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A Distinction With A Very Real Difference

I want to follow up on my previous post which elicited a considerable amount of intelligent criticism, some of which I responded to in the comments. But among the most important critiques was this one from commenter “aw, come on” and it deserves a bit more extended response (apologies for the length of this post):

[Yglesias is] saying the chances of success were so remote that the risks weren’t even close to being worth undertaking the effort.

You’re saying the chances of success were zero, so that the risks weren’t worth undertaking the effort.

(Putting the analogy criticism aside – which also strikes me as petty) your criticism is that he’s not willing to say that the Iraq war was doomed to failure to an absolute certainty? That’s what some people call a distinction without a difference between Matthew’s outlook and my own.

As for whose judgment I’d trust more in the long run — I’ll always take the guy who’s willing to recognize that there [are] no certainties in life.

The point is well taken because it goes to the heart of contemporary political/intellectual discourse. I’ll try to explain why I drew such a seemingly fine distinction and why I think there is a major difference. I’ll also address why I think “aw, come on” may wish to reconsider his opinion of whose judgment to trust.

Most folks are poorly equipped to assess risk and probability. Even highly experienced statistics professors often get confused about seemingly straightforward odds like those in coin tosses and the like. Nevertheless, all of us have share a very rough consensus about what terms like “risky,” “very risky,” and “extremely risky” mean.

Let’s say, for example, that an operation to avert a life-threatening condition with about a 30% chance of failure leading to death is one we would call risky. An operation with approximately a 50% chance of failure most of us would call very risky and one with around an 80% chance of failure extremely risky. Sure, we can argue about the percentage of grades of riskiness forever, move them around by a factor of ten, and cleverly point to all sorts of contingencies that modulate our sense of difference between high risk and extremely high risk and when extremely high risks are justified.

But there are very few among us who would seriously argue that an operation with a 99.999999999999999999999999% chance of failure leading to death is, in any real-world sense, an extremely risky operation! We would call such an operation ” impossible.”

Any physician who called an operation with those kinds of odds merely “extremely risky” and left it at that is clearly guilty of grossly misstating the facts. I doubt any judge in a wrongful death suit would accept the defense that the patient and family were adequately informed of the risks prior to an operation so clearly doomed to fail in such circumstances (if I’m wrong, I’d love to see a link to the case.) I think calling such odds “extremely risky” is not exactly what Frankfurt means by bullshit but it sure smells very similar.

Unscrupulous people work this con all the time. Among the most cynical, of course, are the state lotteries which are nothing more than an unfair tax on the innumerate. Hey, y’never know! Well…actually, we do know. You can’t win the state lottery. Sure, someone will win, but except in the most abstruse, arcane mathematical sense, you have no chance in hell of winning. If you truly understand the odds -and lottery designers are extremely clever at hiding the actual risks- then you know that betting “only” a dollar is a complete waste of your hard-earned cash. You might as well use that buck as toilet paper – at least it would be of some practical direct use to you.

And it was only in this highly technical, mathematical way that a “successful” invasion of Iraq was “extremely risky.” In reality, it was impossible. But that’s not how the liberal hawks understood it.

I suspect this is part of how they were snookered. Their first mistake was the fallacy of the appeal to authority. “Brilliant, thoughtful, geniuses” like Wolfowitz, who had enormous political power were telling us the Bush/Iraq War was extremely risky but “winnable.” Could such brilliant, influential men be completely wrong? Let’s take what these experts say seriously, despite our misgivings. Hey, y’never know!

The second mistake was assuming “extremely risky” meant “some slight chance it could possibly work.” But it obviously couldn’t, not in the real world. The third mistake was the slippery slope fallacy – an “extremely risky” venture is one that is often characterized, as Bush/Iraq was, as audacious and bold, or in Nicholas Lemann’s fatuous description of PNAC’s proposal from whence Bush/Iraq sprung, a “breathaking vision.”

Well once you have a “breathtaking vision” coupled with “extreme risk,” hoary American myths start to kick in. Americans, after all, are risk takers, we are a people of breathtaking vision. And here’s a splendid chance to…do some real good for a change! Hey, y’never know! It could work.

Well many of us absolutely knew it couldn’t. It wasn’t wrong because the chances of success were slim, but because it was, by any rational standard, absolutely impossible. If in the real world an invasion of Iraq ever was “successful” (in terms of democratization and increasing regional stability), then everything we knew to be true about that real world would simply have to be wrong. It would mean not only that Bush and Rumsfeld were competent, but that imposing democracy by invasion works almost all the time (Carnegie Endowment calculated before the war at best a 25% success rate and those successes were in situations not comparable to Iraq), that atrocities like Abu Ghraib would be minimal, that an analysis of the possible reception of a US invasion that stemmed from an agency that can barely read Arabic was in fact precisely accurate, that the rest of the world would line up to cheer us on, if not publicly, at least privately; and -the least likely of all- the relatives of the victims of American war actions would welcome us with kisses and flowers.

By characterizing the chances as exceedingly slim, but real, an utterly stupid idea is given a weight it simply doesn’t deserve. You can discuss how slim the possibilities are, after all, and hey! y’never know, do you? No, folks: You call ideas as bad as the invasion of Iraq exactly what they are: completely nuts. That, to use an overused word, accurately frames the discussion.

Had the mass public discourse been so framed, there would have been no Bush/Iraq War with all the attendant horrors. In fact, that is exactly how Josh Marshall and other ex-liberal hawks framed the debate over Social Security: Bush’s plan is not risky, but impossible. Well, who knows? They’re extremely risky but they could work, right? Actually, no they couldn’t, except in some alternative universe.

That is why this is a distinction with a genuine difference. Matthew makes an elaborate philosophical argument about the morality of high risk taking, complete with intellectually daunting verbiage, the ex ante and the complex sentence structure. But whatever its merits, it’s utterly irrelevant to Bush/Iraq. This is not a case where the morality of risk taking would ever apply because the Bush/Iraq War wasn’t risky at all. It was impossible. The liberal hawks’ failure to understand this (and, of course, the administration’s, the media’s and public’s’) is extremely distressing because the mistakes in reasoning are so fundamental, and so terribly naive.

As for trusting those who say there are no certainties in life, well it sure sounds like a reasonable idea, but only if you’re dealing with reasonable people. Would you trust someone’s judgment who said there’s a slight but very real probability that there was a UFO behind the Hale-Bopp comet? Most of us wouldn’t, but hey, y’ never know, and a lot of people in the Heaven’s Gate suicided so they could travel to that comet. Hey, y’never know, they may be right.

And that, my dear friend “aw, come on” is the problem. In listening to Wolfowitz and Perle, many of us knew immediately we were listening to the foreign policy equivalent of Do and Ti, the intellectual leaders of Heaven’s Gate. True, uncertainties abound in life. But there are limits and the failure of Very Authoritative Experts to understand that the Bush/Iraq War was crazy from the get-go and immediately label it as mad and impossible is a failure of such immense stupidity, it will boggle the minds of historians for centuries.

After all, even Bush the Father was street enough to label the Perle gang as The Crazies.

(PS If you need links, lemme know. I assume everyone knows the references by now, but if you don’t, just ask.

PPS I’m aware that “Aw, come on,” like Matthew and the other war supporters, also finesses the real reasons the Bush/Iraq War was wrong, namely that it was immoral and illegal, flying in the face of thousands of years of common law. That it couldn’t work in a very real sense is not the main issue. But that’s another discussion (grin).)

WHIGging Out

Those of you who are not steeped in the arcana of the Plame story may be wondering why all the speculation about the White House Iraq Group being implicated in a widening Fitzgerald investigation has bloggers salivating.

Read this (pdf) report called “Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II,” written by Colonel Sam Gardiner who identified 50 false news stories created and leaked by a secretive White House propaganda apparatus. Here’s a news story about it:

According to Gardiner, “It was not bad intelligence” that lead to the quagmire in Iraq, “It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war” that was designed to mislead the public and the world. Gardiner’s research lead him to conclude that the US and Britain had conspired at the highest levels to plant “stories of strategic influence” that were known to be false.

The Times of London described the $200-million-plus US operation as a “meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein.”

The multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign run out of the White House and Defense Department was, in Gardiner’s final assessment “irresponsible in parts” and “might have been illegal.”

“Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to the right decisions,” Gardiner explains. Consequently, “Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage.” For the first time in US history, “we allowed strategic psychological operations to become part of public affairs… [W]hat has happened is that information warfare, strategic influence, [and] strategic psychological operations pushed their way into the important process of informing the peoples of our two democracies.”

It was this story that the White House didn’t want exposed and when Joe Wilson started making noises about Dick Cheney and yellowcake, they got very nervous. After all, the WMD’s weren’t turning up in Iraq.

On August 10, 2003, just a month after Wilson’s op-ed, Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus, wrote an article in the WaPo:

IRAQ’S NUCLEAR FILE : Inside the Prewar Debate, Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence

This article is based on interviews with analysts and policymakers inside and outside the U.S. government, and access to internal documents and technical evidence not previously made public.

The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates — in public and behind the scenes — made allegations depicting Iraq’s nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied

This story has never been fully aired to the public for reasons the mainstream press has to answer for. If the Iraq Group (WHIG), which implicates all the big players in this, possibly even the president, becomes a part of a federal criminal case, it will likely also become the subject of intense media scrutiny.

Finally.

More here.

There’s No Fun With Analogies When Slaughter Is The Subject

Matthew Yglesias channels Tom Friedman and compares the invasion of Iraq to a football play in the Super Bowl. Okay, Matt is very, very young and trying to find his voice so let’s not dwell on this unspeakable lapse of taste. As readers of my blog know, I have zero patience with anyone who euphemizes or romanticizes war, even those like Chris Hedges, who have the best of intentions and have experienced war firsthand.

But never mind, Matt will grow up and he’ll get it eventually, I’m sure. What is simply inexcusable is that he still holds to the “well, we’ll never know unless we try” argument of the liberal hawks:

That it now looks very unlikely to, in fact, succeed speaks less to the fact that mistakes were made in the course of the venture than that the venture itself was inherently risky. If, by some miracle, thing manage to work out okay in the end, that’ll be fantastic. But it will have to be by some miracle and certainly won’t “prove” that the decision to go in in the first place was a good idea. That some big gambles pay off doesn’t justify placing bets when the odds don’t make sense. [emphasis added]

Um, Matthew? It doesn’t look any more unlikely now that Bush’s invasion of Iraq would succeed than it did before or during the invasion. Many of us absolutely knew from the moment the “new product” was rumored in early ’02 that the idea of invading Iraq was screaming yellow bonkers and couldn’t possibly succeed. Not that it was risky, Matthew. But that it was absolutely impossible regardless of how many troops were deployed, or whether an occupation plan was in place. Or whether George W. Bush was Commander-In-Chief or George Washington.

Now here’s the thing that galls me, Matt. All the guys who were totally mistaken – not you, hell you’re you’re just a blogger, but people with genuine influence in the discourse, even naive Hamlets like Packer who thinks foreign policy is a splendid opportunity for personal growth – still have influential gigs. However, with one or two exceptions (see Hersh, Seymour; Krugman, Paul), there is not a single opponent of this misbegotten war, who knew it was a stupid mistake from the get-go, who said so then, and who now has access to a major media outlet remotely as often as all you naive rubes.

Where is Jessica Tuchman Matthews? Where is Brady Kiesling? Oh, I’m sure someone can dig up plenty of appearances on, say, the public access channel on the Reed College campus, but y’know where they should be, my friend? They should be regular commentators on foreign policy on the major news outlets because they have demonstrated exceptional perspicacity in foreign affairs. Anyone seen either of them two weeks in a row on a major tv channel? Have any pre-war opponents of the Bush/Iraq war been hired recently as pundits in the Post or the Times, or for the Sunday morning funnies? Y’know, they could use the work. And they do know what they’re talking about. Unlike Friedman, Berman, Pollock, Mead, and so many of the rest.

So Matthew, grow up, ok? You made a bad error of judgment but you were just a kid in ’02/’03. But you’re rapidly approaching the age when you need to take responsibility for your opinions. And it is outrageous that you, or anyone else who supported this war still clings, no matter how surreptiously in subordinate clauses and passive constructions, to the utterly dildo hallucination that there was any chance in hell something as insane as the invasion of Iraq could succeed.

(Slightly edited after the original posting because passion overwhelmed my grammar.)

“We Can Do Better”

Like most Americans, Strindberg-style morbidity and pessimism quickly becomes tiresome around Casa Tristero. For all I know, Swedes get sick of Strindberg, too, but one of the most striking features of our national consciousness, that folks from other places never cease to comment on, is Americans’ sense of optimism with purpose. Often, it is true, this is carried to a dangerous fault. But it’s a country-wide tic we have and it can’t easily be denied. So, being an American, I can’t write a post like The Third Way And The Highway without reflexively thinking, “Lighten up, man! Your audience is dying out there.” So I won’t draw attention in this post to the untidy fact that the Pakistani death toll has reached 42,000 or that there’s a serious food crisis in the Guatemalan villages ravaged by the mudslides or even that dozens of people were killed today in a suicide car bomb in Iraq. Nope. Below, I’ll accentuate the positive. Enjoy!

Here is an article that provides a rough outline of Dean’s plans for the Democrats. It sounds, like many of Dean’s proposals, extremely intelligent and well thought out:

”What I’m trying to do is impose a system and run this place like a business,” Dean said during an expansive interview in his office overlooking the Capitol.

[snip]

Among Dean’s goals are:

–Making Democrats the party of values, community and reform. Armed with extensive DNC polling, Dean is consulting with party leaders in Congress, mayors and governors to recast the public’s image of Democrats with a unified message.

–Improving the party’s ”micro-targeting,” the tactic of merging political information about voters with their consumer habits to figure out how to appeal to them.

–Building a 50-state grass-roots organization, using the same Internet and community-building tools that took Dean’s presidential bid from obscurity to the front of the pack before Iowa.

[Snip]

”I tapped into a craving for community in a society where we’re becoming increasingly isolated from ourselves,” he said.

A look at Dean’s approach: MESSAGE:

The DNC is getting outside help from private-sector consultants who specialize in creating and strengthening corporate images — or ”brands.”

”The last time this party was branded was Lyndon Johnson,” Dean said. ”We’d been in power so long that we didn’t think we needed to do it.”

The lack of a message or brand makes it difficult for Democrats to capitalize on Bush’s political slump and a series of GOP scandals. While the party is unified in accusing Republicans of creating a ”culture of corruption,” Democrats still need to give voters a compelling alternative to GOP rule.

A March 23, 2005, memo by DNC pollster Cornell Belcher found that most voters view politics through a values-laden prism rather than through the economic framing traditionally used by Democrats.

On a list of issue choices, ”moral values” ranked in the middle of the pack and well ahead of abortion and gay rights. That suggested to Belcher that moral values has a broader meaning for voters than do social wedge issues.

”When voters think about moral values, they may in large part be thinking about the strength, leadership and moral fortitude of the candidates … rather than the candidates’ positions on specific social wedge issues,” Belcher wrote.

Dean’s take on the polling is that Democrats must recast the values-and-morals debate.

”It’s morally wrong that so many children live in poverty. It’s morally wrong that we have so many working poor people who can’t pull themselves out of poverty,” he said.

He also believes that voters are more interested in a candidate’s intangible leadership qualities than his positions on lists of issues.

”We have to appeal to people’s hearts and not just their heads,” he said.

A Sept. 26 memo by Belcher found that people are placing a greater emphasis on community and sacrifice for the greater good. Dean tries to appeal to this sense of higher purpose when he says, ”We can do better.”

MICRO-TARGETING:

[Snip]

The Bush campaign worked with consumer data-mining companies to place every battleground state voter into one of 20 to 30 ”clusters” of like-minded people. The DNC’s current system has eight to 16 clusters.

If the DNC can afford it, Dean’s advisers hope to have 40 clusters in time for the next presidential race.

This personalization of politics harkens to pre-TV days when ward bosses and precinct captains, acting largely on instinct, tailored campaign messages to their friends and neighbors.

ORGANIZING:

Dean is putting four or five DNC staff members in every state with orders to organize every precinct. One of the organizers’ first mandates is to conduct four major events a year, one or two of which are mainly social.

Dean learned from his own campaign that it is critical to form relationships that turn into small communities and build into networks of people who feel part of a bottom-up operation with a purpose larger than themselves.

It’s a long-term investment that runs counter to the political culture in Washington that, in the last years of the 20th century, has valued multimillion-dollar TV buys over grass-roots organizing.

”You’ve got to recruit people. You’ve got to ask them to do something,” Dean said. ”You have to treat them like a community.”

Methinks this is the beginning of a plan. It gives us an indication of how mangy things were when Dean took over, as they seem pretty basic to me. A few random comments:

Note the echo of a point I also made yesterday, that voters view politics through the prism of values, not as power centers onto which values can be grafted and changed at will. This is critical towards finding solutions for a modern national party to oppose the Republicans. I think, however, that they may be mistaken to discount the importance of economic issues, especially for the working class and mid-level executives. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Republican yuppies (including my brother, for heaven’s sake!) tell me they were voting for Bush because, all things considered, they always voted their pocketbook. Yes, values. But values includes a responsible attitude towards money (on which, of course, liberals and Democrats can easily demonstrate far more probity than Republicans).

The emphasis on genuine moral values as opposed to wedge issues is about 25 years overdue. This is exactly right. Moral values entail a serious federal and state commitment to aid the poor and disadvantaged. Why? That’s what great countries do. They see such expenditures as axiomatically moral. The GOP wedge issues – contraception, marriage rights for all couples that want it, and so forth – have been cherry-picked, not because they’re vitally important, but because the right can address them with crisp, quotable zingers. It’s not that abortion rights are unimportant, they are very important (bottom line: support for Roe should be unequivocal and unwavering, no matter what one’s personal beliefs). But the right has obsessed about sex-related issues, tying up the discourse into knots while, to America’s shame, the entire country has neglected the poor. The Dean team’s emphasis seems exactly right. Not to give up on Roe for an instant, but to insist that the country as a whole start to look at other moral issues, issues that, incidentally, the Republicans can claim no moral standing.

Dean’s appeal to hearts and not just their heads is also exactly right. Note the phrase “not just their heads.” Dean’s saying Americans are reality-based, and need to be persuaded by reason and knowledge. But he is also saying, that is not enough by a long shot. Americans also should be moved, deeply moved, by the individuals for whom they will vote. Dean makes it clear this is an issue that must be addressed by the party leadership. Yes, indeed.

The emphasis in organizing on the social is an important insight. Yes, there’s Drinking Liberally and I’m sure tons of stuff that I never heard of, but liberals and Democrats need to develop a rich, localized sense of shared community, with faces, voices, and shared memories. Not to talk politics and scheme, necessarily, but simply to hang, make friends. Doing fun things – whatever that might mean, from hunting clubs* to knitting clubs to just great parties – builds friendships and enables peer group pressures, in a good sense, to build activism for political goals.

Finally, it has not escaped my attention that Dean seems not to be addressing – yet – the importance of developing a a clear Democratic stance on national security issues and foreign policy. A clear indication that what Dean’s talking about is the beginning of a plan but there is a long, long way to go. Building a viable national party is exceedingly difficult, even if the tattered infrastructure of a of a once-great political organization can be mended, patched, and improved.

*As a strict vegetarian for 25 years and counting, the suggestion that Democrats and liberals go duck hunting is proof positive I’m not advocating ideological purity (grin).

[UPDATE: Original NY Times link to AP article replaced with ABC News Link. Hat tip to kathyp in comments. A second update corrected an inadvertent slip of the pixel.]

And The Beat Goes On

No doubt, the Bush administration has hit a rough patch, which has caused Americans who love their country to breathe a sigh of relief. Some of us have predicted Bush’s political demise. But let’s get real here. The dismantling of America continues apace. Where normal people feel compassion for the poor and the abject, and wish to offer unconditional help, the Bush administration senses only great opportunities for advancing ultra-right ideologies (and rewarding rich cronies, of course). And Bush has the full backing of the extremists in his party:

As Hurricane Katrina put the issue of poverty onto the national agenda, many liberal advocates wondered whether the floods offered a glimmer of opportunity. The issues they most cared about – health care, housing, jobs, race – were suddenly staples of the news, with President Bush pledged to “bold action.”

But what looked like a chance to talk up new programs is fast becoming a scramble to save the old ones.

Conservatives have already used the storm for causes of their own, like suspending requirements that federal contractors have affirmative action plans and pay locally prevailing wages. And with federal costs for rebuilding the Gulf Coast estimated at up to $200 billion, Congressional Republican leaders are pushing for spending cuts, with programs like Medicaid and food stamps especially vulnerable.

“We’ve had a stunning reversal in just a few weeks,” said Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal advocacy group in Washington. “We’ve gone from a situation in which we might have a long-overdue debate on deep poverty to the possibility, perhaps even the likelihood, that low-income people will be asked to bear the costs. I would find it unimaginable if it wasn’t actually happening.”

Mr. Greenstein’s comments were echoed by Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut: “Poor people are going to get the short end of the stick, despite all the public sympathy. That’s a great irony.”

[snip]

Indeed, even as he was calling for deep spending cuts last week, Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, who leads the conservative caucus, called tax reductions for the prosperous a key to fighting poverty.

“Raising taxes in the wake of a national catastrophe would imperil the very economic growth we need to bring the Gulf Coast back,” Mr. Pence said.

[snip]

Economic growth is crucial to reducing poverty, but the effect of tax rates is less clear. In 1993, President Bill Clinton raised taxes on upper-income families, the economy boomed and poverty fell for the next seven years. In 2001, President Bush cut taxes deeply, but even with economic growth, the poverty rate has risen every year since.

In 2004, about 12.7 percent of the country, or 37 million people, lived below the poverty line, which was about $19,200 for a family of four. The figure was 7.8 percent among whites, 24.7 percent among blacks and 21.9 percent among Hispanics.

Hurricane Katrina gave those figures a face as no statistic can.

“As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region,” with “roots in a history of racial discrimination,” President Bush said in a Sept. 15 speech from New Orleans. Using the language of the civil rights movement, Mr. Bush pledged “not just to cope, but to overcome.”

But liberal critics say his policies will have the opposite effect.

The week before his speech, Mr. Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, a 1931 law that prohibits federally financed construction jobs from paying wages less than a local average. The administration argued that the suspension, which applied only to storm areas, would benefit local residents by stretching financial resources.

Critics said the savings would come at the expense of needy workers.

Likewise, the president suspended rules requiring federal contractors to file affirmative action plans, which his allies called cumbersome.

“He talks about lending a helping hand to the poor and disadvantaged,” Jared Bernstein, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research and advocacy group in Washington, said of Mr. Bush. “But these policies push the other way, toward lower wages and less racial inclusion.”

In another dispute, the president has taken on a senior member of his own party, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

Mr. Grassley wants to expand Medicaid to cover all the poor who survived Hurricane Katrina, including many adults who did not previously qualify. The expansion would last five months, though it could be extended, and the federal government would cover the costs.

While most Democrats support the measure, the Bush administration strongly opposes it, arguing that evacuees would be served faster through more modest changes in existing state programs.

In part, the dispute has the feel of a proxy war about the larger fate of the program, which the administration has sharply criticized.

A similar proxy war has played out in housing policy after the Senate voted to house evacuees through the Section 8 program, which offers poor people subsidies for private housing. Critical of the program’s cost, the administration instead created a parallel voucher program for hurricane evacuees.

In budget battles, the storm had one immediate effect: delaying the $35 billion in spending cuts ordered in last spring’s Congressional budget resolution. About $10 billion over five years was expected to come from Medicaid and about $600 million from food stamps.

The delay occurred after some lawmakers said it was wrong to cut safety net programs with so many storm survivors seeking aid.

But the pendulum is swinging the other way. Concerned about the storm’s costs, a group of 100 House conservatives released a list of suggested spending cuts totaling $370 billion over five years.

And President Bush weighed in last week, saying, “Congress needs to pay for as much of the hurricane relief as possible by cutting spending.”

The chairman of the House Budget Committee, Representative Jim Nussle, Republican of Iowa, wants to increase the cuts in the budget bill to $50 billion, from the $35 billion agreed on last spring. Senate leaders are also talking of new cuts, though they have not announced a numerical goal.

As they search for spending cuts, neither chamber has turned away from the $70 billion package of tax reductions authorized last spring. Mr. Greenstein, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says those tax cuts come on top of two others, passed in 2001, that are scheduled to take effect in January and that benefit the wealthiest Americans.

Mr. Greenstein argues that the logic of shared sacrifice requires the tax cuts to be reconsidered. But most Congressional Republicans disagree, including Mr. Pence, the conservative leader.

“To allow tax cuts to lapse is a tax increase,” Mr. Pence said, “and the economy would suffer.”

Some conservatives say the storm, in exposing the depth of poverty, gives them a chance to push their own solutions to the problem, like school vouchers or subsidies to help poor people accumulate assets.

Sure, Social Security was saved. Sure, Miers dismays some wingnuts. But the beat goes on, and on, and on.

One would think that eventually Americans would wake up and not merely withold their approval in polls but loudly express their disgust with the catastrophic direction the right is taking their country. And I mean loudly.

I must be growing deaf or something…

As Ye Sow So Shall Ye Reap, Muthafuckah

From ThinkProgress

Towards the end of the segment, Kristol got started, saying, “I hate the criminalization of politics.”

I’ll bet he does. Perhaps he should have thought of that before he and his little friends used the Independent Counsel Statute and majority status in the congress ato normalize character assassination, bogus lawsuits, election stealing and partisan impeachments.

Remember this, Bill?

Politicians, jittery as they are, may wish to reread the prophetic words of author Mark Helprin, in a Wall Street Journal piece from October 1997. For Republicans, wrote Helprin, “there can be only one visceral theme, one battle, one task” — “to address the question of William Jefferson Clinton’s fitness for office in light of the many crimes, petty and otherwise, that surround, imbue, and color his tenure. The president must be made subject to the law.”

Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp — and, of course, Ken Starr — Helprin’s call to arms carries a new urgency. Starr’s report will reveal, in Helprin’s words, “a field of battle clearly laid down.” The lines have been drawn. What Republicans now need is the nerve to fight. They must stand for, to quote Helprin again, “the rejection of intimidation, the rejection of lies, the rejection of manipulation, the rejection of disingenuous pretense, and a revulsion for the sordid crimes and infractions the president has brought to his office.” (William Kristol, Weekly Standard, May 25, 1998, page 18.)

Yes, that criminalization of politics is a real bitch, isn’t it Bill? Now that Republicans have a professional federal prosecutor on their asses for serious crimes they are, predictably, stomping their tiny feet and wailing like a big bunch ‘o babies.

Tell it to Bill Clinton and all the people who worked for him who were never convicted of anything but had their careers ruined by Kristol’s hit men during the 90’s — a decade of nonstop trivial GOP smears to which he gladly lent his stentorian hectoring about about morality and “the rule of law.”

Now we have a full-fledged criminal enterprise and illegal patronage machine running the government and they are squealing hysterically because the law is finally catching up to them — and without any help from the hapless Democrats who have no power to do jack shit.

And to top it all off, Mr Morality is all depressed and demoralized that the corporation in a suit he calls a president has nominated one of his political cronies to the Supreme Court. What a bunch of punks. All of ’em.

.

The Third Way And The Highway

There is a much discussed report by The Third Way Middle Class Project called “The Politics of Polarization” that purports to analyze the plight of the Democrats and suggests concrete measures to focus the party. Based on a reading of the executive summary, the conclusions, and some skimming through the report, those of us who are liberals will find at least some food for thought. But it has several major flaws in its reasoning which led the authors to conclude, wrongly, that the Democratic Party should advocate “centrist,” actually center-right, positions.

Two of the flaws are uwarranted assumptions on the part of the authors. First, they deride “the myth of mobilization;” it is a mistake, they say, to assume that by energizing liberals and getting them to the polls in record numbers, Democrats can win. They argue that since conservatives outnumber liberals 3 to 2, “Democrats cannot win the game of “base” ball, except in those rare circumstances in which conservatives are discouraged and demobilized.”

Let’s not argue with their stats for now. What they fail to take into account is that perhaps liberals may not be a dependable base for the Democratic Party.

In my own case, I donated thousands of dollars to Democrats in 2002 and 2004, far more than I ever had before, and far more than I could afford. That is how serious I felt the situation was. Despite having the distinct advantage of having to campaign against the worst president ever, the Democrats lost badly both times. Folks, whatever the amount of shenanigans that went on, it shouldn’t have even been close. The Democratic Party took my money and blew it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… won’t get fooled again.

Come 2006 and 2008, therefore, I will be donating not a dime directly to any Democratic candidate, but rather to organizations that advocate liberal causes – not radical causes, but liberal ones, I’m no revolutionary – who will then donate to candidates that they believe are both viable and liberal. If my money ultimately goes to Democrats, fine. But my money will go only to groups that are unequivocably liberal. If they funnel my money to candidates from other parties, that’s fine, too.

I suspect I am far from alone. If the Democrats tack right, they may find that their liberal base is more mythological than real. The Third Way authors fail to take into account how thoroughly disgusted many of us are. We’re not disgusted with politics (and Republicans are beyond disgust). We’re disgusted with the Democratic leadership and their failure both to win and to articulate a compelling platform. Sure, Dean’s head of the party, but it remains to be seen whether that is more than a merely ornamental appointment. So far, I’m not that excited about what I’ve seen.

The authors fail to understand that liberals are not, in their dismissive phrase, “Michael Moore Democrats.” I, for one, am eminently practical. I’m perfectly aware that a national politician needs to take numerous positions I disagree with if for no other reason than to appeal to people who are quite different than me. But the party hasn’t done that. They’ve advocated positions and implemented strategies that appeal to no one except their marketing consultants. The Third Way authors assume liberals will just pony up as usual even if the party chooses a platform carefully tailored to offend no one, and therefore excite no one. Well this liberal won’t saddle up for that ride. I want to see a genuinely winning strategy. But as Joe himself proved, twice, Liebermanism is not a winning strategy on a presidential ticket. It never will be. Ominously, however, that is what the authors of “The Politics of Authorization” suggest Democrats adopt.

The second flawed assumption is structural. The authors of “The Politics of Polarization” take as a given that political parties in the United States are, first and foremost power clusters, a core of pure energy onto which one slathers a gooey, sticky sweet collection of endlessly replaceable causes. Therefore, what Democrats need to do in order to win is simply pick whatever they want – hot fudge values, melted marshmallow values, walnut sauce, and sprinkles – provided marketing research certifies that enough people find them yummy.

This is not how voters perceive political alignments, at least not in modern times. Parties are perceived as comprising of people with shared social and political values. Their values are inextricably wound up in their desire to obtain political influence; a will to power analysis won’t cut it, it’s far too crude (as crude as a purely “idealistic” analysis would be).

The result of such an analysis leads to disaster. We know what Republicans are. Republicans value big business, the dangerous myth of Manifest Destiny, and a violent, arrogant foreign policy. Democratic leaders, on the other hand value…I have absolutely no idea beyond their desire to obtain and, increasingly rarely, retain power.

This second flaw – that values can be applied to a pre-existing party apparatus and changed as the polls change – is fatal, in my opinion, to their analysis. It fails to take into account that we voters perceive such behavior as the height of cynical opportunism. And it enables the GOP to argue that Democrats “will say anything, absolutely anything to get elected,” which is exactly what Cheney said. The problem is not only one of perception: it is one of analysis. The Third Way authors have chosen a way of conceiving of the problem that is doomed to provide an inadequate party platform. Indeed, their reccomendations are the same tired, same-old, same-old that hasn’t worked for years.

As for the merits of this study, there are some. Kevin Drum rightly points out that the authors are correct: a national security strategy must be articulated. Given that Bush has none – “exterminate all the brutes,” aka Perle/Frum’s “End of Evil” is not a strategy, it’s closer to a racist fantasy – this shouldn’t be that hard. It’s clearly not the fault of “Michael Moore Democrats” that Democrats haven’t been able to. Rather it is the obsession of folks like the Third Way authors that any recognition of complexity in foreign policy will be tarred as “liberal” that’s holding things up.

The study also warns that a rising tide of Hispanic voters will not necessarily help Democrats. If the party leadership were competent, this would be a “no shit, Sherlock” kind of an insight. Under the circumstances, the warning about Hispanic voters is important.

The study also brings up the importance of religion in American political life. It is true that Democrats, and liberals too, have failed to find compelling ways to restate the obvious: to tear down the wall of separation between church and state is not the American Way.

Distressingly, the study takes an ignorant swipe at those of us who know that Democratic rhetoric is in need of a complete overhaul. They assume we think that rhetoric is the only major problem. Hardly. The simple fact, however, is that you can’t have good ideas unless you can articulate them well. Until Democratic rhetoric is focused as carefully as the Republicans have done, it will be all but impossible to come up with compelling new ideas. This is not Lakoffian hoo hah. This simply is what Richard Feynman meant when he said that unless a physicist can teach quantum physics so it’s comprehensible to an undergraduate, the physicist doesn’t understand it.

So there you have it. If the Democrats continue to listen to Third Way authors, they will get enough reality to make them think there’s some there there, because there actually is. A little. But there’s a lot of the same reasoning that has permitted extremism to thrive in the GOP by winning elections with no intelligent opposition. It’s the kind of reasoning that caused the Democrats to squander the greatest gift handed them in the entire history of the party, a gift that should have ensured Democrats a 50 year plus dominance in US politics: the Bush presidency.

(A disclaimer: I have never discussed this subject with Digby and they are clearly not his opinions, or Jane’s, but only mine. Digby or Jane may be less disillusioned with Democratic leadership than I, or more. I have no idea. I just don’t want them to be held responsible for opinions that they don’t necessarily share.)

2005 Ignobels

And there are some doozies. My favorites:

The Ignobel for Physics went to The Pitch Drop Experiment. The experiment began in 1927 and demonstrates the high viscosity of pitch:

The pitch was warmed and poured into a glass funnel, with the bottom of the steam sealed. Three years were allowed for the pitch to consolidate, and in 1930 the sealed stem was cut. From that date the pitch has been allowed to flow out of the funnel and a record kept of the dates when drops fell. The observations which appear in the illustration are brought up to date in table 1. The pitch in its funnel is not kept under any special conditions, so its rate of flow varies with normal, seasonal changes in temperature…

Table 1 Record of pitch drops.

Year Event
1930 The stem was cut
1938(Dec) 1st drop fell
1947(Feb) 2nd drop fell
1954(Apr) 3rd drop fell
1962(May) 4th drop fell
1970(Aug) 5th drop fell
1979(Apr) 6th drop fell
1988(Jul) 7th drop fell
2000(28 Nov) 8th drop fell

The Ignobel for Economics was awarded the inventor of The Clocky, an alarm clock that rings, rolls off the night table, and hides. Repeatedly.

The Ignobel for Chemistry went to the co-authors of a report that answers a question that has puzzled mankind for aeons: Will humans swim faster or slower in syrup?

And the others are also most enlightening.

And for the 2006 Ignobel Peace Prize, I’d like to nominate The Faith Converter 1.9:

Found an admirable tome but it’s in praise of the wrong god? Faith Converter is a godsend for priests, vicars, rabbii and holy men of all descriptions. Preach next Sunday’s sermon from the Vedas, Noble Eightfold Path, Torah or Das Kapital!

The premier theological plagiarism solution for OS X…

Converted text can be copied, saved or printed.

Sample Conversions:

“Attend church at Christmas or else God will send you to Hell, with Satan, for not reading your Bible.”

becomes:

“Attend collective farm #897 at Leninmas or else Dialetical Materialism will send you to the poverty-striken capitalist democracies, with abundant consumer goods, for not reading your Manifesto.”

“If you are a true bodhisattva, you will also appreciate the insights into the Three Baskets (Tripitika) presented by the monk. Be warned not to be a heretic or sell your soul to Mao, as this usually ends badly.”

converts from Buddhism to atheism as:

“If you are a true science-guy, you will also appreciate the insights into the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World – Ptolemaic and Copernican presented by the scientist. Be warned not to be a religious nutter or sell your reticular formation to Pope Paul V, as this usually ends badly.”

Treason Update

Oh, I’m sorry, it’s not really “treason” to leak the name of an undercover operative and thereby expose to possible harm not only her and her family, but all the people she worked with, and her colleagues, not to mention the United States (the United States? And commenting from his place in comedy heaven, Don Adams responds, I told you not to mention that!).

Well, anyway, the legal eagles assure us it isn’t treason, so it isn’t, but if you want a decent roundup of the latest on the treason- dang! – I mean the Rove/Libby investigation of the Plame leak, Hunter over at Kos has the skinny.

How To Win Friends And Influence People

The earthquake in Pakistan is yet one more unspeakably awful natural disaster in, what?, a year plus of horrific tragedies: the tsunami (which was about an order of magnitude more deadly than the Pakistan quake), Katrina, Rita, a horrific mudslide in Guatemala and numerous more that may have slipped from mind on a Sunday morning but are permanently engraved in the memories of the afflicted and their loved ones all over the world. We all know what to do: Find a relief organization we respect and once more open our wallets to aid the victims.

Our donations will surely be joined by others. Indeed, the people of northwest Pakistan can expect one man to be exceedingly generous with his financial aid and with the assistance of his numerous organizations. That man is Osama bin Laden. Remember him? He’s the guy Bush “truly” isn’t that concerned about. Alas, being a New Yorker, with a brand new terrorist threat to deal with, my family does not have that luxury.

Now, bin Laden as we all know is one ruthless, vicious sonofabitch. The stories I’ve come across of how he compels obedience within al Qaeda and from his hapless neighbors are truly revolting – the New Yorker printed a few back in 2002/03, I believe, and there’s no reason to doubt them. But there’s another way bin Laden protects his interests. He buys his safety. And he pays top rupee.

The story of how bin Laden built a major highway in Sudan is well known (by the way, the link is a fascinating interview of UBL from 1996 conducted by Robert Fisk). But that only touches the surface of bin Laden’s “philanthropy.”* Bin Laden and groups he’s funded have built Muslim hospitals, schools, and other buildings. The NY Times Magazine published this description of how bin Laden ensured his escape from Tora Bora:

As the crowd began to shout ”Zindibad [Long live] Osama,” the leader of Al Qaeda moved through the banquet hall dispensing white envelopes, some bulky, some thin, the thickness proportionate to the number of extended families under each leader’s command. Lesser chieftains, according to those present, received the equivalent of $300 in Pakistani rupees; leaders of larger clans, up to $10,000.

Bin Laden really didn’t have to buy the loyalty of the Pashtun tribal chiefs; they were already devoted to him. He was, after all, the only non-Afghan Muslim of any consequence in the past half-century who had stood with the Afghans. But on that November afternoon, and on the nights that followed it, as bin Laden began to lay the groundwork for his escape from the Tora Bora caves, the elusive Qaeda leader was determined to be absolutely sure.

In other words, dear friends, I think it’s quite likely that right now one of the larger donors of aid to the sad people of northwest Pakistan is one of our worst enemies, who by “generously helping out” at this time will further cement the loyalty of those protecting him.

And this brings up some rather important issues for we Americans. With a sensible government, the US would, as a matter of course, immediately open up both its heart and its wallet big time to come to the aid of some of the most beleagured people on earth. Sure, it would be to some extent a political calculation, but the offer to help would be also sincere and instinctive. Emergency aid workers, familiar with both the people and the terrain of rural Pakistan, who could speak their language, would be rapidly dispatched whose purpose would be to save lives, rapidly repair infrastructure and just as rapidly, leave. **

Putting aside all the karma calculations that altruism generates and looking at such aid in the cold light of foreign policy strategy, the amount of goodwill America would receive would be absolutely priceless. Surely, America can easily outspend anyone, even a crazy man with Saudi petrodollars behind him.

There’s just one problem with this scenario. We don’t have a sensible government and therefore, the US simply can’t afford to open its heart in the way the situation deserves. And that’s because the present administration – unlike, or at the very least, more than most – sorely lacks three things: money, brains, and most importantly, a basic sense of human decency (no matter how often compromised) which enables an American government to think wisely, and spend wisely.

Now one would hope, in fact, expect the Bush administration to pony up more than the $100,000 they’ve currently offered, plus helicopters and other supplies. I am sure they will. (And I’m also sure they’ll screw it all up. Remember these are the clowns who dumped peanut butter, for crissakes, onto Afghanistan, the “world’s biggest minefield’ during the first Bush war. )

But the US doesn’t have the cash to spare for large-scale humanitarian efforts anymore. Why? Well, there’s Katrina for one, Rita for another, and let’s not forget all the money given to the tsunami victims. There’s also been another huge money pit for the US recently, can’t exactly remember what it could be…No, not the taxcuts for the rich, something else. Something sucking $200 billion out of our economy. Help me out here, folks: where are we spending all that money again? And exactly why, again?

But while we’re trying to remember where that money went in the past few years, we can contemplate the simple nastiness that’s undermined the nation’s image as a generous one. The poverty of spirit that led the leader of the House to blame the tsunami’s destruction on the failure of its victims to worship God in a proper manner – proper according to him and his cronies, of course. And there are many such examples, DeLay hardly stands alone in his xenophobia.

And so it goes. And it is so pathetic. A great nation, the greatest ever in so many ways, unable to do something as relatively straightforward as earn the goodwill of an abject, demoralized people. A great nation whose leaders can’t even understand why, in a battle for hearts and minds (which is precisely the kind of war bin Laden actually is waging) it is necessary to obtain that goodwill, the price of which is dirt cheap compared to the death of a single soldier or the rage caused by the death of a loved one due to American force.

Enough. It’s time once again to ignore the Bush administration and simply open our wallets, and hearts. Yeah, I’ve donated way too much already, like so many of you folks. But it’s the right thing to do, dammit, so it’s gotta be done.

*Note to rightwingnuts: You may already know this, but in case you don’t: It’s a sad fact that many of you have reading comprehension disorders. That plus some severe cognitive…issues… cause you to read what I’ve written and come to the bizarre conclusion that a tolerant liberal like myself would actually “side with” a religious fanatic like, say, Osama bin Laden, or Randall Terry. These problems aren’t your fault, of course. God, for whatever inscrutable reasons, has endowed many of us with commonsense and logic, and the rest, sadly, are doomed to become, well, rightwingnuts like yourselves. So, let me make this crystal clear, to save you the hassle of typing outraged, but stupidly misdirected vitriol my way: I really don’t need you to tell me what bin Laden’s largesse is actually worth and what it actually means or is intended to do. Got that?

**Obviously, the situation is more complex than even the longest blogpost could address. Some random questions: What nationality would the aid workers be? How would American dollars and help get to people who have been threatened with the torture of their relatives if they “collaborate” with Americans? But that the US should take a heavily proactive role in global emergency disaster assistance -certainly heavier than the Bush administration thinks it should have- is patently obvious, for moral and strategic reasons. The details will be devilish. But they are worth grappling with.