necessity" is in doubt but also because their results are mixed. No war has produced unmitigated successes. The Civil War did not completely "free" African Americans, who remained oppressed for another century. World War I destroyed Europe, and helped pave the way for the rise of Hitler and the Soviet Union. World War II defeated Hitler but enslaved half of Europe behind the Iron Curtain and introduced the world to nuclear warfare. The Persian Gulf War drove Hussein out of Kuwait but helped produce the Osama bin Laden we know today. Add to that the millions of innocent lives lost, and the toll of these wars, generally regarded as "successful," is high. Does that mean those wars were not "worth it"? Demanding unmixed results and guarantees against the unintended consequences of war is as unrealistic as demanding absolute confidence in the "necessity" of going to war in the first place.

Well, yes. All wars have detractors and produce mixed results. But this argument is so broad as to rule out any serious debate about any war within a century of its occurrence. Despite the faux high-mindedness, this is just a warmed-over defense of Bush. It's framed a little bit differently, but it's political shilling no different from that practiced by the various anti-war types and straw men Kagan attacks. Its purpose to dismiss any questioning over the decision to invade Iraq as historically short-sighted and thus invalid.

The arguments he employs are, by now, so stale the odor wafts off the page. He compares Saddam Hussein to Hitler, and Saddam’s Iraq to Germany in the late 1930s.

The main difference would be that Germany in the runup to World War II was a genuine security threat.

He continues with the old standards - Saddam killed and tortured people. He wanted to do other bad things:

For another fact not in dispute is that Hussein remained keenly interested in and committed to acquiring weapons of mass destruction, that he maintained secretive weapons programs throughout the 1990s and indeed right up until the day of the invasion, and that he was only waiting for the international community to lose interest or stamina so that he could resume his programs unfettered.

So we’re back to “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.”

Saddam was effectively neutered at the time the war was launched. The containment policy was working. Could it have continued to work indefinitely – for five years? Ten? Twenty? Who knows? Let’s just eliminate all effective government policies that might fail at some undetermined point in the future and see how we do! (We’d be left with policies that don’t work, but might be made to appear to succeed at some point in the future – like Iraq and the Cuban embargo.)

I am all for democracy taking root in Iraq, and don't think we should pull before the security situation improves and the political system, well, exists. But the U.S. and regional security risks for today’s Iraq are, it seems obvious, potentially much worse than those we’d be facing if Saddam were still in power. If we are going to look at where to go from here, a little honesty from the neocon front would be useful at this juncture. Kagan is capable of better than this.

While I don't agree completely, I do like Stephenson’s argument. Today’s science and engineering – and many of the things that depend on them, such as government regulations, the development of consumer items, medical care, space travel – have created a bunch of “black boxes” that nobody understands.

To use more of a 19th-century analogy, people could understand how sausages were made, even if they didn’t want to look inside the sausage maker. Today, they don’t understand how iPods are made, and even if they could look inside they still wouldn’t get it. But this is inevitable, because science and engineering are more complicated and specialized than ever before. There is more and more compartmentalized knowledge and expertise. What are we supposed to do?

This phenomenon is at the heart of a lot of political disputes – Terry Schiavo, global warming, evolution, etc. You get situations where some people know in their guts that something must be so – despite all available scientific evidence - and act accordingly. Sometimes presenting scientific evidence has the exact opposite effect it should – it’s like waving a red flag at a bull.

But I don’t know that I agree with Stephenson about “Star Wars.” The original movies were easy to understand because they were, uh, simpler. After almost 30 years of mythmaking, Internet gossip, action figures, novelizations, etc. there is just too much backstory. There's no way to squeeze it into the movie. This is not a function of technology or science but popular culture's tendency to generate lots and lots of junk.

I haven’t seen ROTS, but we rented “The Empire Strikes Back” last week because our six-year-old son has been caught up in the Star Wars fervor and wanted to see it. It’s the best movie of the bunch, and has all the hallmarks – bad dialogue, cardboard characters, fetishization of gadgetry, etc. But somehow you did believe in the actors. Lucas just lost his interest in storytelling and actors. The fact that a "Trade Federation" plays a key role in the current cycle's plot should tell you something.

If Congress starts to withdraw its rubber stamp from Iraq and terrorism-related issues, the White House might actually have to defend itself on substantive terms. We may be able to debate what to do about terrorism, domestically and internationally, and whether what we are doing now is working or not.

It’s pretty clear that, basically, nobody knows. We do know that there has been no repeat of 9/11, and that al Qaeda as it existed back then has been weakened by the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and by other enforcement efforts. But the role of the Iraq war - who knows? And has the Patriot Act - whose name itself is designed to quash meaningful debate - made much difference? According to the Washington Post a few days ago, the answer is no – we aren’t arresting very many terrorists at all.

Such a debate would be healthy for the body politic - and might even save some lives.

Cross-posted on washyourbowl.blogspot.com

I had to think about the statement, though. Is there more “frank mendacity” now than there was during the Vietnam War or during Watergate? Certainly plenty of spectacular lying has gone on under both Democratic and Republican administrations over the past generation or two.

The lies and misrepresentations of the Vietnam and Watergate were designed to cover up wrongdoing and policy disasters – they were political survival tactics. But with Bush, lies are just a normal, everyday political and policy tool.

The difference between then and now is, of course, is a unique convergence of spin, power, and ideology. Political spin has always been around, but it reached new heights as the news cycle accelerated, and controlling or managing it became a key function in the White House. Our current leadership took this a step further, with the aim not just of controlling the news cycle but replacing it with an alternative "conservative" narrative of reality. It’s now impossible to tell where the BS leaves off and the lying begins – a line the media could once reliably detect. If everything is spin, then there is no truth and no lies, and as Josh points out, the media haven’t yet figured out how to handle this.

Setting partisan concerns aside (if that’s possible these days) if you seek to deny reality so systematically –undermining human rights, the law and science – you’re not just playing politics but eroding the underpinnings of open debate and democracy. I keep wondering how long the country will stand for it. But then some new outrage occurs, accompanied by yawns. We are, apparently, still in the paranoid backlash stage.

Cross-posted at washyourbowl.blogspot.com

This has several sources. Marshall Wittman points out that many condescending secular liberals do think of the Christian right as a bunch of yahoos. This is the cultural divide at the center of our politics. Nobody (except Bill Clinton) knows how to speak to both sides. Ed Kilgore said that the Christian right’s entire raison d’etre as a flickering beacon of light beseiged by the Godless forces of secularism depends on cultivating a sense of continual grievance and persecution – even when the political reality is quite the opposite.

I would add one more thing: The Christian right’s howling about discrimination (if not the cultural forces it springs from) owes a lot to the political left. Remember that as identity politics came to dominate on the left, a culture of grievance emerged and universities, corporations and government agencies tried micromanaging people’s language and behavior in often ridiculous attempts to stamp out any form of (legally actionable) offense from routine daily encounters. The right condemned it, correctly, at its height. But that was before George Bush’s nanny state arrived, creating opportunities for a whole new class of aggrieved parties.


cross-posted on washyourbowl.blogspot.com

Let’s agree: the content of Dean’s remarks is unremarkable and mostly true. Both the mainstream and right wing media echo chamber have a weird fixation on everything that Dean says – so if he utters anything even slightly eyebrow-raising, it’s Dean Scream time again. So the best strategy is to craft the rhetoric more carefully – don’t give them anything to grab onto.

One point in the story captures this well:
[Kirkuk Police Chief] Abdel-Rahman said he was concerned that the Americans were being duped by the Kurds, who he said have cloaked what is effectively a power grab as a crackdown on the insurgents. Their strategy, he said, is to bolster their alliance with the Americans.

"Unfortunately, they have succeeded," he said.

Blagburn, the intelligence officer, said that even though the Emergency Services Unit is largely responsible for the secret transfers, it continues to provide valuable assistance in the counterinsurgency. Blagburn termed the unit "a very cooperative, coalition-friendly system."

"We know we can drop a guy in there and he'd be taken care of and he's safe," Blagburn said. "That's the reason why the ESU is used most of the time. That's basically the unit we can trust the most."

You have to wonder the degree to which the U.S. forces’ own use of questionable tactics in the handling of prisoners sends a message to its Iraqi partners that, well, anything goes as long as it’s part of the war on terror. And when the U.S. objects to Iraqi forces using such tactics, you have to think a certain amount of winking is going on – or at least that the Iraqis think there is and behave accordingly. This could mean the abysmal U.S. human rights record is more than just an image problem - that it's directly harming our joint efforts to build a civil society in Iraq.

Cross-posted on washyourbowl.blogspot.com