Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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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Party Orthodoxy

Jeffrey Goldberg writes on the Democratic “toughness” problem in this week’s The New Yorker, mostly by focusing on Joe Biden:

He has come to realize, he said, that many Democrats still haven’t grasped the political importance of September 11th, and again he recalled how he had urged Kerry to keep his campaign message focussed on terrorism. Kerry, Biden said, would tell voters that he would “fight terror as hard as Bush,” but then he would add, “and I’ll help you economically.” “What is Bush saying?” Biden said. “Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. I would say to John, ‘Let me put it to you this way. The Lord Almighty, or Allah, whoever, if he came to every kitchen table in America and said, “Look, I have a Faustian bargain for you, you choose. I will guarantee to you that I will end all terror threats against the United States within the year, but in return for that there will be no help for education, no help for Social Security, no help for health care.” What do you do?’

“My answer,” Biden said, “is that seventy-five per cent of the American people would buy that bargain.”

Have you ever read anything more stupid than this? Does he really believe that seventy-five percent of the country is so afraid of terrorism that they would make that bargain? Absolute rubbish.

It’s not fear of terrorism, Joe. I’m sure New Yorkers and Washington DC’ers are truly afraid of terrorism for very good reason and THEY DIDN’T VOTE FOR BUSH! If Bush won because of the terrorism issue it was patriotism, not fear, that got him over the line. People responded to his simple Hollywood tough guy image because it looks heroic. Even “Ashley’s Story” was a made for Oprah moment, not a call to Bush’s great fatherly ability to keep us safe. He ran as Top Gun, not George Washington. There’s a big difference.

For most people in this country “terrorism” is an abstract thing, not a source of everyday fear. Biden is wrong that Americans would trade education, health care or social security for an end to terror threats. They don’t even feel the terror threats. What they cared about in this last election was patriotism and national pride (with a touch of old fashioned bloodlust and revenge) and that is something, particularly in this age of the televised campaign and pop politics, that can move people. But never think that people will trade their own immediate, personal well being for what up to now has been for most people a reality television show. They want it all. Bush’s war has not called for sacrifice for a reason.

This article is an interesting insight into this argument within the party about both the foreign policy differences and the fiercely partisan nature of our politics today. In my mind, they may be intertwined in certain ways, but it’s a mistake to think that we can solve the problem simply by speaking more hawkishly and voting with Republicans on military matters.

The fundamental misunderstanding is that we will be seen as “tough” if we just back a tough foreign policy. I don’t think that our alleged lack of toughness is the result of soft policy but rather a carefully designed negative image forged from years of Republican marketing. Most importantly, it once again completely misses the most important fact about our current state of politics. Bill Richardson doesn’t get it:

The Democrats need to stand with the President when he’s right,” Bill Richardson told me. “His emphasis on being more pro-democracy in the Middle East seems to have galvanized some movement. The Democrats need to establish their credentials on national security, and we get hurt by reflexive negativism.

Interestingly (and when you think about it, naturally) here’s someone who does:

Hillary Clinton says that she has been “forthright in agreeing with the Administration where I thought we could agree,” but she believes that the Administration has taken advantage of Democratic support—particularly in the days after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. “Joe and I and others offered our support to the President and stood unified with him in response to these attacks,” Clinton said last week, referring to Biden. “The Administration saw our actions as a sign of weakness,” she said, adding that it “had a campaign strategy to exploit the legitimate fears of the American people.” Clinton also said that the Democrats must criticize the Bush Administration for its foreign-policy failings—of which, she said, there are many—but that they are hindered by their role as the opposition party. “It’s hard to describe a Democratic Party foreign-policy position, because we’re not in charge of making policy,” Clinton said. “We are, by the nature of the system, forced to critique and analyze and offer suggestions.”

It will not matter if we are agreeing with Bush and Cheney that we should immediately launch nuclear missiles and kill every arab in the middle east, by our very agreement the Republicans will deride us as weak. Politics are playing out on both a real and a kabuki level in which the theatre of the issue is actually more important than the reality in political terms. It’s not a matter of being right or wrong on an issue, as sad as that may be. It’s a matter of being willing to be aggressive against people who quite publicly hold you in contempt whether you agree with them or not.

Sam Rosenfeld on TAPPED, referring to what Josh Marshall calls the “convulsively neoliberal” pundit establishment points out:

The DC chatterers rank no value higher than “political courage,” and their special brand of policy dramaturgy demands that ennobled lawmakers demonstrate said courage by screwing over some constituency or another. Somebody has to pay. Someone must be sacrificed. Hence, when discussing Social Security reform, it is sacrosanct that benefit cuts will happen, one way or another, and that the only honorable lawmakers are those who assess the situation with cold-eyed realism and exact the necessary sacrifices in the name of reform.

This is where I think the real disconnect exists between the punditocrisy/party elites and the grassroots. The argument isn’t really about policy although their are some differences. It’s about what we define as political courage. Insiders still believe that the key is to distance itself from the base of the party as it did in the 90’s, as Rosenfeld outlines above. Out here in the hinterlands we think that political conditions obviously require us to unify behind what feels to us like an existential battle with the Republicans.

Here’s an example of the kind of beltway discussion that seems to me to entirely miss the point:

CROWLEY: With me now to talk more about the Democrats, including their new party chairman, is Bruce Reed. He is president of the Democratic Leadership Council.

We were interested in an article that you and your fellow chairman wrote in blueprint, which said in part about Democrats, “Voters don’t know what we stand for and have grave doubts about what they think we stand for.” You went on to say that changing this is going to require challenging party orthodoxy.

What part of party orthodoxy has to be challenged?

BRUCE REED, PRESIDENT, DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP COUNCIL: Well, Candy, politics is like anything else in life. The most important thing is what you stand for. And Democrats’ biggest problem is Americans don’t have a clue, most Americans don’t have a clue. And some Democrats don’t seem to either.

So the voters have given us some extra time. We think the best use of that time is to have a good, healthy debate within the party about what our values are, what our principles are, and what big ideas we have to back them up.

CROWLEY: So what is it in the party orthodoxy that you think has to be challenged from the DLC point of view.

REED: Well, the central issue in the last election, and a big issue going forward is, what are we going to do to keep the country safe? And, you know, it’s all well and good to criticize the administration’s many mistakes on this issue, but going forward, we need to come up with our own plan to promote democracy around the world, and come to terms with where we will be willing to use military force if necessary.

That seems pretty benign. But, in fact, when I heard this interview on in the backround I was fuming at the tone and the substance of those comments, but even more at what he wasn’t saying. “Party orthodoxy” is a code word — and I hate using code words against our own party — for the liberal wing. I’ve been hearing this trope about party orthodoxy for almost twenty years and it’s as stale as “tax and spend” and “hell no, we won’t go.” The only people who are still listening to this shit are the “convulsively neoliberal” DC establishment.

I was once an adherent of the view that moving to be middle was the smart move. But I finally hit a wall, a wall that apparently has knocked the Democratic establishment unconscious or stupid instead of awake. The other side now holds all institutional power in Washington and its power is strengthened by what the DLC is doing, namely promoting the position that the base of the Democratic party is outside the mainstream of the country. You never hear Republicans doing that.

Mostly, I am infuriated when Democrats do not properly defend our party against the Republicans and call the republicans out whenever they get the microphone. Reed could have made his points and still taken the opportunity to take the fight to the Republicans. Here’s what he did instead:

CROWLEY: You also talked about it’s not enough to say what we’re against, we have to say what we’re for. Looking at Congress right now, one of the criticisms coming from Republicans, but coming apparently through the poll, is that, look, what do the Democrats stand for when it comes to Social Security? Are they handling the Social Security issue well at this point, the Democrats?

REED: Well, I think they’re doing a very good job of pointing out the flaws in Bush’s plan, and they need to do that because it is a bad plan. President Bush seems to have finally found common ground in Washington, and most Republicans are scared of what he’s doing on Social Security as Democrats.

CROWLEY: But is it enough for the Democrats to say no?

REED: Once that plan crashes and burns, Democrats are going to need to step up with our own ideas. Because it’s an important issue for the country over the long haul, and we’re going to have to address it.

CROWLEY: One of the things that you also talked about in your article is, look, this is a false choice between sort of the DLC more moderate and the base. But I want to read you something from “The Nation,” which said this about the DLC: “After dominating the party in the 1990s, the DLC is struggling to maintain its identity and influence in a party beset by losses and determined to oppose George W. Bush.”

When you look at it, moderation and compromise is not what the Democrats have said from the grassroots that they’re about right now. They’re about confrontation. There’s no way you can square that, is that, with the DLC position?

REED: Oh, I think this is a false choice. We’re not about compromise. We’re about putting forward good, new ideas that bring together a majority of the American people.

Look, there are some — Bill Clinton is the only president to get re-elected. We’ve lost five of the last seven elections. There are some Democrats who would like to leave behind the one guy who broke that curse. We think there’s an important lesson from the Clinton years, which is that if you put forward a compelling agenda, you can excite your base and you can persuade new voters to come join your cause.

Well yes, it is about compromise. If Democrats put forward good, new ideas that bring together a majority of the American people, we’d like to think that the fifty fucking percent of us out here who don’t vote Republican are considered a part of that majority. When the moderates fail to get the support of Democrats either in the country or the congress, then they are not doing what they say they are doing, they are enabling the Republicans. Even worse, they are helping to promote the erroneous idea that Republicans are mainstream and we are not. Could we all agree that if a bill cannot garner the support of a majority of Democrats in the Senate and House — it isn’t a Democratic bill. Is that too much to ask?

I’m sure there are some Democrats who hate Clinton. There always were. Most Democrats, however, see Clinton as a man of his time. And if the DLC guys don’t recognize that TIMES HAVE CHANGED then there is no reason to listen to them anymore. The Republicans that were the minority leaders in the house and senate when Bill Clinton got elected were Bob Michel and Bob Dole. Those guys have been turned out to pasture. The Republicans today are systematically starting wars, bankrupting the country and repealing the bill of rights. Excuse me while I get a little more alarmed about that kind of thing than whether Michael Moore and Move-on are a little but unruly. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that centrist and moderate Democrats look at the Republican orthodoxy at least as often as they complain in the direction of the base of the Democratic party. I certainly think that they should take their ample opportunities in the media to make that point as long as they are distancing themselves from the “party orthodoxy.” Indeed, if I were asked to define what party orthodoxy is these days, I would have to say that it is the reflexive recoil against the unwashed masses out here in the grassroots who are tearing our hair out and screaming for the establishment to look at the rogue elephant that is trampling on everything we believe in.

Update: It’s good to see the Senate hanging tough with Reid on the nuclear option. more of this please.

UpdateII: James Walcott: Read Now

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Under Lenin’s banner for the second Five Year Plan!

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government’s role in their production.

This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration’s efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source.

Federal agencies are forthright with broadcasters about the origin of the news segments they distribute. The reports themselves, though, are designed to fit seamlessly into the typical local news broadcast. In most cases, the “reporters” are careful not to state in the segment that they work for the government. Their reports generally avoid overt ideological appeals. Instead, the government’s news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration.

Some reports were produced to support the administration’s most cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare reform. Others focused on less prominent matters, like the administration’s efforts to offer free after-school tutoring, its campaign to curb childhood obesity, its initiatives to preserve forests and wetlands, its plans to fight computer viruses, even its attempts to fight holiday drunken driving. They often feature “interviews” with senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics, though, are excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy.

[…]

In interviews, though, press officers for several federal agencies said the president’s prohibition did not apply to government-made television news segments, also known as video news releases. They described the segments as factual, politically neutral and useful to viewers. They insisted that there was no similarity to the case of Armstrong Williams, a conservative columnist who promoted the administration’s chief education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, without disclosing $240,000 in payments from the Education Department.

What is more, these officials argued, it is the responsibility of television news directors to inform viewers that a segment about the government was in fact written by the government. “Talk to the television stations that ran it without attribution,” said William A. Pierce, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. “This is not our problem. We can’t be held responsible for their actions.”

Yet in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news segments may constitute improper “covert propaganda” even if their origin is made clear to the television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O. said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports “that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials.”

It is not certain, though, whether the office’s pronouncements will have much practical effect. Although a few federal agencies have stopped making television news segments, others continue. And on Friday, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings. The memorandum said the G.A.O. failed to distinguish between covert propaganda and “purely informational” news segments made by the government. Such informational segments are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not an agency’s role in producing them is disclosed to viewers.

And Comrade Gonzales serves the Party once more.

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