I wrote about Wayne LaPierre’s predictable comment that Kassandra Perkins could have saved her own life if only she’s had a gun yesterday. (It turns out the eight guns in the house and that Perkins was a gun enthusiast herself, but whatever.) I somewhat hyperbolically suggested that this argument suggests that one is asking to be a victim if one refuses to remain armed with a loaded gun at all times.
Apparently, this is a real thing. Wonkette found this from a pro-gun site:
Oh they have a gun. Most have several. Know how to shoot them too. But they don’t have immediate access to a gun in their home. Which is the same as not having a gun. They all think they’ll be able to run to their gun at the start of a home invasion. That is one seriously dangerously delusion.
You think the bad guys are going to make an appointment? Knock three times? Wait while you prepare for them? Allow you to secure your kids before you get your gun? I wouldn’t bet my life on it. And neither should you.
There are plenty of “common sense” objections to home carry. It’s unsafe for the kids (definitely not true if you keep your gun on you at all times). I’ll look like a nutcase (who’s coming to dinner?). Etc. And there’s one common sense reason to man (or woman) up and carry a gun in your home: if you need it, there it is.
As John Lennon said before he was shot to death, life is what happens when you’re making other plans. Semper fi baby. Semper fi.
One could think that’s just a lone nut screaming into the void. But if you take Wayne LaPierre’s comments seriously, you have to believe this too. And Wayne LaPierre is the president of the most powerful single issue lobbying organization in the country.
So, all you so-called “victims” out there had better be prepared. We’re one step away from blaming you for failing to have the foresight and responsibility to quick draw on your assailant and shoot him down before he shot you. That’s where this argument naturally leads.
The loss of the polar ice cap over the Arctic Ocean exposes the waters to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide like never before. No one yet knows what scary changes will ripple out from that.
Ed Kilgore wonders why many of us are so specifically hostile to Jonathan Chait over his piece yesterday endorsing raising the Medicare age and I would guess that Chait’s over the top response to Dayen today will explain at least some of it. But it really is more than that. And it’s more than his endorsement of Iraq, although that was pretty bad. It’s his contrarian — usually anti-left (the only way to describe it) — take on just about everything, which often makes no sense at all. I mentioned the notorious “re-install Saddam Hussein” piece yesterday, which was inexplicably published on the pages of the LA Times. But how about this one, from just last year? It’s not as if this is the first time he’s made this argument.
Tom Coburn and Joe Lieberman’s bipartisan plan to cut Medicare is one of those notions whose every word (“Coburn,” “Lieberman,” “bipartisan,” etc.) seems designed to provoke liberal antagonism. Talking Points Memo calls it “Ryan Plan 2.0.” Joan McCarter and Greg Sargent are attacking it as well. I think they’re making a mistake.
I’m, sure Ed can see that Chait’s framing of this argument is virtually designed to provoke. That’s what he does.
Anyway:
First, it’s just not accurate to conflate this proposal with Ryancare. Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan has two huge problems. First, it privatizes Medicare, fragmenting the system into an inefficient private insurance market. Second, it provides grossly and increasingly inadequate subsidies for insurance within that system. Describing that proposal as “ending Medicare” is contestable but fair.
Coburn and Lieberman’s proposal does neither of these things. It may not be perfect, but it’s basically a standard package of trimming Medicare while leaving the basic structure in place. Here’s Kate Pickert’s handy thumbnail description:
* Raise the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67, which the senators acknowledge is only feasible because the Affordable Care Act makes it easier for 65 and 66-year-olds to buy private insurance.
* Institute a single Medicare deductible of $550, ask seniors to pay coinsurance for services from 5% to 20%, and set a new annual “out-of-pocket” maximum of $7,500, which will protect seniors from medical bankruptcy. (Higher income seniors will face higher “out-of-pocket” maximums, up to $22,500 for individuals earning $160-$213,000 per year.)
* Limit supplemental insurance coverage so that seniors can’t purchase Medigap policies to cover all of their out of pocket expenses. Studies show this change could reduce over-utilization without harming health.
* Stop paying hospitals for debts incurred, but not paid, by Medicare beneficiaries.
* Increase Medicare Part B premiums for all enrollees, but especially high-income earners. Increase Part D premiums for high-income earners.
* Fix the SGR for three years. This would prevent Congress from having to constantly vote to prevent Medicare reimbursements from falling dramatically.
* Combat Medicaid Medicare fraud. See here for more on this provision.
The irony here is that comparing this to Ryancare plays into Ryan’s intellectual sleight of hand. Ryan argues that Medicare as it’s currently structured can’t continue. The only alternatives are to do nothing and watch it disappear, impose draconian bureaucratic rationing, or try his proposal.
The truth is that Medicare is in trouble, and the cost-saving measures in the Affordable Care Act are an important step toward controlling health care cost inflation but probably not enough to solve the problem on their own. Over the very long run we need to build on its cost-control devices.
In the medium-run, we probably need to impose some straightforward cost saving. Coburn/Lieberman is a way to do that while preserving the traditional Medicare system. It’s proof that Ryan is wrong.
Of course liberals were going to be hostile to this idea. Just because it isn’t as bad as Ryan’s slash and burn approach doesn’t mean it’s supportable. Chait often takes this approach (what I call the “Goldilocks” style of politics) in which he positions himself as the lone true liberal struggling to find sanity in a sea of crazy leftists and kooky rightwingers. Here you have the left represented by such lefty lunatics as Joan McCarter and Josh Marshall, while the crazy right is represented by Paul Ryan. And the sane center is … Tom Coburn and Joe Lieberman. Surely it’s not hard to see why liberals might be a little bit testy when confronted with that framework.
Now in my view, Chait’s a big boy who likes to mix it up or he wouldn’t frame his arguments this way, so I don’t think he needs to be defended from those, like Dayen, who come after him with equal vigor. That’s the game he chooses to play and he plays it well. Indeed, he’s made a very successful career out of it.
It’s actually a testament to Kilgore’s decency that he would be confused by Dave Dayen’s reaction. Kilgore, you see, is the opposite of Chait although his history as a centrist might indicate otherwise. Kilgore is a mensch and a very careful writer who tries to see all sides and presents his arguments straight up without regard to where they fall on the partisan scale. I read everything he writes and have for years and quote him liberally. I am certainly further to the left than he is, but I know he is not coming to his conclusions out of a reflexive hostility to left wing ideology or a desire to categorize me as beyond the pale in order to present himself as the one true liberal. In other words, from years of reading his work and coming to understand his values, I always feel his respect and I respect him right back.
…the added cost is not the trigger for the invective; that comes from this: Raise the eligibility age and PEOPLE WILL DIE.
No, that’s not an exaggeration, and the failure of certain wonks to take that into consideration speaks to their isolation from everyday people, even the everyday people who provide services to them, such as grocery-store clerks, waitresses, and construction workers in right-to-work states. These are people who cannot wait until they’re 67 for the full complement of Medicare benefits. Many of them are people who will wind up paying the individual mandate penalty in Obamacare, because even if purchased through an exchange, the monthly premium will be more than they can afford.
Yes indeed. As I wrote yesterday, the most offensive part of Chait’s argument was the one in which he says that throwing people in their 60s out of Medicare would be a good way to build support for Obamacare — as if such a cruel political strategy was terribly clever, when it actually well .. kills people.
These are real human beings we’re talking about. I’m one of them. Health care wonks who know what they’re talking about understand that there are plenty of people at my age who are already getting killed in health care premiums which the calculators show aren’t going to be helped all that much by the Obamacare subsidies. I’ve just been praying I could make it to 65. I really don’t want to have to hold on any longer and tons of people in ill health are in even worse shape than I am.
And by the way, the only way this whole thing works is to have it take place quickly, no long phase-in. So it will hit people like me.
Post-mortems of contemporary election coverage typically include regrets about horserace journalism, he-said-she-said stenography, and the lack of enlightening stories about the issues.
But according to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.
Mann and Ornstein are two longtime centrist Washington fixtures who earlier this year dramatically rejected the strictures of false equivalency that bind so much of the capital’s media elite and publicly concluded that GOP leaders have become “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
The 2012 campaign further proved their point, they both said in recent interviews. It also exposed how fabulists and liars can exploit the elite media’s fear of being seen as taking sides.
That is the story of our time. And it has been, by the way, for quite a while. And after watching the Senate refuse to ratify a treaty last week solely on the basis of wingnut lunacy, I’m guessing it’s not changing any time soon. Perhaps people forget that these wackjobs impeached a president over a private indiscretion with the enthusiastic support of the media. That was as crazy as you can get in a democracy — except for their subsequent actions which included stealing and election and invading a country on false evidence. And now we’re on a crazed economic crusade that’s right up there with “we will disarm Saddam Hussein” for absurd up-is-down-ism.
The historical view of this era is going to be incredulous — if we don’t kill the planet in the meantime because of this nonsense.
Progressive Videogame Saturday: The Assassin’s Creed Series
by David Atkins
This is the first in a Saturday morning series dedicated to reviewing progressive videogames. It’s my hope that progressives with an aversion to videogames as mindless, sexist, violent entertainments lacking in art will read these reviews with an open mind, and maybe even try out a game or two. WARNING: Major spoilers below….
The year is 2007. The President of the United States is still George W. Bush, and the American people are still embroiled in two wars in the Middle East, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Turmoil in the Middle East continues to rage, with anti-Arab sentiment still rampant.
A Canadian video game company releases a game called Assassin’s Creed. The hero of the game is Altair ibn-La’Ahad, a hooded Arab man of violent temper who walks in the shadows killing high-profile targets in secret. The setting is the Third Crusade. The villain? Without revealing a major plot twist at the end, the primary villains are European Crusaders, in particular members of the Order of the Knights Templar, men who walk the landscape with crosses on their clothing and shields plotting permanent domination of the lands. It’s your job to put on your hood, blend into the crowd, slip into the shadows and foil their plots with a hidden blade. We experience the exploits of Altair ibn-La’Ahad through the “Animus”, a machine that allows modern day humans to experience the “genetic memories” of their ancestors. Interspersed, then, with the Middle Ages cloak-and-dagger story is a modern-day one in which you discover that the protagonist is actually one Desmond Miles, a modern-day descendant of Altair. Desmond has been kidnapped by gigantic multinational corporation Abstergo with interests ranging from pharmaceuticals to telecom, and forced into the Animus to relive the exploits of Altair. Why? Because the Templars still exist and run Abstergo. What do they want?
Well, at this point I suppose I should mention that the game is determinedly atheistic in the Biblical sense. Every religion in the world, in the game’s story, is supposed to have been a man-made creation to explain the now-extinct but technologically superior race of forerunners (“Those Who Came Before”) who created us. Adam and Eve, the Apple, and the Garden of Eden? Historical events detailing a revolution against the oppressors. Here’s a video from the game’s second installment, labeled simply The Truth:
The “pieces of Eden” stolen or discovered by humans are technological wonders akin to magic that have been lost to history and hidden, often by ancient Assassins. And now multinational corporation Abstergo wants to find them to control humanity. Altair’s memories hold a final piece of the puzzle. Various missions in the game also touch on slavery, the futility of war, persecution of gays and other themes.
If you don’t believe that such a blatantly subversive game could sell in the United States, you’d be wrong. The first and second games of the series have sold over 8 million copies to date plus hundreds of thousands of pirated downloads, and the series has spawned countless sequels, spinoffs, and comic books, and now even a feature film slated to begin filming in 2013.
And that’s just the beginning. The game’s sequels only double down on the message, tying in not only the Catholic Church but even the CIA-backed coups against Allende and Mossadegh, the homophobic persecution of Alan Turing, Bush’s Iraq war, the predations of the IMF, the Yeltsin coup, and even the Citizens United case into the grand conspiracy. It’s almost as if a video game had been written by Naomi Klein.
Desmond has managed to break free from Abstergo’s clutches and join a group of modern-day Assassins. It’s a race between Desmond and the Templars to discover another “Piece of Eden,” this time by going into the Animus to relive the life of another of Desmond’s ancestors, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, in Renaissance Italy. Ezio’s family was framed and executed in a plot involving the infamous Borgias of Italy. Rodrigo Borgia has been using a Piece of Eden as part of his Papal scepter and advancing the ambitions of his son Cesare. Ezio must stop them.
As the player controls Ezio, free-running throughout Florence, Rome, Venice and a variety of other renaissance Italian locations faithfully reproduced as they would have appeared at the time, the player is invited to read encyclopedia-style entries on a hundreds of locations, people and events–all of which are written with a biting sense of humor and sarcasm from a left-leaning perspective. Meanwhile, the player is given assistance from another abducted Assassin who died connected to the Animus, who through sometimes difficult puzzles provides Desmond insight on the Templar conspiracy to control mankind throughout history. Nearly all of these puzzles have a progressive theme and make remarkably subversive implications about various points in human history. How subversive? This is just one of the puzzles:
Following a sequence including quotes from George W. Bush about privatization and code that declares the Iraq War to have been fought by contractors for profit, a Templar says “Democracy must die to ensure the stability of the world. Capitalism will end it.” To solve the puzzle, the player can look at, among other related images including quotes from Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, the faces of the Supreme Court justices, each with a quote taken from their opinions on the Citizens United case. The solution to the puzzle involves discovering the Templar ring on Chief Justice Roberts’ finger. No joke. Solving the puzzle unlocks the following letter:
Supreme Court of the United StatesDecember, 2000 RE: PrivatizationS., I have convinced Sandra to join the majority opinion. The enticement of retirement under a Republican president tipped the scales. Although the ruling will differ from our previous decisions on Equal Protection, it will not call attention to our actual goals. With Sandra gone, we can pave the way for the key majority member of the Order to be seated. As discussed, W. will prove the perfect distraction. I have no doubt he will restart animosities with Iraq. Let him, it will give C.’s contractors more work. When the time comes, I will make sure W. is given Roberts’ name. With Roberts on the court, it will only be a matter of waiting for the right case. After the destruction of Campaign Finance laws, the Company will be free to elect anyone they choose to the Senate, the House and, eventually, the Presidency. Soon, our hopes will be realized. Government will no longer derive its authority from the people, but from us, their protectors. –Antonin Scalia
Yes, this is a video game. One that sold millions of copies in the United States. And there are many, many puzzles like this along similar themes.One of the other beauties of the Assassin’s Creed games is the way that the fictional pseudo-history is woven into the real history often in the service of political points. The corruption of the Borgias is an easy entry for the game to take shots at corruption in the Catholic Church. Ezio meets Leonardo da Vinci who helps him in his cause, even as Ezio discovers his da Vinci’s male partner. Da Vinci is fearful of being discovered, but Ezio as an agnostic Assassin doesn’t care about da Vinci’s homosexuality and wishes only the best for both of them. Lucrezia Borgia is a sympathetic character and victim of her father’s and brother’s brutality. Rodrigo Borgia’s debilitating illness is supposed to have been caused by poison. And the anonymous soldier who finally throws Cesare off a bridge (his actual historical death)? Well, the player controls Ezio in that confrontation, who is turned into the man who does it. There are a wide range of nifty historical fictions like this that reward further research into the real history and further an appreciation of the writing team that developed the Assassin’s Creed games. After a beautifully conceived sequel that sends Ezio to Constantinople to run parkour atop Hagia Sofia while resolving intrigues that ultimately bring the enlightened Suleiman the Magnificent to power, the most recently released installment takes Desmond into the history of yet another ancestor: a half-Native American, half British young Assassin named Connor under the tutelage of an African-American master assassin at the dawn of the Revolutionary War. It’s a gut-wrenching tale that not only nicely weaves real American history into the game’s mythos, but also forces serious introspection on the part of the player by silently breaking the fourth wall. As young Connor takes the side of the American Revolutionaries (and leads the Boston Tea Party–being, after all, a Native American without need of disguise!) in their fight for freedom against the Templar-backed British, the encyclopedia provides constant reminders of just how much of a gray zone the conflict and its reasons often were. Most problematic is the treatment of Native Americans: even as Connor helps the Patriots most of his tribe is assisting the British (as is historically accurate.) Connor continues to insist the Patriots desire only freedom and will leave his people, the Iroquois, in peace. But the player knows better, and the cognitively dissonant false hope can be almost unbearable at times. Connor saves George Washington from assassination, only to be shown by a Templar Washington’s orders to destroy his village and slaughter his people in an attack presaging the Sullivan Expedition (helpfully noted in the game’s database.) Here’s the video of the confrontation: Connor ends the game successful in his mission, but disillusioned as his people flee their lands and slaves are sold at the docks while the crowds cheer their newly won “freedom.” Desmond also finds what he seeks, but must choose between becoming the next world’s messiah only to die and have his words taken out of context by evil men who use them to control society, and a fate almost as unacceptable.
Yes, my friends. This is a video game.
And it can be under your Christmas tree this December if you’ll give it a chance as the amazing work of art and subversive political treatise it is.
MCGUIRK: The war on Christmas is very, very real, and if you ask me, in addition to some grouchy misanthropic heathen atheists it has to do – at the root of it – with two things – abortion and the gay rights agenda, because Christianity is against those things. It’s subtle but that’s why it’s so pronounced in recent years.
O’REILLY: Hundred percent agree. I absolutely agree 100% that the diminishment of Christianity is the target and Christmas is the vehicle because the secularists know the opposition to their agenda (legalized drugs is in that as well) comes primarily from the Judeo-Christian traditionalist people.
We shouldn’t have to hit rock bottom for CNN to start actually doing its job. But at least we’ve found a level of insanity that will actually prompt some legitimate journalism.
WHAT SPEAKER BOEHNER would like to tell President Obama: You gotta give me something to work with here. My leadership knows they’re going to have to eat it – it’s just a question of how and when. But I need something to push off of if I’m going to sell my rank-and-file guys on higher top rates: BIG concessions on entitlements and spending cuts. I see now that I probably shouldn’t have drawn such a red line on rates. But I can’t move, and don’t want to move, from my position on taxes unless you move on entitlements and spending.
—WHAT PRESIDENT OBAMA would like to tell Speaker Boehner: If you want concessions, you need to man up and ask for ’em, which you haven’t done. I want to do something big and I am willing compromise, but I have real leverage and I am not giving away the store. There is an easy deal here, but you have to give on rates and stop painting yourself into corners to get through the news cycle. When you are in a hole, stop digging. We know you need something to move on rates, so you have to say what it is. I won’t negotiate with myself. Rates are going up one way or the other, so let’s do this the easy way.
—WHAT BOEHNER THINKS but won’t tell Obama: We can’t ultimately be against a middle-class tax cut that Dems are for. We get it! But nothing for debt ceiling? You can’t play hardball twice and win. The second debate will sting a lot if you just walk with rates on the first. Either that, or you’re comfortable with walking to the edge of the abyss.
—WHAT OBAMA THINKS but won’t tell Boehner: Your win can be a cut in entitlements, but you don’t consider that a win because you know Republicans can’t boast they cut Medicare.
I just excerpted the pertinent parts. Be sure to read it all (unless you just had lunch.)
This fits with Andrea Mitchell’s assertion in this exchange with Debbie Wasserman Shultz (after showing footage of the president saying he’s in favor of ‘entitlement” reform)
Mitchell: Are you willing to work with the president to go up against AARP and bring House Democrats along for specific cuts to some of the most popular programs for your constituents?
Wasserman Shultz: The savings that we already know we can add upon, that we achieved in the affordable care act …
Mitchell: Beyond that congresswoman, you’ve got to go beyond that if you’re going to get anything from the other side.
DWS, to her credit, said there was no need to talk about benefits cuts when there was more savings to be wrung out of the health care system. But clearly, Mitchell is channeling the zeitgeist when she says that the Republicans are going to “need” some benefits cuts.
Mitchell, like so many other wealthy, celebrity pundits sees these “popular” programs as something frivolous that Democratic voters are hanging on to out of immature petulance and they just need a stern Daddy to come along and take away their toys for their own good. The fact that these “toys” are equivalent to Andrea Mitchell’s yearly dry cleaning bill doesn’t change the fact that they represent the entire hand to mouth existence of millions and millions of elderly people who are too sick and too old to go out and become wealthy TV stars.
Ezra Klein says that the shape of a fiscal cliff deal is clear: only a 37 percent rate on top incomes, and a rise in the Medicare eligibility age.
I’m going to cross my fingers and hope that this is just a case of creeping Broderism, that it’s a VSP fantasy about how we’re going to resolve this in a bipartisan way. Because if Obama really does make this deal, there will be hell to pay.
First, raising the Medicare age is terrible policy. It would be terrible policy even if the Affordable Care Act were going to be there in full force for 65 and 66 year olds, because it would cost the public $2 for every dollar in federal funds saved. And in case you haven’t noticed, Republican governors are still fighting the ACA tooth and nail; if they block the Medicaid expansion, as some will, lower-income seniors will just be pitched into the abyss.
Second, why on earth would Obama be selling Medicare away to raise top tax rates when he gets a big rate rise on January 1 just by doing nothing? And no, vague promises about closing loopholes won’t do it: a rate rise is the real deal, no questions, and should not be traded away for who knows what.
Why? Because you can’t have a Grand Bargain without everybody having skin in the game.
Raising the Medicare eligibility age and Saddam Hussein
by digby
Yesterday I wrote that a consensus is emerging among the allegedly liberal punditocrisy about “entitlement cuts” specifically medicare. I quote Lawrence O’Donnell saying that enough Democrats are ready to go along. Today, Jonathan Chait comes out in favor of raising the Medicare age. His rationale is questionable on all counts but this is mind-boggling:
The political basis for the right’s opposition to universal health insurance has always been that the uninsured are politically disorganized and weak. But a side effect of raising the Medicare retirement age would be that a large cohort of 65- and 66-year-olds would suddenly find themselves needing the Affordable Care Act to buy their health insurance. Which is to say, Republicans attacking the Affordable Care Act would no longer be attacking the usual band of very poor or desperate people they can afford to ignore but a significant chunk of middle-class voters who have grown accustomed to the assumption that they will be able to afford health care. Strengthening the political coalition for universal coverage seems like a helpful side benefit — possibly even one conservatives come to regret, and liberals, to feel relief they accepted.
Yeah, that’ll happen. And hey, if a few million people have to suffer, well, it’s good politics for Obama.(Let’s throw some sick old people out of medicare so Obamacare will be more popular!)
THE DEBATE about Iraq has moved past the question of whether it was a mistake (everybody knows it was) to the more depressing question of whether it is possible to avert total disaster. Every self-respecting foreign policy analyst has his own plan for Iraq. The trouble is that these tracts are inevitably unconvincing, except when they argue why all the other plans would fail. It’s all terribly grim.
So allow me to propose the unthinkable: Maybe, just maybe, our best option is to restore Saddam Hussein to power.
Yes, I know. Hussein is a psychotic mass murderer. Under his rule, Iraqis were shot, tortured and lived in constant fear. Bringing the dictator back would sound cruel if it weren’t for the fact that all those things are also happening now, probably on a wider scale…We may be strong enough to stop large-scale warfare or genocide, but we’re not strong enough to stop pervasive chaos…Hussein, however, has a proven record in that department. It may well be possible to reconstitute the Iraqi army and state bureaucracy we disbanded, and if so, that may be the only force capable of imposing order in Iraq.
[…]
The disadvantages of reinstalling Hussein are obvious, but consider some of the upside. He would not allow the country to be dominated by Iran, which is the United States’ major regional enemy, a sponsor of terrorism and an instigator of warfare between Lebanon and Israel. Hussein was extremely difficult to deal with before the war, in large part because he apparently believed that he could defeat any U.S. invasion if it came to that. Now he knows he can’t. And he’d probably be amenable because his alternative is death by hanging.
I know why restoring a brutal tyrant to power is a bad idea. Somebody explain to me why it’s worse than all the others.
I wrote this at the time:
When I read Jonathan Chait’s piece in the LA Times from yesterday, I assumed he was making a Swiftian modest proposal. I read his piece to be a satirical left hook to the notion that the Baker Commission was going to find some magical solution to the Iraq quagmire and conclude that the only formula that would work would be to put Saddam back in charge.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I just saw him on Chris Matthews’ show explaining that he was engaging in “a little bit of hyperbole but I think there’s something to it” and “maybe we should put it back where we found it.”
Chait said “almost everyone with a brain says we shouldn’t have gone in the first place” however later admits that he was for the war but on different grounds than the neocons who were delusional about spreading democracy. He was for the war because he thought “weapons of mass destruction were the rationale” and said “I didn’t pay attention to, I confess, I didn’t pay much attention to the possibility of a completely failed state. When the Bush administration talked about democracy I thought they were lying they way they lie about everything else that they do.”
Jonathan Chait, you’ll remember, wrote the seminal essay on why liberals should support the war in October of 2002 in TNR. Here’s what he had to say back then:
When asked about war, they [liberals] typically offer the following propositions: President Bush has cynically timed the debate to bolster Republican chances in the November elections, he has pursued his Iraq policy with an arrogant disregard for the views of Congress and the public, and his rationales for military action have been contradictory and in some cases false. I happen to believe all these criticisms are true (although the first is hard to prove) and that they add more evidence to what is already a damning indictment of the Bush presidency. But these are objections to the way Bush has carried out his Iraq policy rather than to the policy itself. (If Bush were to employ such dishonest tactics on behalf of, say, universal health care, that wouldn’t make the policy a bad idea.) Ultimately the central question is: Does war with Iraq promote liberal foreign policy principles? The answer is yes, it does.
His reasoning was that we believe “American global dominance cannot last unless it is accepted by the rest of the world, and that cannot happen unless it operates on behalf of the broader good and on the basis of principles more elevated than ‘might makes right.'” How invading Iraq met that criteria he didn’t explain, (or why American dominance was a positive value in the first place) other than to say that Saddam was a very bad man — the same bad man he later suggested we re-install to power when things went wrong.
So, you know, the lesson is that the Very Serious people always have bad ideas and misunderstand how how things really work. Best to just move along and pay no attention.
Who could have ever predicted that Eurozone economy would shrink for the second consecutive quarter? Bloomberg reports:
The euro-area economy was pushed into a recession for the second time in four years as trade slowed and government spending declined.
Gross domestic product in the 17-nation currency bloc slipped 0.1 percent in the third quarter from the previous three months, when it fell 0.2 percent, the European Union’s statistics office in Luxembourg said today, confirming an initial estimate published on Nov. 15.
Eurozone unemployment reached 26 percent in September. The youth unemployment rate has topped 50 percent and resulted in a “lost generation” for the continent’s young adults. Still, the pursuit of austerity continues.
The US unemployment picture looks better than that, obviously, (although not as good as some would like to pretend) but then so did the Eurozone’s before they instituted widespread austerity. Not that anyone’s paying any attention. Travis Waldren at Think Progress writes:
Lawmakers around the world have ignored the European lesson, though. Australia’s growth slowed last quarter as its government pursued deficit reduction, and in the United States, the so-called “fiscal cliff” brought on by Republican-demanded spending cuts is threatening the country with a bigger austerity package than those that have been implemented in Europe, even with ample proof that the U.S.’s original preference toward stimulus was more effective than the austere European approach.
“The economy still faces fierce headwinds – tightening austerity at the federal level, recession in Europe, slower growth in India and China. There is no sign of the robust levels of growth that would produce the jobs we need for the more than 20 million people in need of full-time work. Mass, long-term unemployment is continuing. That means stagnant or falling wages, spreading misery, jobless young people, inadequate demand and a recovery that will continue to falter, if it continues at all.
“The high drama Washington fiscal cliff negotiations get it wrong. You can’t fix the debt, as the lavishly funded CEO lobby suggests, by focusing on deficits. You have to fix the economy. Fixing the economy will fix the debt.
If you step back a little from the daily sturm und drang it’s almost impossible to believe they are focusing on long term debt at a time like this. The only philosophy that would require such a thing is the Shock Doctrine, anything else would at the very least demand flexibility and room to maneuver when all these moving parts are going in the same direction. Instead, we are locking in severe cuts and fetishizing tax hikes.
Oh well. Maybe it will work here where it didn’t work anywhere else. We’re exceptional dontcha know?