Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Family Schamily

Ok, everybody. It’s time to flood the news outlets with the talking points that Linda Douglas reported last night. The senate is holding a prime time Saturday sideshow to vote on this Schiavo issue and the networks should be FORCED to report that the Republicans are pulling this garbage for political reasons. Via Oliver Willis and NoMoreMisterNiceBlog here is the report:

ABC News has obtained talking points circulated among Republican senators explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case. Among them: “This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited…” and “This is a great political issue… this is a tough issue for Democrats.”

This circus is being produced purely for the benefit of the right to life zealot base of the Party for political reasons. They admit it. Here’s Peggy Nooner:

Here’s both a political and a public-relations reality: The Republican Party controls the Senate, the House and the White House. The Republicans are in charge. They have the power. If they can’t save this woman’s life, they will face a reckoning from a sizable portion of their own base. And they will of course deserve it.There is a passionate, highly motivated and sincere group of voters and activists who care deeply about whether Terri Schiavo is allowed to live.

This should concentrate their minds.

So should this: America is watching. As the deadline for removal of Mrs. Schiavo’s feeding tube approaches, the story has broken through as never before in the media.

[…

The supporters of Terri Schiavo’s right to continue living have fought for her heroically, through the courts and through the legislatures. They’re still fighting. They really mean it. And they have memories.

Nice little party you have here boys. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.

Gosh it seems like only yesterday that Peggy was complaining about anti-smoking laws because of their pernicious intrusion into people’s liberty. I sure can’t wait to hear another lecture on how Republicans just want the government out of our lives. I need for Peggy to tell me again how government can’t solve the problem, it is the problem. I keep forgetting how that’s supposed to work. Is it that the government is only interfering if it charges Republicans for the services that Republicans so willingly use? Is that the problem? Because it sure looks as if the only thing people like Peggy don’t want the government to do is send them a bill. Other than that it’s just fine if the Republicans use the strong arm of the law to step right into the living rooms, bedrooms and hospital rooms of American citizens because a “sizable portion of their … base” doesn’t approve of the difficult moral decisions that they make. What a very interesting view of limited government these people have. What a twisted, greed-soaked view of freedom.

On the other side of this debate, one would assume there is an equally well organized and passionate group of organizations deeply committed to removing Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube. But that’s not true. There’s just about no one on the other side. Or rather there is one person, a disaffected husband who insists Terri once told him she didn’t want to be kept alive by extraordinary measures.

I don’t know why she thinks this, but it clearly isn’t true. It may be that there isn’t a group of blindered fetishists who have devoted their pathetic lives to interfering in the intimate personal lives of their fellow humans as the pro-life people have, but there are millions of people who have had to face these situations and who have strong opinions about it. Many, many of them have decided to let their loved one die a natural death rather than live as they would never have wanted to live — with no mind. These decisions are faced every day all over the country and it is not, as Nooner suggests, that nobody cares. People care deeply and she may just be surprised how much people despise the sick openness with which Republicans are using this issue for political purposes.

This reminds me of another issue in which the Republicans were willing to flout all the known laws that really protect families in their zeal to pander to the radicals in their base. Little Elian. In that case they were more than willing to keep a little boy from his own father because they didn’t approve of the father’s politics. In this case they are flouting the very essence of what constitutes a family by insisting that they have the right to veto the wishes of both the patient and the patient’s spouse.

The Schiavo case also shows that their braying about the sanctity of marriage is a load of rubbish. One of the things that gays want from the marriage contract is the right to make decisions for their spouse in case like this one. Clearly, those rights are only applicable even to straight people if Bill Frist and Randall Terry approve. Otherwise, they may actually enact an act of Congress to stop you — especially if it’s “a great political issue” that “excites their base.” I guess the traditional view of marriage isn’t so sacred after all, is it? And here I thought this stuff was handed down from God. Go figure.

Update: For those who would like a clear rundown of the medical aspects of this case Respectful of Otters has a full compendium of links and analysis.

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The Greatest Show On Earth

What do you suppose would happen if the congress and the media spent as much time on say, torture, as they are on this absurd inquisition on steroids in baseball?

If Democrats think that this is good theatre for them they are nuts. The “optics” on this are not good judging from the off hand comments I’ve heard from varous people today. This is America’s pastime, not the tobacco industry. It is highly unpleasant to watch a bunch of politicians browbeat famous players and then grill baseball owners as if they are a mafia family — while we are at war, the treasury is being bankrupted and unprecedented government corruption is happening right before their eyes. Listening to them sanctimoniously lecture baseball about its ethics and practices is just mind boggling.

If they really want to tackle the issue of steroid use they should call one person — Arnold Schwarzenneger. He knows everything there is to know about the product and he would be an exceptionally good witness who would provide them all with the limelight they apparently need so badly. Publicly humiliating Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa et al, just looks gratuitous. This faux outrage wouldn’t get first place in an 8th grade talent show.

Dennis Kucinich is the only one who made any sense all day when he pointed out that this is rally about America’s “win at all cost” ethos in athletics, business and politics. But he’s the only one. Everybody else is publicly accusing people willy nilly of taking steroids without any proof and then riffing on and on about the shocking, shocking nature of this most important public health matter.

This country is in big trouble.

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Intuitive Barbarity

The blogosphere is gobsmacked by Eugene Volokh’s startling admission that he approves of this Iranian style justice:

Mohammad Bijeh, 24, dubbed “the Tehran desert vampire” by Iran’s press, was flogged 100 times before being hanged.

A brother of one of his young victims stabbed him as he was being punished. The mother of another victim was asked to put the noose around his neck.

The execution took place in Pakdasht south of Tehran, near where Bijeh’s year-long killing spree took place.

The killer was hoisted about 10 metres into the air by a crane and slowly throttled to death in front of the baying crowd.

Hanging by a crane – a common form of execution in Iran – does not involve a swift death as the condemned prisoner’s neck is not broken.

The killer collapsed twice during the punishment, although he remained calm and silent throughout.

Spectators, held back by barbed wire and about 100 police officers, chanted “harder, harder” as judicial officials took turns to flog Bijeh’s bare back before his hanging.

The condemned collapsed twice during the pre-execution flogging
Bijeh was stabbed by the 17-year-old brother of victim Rahim Younessi, AFP reported, as he was being readied to be hanged.

Officials then invited the mother Milad Kahani to put the blue nylon rope around his neck.

The crimes of Mohammed Bijeh and his accomplice Ali Baghi had drawn massive attention in the Iranian media.

The condemned collapsed twice during the pre-execution flogging

Volokh, a professor of constitutional law, writes:

I particularly like the involvement of the victims’ relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he’d killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there’s a good explanation.

I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.

This is awfully interesting, don’t you think? How long has it been since we were talking about torture for the alleged higher purpose of obtaining information a suspect may or may not have? A couple of months? Yesterday? And now the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment has entered the dialog as well.

I have to agree with Roy Edroso on this one:

When critics say that radical professors have “a unique hostility toward Western traditional and commonsense attitudes,” and that their “true raison d’etre is in practice nothing other than to destroy utterly whatever allegiance a young person might have to traditional conceptions in morality, religion, politics and culture,” are they talking about this guy [Volokh]?

They should be. This kind of “moral intuition” coming from a law professor is a rejection of just about everything the West and particularly the enlightenment has been progressing toward for hundreds of years. He rejects empiricism, reason and logic for a primitive bloodlust that can only be described as barbaric.

(I can hardly wait to hear the PoMo spin on this in which it will be argued that flogging, choking and stabbing are long standing Christian traditions and cannot be construed as torture or cruel and unusual punishment when the person actually dies from the activity.)

It’s not really all that surprising. We have been leaning this way for a while with our move away from the idea of dispassionate justice to revenge. Listening to the inescapable rundowns of the Peterson verdict yesterday, I was struck as I often am by the sarcastic angry tone of the victim’s family in front of the cameras just as I’ve often been struck by the spectacle of the families inside the courtroom when they get their chance to confront the perpetrator in the penalty phase. It’s not that I blame them for feeling such rage. But I find it very disconcerting that our justice system believes that this revenge and catharsis should be part of the judicial process itself. Justice is supposed to be blind. Or so I thought.

I don’t believe in the death penalty because I think that the only justification for killing is self defense and when someone is locked up forever that is protection enough from their depredations. But I’m beginning to wonder if accepting the death penalty as we have presents another problem. So much focus is placed on the feelings of the victim’s families these days that I think we may have lost sight of the fact that there can be no recompense for the loss of a loved one. Therefore, the death penalty can never really be enough to satisfy the need that we are trying to make it satisfy.

As Volokh suggests, people will want to inflict pain to try to ease their own but that will not be sufficient either, will it? If one were to ask those relatives who helped in the torture and execution of that criminal if they felt satisfied, I would bet you that they don’t believe that real justice was served. Perhaps they think they should have been allowed to inflict the exact kind of pain that was inflicted on their kids, forced sodomy. Maybe they think that they should have been allowed to relive the murders with him as the victim. But would even that be enough? Could he suffer exactly the same way a child would have suffered in similar circumstances? It’s never going to be enough. And once you go down this road the line between those who kill because of mental defect, disease and evil and those who do it for revenge becomes very hard to see.

Volokh goes on to say that he thinks the constitution should be amended to allow cruel and unusual punishment in certain cases:

Naturally, I don’t expect this to happen any time soon; my point is about what should be the rule, not about what is the rule, or even what is the constitutionally permissible rule. I think the Bill of Rights is generally a great idea, but I don’t think it’s holy writ handed down from on high. Certain amendments to it may well be proper, though again I freely acknowledge that they’d be highly unlikely.

That is exactly why I gave up on arguing for gun control. You cannot even go near the Bill of Rights until Americans have evolved much, much further than we already have. When influential conservative constitutional law professors start giving the Bill of Rights only tepid support then we have to just say no. The Bill of Rights may not be a sacred writ, but it’s the best thing this misbegotten country ever did and it’s the single thing that makes the American system worth a damn.

Of course we have a brand new democracy of our very own creation taking shape before our eyes. Perhaps this will be legally institutionalized in a way that Volokh could heartily endorse: (Via Spencer Ackerman)

When Iraqi and American soldiers detained a suspected Sunni insurgent in Haifa this week, a group of the Shiite troops crowded around him. A sergeant kicked him in the face. Another soldier grabbed him by the neck and slammed his head into a wall. A third slapped him hard in the face.

Ali Abdul Mohsen, a 22-year-old Shiite, pointed his AK-47 at the man and screamed, his eyes bulging, “You will confess or I swear to God I will shoot you here.” Most of the Iraqi soldiers nearby smiled in approval. “This is revenge for everyone who has been killed,” Mohsen said.

Check out the posts commenting on this subject for a real eye opener.

Update: Matt Yglesias makes the erudite philosophical argument.

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Training the Messengers

Parker Blackman of Fenton Communications has an interesting piece on TomPaine.com regarding every liberal’s favorite topic framing. First he suggests that we stop using the terms conservative and neoconservative and simply use “radical.” I, of course, agree since I’ve been doing it since I started this blog. (And in fairness to Carville and Begala, they wrote an op-ed back in ’01 that said the same thing.)

Still, it’s past time that every Democrat committed to doing this. The fact that Tom Delay and Rush Limbaugh are considered mainstream is partially the fault of those who failed to decouple them from the word conservative, which people today believe to be a positive, virtuous word. We need to be disciplined about this kind of thing the way the Republicans are. They are careful and conscious of the words they use and it is very effective.

In that regard, I would highly recommend that everyone read Chris Hayes’ fascinating article about a budding young conservative talking head called “The Message Machine.” It’s creepy and fascinating. This guy’s no Ben Shapiro:

We’d just returned from the first College Republicans meeting of the semester. The Northwestern group is a branch of the College Republican National Committee, whose membership has more than tripled in the past six years. On the surface, it had looked like any other gathering of college kids: about a dozen students sitting around a classroom, sipping Diet Coke and munching on Papa John’s pizza. But as the group started discussing its agenda, I realized I was witnessing something extraordinary. If you’ve ever wondered where the legions of conservative pundits are trained and schooled, where the talk-radio hosts and cable news guests and best-selling authors of jeremiads with inflammatory titles come from, it all starts here, in little classrooms like this one. These humble gatherings, full of kids in Greek-lettered T-shirts and sweats, are the incubator for the future of the right wing.

What the entire meeting would boil down to was message discipline. College Republican President Henry Bowles III, a junior whose vintage T-shirt and carefully tousled hair made him look like the lead singer of an indie-rock band, got things started. He told the group that for the duration of the semester, each session would start with a presentation on some important issue. This week Ben Snyder, a member of Students for Life, would give a PowerPoint presentation about the upcoming Supreme Court battles titled “Us vs. Them.” And next week, said Henry, someone would be talking about the flat tax.

“Fair tax. It’s fair tax now,” said a guy in the front row wearing a Zeppelin T-shirt.

“Right,” said Henry. “Fair tax. That’s the euphemism.”

A little later, as Ben discussed the impending battle over Supreme Court nominees, he mentioned the possibility that Senate Republicans would rewrite filibuster rules so Democrats couldn’t filibuster judicial nominees. This strategy is often called the “nuclear option” because it could provoke a war between the two parties, but has, Ben told the group, “now been renamed the constitutional option.”

Guy was the most vocal person in the room, gently correcting his comrades’ facts and terminology, offering up tidbits and arguments that others might want to employ when arguing with liberals. It was clear that he’d done his homework. When Ben talked about renaming the nuclear/constitutional option, Guy raised his hand and provided some background. While liberals express outrage at the thought of amending Senate rules, he said, the practice of filibustering nominees “is at the very least extraconstitutional, perhaps unconstitutional.” Everyone in the room listened intently. In fact, he went on, during the Constitutional Convention no less a figure than James Madison had taken the president’s power to appoint his cabinet to be so strong he proposed that a two-thirds majority be required to vote down a nominee. “So,” he concluded, “I think that’s an interesting tool to use when you’re debating this issue with people.” The other kids nodded, looking serious.

I graduated from college four years ago, and I happen to have spent a good percentage of my time as an undergraduate talking about politics – in my case, sweatshop labor and other lefty causes – with my activist friends. With the possible exception of a few mild admonitions for language that wasn’t sufficiently PC, I never saw anyone interrupt anyone for slipping off message. I was also surprised to see the Republican kids collectively generating arguments to use when fighting with liberals, sharpening their talking points, and preparing for battle. My fellow liberals and I didn’t see ourselves as engaged in a war of ideas. We probably didn’t even realize there were any conservatives around to fight with.

The meeting ended with an announcement that the club would soon be conducting elections for officers. Someone asked Guy if he was going to run for president, since he seemed the obvious successor to Henry. Guy demurred, though, saying he thought an official position with the College Republicans might limit his future journalistic career.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m unaware of anything like the Republican clubs on and off campus where liberals talk politics on this tactical and strategic level. Do we do this at all?

We also don’t believe in saying that someone is “off message” and it’s hurting us. One of the only ways you can break through the white noise of the infotainment cacophony is through endless repetition of certain words and phrases used in particular ways that become so familiar that people believe it even if they don’t know why. If serious little Republican college kids are on to this in campus bull sessions it would be nice if our leadership and punditocrisy could get with the program.

If you are interested in framing and message, both of these articles are extremely informative on the topic.

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Power To The Owners

Kevin discusses the new CAP tax proposal as a way of putting a wedge between shareholders and rich CEO’s which I think is a great idea. It also raises the question about shareholder clout in general and big pension funds in particular.

We should, as a matter of course, be looking for ways to leverage shareholder power for our causes. A fair number of Democrats are invested in the market through their 401k’s and the big public pension funds, the latter of which are the 800 pound gorillas of Wall Street. We have been remiss in not using that clout to put countervailing pressure on business when it acts against its shareholders’ interests, otherwise known as “the people.” If you combine the organizing power of consumer protests we could, through some savvy collective action, make business wonder if it’s such a good idea to let the hoi polloi join their so-called ownership society after all.

For instance, check out what this guy says:

When Marshall Field’s employed a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs theme for its 2004 holiday festivities, the Chicago-born retailer received some complaints that it was promoting the homosexual lifestyle, an executive said recently.

The concerned citizens divined that there was a “hidden gay agenda” in Field’s theme “because seven men were living together,” Gregory Clark, vice president of creative services for Field’s in Minneapolis, recounted last month at a Retail Advertising & Marketing Association conference in Chicago.

A few years back, Rev. Jerry Falwell went after purse-toting Teletubby Tinky Winky. More recently, conservatives accused cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants of promoting a homosexual agenda.

When Field’s receives such complaints, the department store chain listens to them, Clark said. But unless it receives, say, 10,000 letters and phone calls, it doesn’t change its strategy, he said.

Setting aside the sheer freakishness of people who are so twisted that they think of sex when they see seven little men together, this guy says that he would change his strategy if he got 10,000 letters and phone calls. That’s not all that many. And look how little it takes to get the FCC to act.

This is one area where the organizing types in the left blogosphere could exploit our natural inclination and belief in collective action. Remember Sinclair.

I’d volunteer, but I’m terrible at organizing. You should see my desk. But there are others out there who are very good at this sort of thing and I think it would be worth a try. Business is very sensitive to its image and reputation. We should be pressuring them the same way we pressure politicians. After all, they are the ones who own the politicians.

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Neocon Hitmen

Via ThinkProgress:

“If we want stability on our planet, we must fight to end poverty. Since the time of the Bretton Woods Conference, through the Pearson Commission, the Brandt Commission, and the Brundtland Commission, through to statements of our leaders at the 2000 Millennium Assembly – and today – all confirm that the eradication of poverty is central to stability and peace.” – Outgoing World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn, 10/3/04

“These people are not fighting because they’re poor. They’re poor because they fight all the time. ” – President Bush’s nominee for World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, Congressional Testimony, 6/6/96

“We hear a lot of talk about the root causes of terrorism. Some people seem to suggest that poverty is the root cause of terrorism. It’s a little hard to look at a billionaire named Osama bin Laden and think that poverty drove him to it.” – Wolfowitz, 11/15/2002

I have little doubt that Wolfowitz feels that way. As a card carrying neocon of the PNAC persuasion, he thinks that all this namby-pamby handwringing about poverty is rubbish. He believes in Empire, specifically the American Empire, as the answer to the world’s problems. And his new job is to carry out yet another aspect of that assignnent:

Under Wolfowitz, the Bush administration may now try to narrow the focus of the World Bank, returning the international lending institution to its roots of primarily financing large infrastructure projects and limiting the practice of handing out zero-interest loans, analysts such as Alan Meltzer, who led a 2000 congressional inquiry into the World Bank, said.

How does that translate to Empire, you ask?

BRANCACCIO:

For much of his career, as a consultant in international development, John Perkins says he was an empire builder… though maybe not in ways you’d think.

Perkins calls himself an “economic hit man” — a kind of secret agent of U.S. power, armed not with a Walther PPK pistol but a set of corrupt economic spreadsheets. His job, he says, was to convince developing countries to borrow money to build expensive projects. Projects like roads, dams and power grids that would ostensibly improve the quality of life.

But there was a catch: These projects would also leave these countries with more debt than they could ever hope to repay. This crushing debt, Perkins says, left those countries with little choice but to follow America’s lead on foreign and economic policies. His controversial book, CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN has been on THE NEW YORK TIMES best seller list for 11 weeks.

[…]

DAVID BRANCACCIO: But just for the sake of living with yourself when you’re a younger man, I mean you must have said to yourself, “I am helping the population of this developing country, be it Indonesia, be it someplace else, by bringing, for instance, a hydroelectric project to them.” Yes, it’ll cost them a lot, yes, they’ll have to borrow a lot. But ultimately you must have been guided by the sense that you’re trying to help out poor folks.

JOHN PERKINS: Well, that’s what I’d learned in business school and that’s the model that the World Bank presents. But if you really get to know these countries, and I did, I spent a lot of time in them, what I saw was that the money that was going to build these projects like the hydroelectric projects or the highways or the ports, hardly ever actually made its way to the country.

The money was transferred from banks in Washington, DC to banks in Houston or San Francisco or New York where most of it went to big US corporations. The ones we heard a lot about these days like Halliburton and Bechtel. And these corporations then built these projects and the projects primarily served the very rich in those countries.

The electricity, the highways, the ports were seldom even used by the people who needed them the most. But the country would be left holding a huge debt and it would be such a large debt that they couldn’t possibly repay it. And so at some point in time, we economic hit men, we go back into the country and say, “Look, you owe us a lot of money, you can’t pay your debts. Therefore sell us your oil at a real cheap price or vote with us at a UN vote or give us land for a military base or send some of your troops to some country where we want you to support us.”

DAVID BRANCACCIO: You think that from the word go that this kind of lending was meant to essentially put these countries into hock?

JOHN PERKINS: There’s no question in my mind that this was what I was intended to do was to go out and create these projects that would bring billions of dollars back to US corporations and create projects that would put these countries into such deep debt, that in essence, they became part of our empire. They became our slaves in a way.

[…]

The reason I wrote the book, David, is because finally after 9/11 I realized that the American people must know what’s going on. Because most Americans don’t know. And the that 9/11 was just symbolic of a tremendous amount of anger around the world. And we in the United States don’t are not aware of that. September 11th made us somewhat aware of it although I think we’ve really covered that aspect of it over. We say this is a rogue terrorist.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Or that it’s based in sort of religious passion. Or that it’s something about Saudi Arabia in particular. This isn’t really about the United States and its international relations. That’s the argument.

JOHN PERKINS: That’s the argument. But in fact, if you go to Catholic countries in South America, you’ll see that Osama bin Laden is a is a hero amongst a lot of people. He’s on billboards. He’s on T-shirts. It’s very unfortunate that this mass murderer has become the symbol of a David who is standing up to a Goliath. The way they see it. He’s like a Robin Hood to many people.

[…]

DAVID BRANCACCIO: You know, I saw a World Bank official quoted in regard to your book, hadn’t read the book. Saw some account. But thought that your view of all this was really out of date. And regardless of whether or not your vision of this is really what happened, World Bank has moved on.

Even now they’ve shifted. I saw a statistic in 1980 something like three or five percent of their lending went into things like health and pensions and education. Now it’s up to 22 percent. They’re not giving so much money to big dam projects that runs up the debt.

JOHN PERKINS: If you really look behind those numbers of schools and hospitals and those kinds of things, you’ll see that yes, we’ve spent more money on constructing those types of facilities — building the schools and the hospitals. The big construction companies have gotten rich building them.

But look behind the numbers and see how much money we’ve put into training health specialists. Doctors and nurses and technicians or how much money we’ve put into teaching into training teachers. To fill the schools. It’s not enough to build schools and hospitals. You’ve also got to create the whole system that allows for better education and better health care. It’s- I’m very sad to say it’s a system that has really pulled the wool over people’s eyes. We paint a very good picture, but when you go deep in, you find a very different story.

Clearly, even that 22% is too much for the Empire builders. We must get them heavily in our debt so that we can own them.

Wolfowitz is a true believer that the way conditions in the world will improve is through American power. Others are simply greedy. But it doesn’t matter. The result is the same.

Whatever small amount of progress has occurred since Perkins was working in the field is now going to be turned back in order that American has the strength to strong arm countries into giving us their oil and allowing military bases and any number of other things we wish to take. (And, of course, we need the money for Halliburton and Bechtel and the others.)

I read somewhere recently, maybe even in my comment section, that the neocons are achieving their goals one by one while our howls of protest just fly out into the void. I once compared them to sharks, lethal predators who never stop swimming — they just circle menacingly and systematically bite off one item of their agenda after the other.

Wolfowitz in charge of the World Bank is simply another phase of the plan. Their project is going swimmingly. As they were convinced that Iraq would be a cakewalk, they are convinced that all this hatred we are creating is irrelevant, that our awesome power can overcome anything.

Meanwhile:

Hitler Finds An Audience In Turkey

Why this nation — which welcomed millions of Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and was the first Muslim country to recognize the state of Israel — now appears so fascinated with Hitler is a question that sparks heated debate. Booksellers said buyers tended to be men between the ages of 18 and 30.

Like several other vendors here, Oznur insisted that the newfound popularity of “Mein Kampf” was a factor mostly of price. Sales soared after several new translations were published at the beginning of the year and priced at about $3.50 a copy. Most books of a similar length cost nearly double that.

Some analysts say the appeal of “Mein Kampf” probably has to do with the rising anti-Americanism here, a result of the U.S.-led invasion of neighboring Iraq. Among the work’s chief rivals on the bestseller lists is “Metal Storm,” a gory thriller that depicts a U.S. invasion of Turkey. The hero, a Turkish spy whose training includes shooting his puppy, avenges his homeland by leveling Washington with a nuclear device.

In a country where conspiracy theories are commonly used to explain international politics, “it is accepted wisdom in some circles that Israel dictates U.S. policy,” said Dogu Ergil, a Middle East expert at Ankara University. Thus, his theory goes, anti-Americanism morphs into a hybrid strain of anti-Semitism that in turn arouses curiosity about Hitler.

Nothing to see here folks. Proceed with the empire building.

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The Big Time

Another exciting panel discussion on blogging and the new media! It’s going to be thrilling.

Here’s the roster:

Moderator:
E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Senior Fellow, Brookings; Columnist, Washington Post Writers Group

Panelists:
Jodie T. Allen
Senior Editor, Pew Research Center

Ana Marie Cox
Wonkette.com

Ellen Ratner
White House Correspondent, Talk Radio News Service

Jack Shafer
Editor-at-Large, Slate

Andrew Sullivan
AndrewSullivan.com; Senior Editor The New Republic, Columnist, Time Magazine Live Bloggers

The following individuals will be watching the event, either in person or via the webcast, and providing online commentary in real-time on their respective blogs. Their commentary will also be shown on a projector screen at the event and on the webcast.

Daniel Drezner
www.danieldrezner.com

Ed Morrissey
www.captainsquartersblog.com

Josh Trevino
www.redstate.org

I’m awfully glad that Wonkette will be there to represent the liberal blogosphere by saying fuck a lot. It is, after all, the very essence of what we all do.

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Spanking Uncle Alan

In 1983, Greenspan, a Republican, chaired a bipartisan commission that recommended a package of tax increases and benefit reductions to shore up Social Security’s finances. Congress followed the panel’s recommendations.

Today, he said, the debate is far more partisan. Earlier this month Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada called Greenspan a “political hack.” Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., pounced on him harshly as well. She said his support of tax cuts in 2001 “helped blow the lid off” a government budget surplus and led to last year’s record $412 billion deficit.

Greenspan countered that he warned in 2001 that tax reductions could lead to deficits and that a trigger was needed to force automatic spending cuts if deficits appeared. Congress didn’t do that.

“It turns out we were all wrong,” Greenspan said.

Clinton interrupted him.

“Just for the record,” she said, “we were not all wrong, but many people were wrong.”

Damned straight. Greenspan got up before the country and said that it was dangerous to run a surplus and we simply had to cut taxes. Now he is feverish on the subject of getting the savings rate up. Perhaps I’m wrong here, but from an economic standpoint I thought it didn’t matter a whole lot if the government saves the money or the private sector saves the money, the economy benefits more or less the same.

Randians like Uncle Alan, however, don’t really see these things in terms of the health of the overall economy so much as the imperatives of a moral system that must be followed regardless of the consequences. They believe capitalism is a religion in which it is always wrong for the government to tax the heroic John Galts of the world, as a matter of virtue, not economics. Therefore, their dogma requires that the idea of surplus is positively wicked if the Galt strata are being taxed even a penny.

This strange erratic behavior we see in Uncle Alan these days is to be expected of people who follow the teachings of speedy, chainsmoking Russian romance novelists. They tend to serve their goddess as needs be. One could call them hacks. I prefer cultist.

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Kumbaya

Over at The Poor Man, The Editors take issue with Max Boot’s triumphalism while recognizing that history is usually written by the wankers.

Boot says:

Well, who’s the simpleton now? Those who dreamed of spreading democracy to the Arabs or those who denied that it could ever happen?

In an attempt to get another view into the record before we all break into “I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke” the Editors point this out:

Fifteen hundred Americans, who volunteered to defend their country, are dead in Iraq. This is in addition to however many American and other coalition civilians, and coalition troops, have also been killed – a thousand more, perhaps. Now add in the Iraqi civilians killed – estimated, with almost complete uncertainty, to be in the range of 100,000. And now consider the maimed. And the cost of this is in the range of $200 billion. All these numbers are increasing daily.

Terrorism in the region has unquestionably increased. This doesn’t require defining anyone attacking our troops or civilians or Iraqi allies as a “terrorist” – if killing 125+ people at prayer is not terrorism, then the word has no meaning. Iraq isn’t a democracy, nor is Iraqi democracy inevitable – it is unstable, violent, with sharp ethnic/religious divisions. Some parts are better than other parts, some parts are much, much worse. And some parts are rubble.

Saddam had no WMD, nor any WMD programs, nor any connection to international terrorism, over perhaps the last decade. On this score, as a result of the “framing of a guilty man” that our government engaged in, our credibility around the world has been devastated. In Abu Ghraib, our reputation for respecting human rights has been devastated. By virtue of the bloodshed we have unleashed in Iraq (and by virtue of the tall tales which grow up around it), our reputation for peace and forbearance has been demolished. And by virtue of the fact that we have not honestly come to grips with any of this, have taken no action to correct our mistakes, our devastated credibility has been devastated some more.

And Saddam is gone. And Hosni said there’d be elections, some day. Sweet.

But other than that, remember folks, it’s been a huge success and anybody who doesn’t see it that way is a nattaring nabob of negativism. It’s long past time to break out the Budweiser and move on to destroying social security and shutting down the bong industry.

Do read the whole post if only for the description of the annual Indy 500 kegger at Tim Russert’s place in Martha’s Vinyard. Talk about sweet.

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Rogue Element

Brad Plumer, subbing for Kevin over on Political Animal, links to a wikipedia definition of “rogue state” in order to clarify an earlier discussion in which commenters took exception to his use of the phrase:

Wikipedia has a good discussion: “rogue state” is used almost exclusively by the United States, and has been used to refer to other states that: don’t follow international law, don’t follow standards of proper governance, try to acquire weapons of mass destruction, sponsor terrorism, reject human rights, squander natural resources, or just plain don’t engage in “good” diplomacy. Of course, that could refer to a very wide range of states; in practice, it mostly just refers these days to Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, and maybe Libya—states the U.S. government doesn’t particularly like and doesn’t mind antagonizing. (No official calls China a rogue state, for instance.) Venezuela might find itself on the list soon, but right now it’s only a measly “rogue element.”

I can think of another country that is acting decidely roguish these days what with it’s abrogation of international treaties, it’s spokesmen being on the record saying that international law doesn’t apply to it, that supplies money to terrorist regimes like Uzbekistan, believes in indefinate detention and torture, squanders its natural resources and talks trash to its allies and enemies alike. And it’s crowing about spreading its system of government all over the world as fast as it can. One wonders how long it’s going to take for other countries to have a little meeting and decide that they need to protect themselves from this powerful rogue nation?

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