Well, unfortunately, computer problems are once again plaguing me. (This time it appears to be the monitor: the picture that once spanned the whole screen suddenly switched to a horizontal box about three inches high, then merely a bright horizontal line).

This will mean that I will have to update from other sites. (I'll still be updating, but turnaround time will be a little slow for comments threads and the like.)

One bit of news I saw was that the U.S. WMD inspectors are close to pulling out of Iraq, after having their hopes of finding WMDs pretty thoroughly dashed. No surprise here- the quick switch from a "removing a threat" argument to the "liberate the people" argument already hinted that they weren't expecting to find anything, and this would appear to be pretty clear proof that this has taken place. Honestly, I doubt this will change many minds. Those who were convinced that Saddam needed to be removed are now opening admitting it was a figleaf, and those who were never convinced will feel justified, but are up against the changed justification.

Still, it's something for people to remember when Bush supporters start crowing about Saddam. As RonK pointed out, the lack of WMDs not only vindicates Blix, but implies that what the U.S. did was directly against international law and the charter of the United Nations, as Iraq had not violated any of the resolutions regarding WMDs. (The whole "they didn't provide information" bit was always dodgy, and now looks worse.) Coupled with the news that the U.S. and U.K. are now classifying themselves as "occupying powers" in their new resolution (and, therefore, the lie that was "liberation" being brought to life) I imagine that those in the international community that distrusted the U.S. before will now consider them about as reliable as a Yugo.

Maybe less so.

I haven't dealt much with the "anti-idiotarians" of late. One, Damien Penny, wrote a blurb, however, that I felt compelled to highlight. I was originally going to just post it in Damian's comments section, but decided to bring it here.

f I had just a little more time, I'd savage Antonia Zerbisias's latest mental drippings, in which she bemoans the lack of "outrage" over Rachel Corrie's death, thrashes "Likudnik" bloggers like Charles Johnson for what they've written about her (of course, she does not deal substantially with evidence that her death was accidental, or that Corrie was a major terror-apologist), hints at a Zionist media conspiracy to cover up Israel's atrocities, and claims Charley Reese as a source - a source who's been hassled by the evil Zionist media watchdogs, naturally...

Fortunately, I've sent it to Charles and I know he won't let me down. Go get 'em, Charles! Kill! Kill!

(The Charles in question is the proprietor of "Little Green Footballs", a site notorious for its tolerance for profoundly racist, propagandist and xenophobic commentary, as long as it aligns with the positions of the site owner.)

Still, this raises a few questions I'd like to ask Damian:

First, Damian, does said evidence that the death was accidental or that she was a supposed "terror-apologist" warrant this?
Taken from the Toronto Star column in question

On idiotarian.com: "I nominate the Bulldozer for the Nobel Peace Prize! It improved society; and now with blood on its hands, I mean blade, it'll fit in with past recipients such as: Terrorfat, Mandela, Carter." On littlegreenfootballs.com, where she's known as "the flat bitch:'' "How 'bout we all get together at Rachel's grave and stage a vomit-in on it?'' while on usefulwork.com, "I hope that Rachel's parents read this site. I just want to say hi; and that at least you have the knowledge that she died painfully."

I'm just a little curious. Especially if the shoe had been on the other foot, and if it were, say, a French bulldozer running over an Ivory Coast activist, followed up by the French military firing tear gas at those attending said activist's funeral? Would he support a "vomit in" at said activist's gravesite?

Oh, and for that mater, was Damian really endorsing the comparison of Nelson Mandela (who was called a terrorist during the days of Apartheid by the Americans) with Yassir Arafat? Would he endorse a "vomit-in" at the gravesite of Mr. Mandela when he finally passes on?

Second question. Did Damian really mean to quote a source (specifically, CAMERA) as proof that the article is invalid? Odd choice, when said source is in contention in the article itself. This just slightly begs the question; in fact, tt would be akin to using Mary Rosh as a primary source on the Lott pseudonymity scandal. This is especially questionable considering that CAMERA is an advocacy group. I imagine a quick google or Lexis/Nexis search could come up with several examples of issues where CAMERA shaded its stories to favour its positions. Those sources might well have their own positions, and might be shading their own stories. Unfortunately for Mr. Perry, by simply citing CAMERA as proof of bias, he's made all these other sources just as legitimate, and as they question CAMERA's validity, Zerbisia's source remains substantially unchallenged. Sauce for gander, sauce for goose.

(Yeah, it feels like beating up a newborn puppy. Blame Ampersand and Mike Silverman, whose debate over similar issues led me over to Damian's tendentious thrashings.)

Well. Looks like "The South Knox Bubba" has made a really nice find. He's hit the RNC website, and come up with the talking points that you're likely to be hearing from Republicans and their mouthpieces about the various Dem candidates over the next year-and-change. Knox quoted the headlines:

WHO IS HOWARD DEAN? An Ultra-Liberal On Social Issues Who Is Out Of The Mainstream And Wrong For America.

WHO IS JOHN EDWARDS? An Unaccomplished Liberal In Moderate Clothing And A Friend To His Fellow Personal Injury Trial Lawyers.

WHO IS DICK GEPHARDT? An Ineffective Leader And Traditional Liberal Democrat Who Is The "Keeper Of The Liberal Flame For Organized Labor And Party Activists." Bonus: GEPHARDT HAS BEEN TRIED, TESTED AND REJECTED

WHO IS BOB GRAHAM? A Tax-And-Spend Liberal In Moderate's Clothing. Bonus: Graham As governor: A Tax-and-SPEND liberal Who left Florida in disarray

WHO IS JOHN KERRY? A Massachusetts Liberal Out Of Touch With America. Bonus: KERRY: A NORTHEASTERN LIBERAL AND DUKAKIS'S LT. GOV. WHO VOTES LOCKSTEP WITH TED KENNEDY

WHO IS DENNIS KUCINICH? A Flip-Flopping Liberal Extremist. Bonus: Kucinich voted in favor of a bill making it a criminal offense to injure or kill a fetus during the commission of a violent crime. (Huh?)

WHO IS JOE LIEBERMAN? The Lieberman persona is so inventive, has been so creative, has been so gymnastic in its many shapes and forms, that only he can even begin to explain it. . . . Many politicians look a bit oily, a bit uncomfortable moving across and around the political spectrum, but our Joe looks as comfortable as if he's merely changing clothes.

WHO IS CAROL MOSELEY-BRAUN? A Controversial Liberal Who Was Rejected By Her Own State. Bonus: A Romance And Alliance With A Former Nigerian Agent Sparks Controversy

WHO IS AL SHARPTON? A Liberal Democrat Out Of Touch With America. Bonus: Sharpton Supports Universal Government Run Health Care, Public Campaign Financing, Abortion And Gay Marriage.

(Bubba included links to all of the articles... these are just the headlines.)

Forewarned is forearmed, so it might be a good idea for those a little less inclined to employ these talking points to give them a look-over too. I'm sure the Dems already have responses put together, but everybody else is probably going to have to deal with tertiary versions of these as well.

One thing from the Dean page I'd like to mention... a big and prominent section focuses on how Dean is "at odds with fellow democrats":

Dean Disagrees With Every Other Major Democrat Candidate On The Tax Cut. Dean is the only candidate advocating a repeal of most of the President's tax cuts, while Kerry, Lieberman, and Edwards have called for freezing various portions of the tax relief act. Gephardt has not taken a clear position on freezing or repealing.

This is just one section... there are five. In fact, on the RNC site, there is an entire article named "Dr. Dean Diagnoses Gephardt's Big Gov't-Run Health Care", which details Dean's criticisms of Gephardt's plan. This shows something that should be obvious, but should also be repeated:

"Divide and conquer" is going to be the order of the day!

The Republicans want this to end in the primaries. They know for a fact that the biggest weapon they have is a brutal, bruising Democratic primary that creates enmity, backbiting, and distrust among Democrats and (most importantly) bleeds the candidates' coffers dry. The worse it is, the better it is for their anointed candidate, who can spend every single dollar he amasses during primary season on building up his own brand and attacking the various Democrats. The cost of attacking each on his (or her) own would be as prohibitive for him as it is for the Democrats, but if Republicans can let Democrats do it for them, they can not only save money, they can let the Democrats do their job for them.

A word to the Dems out there... let's not let them play that game, hmm? You're all Democrats, you're all part of the same team and the same historical tradition going back to Kennedy, Roosevelt and beyond, and you're on the right side on the domestic issues that Americans care about. (You also won in 1992 by recognizing the importance of domestic issues... 9/11 made national security an issue, but it didn't make it the only issue.) It's time to take a page from the great Republican leader that the current party repudiated and cheapened when they pursued their "Southern strategy", when the Democrats moved to the side of civil and human rights:

"A house divided against itself cannot stand".

Neither can a party.

I am, to be mild about it, no fan of Mickey Kaus or the tactics of cheap insinuation he too often employs. Still, I wholeheartedly endorse Kaus' call for Prof. Krugman to take an article on Krugman's official site, in which I was referenced, to his New York Times column.

Hey, if Atrios can do it...

Poor Donald Luskin. It looks like he isn't a player after all. He had thought that his crusade (ably satirized by the good Professor here, had actually prevented Krugman from writing on the cuts.

Judging by the latest column, however, he was perhaps... a tad optimistic. In fact, it would seem he had little or no effect, judging by this paragraph:

Finally, as in 2001, we're being told that this tax cut will create lots of jobs. But why should we believe that? It's hard to find an independent economist who thinks that the Bush proposal would create the 1.4 million jobs claimed by the administration — and as I've explained in this column, even that many jobs would be a poor payoff for a tax cut that big.

I'm sure this will prompt yet another NRO piece railing against Prof. Krugman. Unfortunately, it would appear that outside of the occasional Instapundit link and a few "Amens" from the long-converted choir, Luskin will remain yet another lonely pawn.

(And then there's Atrios, who brought down a Senate leader. Free tip: the Wurlitzer, and the Casio, only work if you actually know how to play them.)

Mark Kleiman wrote a long piece about how interventionist foreign policy isn't necessarily "right-wing", as the people being overthrown are often brutal right-wing dictators. Why can't Democrats be for "taking out the bad guys"?

It's an idea I've heard before, and one that I mostly disagree with. There's actually a simple reason, (unknowingly) encapsulated by one of Kleiman's final paragraphs. I might write more on this later, but I'll look at this reason (and one other) now:

The overthrow of the Shah seemed like a good idea at the time, to those of us on the left who didn't know enough to guess what would replace him. Why shouldn't the overthrow of the Iranian theocrats and of the Saudi royal family be desired, on the left -- precisely on the left -- with equal fervency?

There's the rub, Mark... what will replace them? The Shah was a brutal dictator; more to the point, he was a brutal dictator that was installed at the behest of the United States, which probably didn't realize what they were getting into.

That's the problem... there are so many variables that revolutions that seem "like a good idea at the time" turns into something horrible later on. Democracies can easily turn into military dictatorships or militant theocracies, and both of these can turn into failed or collapsed states, which are worse by far. Sure, the Iranian revolution wasn't at the behest of the U.S., but many others have, with similarly poor results. Whether at the behest of conquering powers (as is the case in Iraq) or internal revolution (as was the case in Iran), revolution is a tricky and dangerous tool for change.

In fact, I'd argue that violent revolutions have a pretty poor historical record- just look at what the Russians went through. Instead, I believe that it is a process of political evolution from one system to another that is key to political progress. Look at the peaceful change that we've seen in countries like South Africa and a lot of South America: evolution in action. Heck, here on the North American continent we have an example of evolutionary political change: Canada is a former colony that gained independence without a shot fired, and is just as democratic as its neighbours to the south. There's a lesson from that, which is that American attempts to "export the revolution" (to use the Iranian phrase) isn't necessarily the best way to spread democracy.

Heck, has everybody forgotten that the Ba'athists came to power during a revolution against another autocrat?

There's one other problem with the left turning interventionist in the Bush mold. The left is, last I checked, committed to multilateralism and multilateral bodies. It needs to be. There's no way that left concerns like corporate malfeasance, environmental degradation, human rights problems and a laundry list of other issues can possibly be addressed except on a regional or global level. This cannot be done, however, without multilateral bodies, and there's no way that these bodies can function unless the states that comprise them are confident that these bodies won't attempt to rob them of their sovereignty.

(I don't agree with the "there is no such thing as international law" people, but sovereign states are still the principal actors and will remain so, by definition, for quite a while.)

America can, barely, get away with Bush's rhetoric partially becuase other countries (including other democracies) recognize that it's Bush, and not the political class as a whole. If the left follows in his footsteps, it will indicate that the United States no longer recognizes the concept of sovereignty except when convenient, and will be hard pressed to join or maintain effective membership in these sorts of multilateral bodies. While this may not hurt the U.S. in terms of "big issues", the millions if not billions of international rules, regulations, and agreements that comprise the American interaction with the international system will be severely threatened, if not quickly extinct. This will have a hugely damaging effect on the American economy and American security, one that no amount of military might can cope with. The only other solution would be American global empire, and I'm starting to wonder whether that's even possible.

(And I haven't even got into the other effects yet, like warfare becoming a de rigeur standard for third world countries and regional powers.)

Leftists, Liberals, and Democrats need to recognize this, and recognize (as Bush doesn't) the maxim that "Ought implies Can". Revolutions are dangerous as hell, and the multilateral side effects could be more harmful than any possible benefits to anybody. They need to first and formost promise to repair the damage that Bush has done to America's reputation and its relationship with multilateral institutions.

They also need to recognize that slow processes of political evolution are just as important as flashy (yet dangerous) revolutions, and pledge to spend both time and money (and not necessarily force of arms) supporting democratic movements and fledgling democracies around the globe.

Finally, they need to make their commitment to democracy a global issue, not just a middle eastern one... an America that supports the cause of democracy everywhere, not just where its economic and strategic interests are at stake, is one that will be immune from the vast majority of foreign and domestic critics. Indeed, they might even become supporters. A country that aids democracy where there is no economic or strategic interests is one that should be, and (I believe) will be, roundly supported.

Astoundingly well written and pretty much comprehensive piece on the failure to find Weapons of mass destruction, and what it means, over at Cogent Provocateur.

It's funny, actually, I predicted that there wouldn't be much in the way of WMDs pretty early. Why? Because of this "liberation" trope that got hauled out right before the war started. Had the finding of WMDs been imminent, this wouldn't have been necessary... just cast Saddam as a threat and be done with it. I think the Bush administration realized that they'd get caught out, so pulled out this new rationale before they moved in, just in case. It turned out they had demonstrated some pretty sharp political (if not strategic) foresight.

Two good quotes:

No WMD, no War Powers Resolution. No WMD, no UN Res. 1441. No WMD, no Coalition of the Willing. No WMD, no Azores ultimatum. Everything hinged on Iraq's possession of WMD, and her intransigent refusal to give them up. Scratch the surface of any auxiliary casus belli, and chances are you'll find a circular argument: "Saddam is evil and dangerous. How do we know? Because he has WMDs. How can we be so sure he has WMDs? Because he's evil and dangerous..."

...On yesterday's Nightline, Ted Koppel spotted what may be a more promising explanatory trial balloon -- "all's fair in love and war". By this thesis, we were never serious about WMD. WMD was never anything more than a necessary selling tool for war. War was necessary and salutary as an "object lesson" to lesser beings, reminding them (for their own good) that the US is big and tough. Why now? "9/11 changed everything". Why Iraq? No special reason ... Iraq presented itself as an adversary of convenience. Koppel gathered unabashed supporting testimony from B-list neocon hawks, including former CIA Director Woolsey.

So the whole thing was a lie, it's an admitted lie, and it means that the United States' flimsy justification for invasion under international law has been entirely detonated. (You can't claim "we thought we'd find them", if you actually didn't.) That means that the Bush administration just set the precedent that any old excuse is fine for invasion... and considering that the United States is supposed to be the most non-interventionist power out there, that opens up a whole lotta doors.

(Thanks to Max for the link, and Brian for the original referral.)

Edit: Brian Linse dubbed RonK's piece "one of the best blog posts of all time." I don't know if I agree with that, if only because Digby exists, but it really is spectacular. It should get picked up as an Op-Ed or something.

James Capozzola frets that an article (written by Willian Greider) he found in the Nation is old enough that it's already been discussed and linked to by everybody in Blogovia, yet still wanted to make his own link to it.

He shouldn't worry about it. The article is masterful, describing the goals and methods of the Movementarians extraordinarily well. It details their desire to return to the politics and society of McKinley-era America, leaving behind not just the New Deal reforms but pretty much every other social and political change that's happened over the 20th century. It also recognizes that they aren't in a rush, and that they're perfectly willing to move one step at a time. This is practically self-evident... most of those who watch the Movement for any length of time have probably noticed that it tends to nickle-and-dime its ways to its political objectives. "Faith-based initiatives" seem relatively benign, compared to the end-goal of the heavy re-integration of religion into society and politics. The war over the Bush tax cuts seems like only quibbling over numbers, instead of one salvo in the battle to eliminate income taxes and replace them with regressive consumption taxes. And, of course, the war in Iraq seems like only a confrontation with a dictator, instead of a wholesale reordering of America's foreign policy. It's not that Movementarians are counting on some sort of "slippery slope" per se... it's more that they're making people comfortable with the concept, then pushing a little more, a little more, a little more...

Anyway, the article goes over it in a lot of detail. What really grabbed me, though, is the finale:

In other words, I do not believe that most Americans want what the right wants. But I also think many cannot see the choices clearly or grasp the long-term implications for the country.

This is a failure of left-liberal politics. Constructing an effective response requires a politics that goes right at the ideology, translates the meaning of Bush's governing agenda, lays out the implications for society and argues unabashedly for a more positive, inclusive, forward-looking vision. No need for scaremongering attacks; stick to the well-known facts. Pose some big questions: Do Americans want to get rid of the income tax altogether and its longstanding premise that the affluent should pay higher rates than the humble? For that matter, do Americans think capital incomes should be excused completely from taxation while labor incomes are taxed more heavily, perhaps through a stiff national sales tax? Do people want to give up on the concept of the "common school"--one of America's distinctive achievements? Should property rights be given precedence over human rights or society's need to protect nature? The recent battles over Social Security privatization are instructive: When the labor-left mounted a serious ideological rebuttal, well documented in fact and reason, Republicans scurried away from the issue (though they will doubtless try again).

To make this case convincing, however, the opposition must first have a coherent vision of its own. The Democratic Party, alas, is accustomed to playing defense and has become wary of "the vision thing," as Dubya's father called it. Most elected Democrats, I think, now see their role as managerial rather than big reform, and fear that even talking about ideology will stick them with the right's demon label: "liberal." If a new understanding of progressive purpose does get formed, one that connects to social reality and describes a more promising future, the vision will not originate in Washington but among those who see realities up close and are struggling now to change things on the ground. We are a very wealthy (and brutally powerful) nation, so why do people experience so much stress and confinement in their lives, a sense of loss and failure? The answers, I suggest, will lead to a new formulation of what progressives want.

I absolutely agree with this. As others have pointed out, the roles have changed... Democrats are just protecting the gains that they've made, whereas Republicans (at least, the Movementarian branch of such) are the ones that are actually trying to "progress" somewhere. It's less like two armies clashing on the field of battle in the war of ideas, and more like an invasion, or a slow retreat.

I think there are three main reasons why this is the case. (There may be more). The first is exemplified by Grieder's own conclusion:

The first place to inquire is not the failures of government but the malformed power relationships of American capitalism--the terms of employment that reduce many workers to powerless digits, the closely held decisions of finance capital that shape our society, the waste and destruction embedded in our system of mass consumption and production. The goal is, like the right's, to create greater self-fulfillment but as broadly as possible. Self-reliance and individualism can be made meaningful for all only by first reviving the power of collective action.

The first problem, as shown here, is that many on the left seem to be trying to play the same game as the Movement, except that they wish to go back to the 1930's instead of the 1900's. Rewriting neo-Marxism (as Grieder has done here) is not going to inflame the passion of Americans. Considering that many either aspire to owning a business one day or know somebody that does, considering that many (for one reason or another) are investors, and considering that many (if not most) Americans aren't really bothered by being consumers, this sort of approach will only convince most Americans that the left has nothing new to say and nothing important to offer. It's not that I totally disagree, exactly, it's that rhetoric like this not only seems stale, it perpetuates the class war that the Movement has been fighting since the Reagan period. Their success implies that if the debate stays on that ground, they'll win, and win big.

Second is another problem that the left seems prey to, as exemplified by that "not the failures of government" element in the above quotation. There is this tendency to look everywhere for "underlying structural reasons" for the behavior of government, looking everywhere but government itself. Corporations, electoral systems, the nature of society... anything and everything is employed to rob the Bush administration (and, going back further, the Movement types) of responsibility for their actions. In turn, the solutions desired seem to be not only overly grandiose and unrealistic (it's much harder to change society than it is to change a government), but they completely miss the real and manifest power of those conservatives that have recognized that it really is about government, and are more than willing to use it. This is partially due to the tendency of many in all parts of the political spectrum to believe that the political is the slave of the economic, and the governmental is the slave of the structural. They cannot accept that economic answers are not always suitable for political questions, and that the agency of government can overcome the structure of society (which is, in any case, inevitably and gloriously contradictory). I defended Prof. Krugman because I believe that economics is important, but I genuinely disagree with his idea that economics is akin to Asimov's "psychohistory"... it does not contain all the answers, not even close.

(Besides, the Movement has demonstrated that the first step towards changing society is to gain control of at least one branch of government. The two go together quite well. There's no need to be fatalistic about it- if they did it, others can too.)

The third element is post-modernism. Now don't get me wrong, I believe that the insights of the post-modern project are important ones, even if I disagree with them on several issues, but they create a problem where there simply can't be any unified left-wing "vision", because many on the left disagree that such unity is desirable, or even possible! There are divisions on the right, sure, but they recognize that such divisions are an impediment to the effectiveness of their movement, not something to be prized in and of themselves. The right is winning at least partially because the left is letting them, and the left is letting them because (ironically enough) the right seems to understand Leninist partisanship better than they do, and the importance of unity as strength.

(This can also be seen in the constant conflict between centrist liberals and the idiotically-dubbed "loony left", which is, by far, the best weapon the Movement has and the one that is arguably most responsible for their success.)

Grieder is still right, however, on his basic concept, if not his solution. The liberal-left does need to move into a new era. It needs to embrace unity (at the very least due to a shared enemy), it needs a new vision that is rooted in American culture as it actually is, and not as anti-capitalists wish it would be, and it needs to recognize that there can be and often are political and governmental solutions to political and governmental problems. Not everything is economics, and not everything is structural. Do that, and the Movement has already lost.

(Oh, it also needs to create a coherent and distinctive foreign policy as well. That's one of the few things that 9/11 really did change, and the most egregious example of old economic answers being pushed for new political problems.)

Excellent find, James.

Edit: URL closed.

It would appear that Luskin has taken his little "I disproved you because I say so" game to NRO, where he basically restates his pseudo-arguments against Mr. Krugman in a new forum. He adds a few new twists, however:

Since we first exposed Krugman's egregious lies about President Bush's tax cuts in his April 22 column, he has now published no fewer than seven increasingly defensive and desperate responses on his personal website...His seven responses have been spread over five postings (one, two, three, four, and five). Since we reported on his first response, his strategy has been to conceal his tax-cut falsehood under an increasingly smelly heap of academic economic jargon, charts, and graphs — all designed to bamboozle the unsophisticated into thinking there's a rationale that explains his lie, and that he had that rationale in mind all along.

"Smelly heap", "bamboozle"...hey, the grizzy prospector is back!

This is almost a direct quotation of what he had written on his blog about the subject. The reaction is the same as well- asserting "he's increasingly desperate etc." doesn't prove Donald's argument. Never has, never will. (he did repeat his old argument, but not the refutations, which says a lot about how well he's engaged Prof. Krugman's able refutations.) Still, What's new here isn't Luskin's arguments, but the forum given them. To be honest, I had been a little worried about having placed Luskin front-and-center in the Movement marching order, and had figured that maybe he was a simple transitory crank used to attack the Movement's enemies. A man hauled out for partisan purposes is a pawn, not a player, and should be acknowledged as such. That NRO gave him this bully pulpit, however, implies their support of his arguments.

He certainly thinks he's a player:

The good news is that Krugman is clearly shaken by the new experience of having somebody dare to challenge his insouciant lying. He's even starting to get personal — referring to me in his latest posting as his "stalker-in-chief." But he's definitely feeling chastised. In his last three columns for the Times he hasn't dared to mention Bush's tax plan.

I'll repeat what I said earlier: "Paul Krugman isn't the vainglorious one here". It's hilarious, by the by, that a supposed economics expert hasn't the faintest clue about specious relationships... it's just possible, maybe, that Krugman might be writing about other subjects because he wants to. Luskin assigns himself too much credit. Whether it's because he's tendentious or just credulous is hard to say.

He also goes on to describe Krugman, accurately, as "America's most dangerous pundit", describes his influence (while totally and conveniently ignoring the political machine the good Professor is up against), and brings out a hilarous laundry list of attacks on Krugman, demonstrating:

-his inability to tell the difference between bug spray and mustard gas;

-his ignorance of the "A.W.O.L. Bush" issue, and related ignorance of the loose-at-best connection between NYTimes columnists and the host paper- he is free to disagree with the conclusions of others at the paper, as Prof. Krugman pointed out in an article on Prof. Krugman's own website;

-his eagerness to push his own (donation driven, mind you) website on someone else's forum and on someone else's dime;

-his inability to look at a photograph (for more on this, check out this Hesiod entry);

-and finally, his astonishing ability to take a column and turn it into a blog entry, as he spends most of the column quoting other people's complaints and comments. I've long been concerned about the column-esque nature of my blog entries, but it takes some chutzpah to do the reverse!

(Edit: apparently, he's been doing that since March, as his first column on Krugman was little more than quotations from Matthew Hoy and Robert Musil. Both are pretty weak sources. Hoy is a staunch Krugman attacker, and one of the very first Krugman stalkers I debunked nearly a full year ago. Heck, at one point I was greatly amused to discover he had mixed up the WTO and WHO! Robert Musil is also about the last person I'd call on to "fact-check" anything, considering his complete inability to understand political theory, political philosophy, the international system and international law is something that I had ended up illustrating in abundant detail.

With opponents like that, who needs allies?

Further Edit: Permalinks remain bloggered. Ugh. The archive page with Hoy would be here, and Musil here and here. I think I know what happened, as well... when I tried to switch the blog archive to "monthly" and republish, it reoriented the permalinks but didn't seem to actually change the number and nature of the archive pages. I'll try switching it back to "weekly"... that might cure the linking problem.

Even Further Edit: it worked. Permalinks should work now, even if that Archive on the left is one imposing beast. I'll take working links over design elegance.)

Free advice to Jonah Goldberg and the NRO crew: if he's a player, take him aside and remind him that he's making NRO look foolish. If he's a pawn, then just take him off the board. It's getting sad.

(One final note: has anybody else checked the NRO Author Archive for Mr. Luskin? The man doesn't just spend a lot of time attacking Krugman, since March 20th, he's done practically nothing else! Of course, considering that he came out as a Gold Bug, a species of crank that occupies an even lower ecological position than supply-siders, maybe he realized that being the Movement's pet anti-Krugman attack dog is a superior position.)

Archive listings are fixed. (And huge.) It was a javascript problem.

Only one question remains... why is it that Blogger seems to not want to republish as monthly? It's worked for the most recent archive, but nothing previously.

Dwight Meredith (of the always interesting and often riveting Policy, Law, and Autism blog) wrote an excellent comment on the tax cut in my comments section that I'd like to reproduce here:

Luskin should quit while he is behind. For anyone who has taken the time to read any of PK's non-NYT writing, the liquidy trap argument was obvious. Luskin, of course, can't be bothered to even click through his own link to read the CEA report before relying on it.

Also note that Luskin has not bothered to support his claim of 5.4 million jobs created by the tax cut after he got caught speeding.

Finally, the alleged "big lie" that Luskin keeps harping on is that PK cited the cost/job without citing the cost per job year. Once again, if Luskin would do the work, it would become apparent that the cost per job year does not look like such a deal. Lets take the best case scenario for Luskin based on the CEA report.

The tax cut will create 700,000 jobs that will disappear within 3 years. That is a total of 2.1 million job/years. In addition, the tax cut will create another 700,000 that the CEA report does not specify an end date for. The Krugman liquidity trap argument suggests that those jobs will also disappear relatively soon but assume for the purpose of argument that they last a full ten years. That would result in 7 million job/years for the ten year period. Thus, the maximum number of job/years that could be created is 9.1 million. Call it 10 million job years to get a round number.

The cost of the tax cut is $726 billion over then ten year period. The cost per job year would be $72,600 of tax cuts for each $40,000 of wages.

That can hardly be called a good deal. It is only if Luskin's 5.4 million job fiction (which the CEA report flatly denies and which Luskin has been unwilling to try to defend) is accepted that his argument makes any sense at all. Luskin is not engaged in a debate over economics. He is simply promoting a faith based initiative.

Hah! Nice analogy. I also liked this bit from John Isbell:

"Your Honor, I'm just a simple unfrozen caveman lawyer. Your world frightens and confuses me, with its highfaluting jargonized academic theory."

That's from Phil Hartman, and I still miss him, but it looks like "Unfrozen cavemen lawyer" is alive and well.

(Except for one thing... if I recall the setup correctly, didn't the lawyer actually finish his law education?)

Anyway, thanks to Atrios, Jesse Taylor, Bobby (from the unofficial Paul Krugman website), and Kevin Drum for linking to me.

I haven't been paying attention to the Bennett flap, to be honest, because I haven't really been inclined to follow such a "dog bites man" story. The spectacle of "do what I say, but not what I do" moralizers getting hung by their own petard is older than the forms of media that are used to report them. Bennett is no different.

The chief interest I've had is the wars over what it means, if anything. The entertaining spectacle of Jonah Goldberg defending hypocrisy, for one, is especially amusing considering that he makes such a defense while at the same time denying that hypocrisy has taken place. I think there is a point to the "he never denounced gambling if one can afford it, so is therefore not hypocritical" argument, but why on earth try to mix that with a defense of hypocrisy? I'm sure Bennett wouldn't be pleased by this sort of "and anyway" defense (as in "I didn't steal the pie from your sill and anyway it tasted lousy), and everybody else that has picked up on it are probably just shaking their heads.

(Goldberg pulling out a classic anti-Clinton insinuation ploy was pretty sad too, and not only because "never mind the steamer trunk of lies and other sins he lugged into the Oval Office" is an abundantly cheesy metaphor.)

I personally think the issue here is, oddly enough, less moral and more political. It's about the enduring tension between two main fragments of the Republican coalition- the social conservatives, and the libertarian conservatives.

(Both claim ownership of the word. Both are wrong).

The central conceit of the libertarian conservatives is that they want to be left alone to do what they please, so long as it does not directly hurt somebody else. This includes (but is not limited to) a small, uninterventionist state. The social conservatives' central conceit, on the other hand is that there is a set of (usually religion-derived) guidelines that everybody in a society must follow, regardless of whether they wish to or not, and regardless of whether the actions those guidelines proscribe are harmful. It is the state's role to enforce this ruleset.

This distinguishes them from most liberal "moralizers", by the by, as liberals are chiefly concerned with actions that in some way affect the rights of other individuals. Liberal proscriptions are usually aimed at state intervention and regulation of individual actions that negatively affect others (whether directly or indirectly), whereas social conservative ones are aimed more generally at actions and behavior that "breaks the rules". Many social conservatives support their arguments by saying that not following these rules will affect others, and that's legitimate, but the point is the rule set, and not the effects. This is a distinction that Goldberg doesn't understand or deliberately ignores when he attacks "liberal moralizers"; I'm inclined to believe the latter, because one of the central tenets of neo-conservatism is that it isn't important what those rules are, just that they exist and are followed.

(This is why I'm not naming the source or nature of the ruleset. It isn't important.)

These two groups (social and libertarian conservatives) make up the Republican coalition. They are brought together, I believe, largely by a common enemy. The libertarians don't like the idea that liberals forward of the state blocking actions by individuals because of indirect effects that those actions might have; such as, say, the negative effects of unrestricted and unregulated commerce. The social conservatives don't like that liberals could largely give a rat's ass about their rulesets, and actively oppose them when the rights of various individuals are (directly or indirectly) harmed by the rules themselves.

Up 'till now, this has worked relatively well, as they've been quite aware of the necessity of unity. The great contribution of the Movementarians is that they've added a near-Leninist dedicatation to the success of the coalition, largely by casting the coalition as opposed to "liberal governmental elites" and promising to bring down said elites if they're brought into power. This satisfies both camps. The libertarian side chortles with glee over their increased financial resources post-tax cut and the freedom that comes with being able to spend their own money instead of having the "nanny state" do it for them The social conservatives are happy because they're rooting out the liberalism that is supposedly blocking the successful implementation of their ruleset. Both get what they want, but only until they succeed. Once they succeed, they're going to start wanting to pull in different directions, because there are going to be inevitable conflicts between those who prize freedom and those who prize order.

The battle over Santorum was the first step. The conflict over his deliberately and unapologetically anti-gay remarks strikes to the heart of this, but Bennett fits into it as well. See, while Bennet's specific vice was not something he personally attacked, it was something that is generally frowned upon by the dominant ruleset in the United States. This creates a problem. If he defends his vice as a personal freedom, then the libertarian wing has that much more ammo in its battles against the social wing, of which Bennett is a key member. After all, if this freedom is ok, then why not others, like (say) smoking marijuana? (The debate has already started on NRO's Corner between Goldberg and Andrew Stuttaford). Yet to allow too many of these freedoms would hurt the ruleset as a whole, which social conservatives cannot abide. The demonstration of inconsistencies in the ruleset also creates a huge problem, because the only reason that social conservatives can convince people to follow the ruleset is if they present it as necessary, universal, and inevitable- the whole point is that it isn't a matter of personal choice. Raising the question of "which one" raises the answer of "none of the above". Neo-conservatives like Goldberg are presented with a huge conundrum by this, because to them it is the existence of any ruleset that is key, not any specific one, and the "none of the above" option threatens that existence.

Many people after the 2002 election, myself included, predicted that the Republican coalition would begin tearing itself apart as it tried to head in different directions. That has already started, but it's not going to be a quick process, as there are a lot of people dedicated to keeping things together. No matter how it is defended, however, Bennett's "personal choice" threatens that Republican coalition. It won't necessarily cost them votes, but Lincoln had a point when he said that "a house divided cannot stand". And it's rather sweet schadenfreude for those of us who are sick of having to deal with the divisions within the left.

Brad DeLong is ticked.

You know, I didn't use to be a very partisan person. While I cannot imagine any likely eventuality that would lead me to cross from the Democratic to the Republican side of the aisle--at least not until the poison injected into the bloodstream of the Republican Party by Richard Nixon's southern strategy dies away enough to reduce its fever beneath 104--I used to think that alternation of power, circulation of elites, give-and-take was useful. There are, after all, good things that the Republican Party can do easily that the Democratic Party cannot: tax simplification for example (with the honorable exception of Bill Bradley, who has done the most heavy lifting on this issue in my lifetime); trade liberalization; a general push forward to try to keep the government from making people spend their lives filling out government forms and checking to be sure they are obeying every single regulation (with the caveat, however, that the same Republicans who inveigh against every regulation of the market are very eager to regulate the bedroom).

What I am trying to say is that I used to think that total political dominance by the Democratic Party would not be good for the country, that Republicans had a place just like abortion has a place--that periods of Republican rule should be safe, legal, and rare.

No more. And it is not the mendacious incompetence of Bush II economic policy that has changed my mind. It is things like this news item noted by Matthew Yglesias: this executive branch team is just too stupid and too incompetent for them to have any place protecting my children. We need them out, and some adults in.

No arguments here. Why is he so ticked, however? Because of this, courtesy of Matt Yglesias:

A specially trained Defense Department team, dispatched after a month of official indecision to survey a major Iraqi radioactive waste repository, today found the site heavily looted and said it was impossible to tell whether nuclear materials were missing.

The discovery at the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility was the second since the end of the war in which a known nuclear cache was plundered extensively enough that authorities could not rule out the possibility that deadly materials had been stolen. The survey, conducted by a U.S. Special Forces detachment and eight nuclear experts from a Pentagon office called the Direct Support Team, appeared to offer fresh evidence that the war has dispersed the country's most dangerous technologies beyond anyone's knowledge or control.

In all, seven sites associated with Iraq's nuclear program have been visited by the Pentagon's "special nuclear programs" teams since the war ended last month. None was found to be intact, though it remains unclear what materials -- if any -- had been removed.

This is, of course, not proof that Saddam had nuclear weapons. The best evidence (i.e. the stuff that wasn't forged) implies that he didn't. Still, this sort of absolute bungling and incompetance shows that there needs to be a change. The Bush administration's mastery of spin should not and must not keep them in power one second longer than is constitutionally necessary, because they are clearly and demonstrably making the world a more dangerous, more chaotic, and harsher place. It's not even that "the terrorists have won"... it's that Bush is losing, by making things that much worse.

I should probably leave the guy alone, it's getting embarrassing, but I wanted to bring up another bit of Luskin wisdom:

What I really said was that Krugman's responses to my challenge to him have all been to kick up a lot of highfaluting jargonized academic theory to offer an after-the-fact and entirely conjectural explanation of a claim that was initially presented in his column as nothing more than common-sense open-and-shut arithmetic -- that Bush's tax cuts spent $500,000 each to create 1.4 million $40,000 jobs.

Ahem.
"a lot of highfaluting jargonized academic theory"

Unless Donald happens to be a grizzly 1890s prospector, that's one of the most profoundly stupid things I've ever seen written about economics. That's saying a lot: I've seen an awful lot of stupidity over the years I've been on the Internet. What Donald either is in denial about or doesn't get is that Prof. Krugman isn't offering any kind of "after-the-fact" explanation- he is, as he has repeatedly stated, merely describing the assumptions that underlie the thinking of himself and many (if not most) other economists. The assumption was always there, merely unstated. Donald's attack appears to have come partially out of his ignorance of these commonplace assumptions, partially due to his being financially, emotionally and intellectually wedded to a crank economic theory that most respectable economists wouldn't touch, and partially due to old fashioned cognitive dissonance related to both of these. Fortunately, those of us who are neither ignorant, tendentious, nor so brittle as to see debate as a threat to our sense of self can see this for the sad spectacle that it is. Sorry, Donald, it wasn't that he lied, it's that you dropped out of Yale before anybody taught you any economics.

Does it matter that this particular species of elephant shit happens to be a "signature academic issue" for Krugman? For the seemingly infinitely vain Krugman, it does. He writes,

"...I set out to write down a fully worked-out, no loose ends model to show that liquidity traps can't really happen. (The purpose of such a model is to help you think clearly about an issue - realism is not the point.) To my surprise it showed that liquidity traps can indeed happen; Japan's trap was real. And Japan remains stuck in that trap. That in itself makes the liquidity trap a very important subject..."

What makes it very important? The fact that Paul Krugman created a model? A model about which he himself says "realism is not the point"? Stop the presses! I can see the headlines now... "Economist Creates New Model! World Leaders Rush to Princeton Despite Non-Realism!"

And with this, Luskin keeps on digging deeper and deeper. The point of an economic model is not that it is a reflection of all the factors of an economy, but that it illustrates the relationships that make up parts of that economy. By understanding the relationship in the simplified realm of modelling, you can figure out how it works in the "real world". Krugman used this to great effect when talking about the division of resources between secondary, primary, and tertiary industry using a "hotdogs and buns" model. While this model was hardly "realistic", it built a very compelling picture of why it's important not to confuse job gains and losses in one sector of the economy with the economy as a whole.

More importantly, where is the vanity in Prof. Krugman attempting to disprove liquidity traps and discovering that he was wrong? Where is the vanity in working from that piece of knowledge derived from an admitted (and corrected) error? Especially considering that everybody and his dog was lauding Prof. Krugman for his insight regarding Japan's economy, I'd say it takes some level of humility to admit that this knowledge comes from being proven wrong. Somebody as tendentious and brittle as Luskin has demonstrated himself as being time and again would have ignored the results, spun them, or simple let it drop. I'm sure that the vast majority of Movementarians would. Prof. Krugman did not, and admits it when rebutting a dishonest and tendentious attacker to boot!

To repeat a variation on a phrase I've grown attached to, Paul Krugman isn't the vainglorious one here.

Wow. Apparently my series of pieces on Donald Luskin's attacks on Paul Krugman has prompted the man himself to link to my own humble site in his latest piece. It is (appropriately enough) entitled "elephant shit" and deals with the concept and history of liquidity traps.

I'm honored.

Here's Krugman detailing the modern history of liquidity traps:

By the 1990s, however, the liquidity trap had largely (though not entirely) vanished from economic discussion. The Fed had demonstrated its power in ending recession after recession; there seemed no reason to doubt that it could always do so at need.

Then came Japan, which by 1996 looked an awful lot like a country in a classic liquidity trap. And that was scary: it meant that our grandfathers weren't as stupid as we thought, that 1930s-style slumps may not be that easy to cure, after all. Or as I put it a couple of years later, it was as if a disease we had thought controlled had reappeared in a form resistant to all the usual antibiotics.

At first I didn't believe it; in early 1998 I set out to write down a fully worked-out, no loose ends model to show that liquidity traps can't really happen. (The purpose of such a model is to help you think clearly about an issue - realism is not the point.) To my surprise it showed that liquidity traps can indeed happen; Japan's trap was real. And Japan remains stuck in that trap.

That in itself makes the liquidity trap a very important subject: Japan is the world's second-largest economy, and not that long ago seemed to be the economy of the future. But there was obviously more. If it could happen to Japan, why not to us? As the US bubble of the 90s grew to rival that of Japan in the 80s, one couldn't help wondering whether we might see a similar aftermath.

Sure enough, here we are, Fed funds at 1.25, with an economy still losing jobs. We hope that things will pick up, that a year from now this will all seem like a bad dream. But at the very least we're having a serious scare.

And do I need to point out that the case for fiscal policy to create jobs rests mainly on the fact that the economy is near a liquidity trap? If the interest rate were currently 5 percent, we'd all say that the Fed needs to cut more, while the Treasury and the Congress should focus on long-term fiscal responsibility. It's the Fed's possible ineffectuality that makes us reach for another tool.

I've said before that I'm not an economist, but I can recognize and respect the work that they do- and in turn recognize what's truly in contention and what isn't. That was and is the best part about Krugman's popular work. He lays out the economic terrain well enough and simply enough that it's easy to tell when you're looking at a serious debate within the field, or crank science on the order of magnetic healing and phlogiston-based combustion.

It remains important, however, to avoid mixing up forests and trees. This individual salvo at Prof. Krugman, and even the attacks on Prof. Krugman himself, are merely a part of the larger whole. If this attack were aimed at a supporter of the Bush administration, it would have been quickly rebutted by a whole bevy of sources, and there are countless outlets by which the rebuttal can be spread and repeated, to the point that the rebuttal becomes better known than the original charge. That this has a lot to do with the power of the Presidency is important, but as "Issuesguy" has been pointing out, it is vitally important to look beyond the words, and start looking at the broader patterns of behavior, because politics nowadays is as much about how, where, and how often words are used as it is about the words used themselves. When employing the Big Lie, after all, it's almost unimportant as to what the substance of it really is, as long as its consistent and serves some political aim.

Robert Cox once said that "all theory is made for somebody and for some purpose". I don't necessarily buy that in its totality. The willingness to sacrifice (or ignore, or deny) empirical reality for political expediency is one of the major reasons why American politics is in the mess it is and the neo-conservatives have been so wildly successful. When trying to parse the arguments of transparent operatives like the Krugman attackers and cranks like Luskin, however, looking at whether it's "for somebody and for some purpose" is a useful tool at figuring out what's really going on.

In this case, of course, it's all about trying to blunt one of the most unapologetic and successful critics of the Bush administration anywhere. That's the Alpha and Omega of all of this, and it doesn't matter whether Krugman's right or wrong, or whether he's an economist, a journalist, or just a random guy on the street. If they're critics, they need to be checked, and because many of his critics honestly believe that their political opposition are at least misguided and at worst evil, they'll do or say anything that serves their purpose. These ends justify any means.

Edit: slight wording change on previous paragraph

Thanks again for linking, Prof. Krugman.

Didn't see much of the Dem debate except for clips , but I think the definitive take on it is here, courtesy of Digby.

Oh, by the way, yet more self-parodying Luskin fun:

Krugman is forced to go into all that at length with lots of elephant-shit about "liquidity traps" and Fed policy and so on, trying to connect the dots between these textbook theories and his specific claim that the jobs will vanish after exactly one year. But at the end of the day it's all just theory upon guess upon judgment upon conjecture upon approximation. None of which was disclosed in his agitprop arithmetic.

So the claim that those 1.4 million stipulated new jobs will all vanish after just one year is an heroic claim, and an undisclosed one.

Indeed. Unfortunately, as is quickly clear by reading Krugman (or my earlier postings), that isn't what he argued. Anybody who puts the phrase "liquidity trap" in scare quotes is demonstrating deep and abiding ignorance. Even if you don't agree with Keynes, to not even realize where this comes from....

As for the elephant poop, well... think about Dwight Meredith and his "it isn't Krugman who is the liar here" and go from there.

What kills me is that apparently people got investment advice from this guy.

Well now, this is interesting. I just got an email from "webmaster@hatrack.com" (which would be, I believe, Warner Brothers) about my choice of site name and of pseudonym. Nothing hostile, which I appreciated, but an inquiry about whether I cited the sources of the pseudonym and phrase. I replied that I did so (as you can see by that newly-added link at the top), and mentioned that I would be happy to add a proper bibliographic citation of Mr. Card's work, should it be required to distinguish my own humble site from his writings.

I anticitipate that clearly acknowledging the source of both should clearly resolve the issue, but will let you know if anything develops.

Hoo boy, Luskin just keeps on going. It's telling that this is continuing... if the argument was better somebody who actually knew about economics (Luskin is a Yale first-year dropout) would have taken over, and if the Movementarians and their blogger fellow-travellers weren't so rabidly hateful against any and all critics, the matter would have been quietly dropped. Aside from pathetically trying to score points by calling Krugman a lousy lecturer (which is utterly meaningless), we see this paragraph:

And now... with the second apologia in its evening edition... we see Krugman pull out all the stops, resorting even to bold-face type. I can just imagine his tiny fists pounding the keyboard, screaming out the one thing that can save him...

So, you ask, why were these paragraphs boldfaced? I'll quote the first in full (which Luskin, predictably, didn't):

Update: Yes, this means that the output and employment increase created by a fiscal expansion goes away - the additional jobs are here today, gone tomorrow. Don't take my word for it - check any major principles textbook. Tax cuts may create jobs, but the jobs go away even if the tax cut remains in place. "in the long run, shifts in aggregate demand affect the overall price level but do not affect output." Mankiw, p. 744.

That's right, folks... the section was in boldface because it was an after-publishing edit, no different than a blogger putting something in italics in order to differentiate between the newer and older material. (I don't usually do it, but it's common.) Luskin's a blogger, he'd know this, yet deliberately misportrayed the real reason in his quest for juvenile "points" on Krugman.

(Plus, he continues to misinterpret what Krugman is saying, mistaking the idea that "the jobs would exist anyway after a few years" to "the jobs would go away after a few years".)

Add the woeful shot at the maintainer of the Unofficial Paul Krugman archive as being "infinitely sycophantic" and the spectacle of David attempting to fell Goliath by flinging his own rancid faeces is quite complete.

As Dwight Meredith said, Krugman isn't the liar here.

Edit: Bobby, the aforementioned "infinitely sycophantic" maintainer, actually illustrated the whole thing quite well:

"Krugman's theory asserts that there would be no more jobs beyond the 1.4 million created in the first two years of the Bush plan (I don't agree with that, but let's stipulate it). While there would be no more jobs, he never asserts that those initial 1.4 million jobs will vanish at any time over the then years of the plan. They will be there generating $40,000 wages each year for ten years. So we still have to divide the ten-year cost of the tax cut by ten, because those jobs will be around for ten years."

As I understand it, the writer, Donald L. Luskin's, analysis is wrong for the following reason: AS SOON AS WE ARE NO LONGER NEAR THE LIQUIDITY TRAP THE PRESENCE OF THE TAX CUT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE AS TO WHETHER THOSE 1.4 MILLION JOBS EXIST THEREAFTER.

To see why here's a thought experiment:

Let's say we pass the tax cut in Spring 2003. It's now the end of 2004, and, by now, we are no longer close to a liquidity trap. This means that the Fed once again can bring us back to full employment through monetary policy, whereas monetary policy was relatively ineffective during the trap. For the sake of argument, up until now the tax cut has created 1.4 million jobs. We are now faced with two choices:

(1) Repeal the tax cut. Thereafter, we let expansionary monetary policy maintain the 1.4 million extra jobs and create any new jobs until we have the unemployment rate that the Fed desires. Notice that, in the years after the trap is over, those 1.4 million jobs remain although the tax cut is gone.

(2) Keep the tax cut in place. However, the Fed will match this choice with forgone interest rate cuts or interest rate hikes. The Fed will conduct a monetary policy that maintains those 1.4 million jobs and create new ones until we have the unemployment rate that the Fed desires. So those 1.4 million jobs remain with or without the tax cut.

Just to make it crystal clear, let's put it together: In the years we are near the liquidity trap, under our assumptions, the presence of the tax cut creates 1.4 million jobs. After the trap the presence of the tax cut not only makes no difference in new job creation, it makes no difference as to whether those 1.4 million jobs still exist thereafter.

Therefore the 1.4 million jobs can be attributed to tax cuts ONLY IN THE YEARS WE ARE NEAR THE LIQUIDITY TRAP AND NOT AFTER THE TRAP ENDS.

Please do not fail to note that the time when the trap ends is exogenous to this model and, here, is independent of whether or not a tax cut is passed. Indeed Krugman says, "Now most forecasts presume that we'll be out of the trap by next year - that is, before most of the supposed job creation from the tax cut takes place. Even if you're more pessimistic than that, we're probably looking at only 1-2 years when fiscal policy creates jobs." I am assuming that these forecasts do not assume this tax cut which has not passed yet. Anyway, sorry if I botched or misinterpreted any of this.

'Nuff said. This is probably why Luskin had to namecall... "Bobby" had his number, and Luskin knows it. His only hope was flung faeces, counting on the idea that two opposite ideas will produce the expectation that the truth lies at the middle, even if one side is completely fallacious.

Thus the Wurlitzer plays on.

Over the past few hours, I've been tracking the argument that has gone on between Paul Krugman (via his website) and the supply-side Objectivist Donald Luskin. Luskin attacked him for a column he wrote for the New York Times earlier, where Krugman argued that the "1.4 million jobs" that Bush claims his tax cuts will deliver won't justify the cost of the cuts. Luskin attacked Krugman, as Luskin believes (quite passionately) that the cuts will create jobs over the entire 10-year period. Krugman responded on the website, and Luskin fired back with the link above, attacking two main arguments: one forwarded by Dwight Meredith about how "the dog didn't bark" and the other Krugman's own piece.

Dwights piece brought up, among other things, a "the dog didn't bark" argument:

Secondly, and far more persuasive to a Sherlock Holmes fan, is the dog that didn�t bark. President Bush in currently traveling the country in an effort to build support for the tax cut plan. He and his surrogates say at every stop that the tax cut is meant to create jobs. If credible evidence that his tax cut proposal would create 5.4 million jobs existed, a Donald Luskin column in NRO would not have been the first time we had heard that figure. In the absence of hearing that dog bark, it is safe to assume that no credible evidence that the tax cut would create 5.4 million jobs exists.

Seems credible enough, and Dwight followed it up with a credible defense of Krugman's figures and attack of Luskin's as being willfully disingenuous. Luskin's response?

Meredith's defense is narrowly focused on whether 1.4 million jobs are all the jobs that will be created by Bush's tax-cuts. Even if you assume that no more than 1.4 million jobs will be created, Krugman's claim that $500,000 in tax-cuts is buying only $40,000 worth of jobs is still wildly wrong. For Krugman's claim to be correct, those 1.4 million jobs would have to exist for only a single year and then vanish -- and you'd have to believe that the tax-cuts would have no other favorable effect to which you could assign some of their cost. So to assert that my critique is wrong -- simply because one part of it relied on the assumption that over ten years there would be more than 1.4 million jobs created -- is like defending O. J. on the grounds that, yes, he stabbed Nicole to death in her kitchen, but it's a vicious lie to say that he left the lights on in the kitchen when he left.

This is where things start to get a little hairy. Luskin's attack on the Krugman article itself depends on attacking one key point of the argument in order to break it down- his entire critique hinges on Krugman supposedly messing up these figures. (There was an additional attack on Krugman based on the financial crisis of the states, but it's immaterial, and telling that it was never raised again.) Dwight was attempting to question Luskin's credibility in the same fashion that Luskin attacked Krugman- and even implied as much with his final section:

Thus, based on the CEA report, the effects of the tax cut proposal will be to increase job growth for the first year and a half of the ten-year period and then decrease the creation of jobs after that initial burst.

The administration often talks about the 1.4 million jobs to be created in the first two years of the tax cut. It rarely talks about the effects of the tax cut on job creation for any period after 2004.

We find it highly ironic that Luskin would call Krugman a liar for failing to consider the job creation effects of the tax cut after 2004 when Luskin first links to the CEA report and then ignores its findings on that very subject.

Paul Krugman is not the liar here.

Luskin was obviously responding to this by attempting to bully and dodge his way around it (in the exact same fashion that he accused Krugman of doing), yet Dwight's critique holds, as Luskin did not challenge it on its substantial points, including the accusation that Luskin was spreading deliberate falsehoods. With that, we're forced to make a choice: either the credibility of Luskin's entire critique comes into question, or the credibility of Krugman remains untouched by Luskin's attack on this one set of numbers. Luskin's defense, ironically, implies the latter.

However, there's a much worse game being played here. I'll hit you with two paragraphs, one responding to the other. First, Krugman's defense:

No, I didn't forget to divide by 10. (For God's sake: whatever you think of my politics, I am a competent economist, and know how to use numbers.) What I foolishly assumed readers would know - this isn't condescension, I really was foolish - is that no serious economist thinks that a tax cut or spending increase will have any effect on employment more than a couple of years from now. The reason is straightforward: normally the economy is operating more or less at full employment, and any demand stimulus from a tax cut will be offset by an interest rate increase by the Fed. The Fed, of course, polices the economy to prevent inflationary pressures. And eventually we will return to normal circumstances.

The only situation in which a tax cut or spending increase creates jobs is when the economy is operating below full employment, and the Fed is unable to remedy the situation.

We are in such a situation right now - or at least I think we are. The Fed, by the way, does not agree: it thinks that a good recovery is just around the corner, and that it will soon be raising interest rates; in that situation any demand push from a tax cut will simply cause it to raise interest rates faster.

I don't agree, and neither do most private-sector economists; they think that the economy will remain sluggish for a while. And the Fed can't remedy the situation by cutting rates, because it has already cut them almost as far as it can. So since the economy could use a demand push right now, for the time being a fiscal expansion - either a tax cut or a spending increase - would indeed create jobs.

Fairly straightforward, and entirely sensible: if the economy heats up, the feds will cool it off. Krugman doesn't feel it's that heated up right now, so there will be a short-term affect on jobs, but the recession will eventually end, and the feds will eventually step in to cool things down. "When" is a valid question, but not "whether". This is no new argument- it goes back to most of Krugman's books, where he lays out the macroeconomic reasons why tax cuts aren't a cure-all nostrum, and have little to do with wage or job growth, but do have valid productivity effects.

Luskin's response, however, severely damages his credibility:

What follows is an hilariously complicated theory involving the role of the Federal Reserve and various other abstruse elements, leading to the conclusion that the 1.4 million jobs created in the first two years of the Bush plan are all there will ever be. It's full of intellectual bullying ("...Nobody, and I mean nobody, who knows any economics thinks...") and completely fabricated un-facts ("The Fed, by the way...thinks that a good recovery is just around the corner, and that it will soon be raising interest rates...").

If all that crap had been included in the original column, Krugman's simple, flat-out, drop-dead claim that the Bush plan would cost a whopping $500,000 to produce a meager $40,000 in wages would have come off like the brittle, over-specified, forecast-dependent econobabble that it is.

This is not what Krugman wrote, Luskin knows this is not what Krugman wrote, and the very use of the inane term "econobabble" speaks volumes. Luskin knows very well (or should know) that this is not what Krugman wrote. To argue that this is "complicated" implies either that Luskin is utterly ignorant, willfully tendentious, or engaging in the kind of deliberate anti-intellectualism that Scott Adams satirized so well when he had Dilbert's boss say "anything that I can't understand must therefore not be important".

If Luskin had attacked Krugman's points on their merits...if he had contradicted the idea that the Feds would have an effect on employment, then that would be valid. It'd be hard to argue, but he could resurrect the ghost of Milton Friedman and go from there. Of course, then Krugman would eat him alive, as Krugman dissected supply-side arguments with great skill in "Peddling Prosperity" and he'd probably need only to turn to the right page and quote himself. Still, he could make a go of it. That is not what he did*. By deliberately misinterpreting Krugman's response, he not only entirely conceded any and all of the points that Krugman made, but irretreivably damaged his own credibility among any but the already-converted.

In many respects this is quite academic, as opinions will not change. Krugman is going nowhere, his detractors aren't going to find much in the way of support outside of the red-meat circle, and it'll take a hell of a lot more to damage the credibility of Paul Krugman than anything his BlogStalkers have brought to bear -- including Luskin's jihad. What interests me more is nature of the battle itself. Luskin makes great hay out of the lack of support that Krugman received on this. Oddly enough, he's correct: this sort of attack on a right-wing economist supporting the Bush plan would have been quickly met by all the rhetorical weaponry the Movementarians and their BlogFollowers can bring to bear. Even right-wing bloggers can count on no small amount of support. Yet when Krugman is attacked, it ends up being akin to medieval bear-baiting- he far outmatches any of his detractors, but their sheer numbers may lead them to (at least perceived) victory.

Well, this is, at least, my own small contribution.

(*There were two other points he made, which was that the jobs would be around for 10 years- Krugman didn't account for that, and that there would be supply-side effects, which Krugman ignored... which means that Krugman was mistaken. (Luskin says "lying", but that is merely more base attacks.) Both raise questions. Krugman and Bush are both talking about employment over-and-above what the economy would normally provide, and Krugman is quite rightly ignoring other employment: If 1.4 jobs exist in three years that would have been there anyway, then the Bush tax cuts become meaningless. As for supply-side effects, Luskin's attempt to invoke them as proof that there would be more than 1.4 million jobs created raises two questions: why didn't the CEA include them, and more importantly, why didn't Bush include them? Dwight's missing dog, once again, doesn't bark.)

edit: Max Sawicky has his own take on it here, which appears to be that both are wrong, but to different degrees: PK is somewhat wrong and a little arrogant, but that Luskin "just babbles like a fool". I'd say that comes out as a win for Paul. Brad DeLong mostly linked to the Meredith piece, but check out the comments section; Luskin gets ripped to shreds by many of the commentators there, including the always-interesting "Dsquared". Even my old friend Tom Maguire ends up backing Krugman (mostly), which makes it both a red letter day for Krugman supporters and a probable Real Bad Day for the less-supportive Maguire.

More on Jon, prompted by a comment from Tresy:

If Stewart had wanted to venture into politically incorrect territory, he might have asked Zakaria about the theocratic strains lurking just beneath the surface of Republican rhetoric, and what that says about our own democracy. Is it bad for Muslims to want their countries governed according to Islamic doctrine, but not for the Christian Coalition to want it governed according to fundamentalist Christian doctrine?

Jon didn't seem to quite know how to handle him. I don't think he agreed much, but I know that Jon does not generally go hostile on people he disagrees with- he was civil to COULTER, after all- so it's not surprising that he didn't go hardball. It's not his job.

I actually agree with his basic concept. Democratic institutions are as important as actual elections. The problem is with the concept that they should be imposed from without, instead of grown from within. One of the biggest problems with the Russian system and Russian economy is not that the Russians ignored the necessity of political institutions (the Soviet Union was riddled with the things), but that their "helpful" American advisors were compelling them to go with full-on privatization and de-institutionalization. Since the methods of privatization used didn't work properly (mostly due to the failings of market fundamentalists), Russia ended up in the grip of kleptocrats.

With that and countless other examples of screwed-up American-led nationbuilding, Zakaria's thesis deserves a hell of a lot more critical analysis than it seems to be betting.

By the way, I just thought of something: I wonder whether the U.S. should be taking as much credit for nation-building for Japan as they currently are? The jury may still be out on how well that worked. Japan is currently suffering through a rather brutal long-term recession/depression. The seeds of that go back a long ways, to the very beginning of Japanese economic ascendancy. Japan's also a notorious one-party "democracy". Yes, Japan is now far from its WWII-era militarism and pseudo-fascism, but I imagine that had more to do with the imposed nature of the system and the historical inability of fascism to handle military defeat rather than actual nation-building. One might also question whether the powerful nationalism and business/governmental ties that characterized Japan throughout the 80's and 90's don't retain vestiges of the old mode of thinking, even if the military route of expressing it is no longer acceptable.

On the other hand, Germany seemed to turn out ok. Then again, they're part of the "Axis of Weasels" now, so maybe not. (Is it a good thing or a bad thing that a country rebuilt by the U.S. is now powerful enough to defy them? What if Iraq becomes another Germany?)

Watching Jon Stewart right now, and saw Fareed Zakaria say "we built democratic institutions in South Africa" as proof of the necessity of the U.S. building democratic institutions before allowing people actual democracy.

One Stewartesque word:

"whuuuuuuh?"

I think Nelson Mandela might want to have strong words with Mr. Zakaria, especially considering that American Cold War interests were instrumental (if not essential) in the promulgation and continuation of Apartheid, and I honestly doubt that anything like the Truth and Reconciliation committee (which emphasized reconciliation over retribution) would have got off the ground with American stewardship.

I'll admit, I'm not an expert on South African history, but this is just jarring.

Could Andrew Sullivan be on the verge of abandoning the Republicans? Not sure, but the Santorum controversy (which I haven't really dealt with- go check Eschaton and The Rittenhouse Review for more on the issue) and Sully's reaction seems to imply so.

That's how little they care about individual liberties. I guess, as so many gloating liberals have emailed me to point out, I have been incredibly naive. I expected a basic level of respect for gay people from civilized conservatives. I've always taken the view that there are legitimate arguments about such issues as marriage rights or military service and so on; and that fair-minded people can disagree. And, of course, there are many fair-minded people among Republicans and conservatives who do not agree with Santorum, and I am heartened by their support, especially the Republican Unity Coalition and Marc Racicot, RNC head. But something this basic as the freedom to be left alone in own's own home is something I naively assumed conservatives would obviously endorse - even for dispensable minorities like homosexuals. I was wrong. The conclusions to be drawn are obvious.

Many have blogged, written, opined and lamented the divisions on the left, including myself. We should remember, however, that there is a division on the right... not just between "paleoconservatives" and "neoconservatives" but between both and the pseudo-libertarianism of many who lean towards the Republicans. (Neoconservatism in its proper, Straussian form does not seem to be as compatible with Libertarianism as many seem to believe). While they can get along on many issues, the continuing battles about homosexuality (and to a lesser extent, race) on the right are probably the best illustration that there are certain issues upon which they are irreconcilably divided, and that the coalition on the right has its own contradictions.

Up until now, however, they've been able to get away with not truly addressing these conflicts. The dedicated, ambitious neo-conservatives that make up the core of the conservative movement realized a very long time ago that infighting would weaken if not annihilate their ability to elect legislators and executives. While its unlikely that these divisions would lead to alternative parties growing in power and stature- the American system is utterly bipartisan and will remain so for a good while to come- it would definitely lead to bruising primary battles, policy conflicts, and voters on the "wrong" side either sitting out on election day or voting for the Democratic "lesser of two evils".

The fear of that happening is what has led to the strength and cohesion of the Republicans since the late 80's. The acknowledgement that all policy and personal conflicts between members should be subordinate to the goal of gaining and retaining power isn't new (ironically enough, it's Leninist), but without it, the modern Republican party and conservative movement would be toast, and quick.

That's why I've been calling them "Movementarians". it isn't conservatism that unites them because "conservatism" is a contested concept. The zealotry of some towards their brand of "conservatism" is the key cause of these factional battles. It isn't about any single leader, either- although they support Bush, it's hardly a personality cult. Instead, its the sense of movement and the willingness to sacrifice their goals to the success of the Movement as a whole that best defines them. The Movement is the key aspect, thus, "Movementarian".

(And, yes, like all good modern political terms, it comes from the Simpsons.)

Thing is, this can only last for so long. The conflicts we're seeing within the Bush administration and the conflicts that we're seeing over conservatism as a whole (like Sully vs. Santorum, or Novak vs. the Neocons over the war) are evidence that, having gained power, the conflicts over how to use that power are stressing the unity of the Movement. Success for those who don't share the goals of the Movement may lie in exploiting these faultlines, to break apart the coalitions and the various "conservatisms", so that primaries become more contentious and candidates are forced to take a stand.

More importantly, though, success will lie in recognizing that it is precisely the kind of "purity" that many on the left prize so heavily that tears apart political coalitions. This does not mean that the "far left" doesn't need to exist... it does, as it provides a backdrop upon which moderate leftists and liberals can present their ideas, and sometimes the extremists' goals can contain the seeds of really good and really innovative policy ideas. Still, all need to recognize that they're moving in the same direction, and they're largely for the same things, and that if they're willing to compromise some of their "purity" they can get a lot more done. There is room for both a center-liberal like Kevin Drum and a socialist like Martin Wisse (excellent bloggers both), and that in order to succeed the first step is to recognize that, and abandon the kind of distancing games that extreme and center both engage in in order to disassociate with the "other guys". They'll only succed when they learn the lesson that the Movementarians are, perhaps, forgetting:

Ultimately, they're on the same side.

So.... it's begun.

According to the Washington Post, the Iraqi Shiites are already starting to move the country in a direction Washington never intended:

As Iraqi Shiite demands for a dominant role in Iraq's future mount, Bush administration officials say they underestimated the Shiites' organizational strength and are unprepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist government in the country.

The burst of Shiite power -- as demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands who made a long-banned pilgrimage to the holy city of Karbala yesterday -- has U.S. officials looking for allies in the struggle to fill the power vacuum left by the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

As the administration plotted to overthrow Hussein's government, U.S. officials said this week, it failed to fully appreciate the force of Shiite aspirations and is now concerned that those sentiments could coalesce into a fundamentalist government. Some administration officials were dazzled by Ahmed Chalabi, the prominent Iraqi exile who is a Shiite and an advocate of a secular democracy. Others were more focused on the overriding goal of defeating Hussein and paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics in the region.

"It is a complex equation, and the U.S. government is ill-equipped to figure out how this is going to shake out," a State Department official said. "I don't think anyone took a step backward and asked, 'What are we looking for?' The focus was on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein."

Indeed it was, despite the concerns of pretty much everybody not directly caught up in the project. The biggest problem with removing Saddam has always been what to do afterwards, and outside of "quagmire week", most people were quite aware that removing Saddam's regime would be the easy part. Since outsiders knew, those insiders not hit with the blinding brilliance of America As The Shining City on the Hill should have known as well. Why didn't they prepare for something they were endlessly warned about?

Oh. Right. The looting of the museum and library. This is getting to be a trend, isn't it? There's pretty abundant proof at this point that the post-war scenario was not properly thought out, something that even the most hawkish liberals had been worrying about. While the Museum's looting was bad enough, however, the side effects this time could be catastrophic.

The administration hopes the U.S.-led war in Iraq will lead to a crescent of democracies in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, the Israeli-occupied territories and Saudi Arabia. But it could just as easily spark a renewed fervor for Islamic rule in the crescent, officials said.

I do wonder who these particular "officials" are. I'm betting they're out of State, not the Pentagon, and that State had been worried about this particular eventuality for a while. This actually raises an important question- how bad is the infighting getting? It seems like State and the neoconservatives within the Bush administration really are at loggerheads on everything. There's State's desire to bring the U.N. on board, which Cheney, the Pentagon, and the Defense Policy advisor types were manifestly against. There's the question of who runs the show in post-war Iraq, and for how long, as some Defense types are already suggesting a quick pull-out after the infrastructure is rebuilt. There's the relative importance of Chalabi- darling of the neocons, and more and more a complete wash on the ground in Iraq. There's the all important question of whether Iraq will be allowed to be democratic even if the people decide that they don't want to have a close relationship with the United States. A series of stories in the media implied that the post-war chaos in Baghdad was at least partially due to dueling plans and wars over control between different branches of the U.S. government. Is this the fruit of that conflict?

More importantly, who should win that conflict? Newt Gingrich is already coming out on the side of Defense at the AEI, although somebody should let him know that Bush's agenda does not have to be the AEI or PNAC agenda. There's no doubt that the conservative media and the neocons at the helm are going to be backing their people in Defense. Still, while Defense should be given its props for (most) of their handling of the war, they shouldn't be the ones handling the peace. Not because I think that the U.S. military can't handle it, but because at this point it's already been pretty conclusively demonstrated that Rumsfeld and Co. can't be trusted with the safety and security of the Iraqi people due to their penchant for poor planning. Even if Defense stays in, the neoconservatives should definitely be taken out of rotation, as almost everything they've advocated as a solution for Iraqs woes has either had the stench of empire or has been proven hopelessly wrong. (Witness Chalabi.)

I said long before this war began that nobody would want Saddam around in-and-of himself... that, at best, he's useful mostly as a classic Hobbesian sovereign, there to keep order at the price of freedom, because the chaos of freedom would be even worse. I worried that once he was removed, the situation in Iraq would grow steadily worse, as it's an almost-entirely invented country that was only kept from flying apart by the efforts of British-backed monarchs and then the most powerful strongman in the middle east. It's a little early, of course, but it would appear that religion's centrifugal effects are already starting to take their toll.

I had also said that war is not a magic wand- that it carries its own risks and consequences, ones that can far outweigh the benefits initially sought. The end of both the Franco-Prussian War and the first World's War can be seen as examples of this, as the former led to the latter and the first World War led to an even greater one. This does not mean necessarily that those wars should not have been fought (although it takes a gifted mind to defend the insanity of the first World War), but it does mean that what plays out after the war is over matters, whether it's Bismarck's efforts to isolate France or the Treaty of Versaille where France and its allies pay back Bismarck's successors in spades, not realizing what they're actually seeding. Even the end of the Cold War can be seen in this light, as the breakdown of the U.S.S.R. was deeply traumatic to both Russians and the region, and the fallout in Russian politics has led to a streak of nationalism that is disturbing to anybody who cares to take a close look at it.

This war in Iraq looks to be moving in these very same directions. The blindness, foolishness, zealotry and tendentiousness of the neoconservatives running the show (either directly in the administration or indirectly through the conservative media) are slowly crushing the prospect of peace, prosperity, and secularity in Iraq. If they guessed wrong, and it's pretty manifestly obvious they have, their responsibility for the situation should be highlighted and publicized, and the responsibility for diplomacy should be given back to the diplomats at State.

That may not suit Bush's agenda, as Newt has been charging...

but it may save Iraq.

Edit: Another piece on the same issue. One quote, right at the top, should summarize everything that's wrong with this situation:

Just days before a meeting this week in Beijing between U.S. and North Korean officials, for instance, the Defense Department pressed to have James A. Kelly, the head of the delegation and Powell's chief Asian expert, replaced by Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, a Rumsfeld ally on North Korea. Powell rejected the suggestion.

What more needs to be said? This is a battle between the expertise and pragmatism of the people at State and the neo-conservative movementarians, a group that appears not to have sunk its claws too deep into at least one part of the American executive branch. This definitely puts Newt into context- he's trying to open the door for the Movement to take over State too. Blaming State for the alienation that the Bush doctrine prompted is only the start. Looks like we now know where Bush's next war is going to be, and it's going to be at Foggy Bottom.

Well, looks like the fulmination over the Oil-for-Food program is at this point academic, as France has just announced that they want the sanctions to end. Considering that Bush had already called for this, it's likely that the sanctions will therefore soon be lifted.

Good news, mostly, although it does raise a question: if the situation becomes better in Iraq due to the sanctions being lifted, can the American government justly take credit for this, considering they were instrumental in the creation and continuation of the sanction regime in the first place? I'm sure that many will blame Hussein, but he didn't create the sanctions, he just had them slapped on him when he invaded Kuwait.

Odd how these things work out, hmm?

Anyway, the article includes a quote by Blix about American shenanigans during the inspections:

In an interview with BBC radio aired Tuesday, Mr. Blix said that before the war, the United States and Britain appeared to have used "shaky" intelligence, including forged documents, in an effort to prove Iraq had banned weapons.

He called it “very, very disturbing” that U.S. intelligence failed to identify as fakes documents suggesting that Iraq tried to buy uranium from the West African nation of Niger. He told reporters at the United Nations on Tuesday that the contract about "yellow cake" uranium "was more than shaky, it was a fake."

He also told the BBC that U.S. officials tried to undermine his inspection team by telling the media that he withheld information about an Iraqi drone from the Security Council.

"They felt that stories about these things would be useful to have and they let it out," he said. "It was not the case. It was a bit unfair and hurt us."

It's pretty obvious that the Bush administration had absolutely no interest in or desire for inspections to work, as they would have threatened the policy of regime change... yet they couldn't abandon it entirely, because they hadn't yet made the shift of war justification from WMDs to "freeing Iraqis". Still, confirmation of this obstructionism isn't going to help Bush either in the eyes of non-Americans or in the eyes of history. We'll never know if inspections would have worked, because they weren't allowed to.

Well, this is disturbing. Apparently there are Children at Camp X-Ray.

Children.

I mean, while it isn't the hell that some people portray it as, one of the the primary raisons d'etre for it is interrogation, and it has been shown in the past that the U.S. is not above the use of torture (or allowing others to use torture and then benefiting from the results).

The thought that a U.S. army corporal could be interrogating a child as I write this sends shivers down my spine. Not just for what it means, but what the reaction will be if anybody in the Arab world finds out. Like, for example, if they watch ABC.

Ok, here's a quick question... can anybody tell me how to go about getting archives that go past september of 2002? Is this a blogger bug or some sort of weird template thing?

Edit: Ok, I've futzed with practically everything, and no dice. The only big problem I've seen is that my blog archive template is giving me a "no such file found" bit, which might explain a lot. I hadn't played with that much since I got the blog, but if that's what's doing it, then I'll see about fixing it.

Anybody wish to confer about this in more detail, email me; if I get help, I'll give credit.

Matthew Yglesias writes a somewhat glib bit on the Saddam statues getting knocked down:

Personally, I'm a statue freak so I think people should keep as many statues as possible in their cities. Obviously I understand the impulse to knock down Saddam's statues and I won't blame people if they do it, but I hope that a few are at least left standing as exemplars of what was, after all, a significant period in Iraqi history. They should also consider putting up new statues of other people so that the country doesn't undergo sudden statue depletion. Fortunately, Mesopotamian history is filled with commemorable figures going all the way back to the days of Gilgamesh.

Oddly enough, Saddam may stick around. One of the phenomena that I remember hearing about in conversation a while ago was that statues of Soviet-era Russian leaders and politicians are either going back up in their places of honor or there is significant agitation to do so- up to and including KGB leaders, not the most desirous lot.

I don't see this as being about the policies and actions of the figures in question, of course. The thing is, Yglesias' idea that "it's a significant part of their history" may well be echoed by the people of Iraq themselves, especially if the rebuilding doesn't go as well as hoped (again, see Russia) and many Iraqis start thinking that they would be better off now if they were under Saddam. This would be a huge embarassment to the United States, of course, as (unlike in Russia) the United States was instrumental in the end of Saddam's regime and any nostalgia for said period is a pretty direct rebuke of the U.S., but that's why the rebuilding is so important.

Unfortunately, according to this piece, which implies that many within the government want to bail out fairly soon:

These officials are leaning toward a quick exit from a country that U.S.-led forces conquered in less than a month. The administration remains committed to repairing and rebuilding war-damaged infrastructure, in many cases to standards considerably higher than before the war started, a senior defense official said. Indeed, San Francisco-based Bechtel Group was just awarded an initial $34.6 million contract to rebuild airports, water and electricity systems, roads and railroads.

But the far larger task of ensuring that Iraq emerges as a representative democracy friendly to U.S. interests and operating with a free-market economy would be left to an Iraqi interim authority, which could control key aspects of Iraqi governance within months.

Oops. This could be disasterous. These officials are apparently willing to do the easy stuff (that is, not coincidentially, highly profitable to American companies doing the rebuilding) but not the hard stuff: actually building that democracy that they've been talking about. On a certain level I do sympathize- the longer the American presence, the louder the cries of "colonization", and the behavior of the U.S. to date hasn't exactly disproved that claim. (I wonder how many Iraqis are going to know the name "Halliburton" before this is over?) Still, it's manifestly obvious that the wealth of Iraq could pay for the reconstruction whether or not the U.S. army is there, and it is also obvious that Bush's rhetoric compels him to not just rebuild infrastructure, but play midwife to a middle eastern democracy as much as he is able.

If he cannot do that, and pulls out, then he only demonstrates that Afghanistan's current woes are part-and-parcel of Bush-style "regime change". Those that look back nostalgically at order and prosperity (such as existed in Iraq when it wasn't embroiled in warfare of one kind or another) will want to rebuild not just Saddam's statue, but Saddam's governing style. Interwar Germany all over again.

edit. Kevin Drum posited the eminently sensible idea of letting the U.N. get involved:

A few days ago I suggested that since there were big problems with both a prolonged American presence in Iraq and with a quick pullout, a strong role for the UN would be a good compromise. What I meant, of course, was that a true multinational presence is the best long run solution, and since the UN is the only serious multinational organization we have with experience in nation building and peacekeeping, the UN it is.

He quotes David Adesnik's anti-U.N. argument, but as Adesnik's (or at least that of his argument) conception of U.N. involvement appears to be limited entirely to the oil-for-food program, the IMF, and the World Bank, I think it can be safely dismissed. There's more to the U.N. than those, and I'd question whether he believes that the U.N. is ever successful.

(He also demonstrates a possible inability to understand the job that's necessary when describing a successful rebuilding occupation as "temporary"; as opposed to permanent, maybe, but that's a pretty long "temporary"- and what's with pulling out the "bipartisan consensus" canard that died in the 2002 election?)

No, the real problem is whether the U.N. even really wants the job. I'm sure that more than a few American policymakers who aren't wedded to the anti-U.N. neocon faction would love the U.N. to move in, pick up the job, and pick up the tab. That's the problem, though- since the U.N. didn't support the war, their legitimacy as a body that can confer legitimacy to military action would be even further eroded if they did move in, as they would be seen by all and sundry as an American handmaiden. So it looks like it'll be an American job, not a U.N. one. The U.N. may do it, but it'd create more problems than it solves.

Lot of that going around, come to think of it.

Excellent piece by Teresa Neisen Hayden about the spin doctoring that's dominated this entire "war" and that is currently being done over the looting issue. Quoting would be pointless: just go read it.

Very angry piece about Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) by Kevin Drum.

This week Glenn seems to have completed his transformation into the Rush Limbaugh of the blogosphere. Like the piece above, in which he "can't help but feel" that journalists and intellectuals are really motivated by sympathy with murderous dictators, Instapundit has turned into an orgy of innuendo and name calling, with anti-war activists saddened because they "didn't get the oceans of civilian blood [they] wanted," smug remarks about how the BBC "has shot itself in the foot" simply for reporting the looting in Baghdad that everyone is reporting now, and snide comments about scare-quoted "neocons," as if these folks don't really exist and it's shocking to suppose that anyone has ever wanted this war to expand beyond Iraq.

Glenn's schtick has always been a bitter and cynical one, but the end of the war seems to have been a watershed for him. Like Rush with his "stack of stuff," Instapundit has turned into nothing more than a clearinghouse for bile, with post after endless post explaining that anyone who disagrees with him is really motivated by a seething hatred of America and a desire to see everything that is good and true torn limb from corrupt limb. The level of rage and contempt that it takes to continue extracting pleasure from banging out this kind of stuff on a daily basis baffles me.

My vote on this is that Glenn is trapped in a "David Brock dilemma". Brock said in his book that although he was bothered by the length and breadth of vitriol that he went to in attacking Clinton and the Democrats, he knew that if he softened up, he'd be in deep trouble with his newfound Movementarian friends. While Glenn isn't a neoconservative, it's pretty clear that any rise in prominence and fame that Glenn will enjoy from here on out will be through Movement outlets like the Washington Times, Fox News, the Weekly Standard and the like. If he antagonizes them by veering off message, like Brock did when he wrote that book about Hillary Clinton, he'll end up persona non grata, or at the very least the kind of person who prompts muttered whispers when not quite within earshot.

In other words, if he veers off message, he'll never be anything more than he is now. I don't think he's quite willing to do that, and in that situation, where there is a logical (if flawed) case to be made for the Movement's positions, it's easier to stay on message and just ratchet up the rhetoric. That's what he's doing, and that's why he's being slowly "Rushified".

On the other hand, he could just be being an ass. Still, the "Brock effect" could be a factor.

Well, looks like nothing's been found so far. The biggest possibility, radioactive material at a weapons plant near Karbala, turned out to be a bust:

The team found radioactive material in a maintenance building and "dual use" biological equipment that could be used for peaceful or military purposes buried in metal containers under huge mounds of gravel and dirt.

Col. Richard McPhee, commander of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, a Defense Department unit responsible for the search for unconventional weapons, took a specialized nuclear detection team to the site today and removed seven canisters containing a radioactive isotope of cesium from the huge maintenance warehouse.

Although analysts have not yet determined its specific purpose, the experts said they thought that the cesium was probably intended to calibrate machinery in one of the many new buildings and production facilities that were under construction here.

The article goes on to point out that the inspectors are having some real problems: they are underequipped, get either underreaction or overreaction from military brass, and (ironically?) are beset by looters, who are carrying off things before they can be inspected.

Word that the plant was open to pillage spread quickly through surrounding impoverished villages, several of which have been without electricity, medicine and even water since the war began. By the time the Defense Department specialist unit arrived, much had already been looted.

For instance, the experts found manuals that came with two drying ovens imported from Germany, equipment that can be used to culture viruses and bacteria for weapons. But the ovens themselves were gone by the time the specialists arrived.

This is ominous. It suggests that the widespread looting is not just the theft and destruction of the heritage of the Iraqi people by gangs of thieves, but a security risk in-and-of itself if WMDs are indeed present. (Of course, if they aren't, there are other problems.)


By the way... I'd like to address the pathetic Movementarian rhetoric that the looters are somehow "the Iraqi people" and thus deserve their loot. Historical treasures like those found in the National Museum belong to all the Iraqi people, not just whichever got to the loot first. By allowing looters to steal and destroy these antiquities, the Bush administration (who, as I mentioned, were warned about this) are either inadvertently or deliberately erasing the past of the Iraqi people. This is also true of the fineries in Saddam's palaces- why should something that belongs to all the Iraqi people only benefit those who happen to live in Baghdad and fight their way into the compound first? If the palaces are to be sold off, then let them, but it should benefit all equally, not whomever happens to luck into stealing it. It is precisely this problem which plagues the former Soviet Union, albeit on a much, much grander scale: the kleptocrats were and are essentially looters, and beneficiaries of one rather unsuccessful form of American-led "transition". That, of course, wasn't Bush's fault, and had nothing to do with him. Still, it's an object lesson- looters are not representatives, or victims. They are simply thieves, stealing what should be public property and making it private without the people's knowledge or consent.

Then again, if you stop and think about it, that isn't a new thing for the Movementarians, is it?

Here's a thought:

While there's no doubt that many of the archeological treasures that were looted over the last week-or-so have been destroyed, many (possibly most) may not have been. Pretty much everybody who is in charge in Iraq (for what that's worth) is no doubt going to be anxious to have these things returned to the Iraqi people as a whole, safely kept within the museums within which they belong. However, a "get tough" law and order approach to this will be possibly more trouble than its worth, as it'll be fairly simple to smash/burn/whatever the artifacts, and I for one don't give a rats ass about punishment as opposed to getting those treasures back safely.

So whoever does eventually run the show over there, I have a suggestion: complete amnesty for those that return the artifacts, including (perhaps) a reward for their safe return. Does this mean that this may reward thieves? Yes, but punishment of theft, no matter how great, is of vanishing importance compared to the historical record itself. It would also set them apart from Saddam's regime, who would have no doubt taken a hard (read: murderous) line on anything like this, and the shock of the differing treatment may do wonders for convincing people that the new boss is not the same as the old boss.

If this step has already been taken, then fine, no problem, great minds and suchlike. If it hasn't, however, it should be considered. This is the history of civilization here, and it's more important than vengeance.

Edit: that being said, some thought should be given as to the larger responsibility here. I had thought that this was an unanticipated accident. According to this, however, we appear to have ended up in another situation where the basic incompetence of the Bush administration is demonstrated, and its the one thing that Bush was supposed to be good at: they never, ever listen. At least, to anyone outside the Movement.

I was gratified to discover a mention in an (as usual) excellent piece by Digby, one part of which I'd like to elaborate on:

The lesson of Iraq is that the United States is going to do what it wants to do without regard to international law or any nation’s good faith effort to cooperate. If they have decided to take military action against you it is a fait accompli. “Aggressive engagement” looks suspiciously like the “Decade of Defiance and Deception” public relations package that sold the war to the American public. No world leader is now under the misapprehension that complying with American demands necessarily guarantees that he will not be invaded and deposed anyway. There is no value in face saving or compromise because the US has proved that it will change its goals and create new rationales at will. So, the only question for any leader in this situation is whether to surrender without bloodshed or go down fighting. All moral authority is vested in America's willingness to deploy its military.

American foreign policy is now entirely unpredictable and is based upon nothing more than an elastic self-serving notion of American security. It requires no international consensus regardless of whether it directly impacts US national security and does not follow any international law or norms. It interprets treaties as it wishes without regard to precedent and holds other nations to standards to which it does not hold itself. It does not speak with one voice so its impossible to judge its real position and act accordingly. The American public are overwhelmingly supportive of the administration's new policy regardless of whether the government lies blatently about its reasons so there is little hope of any internal pressure to moderate. The world must now base its relationship with America on nothing more than blind hope or fear of one man's unknown intentions.

There are two related problems here: One being international law, the other being international power. The United States is the most powerful country in the world right now, with nobody to match it- that's why those who run the United states feel they can discard international bodies like the UN, as they think the U.S. doesn't require any sort of collective security arrangement to make itself safer- indeed, it is so powerful at this point that its security objectives are supposedly better served by simple force.

This seems to be an attempt to discard "soft power" or, at least, redefine it to suit the purposes of the neoconservatives.It used to be that they felt this required at least the appearance of multilateralism, but outside of the sad show that was the "coalition" (where countries were either strongarmed into joining or just added without their knowledge), multilateralism is pretty much dead right now. Without a new paradigm for soft power outside of "collective consent" (Which is what the U.N. represents), there's not much else to go on: the "liberator" bit is going to get old quickly, and isn't going to win the U.S. any friends or allies among governments that don't want to see today's Baghdad become paradigmatic. The "shining city on the hill bit" may be good enought to keep local support, but it won't gain any soft power in international relations. The problem is that without soft power, the United States' control only lasts as long as its military is strong enough to fend everybody off... and without any ethical basis by which the United States can justify this arrangement, other countries can portray their contra-American buildups as morally justifiable, and even use it to build what they see as "defensive" alliances.

Up until now that would be counter-productive at least, but then again up until now they could rely on the United States being reluctant to wage war and wanting to be seen as having a stake in international order. As both of those are gone, what's to stop an arms buildup, especially in countries that are friendly today but recognize that they might not be tomorrow?

Well, one bit of good news: at least according to this Guardian piece, there's no appetite for an invasion of Syria, at least, not right now.

he White House has privately ruled out suggestions that the US should go to war against Syria following its military success in Iraq, and has blocked preliminary planning for such a campaign in the Pentagon, the Guardian learned yesterday.

In the past few weeks, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, ordered contingency plans for a war on Syria to be reviewed following the fall of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, his undersecretary for policy, Doug Feith, and William Luti, the head of the Pentagon's office of special plans, were asked to put together a briefing paper on the case for war against Syria, outlining its role in supplying weapons to Saddam Hussein, its links with Middle East terrorist groups and its allegedly advanced chemical weapons programme. Mr Feith and Mr Luti were both instrumental in persuading the White House to go to war in Iraq.

Mr Feith and other conservatives now playing important roles in the Bush administration, advised the Israeli government in 1996 that it could "shape its strategic environment... by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria".

However, President George Bush, who faces re-election next year with two perilous nation-building projects, in Afghanistan and Iraq, on his hands, is said to have cut off discussion among his advisers about the possibility of taking the "war on terror" to Syria.

"The talk about Syria didn't go anywhere. Basically, the White House shut down the discussion," an intelligence source in Washington told the Guardian.

Interesting if true. I'm wondering, however, whether this is actually Bush's doing. The political leadership at the White House (Card and Rove) might be in conflict with the warhawks on this. The hawks are in full-on "let's blitz our way across the Mideast" mode, whereas the political types know that starting belligerence in Syria could backfire in a massive way, and are probably counting on that "reverse domino effect" to do the job of aiding U.S. interests anyway.

Just goes to show: when there's no real political opposition, the conflict will inevitably become internal. It happened with the Liberals in Canada, and it may be building in the Republicans in the United States.

Don't know what to think of this... anybody got any other links to this effect?

(Important part bolded)An Iranian news agency allegedly close to top conservative military figures attributed the fall of Baghdad to a secret tripartite agreement between Saddam Hussain, Russia and the US.

According to the Baztab agency, al-Sahaf was instructed to stay in Baghdad until the very last moments to lend the impression that everything in Saddam's camp was under control. The agency also claimed that Russia gained $5 billion to orchestrate this agreement.Anyone got other sources for that idea? It's unattributed in this article (which was about al-Sahaf), and the only version I had heard didn't involve the U.S.

From Eric Tam:

Hey, Steven "Le Nuke" Den Beste, Michael Ledeen, William Safire, and all of you other whackjob righties who argued that the French and the Germans were in some sort of insane conspiratorial alliance with Saddam Hussein and/or fundamentalist Muslim groups to assault the United States, repeat after me:

Those French and German soldiers are still in Afghanistan.

That's right. Not once, during the entire UN imbroglio did either France or Germany utter a word about the contribution of its vitally needed troops from the International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. This was the Bush Administration, that holy defender of muscular humanitarianism, who threatened to withdraw American participation from the Bosnia peacekeeping mission so as to get its way with the International Criminal Court. In other words, it held the peacekeeping mission hostage as a foreign policy bargaining chip.

Given this difference in behaviour, it's incredible to me that so many Americans could sincerely assert the humanity of the American power and the perfidity of the Europeans. Do they realize how important ISAF is to the thin line between Karzai's very fragile regime in Kabul and an Afghanistan that's completely at the mercy of the Taliban or a bunch of warlord thugs? Or that the U.S. continues to refuse to lend support for its expansion outside of Kabul?

The next time you hear someone mouthing off about Freedom Fries or some other such nonsense, remember Bill's mantra about our European friends. And say it after me again:

Those French and German soldiers are still in Afghanistan.

Not much more that needs to be said, except that the action in Afghanistan wasn't even under the U.N.- the French and Germans are there solely because they're supporting the Americans in that. It's certainly true that one of the reasons they're there is because they don't want the heat for leaving, but as Kleiman mentioned, that doesn't mean that they still couldn't, and that it doesn't matter that they're still there.

Stanley Kurtz is calling for war with North Korea, using a neat bit of circular logic:

What are the North Koreans really after? Are they practicing nuclear brinkmanship and blackmail simply as a way of extorting financial aid and security guarantees from the West, or has Kim Jong Il made a fundamental decision that nuclear weapons are essential to the survival of his regime...

...I believe that Kim Jong Il has decided that the survival of his regime depends upon the possession of nuclear weapons. Such a decision by the North Koreans would be entirely rational... He also knows that, post-9/11, the United States is especially interested in putting an end to his regime. Given that, Kim has every reason to conclude that the only certain way to deter the United States and its potential allies is through the possession of nuclear weapons.

It is true, of course, that the very possession of nuclear weapons is what makes the North Korean regime anathema to the United States. So why not disarm and survive?

Well, offhand, I'd say it probably has something to do with the fact that it's not the possession of nuclear weapons that would cause the Americans to invade North Korea, but (as this article aptly demonstrates) the possibility that at one point the North Koreans may have nuclear weapons. I realize that it's easy to forget that the exact moment this whole crisis began was when Bush threw North Korea onto the "Axis of Evil" and prompted them to start madly pushing to get nukes because they knew that Bush was going to take them out, but if you're going to place blame for the failure of negotiations, that's where it should go. The Bush administration has demonstrated that it doesn't matter whether or not the weapons exist or the desire exists to use it, just that it might down the road.

Indeed, look at how he follows up:

And given North Korea’s isolation, possession of a nuclear deterrent may be the only realistic path to regime survival. Put yourself in the place of Kim Jong Il. Would you feel safe knowing you were years away from reconstituting your nuclear weapons program? Would you trust the United States to harmlessly funnel massive economic aid to your now denuclearized state, or would you fear covert or overt American steps to destabilize and destroy your now denuclearized regime before you had a chance to change your mind and rearm?

This is a familiar logic, then; the cop-movie cliche where one person asks a second which person he should kill, and then the second agonizes because he's supposedly "responsible", even though he didn't pull the trigger. Kurtz's logic depends on the United States being seen as a threat by Pyongyang, and the very existence of the piece and the line of argument it generates is the surest proof that such a threat exists! Kurtz acknowledges that what the North Koreans are most concerned about is the possibility of the Americans bringing down their regime anyway; he's damned if they do, damned if they don't, choosing only the excuse given. He's right in one respect- at this point, the surest route to security for any dictator is to get nukes, and I can guarantee that they're all eyeing the Russian arsenal very, very closely as their own day of an American takeover gets closer and closer, unless they're lucky enough to be aligned with the U.S., like Pakistan. This is, of course, the security dilemma (defensive acts by one actor seen as offensive by another), and is exactly the kind of thing that the concept of national sovereignty is supposed to prevent. If sovereignty is assured, then things like nukes aren't needed, because invasion isn't likely unless a country prompts it. With the United States' current belligerence, the only possible way to ensure peace is either an empire, or for the U.S. to make sure that all their non-allies are too weak and isolated to survive, let alone pose a threat. Kurtz' arguments are a self-fulfilling prophecy.