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Mr. 9/11 is having a tough few days

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Looks like Mr. 9/11 is in for some stormy weather. Even the New York Times covered the story about Rudy paying the security costs for his Long Island adulterous trysts out of the budgets of obscure city agencies. (It should be pointed out, however, that the Times obligingly buried the story in the back pages of Section A, and tried its best to cover for Rudy).

Today we learn that Rudy’s initial excuse (I knew nothing about it, and anyway I got security everywhere, even my love nests) because besides paying the extra security costs for the Long Island love romps, the taxpayers of New York were footing the bill for a chauffeur and security for the little lady, whether she was with the Mayor or no. As icing on the cake, it turns out that the trips to Long Island may have been necessitated, at least in part, by the fact that the Mayor’s preferred love nest, the one located at 7 World Trade Center, had been destroyed. You may remember that was the spot Rudy chose as the emergency command center, over the advice of the experts. It was more important to Rudy that he had he could have Judy conveniently close by. The American people are still largely ignorant about the fact that Rudy was running around New York that day because he literally had nowhere else to go. That’s a fact that may just get a little more coverage now. It’s amazing how adding a little sex to a story makes it so much easier to understand.

But there’s another story hidden in this story, one more important but a lot less sexy. The most important thing we should want to know about any presidential candidate is how he or she will actually conduct themselves as president. Are we in for four to eight more years of Constitution trampling and arrogant governance, or will we have a president who knows at least some bounds, and recognizes some limits on his/her actions.

One of the hallmarks of the Bush near dictatorship has been its refusal to operate in the open. It essentially asserts the right to operate in total secrecy, and to a large extent it has gotten away with doing so. If the next president isn’t reined in, or doesn’t rein himself in, then we are in real trouble. That’s why this is troubling:

When the fact that the security detail was accompanying him on the visits to Ms. Nathan’s condominium was first reported in May 2000, the Giuliani administration refused to provide an accounting of the expenses, suggesting that it was a security issue.

Perhaps Bush has made more patently absurd claims, but I doubt it. There is no logical reason why the costs of providing security to the Mayor and his girlfriend affects security. For that matter, exactly whose security would be threatened? If he was willing to pull that type of stuff as Mayor then imagine what he’ll be doing as president. There is no greater danger to a democracy than an executive who firmly believes that the public has no business knowing what its government is doing.

Filed in Creeping Totalitarianism, Republican Corruption | | Comments (1)

But why don’t you tell us what you really think?

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Via Pharyngula, a fellow named Pat Condell:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5cXWElb-GE[/youtube]

Filed in Religion | | Comments (0)

The insolubility of the Social Security non-crisis

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

As a reminder that there are no final victories in politics, there have been rumblings on the internet that the wise people in Washington are insisting that we must, before all things domestic, fix the non-existent crisis in Social Security. Kevin Drum is the latest super blogger to note that the Washington Post has been beating the drum about the “crisis” quite steadily, despite the lack of evidence that Social Security has more than minor problems, all of which are rather long term. He points out that we might be better served waiting, at least until the trust fund balance is exhausted, to decide what action to take, as we will then have a better idea about the lay of the land at that point.

There’s another point that has to be made. There are only two “solutions” to the crisis, at least only two that are within the acceptable limits of discussion. One is to solve the “crisis” by raising the payroll tax, the other is to solve the problem by destroying the program. The latter didn’t work out too well for Bush, and it’s unlikely that his fellow Republicans will want to walk that plank at this particular moment. That leaves increasing the payroll tax.

But, that presents a problem. At this point raising the payroll tax would simply increase the Social Security trusts fund surplus. That increased surplus would be invested in the very treasury bills that Bush and his Washington Post supporters insisted were worthless; mere “I.O.U’s. Full faith and credit, we were told, was for the Chinese, not the American worker. That being the case, any money we infuse into the system now will simply disappear down the same hole, stolen by George Bush to transfer to his cronies, and replaced by worthless pieces of paper. The only thing we can hope to do is pay as we go, because any surplus we generate is lost to us. By that logic, it makes no sense to do anything until payroll taxes no longer cover the cost of current benefits. In fact, if we accept their logic, the rational thing to do now would be to cut payroll taxes so that they only cover current benefits, since we are flushing the surplus down the toilet anyway.

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Soft bigotry of no expectations

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

In today’s Times we learn that Bush still eschews the hands on approach to Mid-East peace that Bill Clinton took in his final days in office. Besides the reflexive position that anything Clinton did was bad, there’s another consideration motivating Bush. He’d be risking visible failure, and he doesn’t like to do that. Unlike Clinton and Jimmy Carter he’s too afraid to fail to lay it all out on the line. Normally, we might be inclined to condemn a president who refused to take a chance for peace, but in Bush’s case we must admit that his fear has led him to the better choice. Consider this, from the Independent, via Firedoglake:

Making matters worse was Mr Bush’s lack of knowledge and sense of history. Flynt Everett [sic], once the top adviser to Ms Rice on Middle East matters, but now a strong critic of the President, last week related how at a 2002 meeting in the White House situation room, he heard Mr Bush say that as soon as the Palestinians had a democratically elected government, their leadership would be “less hung-up” on issues like borders and the status of Jerusalem.

Mr Everett [sic] was astounded. It was, he told the Washington Post last week, “one of the most profoundly ignorant statements anyone has ever uttered on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” [Emphasis mine]

This is the man that some people felt deserved to be president, saying things that are so profoundly stupid they leave you open mouthed with astonishment. So, thank you Mr. Bush for staying out of the talks. They will fail miserably, but at least, without your presence, we may avoid another war.

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Weapons of mass distraction, Courant edition

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

I was so disappointed this morning as I perused the front page of the Courant. Not a single story about a disabled person struggling mightily against their particular disability. But I perked up soon enough, because there in the place where I expected my daily dose of pathos was a vitally important story about three bozos who had their chests tattooed to honor their dead mother. Now that’s a story that deserves more than one half the space on the front page. If the Courant hadn’t made the wise editorial decision to print that story, they might have had to print… you know, ..news.

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Least surprising shocking development of 2007

Monday, November 26, 2007

Talking Points Memo reports that Bush and al-Maliki have sealed a deal whereby he, on behalf of the Iraqi people, will allow Bush’s cronies to economically rape their country, and Bush, on behalf of the American people, promises to keep al-Maliki in power.

Iraq’s government is prepared to offer the U.S. a long-term troop presence in Iraq and preferential treatment for American investments in return for an American guarantee of long-term security including defense against internal coups, The Associated Press learned Monday.

More here. Sounds like a great deal for everyone concerned, except the American and Iraqi people, both of whom will pay dearly for this little sweetheart deal. I always thought that deals like this required treaties, but silly me, that’s so 18th century.

Lots of folks are pointing out that just a few short years ago anyone who claimed we would never get out of Iraq was a fevered conspiracy theorist. Now that a permanent presence has been announced as the American policy we always knew it was, it will likely cause barely a ripple among those who denied the obvious years ago. That included the Bushies, by the way, as TPM also documents.

Once again we follow in the Roman way, establishing client kings in distant lands through whom we rule our empire. (I know we’ve done it before, but never quite so blatantly. Some might call the explicit coup insurance rather tacky). Whether for good or ill we lack the talent the Romans had for Empire. But even the Romans, at least the general populace, found that there was little profit in Empire, and what there was went to the— you guessed it: the Emperor’s cronies. This permanent occupation will be, among other things, a great, albeit inefficient, mechanism for transferring what is left of the wealth of the American middle class into the pockets of the top 1% of the top 1%.

Filed in Creeping Totalitarianism, Iraq | | Comments (0)

Could anybody really be this stupid?

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Mark Halperin gets to occupy real estate on the op-ed pages of the New York Times, while confessing to a level of stupidity that can only be described as mind-boggling:

MORE than any other book, Richard Ben Cramer’s “What It Takes,” about the 1988 battle for the White House, influenced the way I cover campaigns.

I’m not alone. The book’s thesis — that prospective presidents are best evaluated by their ability to survive the grueling quadrennial coast-to-coast test of endurance required to win the office — has shaped the universe of political coverage.

…

For most of my time covering presidential elections, I shared the view that there was a direct correlation between the skills needed to be a great candidate and a great president. The chaotic and demanding requirements of running for president, I felt, were a perfect test for the toughest job in the world.

But now I think I was wrong. The “campaigner equals leader” formula that inspired me and so many others in the news media is flawed.

Who woulda thunk it? What a shock to find that the ability to fool most of the people most of the time does not correlate with presidential competence.

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Iraq on the campaign trail

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Shade, once again, of Vietnam. The New York Times reports that the Democratic candidates are shifting their tone on Iraq in response to alleged security gains in that country. (As Democrats See Security Gains in Iraq, Tone Shifts) This is not the first time that we have been told that things are looking up in Iraq, as we were so often told the same thing about Vietnam. In fact, these kinds of claims are made with surprising regularity, as we folks who are inflicted with a Senator named Lieberman are well aware. It usually doesn’t take long for events on the ground to belie the sunny predictions; in fact, just a day before this article was published the Times reported on a series of bombings that left 26 people dead. It might also come as a surprise to the eternal optimists that the folks responsible for the mayhem in Iraq are probably not unaware of the fact that our overextended military will have to stand partly down soon or risk implosion. They may, in other words, be simply biding their time.

One must hope that the Democratic candidates are capable of exercising a little foresight and common sense; whatever illusory gains may have been made, and it is likely they are just that, don’t change the basic picture.

But in fact, there seems to be less to this article than there appears. The campaigns do not appear to have changed their positions and only one “adviser” was willing to speak on the record to urge Democrats to fall in line behind the failure that is Iraq:

“The politics of Iraq are going to change dramatically in the general election, assuming Iraq continues to show some hopefulness,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who is a supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s and a proponent of the military buildup. “If Iraq looks at least partly salvageable, it will be important to explain as a candidate how you would salvage it — how you would get our troops out and not lose the war. The Democrats need to be very careful with what they say and not hem themselves in.”

Michael O’Hanlon is, of course, the guy who went to Iraq months ago and wrote a column in which he called himself a critic of the war (untrue, he was an early supporter and remains so) and in which he claimed the surge was succeeding based on a guided tour of Iraq conducted by the Defense Department. His presence as a Hillary adviser is just one of many reasons why her candidacy is viewed with suspicion. It leads one to think that, if she is elected, she will never withdraw from the country. But Hillary’s present fudging on all things Iraq is not a change of tone, it has been her tone all along. Nor is there any substantial evidence that the other candidates have changed their basic position. The fact that they are talking more about economic issues may be a reflection of the fact that people are beginning to realize that Bush has created a train wreck there too.

The candidates would be wise to steer clear of the O’Hanlons. As in Vietnam, the tunnel in this particular war will just keep getting longer, and the light at its end grow ever more distant.

Filed in Democrats, Presidential Politics | | Comments (0)

The limits on our discourse

Friday, November 23, 2007

What with Thanksgiving and all, including a visit from my kids, I won’t be writing much over the weekend, but that doesn’t mean I won’t inflict my ravings on my helpless readers at all.

Today, an object lesson in the sort of unconscious limits that we place on the acceptable realm of debate in this country.

The New Yorker, has an otherwise excellent article by George Packer about the fact that the Republican candidates, or at least the leading candidates, have been forced, willingly or unwillingly, to compete with each other in a race to the intellectual and moral bottom:

As the tide goes out on President Bush’s foreign policy, the mass of flotsam left behind includes a Republican Party that no longer knows how to be reasonable. Whenever its leading Presidential candidates appear before partisan audiences, they try to outdo one another in pledging loyalty oaths to the use of force, pandering to the war lobby as if they were Democrats addressing the teachers’ union.

Yet, in an article bemoaning the inability of Republican candidates to step outside of the Republican mindset, he has this to say about Ron Paul, a nutcase to be sure, but not necessarily on the subject of Iraq:

In this election, the isolationist candidate is the Texas congressman Ron Paul. He frequently attacks the core rationale of Bush’s foreign policy, and receives enthusiastic applause for doing so, which indicates that Republican views about the war in Iraq might be more heterodox than the leading candidates and their strategists assume. But his brand of anti-interventionism reduces the Republican debate to hawks versus cranks. “They attack us because we’ve been over there. We’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years,” Paul said at a debate in South Carolina. “I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it.”

I’m not saying that Paul isn’t a crank, but there’s nothing about the quote Packer uses that remotely proves that point. The first two sentences are statements of fact; the last is an eminently reasonable statement of opinion. Perhaps it’s the last sentence that proves Paul’s crankiness on the subject of Iraq. He is, after all, stating explicitly that we should listen to our adversaries and consider taking the reasons they give for hating us at face value. While this is a perfectly rational statement, in fact a self evidently true statement, it is also a statement that runs against an implicit orthodoxy in our present discourse, which holds that we should never listen to what our “enemies” have to say, nor should we ever engage with their ideas. The fact that our refusal to listen often creates new enemies is ignored, or, to some minds, actually proves that our approach of righteous ignorance is correct.

Listening to others does not imply agreement with them, but it is the only way to really understand them. Nor does the fact that a person or organization turns to terrorism as a strategy necessarily prove that they do not have legitimate grievances. We can condemn the attacks on the World Trade Center while agreeing with bin Laden that the U.S. has no business maintaining a military presence in the Middle East. We can do that, that is, as a matter of logic and common sense, but we cannot do it in the irrational arena of American politics. Bin Laden actually understands this about our political dialog, and has used it against us. Most cultures would have seen through his attempts to re-elect Bush with his supposed endorsement of Kerry. Not the U.S., which listens with its ears shut.

Paul may be a crank, but his suggestion that we actually listen to our adversaries is not admissible evidence in support of that proposition.

As an aside, I must point out that the limits of acceptable discourse, are subject to change in this country. Every once in a while it becomes unacceptable to advocate racist ideologies, even if one dresses them up in pseudo-scientific jargon, but now is not one of these times. So while we can’t advocate listening to what our adversaries have to say, it is presently acceptable to argue that a substantial segment of our population are intellectually inferior and apparently also acceptable to argue that, while blacks may not be inferior, White Anglo Saxon Protestants are definitely superior.

Filed in Politics | | Comments (2)

Happy Thanksgiving

Thursday, November 22, 2007

This year’s apple pie.

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