Month: December 2006

A Retraction

by digby

I have been roundly chastized for suggesting that Christopher Hitchens is open to the idea that the Holocaust is a hoax. I admit that I was being hyperbolic and I regret writing it. I extrapolated that he was open to the idea it was a hoax from the fact that he is so intimate with a range of Holocaust deniers, whom he insists on calling “revisionists” and whose shoddy scholarship he defends for inexplicable reasons.

Max Blumenthal called him out on Huffington Post last year:

You [Hitchens] then wrote your Minority Report column for the Nation on October 3,1994 about a dialogue between you and Faurisson. “It is widely alleged that gas chambers– ‘chemical slaughterhouses’ — were used to destroy European Jewry,” you reported Faurisson telling you. “Very well, where is there a surviving authentic model, or photograph, or model of the operation of one such?”

You replied, parrotting Faurisson’s own words to Berenbaum:

“My own first answer must be that I have never seen such a relic of an operating gas chamber (though I have seen small-scale crematoria in camp museums in Germany).”

Faurisson then asked you whether you “understood that much anti-Nazi propaganda is just that? That there was no soap made from human fat? That the confession of Rudolph Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz was extorted by coercion and in any case mentioned a total death at Auschwitz that not even the Israel experts at Yad Vashem credit?”

Your unbelievable reply: “Here, my answers are yes and yes, because I know that the story in the first case, and Hoss in the second, have been debunked.”

And who “debunked” these stories other than Faurisson himself? Who?

Charles Taylor’s review of Deborah Lipstadt’s book about Irving’s trial (in which he was found to be a holocaust denier)points out, however, that Hitchens has been very clear that his dinner companion, David Irving, does not say the holocaust was a hoax:

Giving Hitchens the benefit of the doubt about the lies of [Irving’s] Goebbels book still does not excuse this claim from his 1996 Vanity Fair article: “And, incidentally, [Irving] has never and not once described the Holocaust as a ‘hoax’.”

Restricting ourselves just to what Hitchens could have known before writing that, we find that, testifying at the 1988 trial of a Canadian Holocaust denier, Irving said, “No documents whatever show that a Holocaust had ever happened.” What’s the defense of this? That Irving doesn’t use the word “hoax”? OK then. How about these?

In a 1991 speech, Irving said, “Until 1988, I believed that there had been something like a Holocaust … but [in] 1988 … I met people who knew differently and could prove to me that story was just a legend.”

In 1990: “The holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened. That of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is an invention.”

And, again, in 1991: “More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.”

Hitchens does not defend these people only on the basis of free speech. If that were so I would not have written anything at all. As repugnant as what these people write is, I do not support (although I understand) the European laws against such things.

What I also do not support, any more than I support balderdash like creationism or Charles Murray’s “Bell Curve”, is an agenda masquerading as scholarship. And that obviously is what these holocaust “revisionists” are selling. Hitchens is not a stupid man and while his defense of them may have began as reflexive contrariness, he has subsequently sold his own credibility in defending them.

So it is true that I have no proof that Hitchens is open to the idea that the holocaust was a “hoax” and it was a mistake to say that unequivocally. The only proof I have is that he is a great defender of the shoddy scholarship of “revisionists” who believe that the Holocaust is a “legend.”

My intention in the post below was to show that Hitchens’ contrary iconoclasm was on a collision course with itself. I did it badly, in a hurry and I regret it.

mea culpa.

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Hitching A Ride To Hell

by digby

A friend sent me this interesting little tid-bit which reminds me that Christoher Hitchens must be face deep in the egg-nog right about now:

David Irving, the historian jailed for three years in Austria for denying the Holocaust, is free after a court reduced his prison sentence on appeal.

Irving, who was sentenced in February, was released after Vienna’s highest court ruled today that he should serve one year in prison and the remainder of his sentence on probation.

You’ll recall that old Hitchens was quite the staunch defender of Irving — and not just on free speech principle, mind you. He defended many of his conclusions as well:

It is best not to mince words…. What of your precious free speech, they say, when the Holocaust is immune from criticism on your own soil?…. Now may I mince a word or two? I have been writing in defense of Mr. Irving for several years. When St. Martin’s Press canceled its contract to print his edition of the Goebbels diaries, which it did out of fear of reprisal, I complained loudly and was rewarded by an honest statement from the relevant editor — Thomas Mallon — that his decision had been a “profile in prudence.” I will not take refuge in the claim that I was only defending Mr. Irving’s right to free speech. I was also defending his right to free inquiry. You may have to spend time on some grim and Gothic Web sites to find this out, but he is in fact not a “denier,” but a revisionist, and much-hated by the full-dress “denial” faction. The pages on Goebbels, as in his books on Dresden, Churchill and Hitler, contain some highly important and damning findings from his work in the archives of the Third Reich.

Irving’s so hated by the Holocaust deniers that he’s featured as an expert, along with Hitchens, on the Stormfront website.

One wonders what Hitchens feels about the Iranian Dark Lord, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s, little Holocaust denial confab the other day — the same Hitchens who called Juan Cole an apologist for the Iranian president simply because he correctly translated a speech. (Of course, Hitchens’ main beef with Ahmadinejad seems to be that he’s an “uncultured jerk” so perhaps it’s not a problem.)

But that’s got to be nothing compared to the this. (Hitchens, you’ll all recall, wrote a book claiming (rightfully, in this case) that Kissinger is a war criminal.):

Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, one of the Republican Party’s most respected senior statesmen, says that the Bush administration may have to give up on democracy in Iraq to salvage the goal of stabilising the country.

Kissinger — who has frequently advised US President George Bush in the three years since the US invaded Iraq — told the Los Angeles Times that he believed democracy for now was out of reach for Iraq.

His comments, coming after the US electorate earlier this month dealt ruling Republicans a resounding defeat in congress, largely over the lack of progress in the war in Iraq, sharpened the criticism aimed at the White House even from within Bush’s own ranks.

Kissinger’s analysis also broadens the options being proposed for the war.

Meanwhile, Republican presidential hopeful John McCain, a US senator who as a Navy pilot spent several years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, told ABC News US soldiers were “fighting and dying for a failed policy”.

He repeated his longstanding call for more US troops in Iraq, saying on Sunday that the 145000 soldiers already there needed reinforcements to ensure military victory.

McCain is exploring making a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

Kissinger, who supported the 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, said it would have been better for the US to postpone democratic development and instead install a strong Iraqi leader.

“If we had done that right away, that might have been the best way to proceed.”

Yesterday it was revealed that Republican front runner and avowed Islamofascist fighter St John McCain just hired Kissinger for his campaign.

Hitchens is a man who must no longer have any bearings. He is open to the idea that the holocaust is a hoax, just like all those nasty islamofascists he believes are just like Hitler. And now the war criminal who Hitchens devoted a good portion of his life to bringing down has joined the anti-Islamofascist cause — and he’s bringing his old Pinochet tactics to the war. The war that Hitchens declared “A War To Be Proud Of.”

(For a thorough dismantling of that article see this post by Cave Shadows who writes: “Hitchens has coalesced his defense of the Iraq invasion almost entirely to the premise that the US needs to be conducting this occupation as a dry run for invasions to come.”)

Today Islamofascists and Holocaust deniers and war criminals are all mixed up in one big Hitchens stew of cross purposes. The cognitive dissonance must be getting dizzying.

Hide the cough syrup.

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Ponies Full Of Money

by digby

I have a little suggestion. Before anybody signs another blank check for Bush to expand the military, escalate the war or add more than 70 billion to the “emergency” supplemental, how about we make the Pentagon account for this:

The Pentagon is still struggling to get a handle on the unprecedented number of contractors now helping run the nation’s wars, losing millions of dollars because it is unable to monitor industry workers stationed in far-flung locations, according to a congressional report.

The investigation by the Government Accountability Office, which released the report Tuesday, found that the Defense Department’s inability to manage contractors effectively has hurt military operations and unit morale and cost the Pentagon money.

“With limited visibility over contractors, military commanders and other senior leaders cannot develop a complete picture of the extent to which they rely on contractors as an asset to support their operations,” said the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress.

According to the report, some 60,000 contractors are supporting the Army in Southwest Asia, a region that includes Iraq. That figure is compared to the 9,200 contractors used to support the military in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

This unprecedented number of contractors on the battlefield means loss of visibility, GAO reports.

Commanders are often unsure how many contractors use their bases and require food, housing and protection, according to the report. One Army official said the service estimates losing about $43 million each year on free meals provided to contractors who also receive a food allowance.

The military does not have enough personnel devoted to overseeing the implementation of contracts, GAO found. In one case, a single person was assigned to monitor compliance of a contract at 27 different installations throughout Iraq in just a six-month tour.

Jane wrote about this the other day over at Firedoglake, noting that the Iraq study Group said “there are roughly 5,000 civilian contractors in the country.” Wise old mandarins indeed.

There is some good news:

Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he plans to establish a subcommittee to conduct thorough investigations, including one on contractor abuse.

The war profiteering that’s gone on for the last six years is an extremely important issue and I hope the new congress gets to the bottom of it. Not only are they bankrupting the nation, every taxpayer dollar they spend on Bush cronies and graft and corruption in the military industrial comples is a dollar not spent on the actual troops. This should offend every right thinking person in the nation, no matter what their partisan persuasion.

Update: Maha has a very intriguing post up that adds much to this discussion of what this war is costing us.

The January 2007 issue of Harper’s (the cover art is a photograph of a rubber duckie) has an article by Chalmers Johnson titled “Republic or Empire: A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States.” It’s not online and won’t be for awhile (once again, Harper’s policy about not putting articles online until they’re a couple of months old makes me crazy), but reading the article in light of Baker’s news story is guaranteed to scare the living bleep out of you.

In the article, Chalmers discusses “military Keynesianism,” in which “the flow of the nation’s wealth — from taxpayers and (increasingly) foreign lenders through the government to military contractors and (decreasingly) back to the taxpayers.” As a result, “the domestic economy requires sustained military ambition in order to avoid recession or collapse.” Then, he ties military Keynesianism to the “unitary executive” theory and Bush’s increasingly unchecked power. Meanwhile, citizens and media dutifully “abet their government in maintaining a facade of constitutional democracy until the nation drifts into bankruptcy.”

I haven’t read the article but I will look forward to doing so. Read Maha’s post in the meantime. This is a subject which is long overdue for discussion in my opinion.

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Merry Kitzmas!

by tristero

Merry Kitzmas! What? You don’t know about Kitzmas???!!!? It’s the one year anniversary of the happy resolution of Kitzmiller v. Dover, which dealt a major blow to the purveyors of “intelligent design” creationism. If you have an hour or two over the holidays, this is a perfect time to settle into a nice, intelligently designed (by humans, of course) chair or sofa and read Judge Jones brilliant decision.

Kitzmiller is, along with the fall ’06 elections, one of the few major victories for the side of reason and science during the Bush infestation. Its importance for the future of science education cannot be overestimated. Let’s not forget that Scopes lost (and for those of you who only know about Scopes through Inherit the Wind, go thou and read Summer for the Gods) for the real story, which is far more interesting.

I’m off again ’til the New Year. Happy Holidays and New Year to all!

Comedy Is Tragedy Plus Time

by digby

Matt Yglesias wonders why Tom Friedman is speaking in stupid riddles. (If I had a nickel for every time I’ve asked myself that question…)

In this particular case he can’t figure out what Friedman means when he says:

“Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?”

If you answered “Yes,” you would not be allowed to work in Iraq. You could go to Korea, Japan or Germany – but not Iraq. Only those who understand that in the Middle East the shortest distance between two points is never a straight line should be allowed to carry out U.S. policy there. . . .

I have no idea. But when I read it a couple of years ago, I laughed out loud because it immediately reminded me of the Alan Alda character in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” whose line “if it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks it’s not funny,” evokes one of the most hilarious Woody Allen eye rolling reaction shots ever.

Truly, Tom Friedman is one of those utterly pompous, psuedo-intellectual Woody Allen characters who have nothing to say but who obscurely blather on as if their gibberish has some great significance. And because he’s been anointed as a “great thinker” everybody nods their head in agreement because they are afraid they’re missing something so profound it’s above their heads.

Take this one for instance:

So here’s how I feel: I feel as if the president is presenting us with a beautiful carved mahogany table — a big, bold, gutsy vision. But if you look underneath, you discover that this table has only one leg. His bold vision on Iraq is not supported by boldness in other areas. And so I am terribly worried that Mr. Bush has told us the right thing to do, but won’t be able to do it right

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Hookay. If people think the shortest distance to between two points is a table leg, they are bold and gutsy but they should go to Japan, which has very nice mahogany tables. Or something. Seriously, half the time I don’t know what the hell he’s going on about and I’m convinced he doesn’t either.

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Didn’t We Tell You That Bush Was A Fool?

by digby

Back in July of 2004, I wrote a post recommending that people check out this video by fellow blogger and musician Brew. I agreed with the sentiments, of course, but at the time I sort of knew it was prematurely anti-Codpiece for commercial success. The country was still mindlessly flagwaving and Junior was still well over 50 percent.

Brew happened to write me about something else today and I was reminded of his song and wondered what had happened with it. It turns out that like everything else these days, it’s up on Youtube.

It’s a difficult video to watch. (There are some very harsh images of war, so be advised.) But there are some other images that nobody ever talks about. They barely talked about it when they happened and they don’t talk about it today even though the whole country is discussing the massive mistake that Iraq has turned out to be: the millions of people who were against this war from the beginning. And all those millions of people all over the world were not against the war because they were pacifists (although some probably were) and it was not because they were terrorist sympathizers or “hate America firsters” as was popular slander at the time. It was because they knew from the get that George W. Bush and all his neo-poleons were liars.

This song was ahead of their time when Brew and his bandmates put it together. Its time has come:

Mission Accomplished

by digby

As I was reading the various stories today about escalating the war and increasing the size of the military, I came across this:

Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.

[…]

In the images of fallen statues, we have witnessed the arrival of a new era. For a hundred years of war, culminating in the nuclear age, military technology was designed and deployed to inflict casualties on an ever-growing scale. In defeating Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, Allied Forces destroyed entire cities, while enemy leaders who started the conflict were safe until the final days. Military power was used to end a regime by breaking a nation. Today, we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war. Yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent.

[…]

The Battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001, and still goes on. That terrible morning, 19 evil men — the shock troops of a hateful ideology — gave America and the civilized world a glimpse of their ambitions. They imagined, in the words of one terrorist, that September the 11th would be the “beginning of the end of America.” By seeking to turn our cities into killing fields, terrorists and their allies believed that they could destroy this nation’s resolve, and force our retreat from the world. They have failed.

In the Battle of Afghanistan, we destroyed the Taliban, many terrorists, and the camps where they trained. We continue to help the Afghan people lay roads, restore hospitals, and educate all of their children. Yet we also have dangerous work to complete. As I speak, a special operations task force, led by the 82nd Airborne, is on the trail of the terrorists, and those who seek to undermine the free government of Afghanistan. America and our coalition will finish what we have begun.

From Pakistan to the Philippines to the Horn of Africa, we are hunting down al-Qaida killers. Nineteen months ago, I pledged that the terrorists would not escape the patient justice of the United States. And as of tonight, nearly one-half of al-Qaida’s senior operatives have been captured or killed.

The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of al-Qaida, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more.

In these 19 months that changed the world, our actions have been focused, and deliberate, and proportionate to the offense. We have not forgotten the victims of September the 11th — the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got.

Read the whole thing and remind yourself how surreal it all was. The hubris and naivete combined with the cynical rhetorical manipulation are dizzying.

If the press had been something other than servile bootlickers, that complete mess of a speech would have been deconstructed from the moment it was spoken. He implied that Iraq was involved in 9/11 and he clearly believed that Don Rumsfeld had “invented” some new kind of warfare that meant we could dispense with all that ugliness with death and blood and horror. What an incredible fool this man is.

But no more a fool than the puerile sycophants in the press who on that day fell for his flightsuit stunt like the screaming teenagers in “A Hard Day’s Night.” It was, I think, the worst moment of American journalism in a century (and that includes Lewinsky.)

That speech was given 1328 days ago.

Our entire involvement in WWII from Pearl Harbor to the Japanese surrender lasted 1315.

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Unaffordable

by digby

Fred Barnes just said that it’s not true that the joint chiefs unanimously oppose an escalation of the war — it’s that they are afraid Bush won’t send enough troops to get the job done and that if it’s a temporary escalation, the whole place will fall apart after we pull those troops back out.

He didn’t think those were important differences of opinion, naturally, because he has once again cast his lot with Junior, but really, these are huge and serious concerns.

It’s clear that Bush is listening to these armchair Neopoleons because they are saying that he can “win” if he just sends in a few more troops for a few months and claps louder. And his generals are all saying that the only way he can “win” is with a massive new army that stays in Iraq forever. That is the reality based choice for “winning.” Period. And it isn’t going to happen because 70% of the country have wised up to the fact that this pony hunt is making the country less safe and it’s costing us our future.

According to the WaPo this afternoon:

In an interview with The Washington Post, Bush said he has instructed newly sworn-in Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to report back to him with a plan to increase ground forces. The president gave no estimates about how many troops may be added but indicated that he agreed with suggestions in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill that the current military is stretched too thin to cope with the demands placed on it.

[…]

The Army has already temporarily increased its size from 482,000 active-duty soldiers in 2001 to 507,000 today and soon to 512,000. But the Army wants to make that 30,000-soldier increase permanent and then grow an additional 7,000 soldiers or more per year. The Army estimates that every 10,000 additional soldiers will cost about $1.2 billion a year.

That is on top of this:

The Defense Department has requested $99.7 billion more in emergency funding for Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terrorism that, if approved, would bring war spending in fiscal 2007 to a record $170 billion.

The request is in a 17-page memo approved Dec. 7 by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England that is under review at the White House. About half the new money — $48 billion — would go to the Army, which says its costs have risen sharply as fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan drags on and more equipment is destroyed or damaged.

The request, added to the $70 billion that Congress approved in September, is 45 percent higher than the $117 billion in supplemental funding approved last year. It reflects an earlier England memo telling the services they could include expenses they considered related to the global war on terror even if not strictly to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Do the American people really want to continue to mortgage their own future and their children’s futures so that George W. Bush can save face? Because that’s what this escalation is all about. Every penny that’s spent on this not only prolongs our involvement in this misbegotten war, exacerbating the horror for the Iraqis and robbing Americans of money that is desperately needed for other things.

Like this, for instance:

Reports of homicides, assaults and other violent offenses surged by nearly 4 percent in the first six months of the year compared with the same time period in 2005, according to the FBI’s latest Uniform Crime Report. The numbers included an increase of nearly 10 percent for robberies, which many criminologists consider a leading indicator of coming trends.

The results follow a 2.5 percent jump in violent crime for 2005, which at the time represented the largest increase in 15 years.

[…]

The numbers come amid heightened criticism of the federal government from many police chiefs and state law enforcement officials, who complain that the Bush administration has retreated from fighting traditional crime in favor of combating terrorism and protecting homeland security. Justice officials dispute those contentions and pointed yesterday to an ongoing study designed to identify solutions to the rise in violent crime.

Bush has not retreated from fighting crime in favor of combatting terrorism. He’s retreated from fighting traditional crime in favor of burnishing the Republicans’ national security image and kicking back taxpayer money to his cronies. We are not safer from terrorism and our entire society is starting to fray around the edges because of inattention to fundamentals, resulting in wage stagnation, health care insecurity, higher crime, crumbling infrastructure, a broken military and failing education.

The Iraq money pit has made things worse for everyone — Iraqis and Americans alike. None of us can afford an escalation of this surreal pony war.

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Incoherence

by tristero

A prime example of the deplorable condition of our public intellectual discourse. In truth, it is an almost completely incoherent essay, but I think Orlando’s arguing that because Bush misunderstood John Locke, liberal naivete is the root cause for the fiasco of Bush/Iraq. Like I said, it’s incoherent.

Patterson’s first sentence seems pretty clear:

One of the more disquieting aspects of the Iraqi occupation is that the president’s final rationale for it is a cherished, though groundless, liberal belief about freedom.

So Bush/Iraq was a bad idea because it was based on a groundless liberal belief about freedom, says Patterson. The belief, being groundless, is the problem.

But not so fast. In the third paragraph, Patterson writes:

Once President Bush was beguiled by this argument he began to sound like a late-blooming schoolboy who had just discovered John Locke, the 17th-century founder of liberalism.

Huh? Suddenly, it doesn’t matter whether the idea was groundless or an indisputable fact. More important is that Bush’s understanding of Locke – ie, liberal notions of freedom – is that of a late-blooming schoolboy, ie, someone without a deep understanding.

In other words, Patterson can’t make up his mind. Is the problem the groundless liberal belief about freedom, or is the problem that Bush acted on a shallow understanding of what the liberal belief about freedom is? But one thing Patterson tries to make clear: the fiasco of Bush/Iraq is the fault of liberal thinking. Properly understood or poorly, it doesn’t make a difference when it comes to liberal belief.

Liberals’ “cherished” belief about freedom is groundless, he says up front. And Patterson goes out of his way to drive the naivete of liberals home. They might call themselves “neo-conservatives,” but Patterson knows they are really “neo-liberals.”

And so this bizarre essay is really only comprehensible as an exorcism.* As Digby has pointed out on numerous occasions, conservatism can never be wrong, liberalism can never be right. Therefore, if people calling themselves “conservative” (neo, or whatever) are wrong, then they cannot be, in reality, conservatives but misnamed liberals. Once we see that they are not “real” conservatives, they can easily be condemned and conservatism’s infallibility is preserved.

But wait, there’s more! Orlando moves so fast he’s slipped one heckuva strawman past the readers of the Times. And that is the liberal belief about freedom that is at the core of his confused argument, namely

… the doctrine that freedom is a natural part of the human condition.

Nowhere does he provide a quote from what he calls the “liberal past” from any liberal actually believed that. He depends upon our half-remembering Rousseau, Locke, the Enlightenment gang – surely, we assume, one of them said, somewhere or another that freedom is a natural part of the human condition. So Orlando can’t be bothered to tell us exactly where.

And that is for a very good reason. Orlando’s description of the liberal “doctrine” of freedom as a natural condition is a grotesque distortion. Perhaps somewhere Locke actually said exactly that, but Orlando’s ripped it from context, and oversimplified the idea, making it appear self-evidently naive and foolish. It is easy to swat away.

What’s not so easy, and Orlando knows it which why they go unmentioned, is to argue against the real words of Locke regarding man’s natural rights to life, liberty, and property, words which are echoed in the Declaration of Independence. Words which I, being an American, think are rather wise, and not naive. I have no problem asserting them as universal rights for human beings. However, the leap from that to overthrowing Saddam Hussein makes the famous jump cut in 2001 from the apes to the spaceship look like a mere blip. It does not follow that because life, liberty, property, therefore invade and conquer a country that is not a threat and that you know nothing about.

And it certainly doesn’t follow, as Orlando says it does, that

…because freedom is instinctively “written in the hearts” of all peoples, all that is required for its spontaneous flowering in a country that has known only tyranny is the forceful removal of the tyrant and his party.

And I’d be very curious to know where Locke says this.

Speaking of Locke, calling him, as Orlando does, the “the 17th-century founder of liberalism” is a little like calling (the 18th century) Weber the inventor of opera. It is so over-simplified that doesn’t enlighten, except about the blithering ignorance of the person who talks like that. Both, of course, were enormously influential in their respective fields. But Weber didn’t invent opera, and Locke certainly didn’t found liberalism.

No, Orlando, the problem of Bush/Iraq wasn’t a naive liberalism. Nor was it a callow president misunderstanding the liberal founder, Locke. It was stupid, ignornant, malicious people in thrall with an ultra-conservative, fascist ideology that perpetrated Bush/Iraq. It was a terrible idea and only terrible people would act on it. Their worldview – marinated in a foul imperialistic manicheism – is uttlerly illiberal.

The incoherence and disortions noted above in Orlando’s op-ed are inexcuasable. He, like so many others who are now making the case for the “liberal” failure o George W. Bush are just clowning around. For in truth, a genuinely useful American intellectual discourse begins with what Orlando tries to exorcise – the articulation of a 21st century liberalism. One more sleazy attempt to blame liberalism for the obscene, forseeable failures of the conservative movement is the last thing we need.

*I’ll leave for you folks the second half. Honestly, I can’t understand it. It seems predicated on the same simplistic, and wrong, notions of the terms “freedom” and “liberty” as the first part. But like I said, I have no idea what his point is other than we, the free, will prevail over the unfree Chinese. And for this they pay him the big bucks?

Scarlet Barcode

by digby

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the busybody culture seems to be on the uptick. It’s not just the Schiavo stuff, which is the worst of it in that it featured the president himself flying back to Washington in the dead of night to sign special legislation. It’s more than that and it has to do with the religious right,corporations and government all working together (and sometimes using modern technology) to regulate personal behavior. I no like.

You have moral scolds and personal responsibility hypocrites and authoritarians and rapacious business interests that are determined, for a variety of reasons, to erase the idea of personal privacy on the one hand and the idea of redemption and reinvention on the other. Combined with a breathlessly intrusive tabloid media (dripping with hypocrisy and phony sanctimony) and you have a recipe for some very unpleasant social changes.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

The collateral consequences for people with criminal convictions are already severe. One misdemeanor can significantly diminish or outright ruin your chances for various types of employment, housing, financial aid, higher education, and licensing (not to mention its potential immigration consequences). These collateral effects of criminal convictions — most severe for people being released from prison — disproportionately harm the poor, creating a miserable cycle that makes it even more difficult for people in economically and educationally depressed communities to better their circumstances.

To make matters even worse, the FBI now wants to go beyond tracking “severe and/or significant offenses” (felonies and significant misdemeanors) and include on criminal history reports (accessed by employers and licensing agencies) “non-serious offenses” – from drinking in public to teenage vagrancy, traffic violations to urinating in public, loitering to disorderly conduct. As Michelle Chen observes in the New Standard, this “would foreclose employment opportunities for an untold number of people, disproportionately impact people of color, and invite the abuse of sensitive information.”

The majority of employers will not hire someone with an arrest or “infraction” history, and even the most meaningless of follies will cause heightened scrutiny of the applicant. Any negative information, no matter how minor or long ago, will inevitably be prejudicial towards the applicant. Compound the stigma of even a non-criminal record with the fact that numerous state and federal laws have made it increasingly easy for employers to perform invasive background checks, and soon people’s lives could be negatively impacted by the revelation of even the most minor indiscretions.

Additionally alarming is the fact that these vast criminal records databases are riddled with mistakes or incomplete — half the arrest records do not contain the outcome of the cases (i.e., dismissal, acquittal, the District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute, etc.). Not only does the FBI want to allow even greater invasions of our private lives, but such incursions would sometimes uncover false and misleading information — but damaging nonetheless.

Like the bankruptcy bill or these “shaming sentences” this is part of the zero tolerance culture that we see emerging in the courts and elsewhere, where we have ritual public humiliations designed to “send a message” and where people can never escape the mistakes of their youths. This allows the powerful and the sanctimonious to indulge in the fiction that they are morally superior by forcing others to pay both publicly and forever. A zero tolerance society turns into a paranoid society very quickly.

Here’s the thing. I’m not big on American exceptionalism as a rule. But if there’s anything about American culture that makes it unique it is the idea of second chances. After all, the colony and then the nation was settled by refugees and opportunists, petty criminals, fortune hunters and losers who were looking for a chance to start over again. It’s who we are.

I’ll evoke the usual suspect here, even though it’s an unbearable cliche, because it happens to be true:

“Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more he loves it; for the instability; instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.”

There’s a lot about that to quarrel with, but I believe it is intrinsic to our success as a nation, whether its the willingness to take risks and create a dynamic, vibrant economy or our ability to come back after having made mistakes and create art and music and technology — or just a decent life for ourselves and our families. When you strip it down to fundamentals, it’s what makes progress possible.

But this new propensity among our institutions to track your every movement and keep secret lists with your data and share it amongst themselves is likely to stifle all that creativity and energy and turn us into a paranoid, withdrawn, insecure culture where one mistake can mean the end of everything. There can be no vibrant capitalism where you cannot afford to take risks. There can be no growth or knowledge or invention if you must watch your every step and know that no matter how trivial your misstep or whether you pay your debt to society, you will always be subject to social, economic and governmental disapprobation.

Every day I hear conservatives talk about freedom and liberty. And every day I see their institutions conspiring (sometimes with the help of well meaning, but misguided liberals) to erode the foundation upon which liberty is built. Of course people must behave responsibly and lawfully. A civil society depends upon us all agreeing to follow its rules. But humans are only human and they make mistakes. If we begin to use this powerful technology to ensure that there is no statute of limitations on life lessons and errors, everyone who doesn’t have the means to game the system will be wearing a scarlet barcode on their foreheads. Because, (I know you’vve heard this before somewhere) nobody’s perfect.

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