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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%.

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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.

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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.

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Happy Thanksgiving

Thursday, November 22, 2007

This year’s apple pie.

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Bad news for New York lawyers

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Via Susie, we learn that times are tough for associates at New York law firms:

New York law firms are cutting associates for the first time since 2001 as the collapse of the subprime mortgage and credit markets causes private equity deal volume and structured finance work to slow.

Clifford Chance, the world’s highest-grossing law firm, dismissed six senior associates who worked on mortgage-backed securities in its structured finance practice on Nov. 5. At least two other firms asked associates, or salaried lawyers, to take sabbaticals or switch departments, a move that often precedes job cuts. Partners, about one-fourth of the attorneys at the biggest firms, may also face some belt tightening.

The subprime collapse and its effect on the credit market and the volume of deals have brought a slowdown in work, probably leading to job cuts. While structured finance practices have been hit the hardest, mergers and acquisitions and private equity practices also face a slowdown, legal consultants said.

Not to worry-too much. They can always get work foreclosing on the people whose lives they indirectly helped to ruin. It doesn’t pay nearly as much, but on the plus side it’s not quite so mind numbingly boring (close, though) as working on mortgage-backed securities.

Filed in Economics, Lawyer stuff | | Comments (0)

Yet another Bushie exempts himself from the criminality

Monday, November 19, 2007

Supposedly, this is an excerpt from Scott McClellan’s new book:

The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

There was one problem. It was not true.

I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the president himself.

Yet another Bush lackey blowing the whistle when it’s too late. Did Scotty really “unknowingly” pass along false information? There is a rather simple equation that most of us had learned before Scotty even got his job. If Bush says it, there’s a 99% chance it’s a lie. If Rove, Libby, Cheney, Card and Bush all say it, there is absolutely no possibility that it is true. Does Scotty really expect us to believe he was so stupid he couldn’t figure this out?

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Bill Maher on health care, etc.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Gliding toward the holiday, feeling a bit lazy. Bill Maher’s latest rules.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxG6VFdwdM0[/youtube]

Yet more proof that only comedians can tell the truth about the state of this country.

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Reagan, Republicans and race

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Over the course of the last few weeks Paul Krugman and David Brooks, both columnists for the New York Times, have been trading blows about Ronald Reagan. The general charge is that Reagan made coded appeals to white racism as part of his campaign strategy, consistent with the overall Republican electoral stategy since 1968. The specific charge is that Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi to send exactly that same message. Philadelphia was the town that killed 3 civil rights workers in the 60s, and Reagan’s speech touted his own belief in “states rights”.

Krugman started it by writing a column about the Republican raced based strategy, noting the Philadelphia speech as a case in point. Brooks responded by claiming that the speech was not a calculated part of any race based strategy and that anyway, Reagan didn’t open his campaign in Philadelphia and that basically, it was all just a big, but innocent, mistake. Krugman responded on his blog, pointing out quite effectively that Reagan had managed to make the same type of mistake over and over again.

Now comes Lou Cannon, Reagan’s many times biographer, into the breach. According to him, the charge is as follows:

Political mythologies endure. One myth that is enjoying a revival in a year when Republican presidential candidates are comparing themselves to Ronald Reagan, their iconic hero, is the notion that Mr. Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in 1980 by a coded appeal to white-supremacist voters.

This is in fact, not the charge that has been made, but we will let this pass for the moment. Cannon goes on to disprove the alleged charge by establishing, to his satisfaction at least, that:

1. Ronald Reagan was not a rascist. This fact is proven because Reagan had a black friend with whom he formed a bond back when he was a liberal. His stands against civil rights laws were merely principled constitutional stands having nothing to do with race.

2. The appeal to race didn’t work. This fact is merely asserted.

In some ways Cannon reminds me of the “moderate” who believes that, by definition, the truth must lie somewhere between the views of the left and the right. If it doesn’t, then one should fall back on non sequiturs.

Neither Krugman or any other responsible person that raises this issue has charged that Reagan was a racist. Reagan’s personal feelings on race are besides the point. The charge is that he, consistent with the Republican party’s overall strategy, sought to exploit and exacerbate racial tension to win votes. Even Brooks understands the nature of the argument. If Reagan wasn’t a racist then his actions were even more shameful, because even more cynical.

Nor does the argument made by Krugman include or depend on the claim that the Philadelphia speech succeeded in its objective. Whether Reagan was a net winner or loser by making that speech (and he did win Mississippi, after all) is also beside the point. While we punish them differently, there is little moral distinction between murder and attempted murder. There is just as little between trying to win votes by appeals to racism and actually doing so. If the Philadelphia speech was not a winner for Reagan, the overall strategy certainly was. As Krugman points out in his blog, the speech was only one of many instances of Reagan’s use of coded appeals to racists. He would not have continued the practice if he didn’t think it was working.

We must give Brooks points for, at least, dealing with the issue at hand. True to form he was disingenuous about it, but he accurately characterized the issue. Cannon eludes it and attempts to deflect it by asserting (certainly not proving) two propositions that are essentially unrelated to the core charge.

This is not just ancient history. The Republican candidates continue to rely on coded messages to various groups, whose common trait is intolerance of one sort or another. I don’t know if Giuliani is a racist. He probably has black acquaintances too. Whatever his personal feelings, Giuliani is crafting a race based strategy reminiscent of Reagan, et. al., and the candidates are falling all over each other to endorse various forms of religious intolerance. The fact that one or more of them may think that these people are actually yahoos is beside the point. They are currying favor with them to win, and implicit in that is a pledge to deliver for them down the road. It is beginning to look like these appeals to bigotry are losing their effectiveness, one of the few glimmers of hope we have in what is otherwise a rather bleak political scene. The Republicans have not given up, however. Hence their attempts to one up one another to prove their bona fides with the hate groups.

Speaking of columns in the New York Times, Tom Friedman proved he has learned nothing from the past 5 years and is ably skewered here.

Filed in Media, Republican Corruption | | Comments (0)

Joe Courtney speaks out on contempt charges

Saturday, November 17, 2007

The Hill reports on the attitude of House freshmen on the Miers/Bolton contempt issue:

Despite their skittishness on other signature Democratic issues, most of the Democrats’ “Frontline” members wholeheartedly back sanctions against the White House for rebuffing the House Judiciary Committee in its investigation of the U.S. attorney scandal.

“At some point, the process has no credibility if people aren’t willing to testify,” said Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.), who beat a Republican incumbent in 2006 by less than 100 votes.

I don’t think it’s fair to lump Joe in with the other freshmen, despite his small margin of victory. At this point, it’s hard to see that he’s endangered, or that a contempt vote against these Bush cronies would be unpopular in his district. More importantly, he wasn’t recruited by Rahm Emanuel, who made a point of recruiting the most conservative candidates he could find, many of whom went on to lose in the general election. Those that got swept in are now millstones around the neck of the Democratic party, a brand new crop of Democrats in Name Only, most of whom had vanished when the Republicans took control. That was the silver lining on that massive cloud, but Emanuel has diligently sought to undermine the party. (He’s now asking the Democrats to turn right on immigration, practically pushing Hispanic voters back to the Republicans, who they have deserted in droves).

But back to the subject, good for Joe for standing firm on this issue.

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