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Myth and Reality

Monday, April 27, 2009

This has been a busy weekend for us, so we just got around to watching Thursday’s Daily Show (I record it every night on my computer). Stewart’s guest was Professor Richard Beeman, who just wrote a book about the Constitutional Convention called Plain, Honest Men. You can watch it below if you like.

Stewart marveled at the fact that these guys could write the entire Constitution (less the Bill of Rights) in 4 months, when, according to him, it takes our present day Congress four months not to pass anything. Far be it from me to argue that the general run of Congressfolks today measures up to the Founders, but it always seems odd to me that we can (and we all do it) at one and the same time glorify the founders while disparaging the way in which the government they designed works. If they had done the crackerjack job we all claim they did, the government would work well and respond effectively to our needs. It doesn’t.

The sad fact is that many of the compromises embedded in the document are serving us very poorly. Whether intended or not, we now have a government in which one house of Congress is disproportionately influenced by sparsely populated states. That situation is made even worse by the operation of the filibuster, but even if there were no filibuster the fact is that the Senate would still be overly influenced by a relative sliver of the population. This affects national policy, which has become badly skewed precisely because the Senate is not responsive to the settled will of the majority.

The fault, of course, is neither in our stars nor (at least wholly) in the framers, but in ourselves. They were well aware their handiwork was not perfect, and fully expected that improvements would be made. We haven’t done that. Right now we have 40 senators who can stop just about anything from being done to address a truly serious national crisis. They probably represent 20% of the people in the country. There’s something wrong with that setup. Sure, the people in Congress today are a particularly squalid bunch, but the Framers expected that too. The government they designed no longer works, but we are blind to that fact. If you want to know why we don’t have a decent health care system you need look no further than the United States Senate. The same holds true on a host of issues. If we stopped thinking of them as demi-gods, and acknowledged that they were human beings who created a flawed product that is badly in need of updating, we’d all be better off.


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Susan Collins shows what a moderate can do

Monday, April 27, 2009

Sometimes things just don’t break your way. Susan Collins, intellectually challenged Maine “moderate” Senator, must be wanting to share a drink with Bobby Jindal these days. Why it seems like only yesterday (because it was) that her website proudly reprinted an article from the Wall Street Journal, in which she trashed the idea of using stimulus money to plan for and respond to a flu pandemic. The article’s been scrubbed from her website, but you can see it, in all it’s glory, right here. And you can see right here that she went out of her way to take credit for protecting us from being protected against a pandemic.

Of course, Collins allowed that we should in fact plan for pandemics, only the money didn’t belong in the stimulus package. Only she forgot to say where it did belong, so the money is nowhere. We can only hope that the Democrats up in Maine will make sure her constituents know that she was more interested in pleasing Karl Rove than representing them.

I suspect that as a major event, the swine flu pandemic will fizzle. We must surely hope that it does. But the fact is that we can assure the fizzle if we engage in planning, which takes money. In this case, about the amount of money we are wasting on bonuses for just some of those AIG folks.

UPDATE: I was in error in stating that the money for this is presently nowhere. It did, in fact, get into the regular appropriation bill. I don’t know what role, if any, Collins played in putting it there.


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Topsy Turvy

Sunday, April 26, 2009

David Broder has rightly been subjected to more withering blogger scorn than I am capable of expressing, but that doesn’t mean I can’t add my mite. His recent column (Stop Scapegoating) advising against prosecuting torturers has been deconstructed here and here as well as elswhere, but there are many levels of absurdity in the column, so I will concentrate on a point I have not yet seen made.

As digby points out, Broder exemplifies the the beltway philosophy that holds that people in power should suffer no consequences for either mistakes or criminality. But he has gone even further in this piece.

Let’s start with his his injunction that Obama “stop the retroactive search for scapegoats”.

A scapegoat, as we all should know, was an innocent goat upon whom the Jewish people ritually transferred their own sins. The goat was then forced into the desert, where it died in expiation for the sins it had not committed. Jesus Christ, according to the Christian tradition, was the ultimate scapegoat.

Broder turns the meaning of the word inside-out. He argues that we should transfer the actual guilt of the goat to us the people:

Again, [Obama was right to release the torture memos], because these policies were carried out in the name of the American people, and it is only just that we the people confront what we did. Squeamishness is not justified in this case. (Emphasis added)

We, the people are the guilty parties because these people made the decision to torture in our names. That being the case, those who actually committed the crime should not be punished.

It’s an odd sort of logic. Now that Nazi comparisons have been legitimized by the right, we are free to point out that it’s a bit like arguing that the German people were primarily responsible for the holocaust, so it was inappropriate to punish Hermann Göring, et. al. And, as Broder demonstrates, God forbid we should have punished Hitler had we caught him alive:

Suppose that Obama backs down and Holder or someone else starts hauling Bush administration lawyers and operatives into hearings and courtrooms.

Suppose the investigators decide that the country does not want to see the former president and vice president in the dock. Then underlings pay the price while big shots go free. But at some point, if he is at all a man of honor, George W. Bush would feel bound to say: That was my policy. I was the president. If you want to indict anyone for it, indict me.

Is that where we want to go? I don’t think so. Obama can prevent it by sticking to his guns.

No, we wouldn’t want to put George Bush in the dock. Look how well it worked out when we gave Nixon a pass on Watergate and Reagan a pass on Iran-Contra.

But there’s something more profoundly repellent about Broder’s thinking here. To return to the Nazi comparison, the German people did accept their share of responsibility for the crimes committed in their names, and they are a better people for it. But Broder is not really looking for that. His reference to these crimes as “policy disagreements” gives him away. What he is really saying is that since we are all guilty, none of us are guilty.


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Friday Night Music

Friday, April 24, 2009

Am I repeating myself here? I searched the site, and couldn’t find them. Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker Rick Gretch, and Stevie Winwood. Blind Faith, In the Presence of the Lord.

And as a bonus, Clapton and Winwood together more recently (better audio quality for sure) reprising a song from Blind Faith, Can’t Find My Way Home:


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Puzzling

Friday, April 24, 2009

Republicans must be immune from cognitive dissonance. There are plenty of examples, but here’s one that truly needs to be more widely known.

We are told by Rove and his ilk that Democrats would be criminalizing “policy differences” if they so much as think about investigating the Bush era war criminals.

At the same time they threaten to filibuster someone who is on the other side of that policy divide, Obama’s nominee to head up the Office of Legal Counsel, who happens to oppose torture. Make no mistake about it, their reasons for opposing her, after you strip away all the bullshit, is that she is anti-torture. So, a person who is anti-torture is fair game for Republican attacks, but actual torturers are off limits.

Speaking of hypocrisy and inability to see ourselves as others see us, someone with time on their hands could have a good time taking apart Arlen Specter’s recently published article in the New York Review of Books entitled The Need to Roll Back Presidential Power Grabs. When I read it I was stunned. If I didn’t know better I would have thought, based on this article, that Specter was a fearless opponent of the Bush power grabs, standing up for truth, justice and the American way. He even makes a pitch for keeping the courts open to lawsuits against the phone companies (substituting the government as the defendant) after he enabled that unconstitutional immunity statute in the first place. Specter is in a bind these days. He is tacking to the right to protect himself in the Republican primary, but he badly wants to protect his unearned reputation for moderation and independence. In fact, when push came to shove (or even just to poke) he always caved. The article is full of the self congratulatory use of the personal pronoun. It would be the work of a weekend, at least, to do the googling necessary to demonstrate how mendacious his article is. It is just jam packed with lies, distortions, and special pleading. Unfortunately, this is not a weekend that I can devote to this worthy endeavor. Here’s hoping someone will.


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Cheney is guilty, guilty, guilty

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The Cheney “defense” to torture is that committing that crime enabled his henchmen to obtain information that “saved lives”. That may be, but probably is not, true. Of course, if we’re going to tote up lives saved, we also have to tote up lives lost to the terrorists our torture tactics created.

But today we find that in fact, Cheney wasn’t looking for facts, he was looking for cover. He ordered prisoners tortured to get evidence for something the CIA told him was not true: that there was a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. There was no such link, but Cheney ordered more and more torture in order to get “evidence” for what he wanted to hear. We should also note in passing that we are not talking the “ticking time bomb” scenario here. The standard Cheney justification for torture-necessary in order to get information about an imminent attack-doesn’t apply.

The torture techniques employed were perfectly suited to get the evidence Cheney was seeking, since many of them were developed by the Communists to wring false confessions out of their prisoners. For my own part I’ve always believed that all forms of torture are designed to get false confessions, since generally speaking the torture only stops when the torturer hears what he wants to hear.

If true, and we all know in our hearts that this all these charges are true (and to prove it I suggest we waterboard Cheney and ask him) this is further proof that Cheney has committed war crimes of the highest order: he ordered people tortured in order to get them to lie. It is self evident that such lies will save no lives, though they may cost many lives, as they surely did. Even Cheney’s inadmissible defense is inapplicable to the case.

Let us hope that the organ that passes for Cheney’s heart keeps beating at least until the jury comes in with the guilty verdict and the prison door slams behind him.

UPDATE: I must respond to one of my right wing commenters, who claims that torturing helped foil a plot to bomb the Library Tower in Los Angeles. In order to accept that, one must accept the proposition that time goes backwards:

Some in the media have interpreted the memo’s statement that the use of harsh interrogation techniques on Mohammed “led to the discovery” of the Library Tower plot as evidence that the use of these tactics was necessary for intelligence officials to thwart the plot. But as Slate.com’s Timothy Noah noted on April 21, that claim conflicts with the “chronology” of events put forth on multiple occasions by the Bush administration. For instance, in a February 9, 2006, White House press briefing that Noah cited, Bush homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend noted that Mohammed was not captured until more than a year after the individuals planning the Library Tower attacks had concluded that the plot had been “canceled.” Noah also noted that a May 23, 2007, Bush administration fact sheet stated that the administration “broke up” the Library Tower plot “in 2002” — before Mohammed was captured.

But I’ll say it again, using a timeworn cliche, the end doesn’t justify the means, particularly when one doesn’t know beforehand what end one is likely to reach. We are no more justified in torturing than Osama bin Laden is in killing innocent people in order to bring about his Caliphate. And I would ask my right wing friend, are our enemies allowed to torture our soldiers when they capture them?


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Hillary states the obvious

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Hillary Clinton has turned out to be a brilliant pick for Secretary of State. Here she is pointing out the obvious to a Republican spouting a Drudge inspired talking point.

We’ve come to a sorry point when the Secretary of State has to defend the president for not acting like a jackass when he meets with world leaders, but that’s where we are these days.


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Puzzling

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Now that Obama is inching ever so slowly toward prosecuting the torturers in chief, Dick Cheney’s bizarre behavior grows ever more perplexing. One would think that a potential criminal defendant might keep his mouth shut, rather than admitting all the elements of the crime with which he may be charged. Perhaps he should consult with competent counsel.

He has been telling the sycophantic Sean Hannity that the torture worked, which we all know is a dubious proposition at best. But from a legal standpoint, it is probably totally irrelevant. A murder can’t defend his act by arguing that the person killed deserved to die. The torture statutes and treaties presuppose that the person being tortured is an enemy of the torturer, and therefore they presuppose that torture might in fact yield something of use. But torture is banned completely, that fact notwithstanding. These issues are ultimately not decided in the court of public opinion, where Cheney would likely lose anyway. They are resolved in a courtroom, and likely a courtroom in Washington D.C., hardly the place I would choose to go on trial were I Dick Cheney.

He really should shut up. If prosecution comes, all the prosecutor might need to do is roll the tapes with Sean.


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Bring Back Fitz

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Now that Obama has kicked the torture can back to Holder, Holder could do the country a favor by kicking it on to a special prosecutor. And who would be more fit for the role than Patrick Fitzgerald, who took down Scooter Libby. He already knows the territory and has proven his bona fides.

Sure, the right-wing would go bat shit crazy, but is that a bad thing? They are already unhinged, and there’s no point in trying to placate them. At this point, it’s probably better to get them into even more of a lather, since their fulminations don’t seem to be doing their cause much good.


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Another insane Republican

Monday, April 20, 2009

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Albert Einstein

Perhaps one doesn’t qualify as insane if one repeats what others have already done, but if you expect different results when you repeat the actions of others your mental health is still in question.

What to make of the parade of Republicans who have attempted to distance themselves or their party from Rush Limbaugh, only to eat their own words within days or hours. Why go there, knowing what’s happened to those who have trod that path before. And why, if you’re going to try, would you serve yourself a meal of the same words those pioneers have eaten before.

The latest to chow down is Republican Congressman Todd Tiahrt, who actually echoed people like Michael Steele, by referring to Limbaugh as an “entertainer”. Not only did he diss Limbaugh, but he used the same terminology that forced Steele to his knees. My own theory for this bizarre behavior is as follows. These questions are usually posed to the hapless Congresscritter in question by rational people. In this case, it was the editorial board of the Kansas City Star. It is very difficult, even for someone as brain dead as a Republican, to admit to sentient humans that they owe fealty to Rush Limbaugh. They can’t bring themselves to do it, particularly if they are speaking to someone who is able to employ the most deadly threat to any Republican talking point: the follow up question. Even for a Republican, it’s not easy to admit that you take your marching orders from a drug crazed guy with serious mental health issues.

So, we have this parade of Republicans, each of whom does the same thing, each of whom presumably hopes against all odds that things will turn out differently this time.


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