Canada's Referendum

Edit: I hadn't realized that Mr. Wells was a reader! He wrote an extra-friendly note to my last piece on Canadian politics, and I wrote a friendly response back. Feel free to read them.

Oh, and by the way... Mr Wells?

Chris Dornan had Maclean's nailed- the Svend cover was ludicrous, and the shift in the magazine's tone under Whyte is bizarre, considering the rank failure that was his stewardship of the National Post.

I realize that you have a job to do, and I'm sure nobody begrudges you that, but c'mon... "Canada should sell its water to the Americans before they steal it"?

You gotta be kidding.

I criticized Paul Wells a little while ago for his misrepresentation of Paul Martin's positions and his seeming personal dislike of Martin. I haven't changed in that opinion, but I do think that an article he wrote claiming that "this election is about Stephen Harper, and whether he'll be trusted to lead" provides a useful jumping-off point for an idea that both Canadians and Americans should consider:

Canada's election is, primarily, about George W. Bush.

Leave aside, for the moment, the issue of Canadian unity. The main points of contention are protection of the social safety net, the Conservatives' social conservatism, and Canadian sovereignty in its foreign policy. The main reason why Mr. Harper is attacked as being out of the mainstream is his views on these three broad issues: they see him as disdainful of social welfare, backed by hardcore social conservatives, and supporting tight fiscal and strategic integration with the United States.

Yet, for all three of these issues, the basic idea is similar: Harper wants to make Canada more American, and less European. Harper and the other conservatives insist that they are not stealthy Republicans and aren't THAT conservative, but they're still derided as "scary".

Scary? Harper isn't scary, not in-and-of himself. He's a policy wonk who never learned how not to look wooden on television. What makes him scary is that the a significant plurality (if not a majority) of Canadians absolutely, positively, and viscerally LOATHE George W. Bush, and everything that he represents.

This is not due to envy, as Republicans seem to believe--few Canadians envy American political and popular culture, but simply appropriate what they like about it and jettison the rest, just as the rest of the world does--but simply because he represents a part of Americana that is almost entirely unexportable, because it relies on a religiosity that doesn't exist in Canada and a neo-conservative sense of American mission that, by definition, almost any outsider doesn't share. Americans themselves? Like many non-Americans, Canadians regard the vast majority with fondness. Not identification, but fondness.

Canadians don't like Bush or what he represents, but they have an advantage over those Americans who don't: they have that big beautiful border, protecting them from his follies. It's not just a geographical line, but a policy-based one- as long as Canada is different, that line keeps them independent. It kept them from going to Iraq, it kept them from domination by the religious right, it kept them from the attempted gutting of social security, it kept them from the Department of Homeland Security... the more that Bush has screwed up, the better that line on the map looks.

Thus, Harper's woes. It's not just about whether or not the policies he espouses would be good for Canada. It's about that line, and whether or not the policies would make that line fade or disappear. Paul Martin's anti-American tirades are code for "I'll keep that line sharp and safe", which (since it's the most important issue in American politics) is also code for "I'll keep your friends and family from bleeding to death on the streets of Baghdad". He pledges that as long as he is Prime Minister, George W. Bush and the Other that he represents will be kept down where they belong, until whatever the hell caused the American people to actually vote for the man dissipates or burns itself out.

So, to a certain extent, this isn't about Harper. It's about W. The worse Bush looks, the more important that line becomes, and the easier it is for Martin to ride these fears to victory. Harper cannot retain his policies and also allay these fears. His talk about standing up to the United States is immaterial, because his policies would make Canada more like the United States, and thus blur the border. The best he can do is show that Martin would blur it as well, which is why the Conservatives have been trying so hard to paint Martin as a fair-weather nationalist. Jack Layton's NDP is doing much the same thing, because they also can't credibly claim to be able to defend the line: they don't have the power, and won't have the power.

The only two provinces that don't really care about this are Alberta and Quebec. Quebec, because it will be distinct from the rest of English-speaking North America no matter what its policies are. Alberta, because the conservative political movers-and-shakers there are just fine with Republicans and Republicanism, and see the blurring of the line as a feature, not a bug.

(In fact, it is this that is Harper's biggest millstone: Ontarians and Albertans have a deep distrust of one another, at least partially due to this issue. It is Ontario, however, that Stephen Harper--the self-identified conservative Albertan--needs to win.)

It is unfortunate, but events down south will almost certainly have an effect up in Canada. It won't be easily measured, and as an intervening variable, it will likely not show up on any poll... but it will have an effect nonetheless. Harper is running against two men, and judging by the latest news, Bush is likely to remain a serious, serious problem.

IMPEACH

Brilliant idea over at Daily Kos: IMPEACH: The Guerrilla Marketing Movement.

So, now that all impeachment bets are off, what can we do to take this topic off the TV talk shows and the blogosphere, and put it where the rest of America can see and feel it?

Anything you want to.

But I have a few suggestions, and they include everything from simple act that anyone can afford, to elaborate collective action schemes that no one can miss.

The key thing to keep in mind: The message is simple, universal, and non-specific. But if it's the same everywhere, there will be no mistaking what it is, and how widely it's supported.

So, let's talk.

This idea isn't new, by any means. It's just being put to a new use -- taking impeachment out of the realm of broadcast wonkery, and making it real.

This isn't about achieving the result of impeachment directly. I think we all know where we stand on that score. This is about building resonance, and making impeachment "real," because it's being brought to the attention of real people.

What I'm proposing is this: Go into your word processors right now, and type out the word "IMPEACH." Go ahead, use caps. Center it. Bold it. Make it 72 point. Turn the page to landscape if you like, and make it bigger.

You've got a sign. Print it out. Xerox it. Put it up on a lamp post. On a supermarket bulletin board. Inside a newspaper vending machine. Anywhere.

You've joined the movement.

How does it feel? Want more? Would you be willing to spend a little money on it?

Pick up a pack of Avery labels down at the office supply store. Print out a page worth of stickers that say the same thing. IMPEACH.

Not impeach Bush. Not impeach Cheney. Not Chimpeach. Just IMPEACH.

Bolded that last bit because it's the most important. This is a brilliant idea, because if it takes off it'll create buzz and make the concept more acceptable. The key is the use of the single word: everybody knows who the "impeach" refers to, and trying to weigh it down with arguments and cases and whatever doesn't matter. The case is out there. The argument is out there.

Instead this should be like the teaser campaign that happens long before the movie is even finished. Just the force of one word over, and over, and over, and over again, everywhere you look, in places you don't expect it. It'll piss Bush supporters off, but that doesn't matter: the act of arguing against an idea is the most important one for legitimizing it. And hell, how do you argue against the repetition of a single word?

Do it right, and it becomes a trend, and while Bush's corporate backers know how to coopt a trend, they have no idea how to stop one.

Just one word:

IMPEACH.

Breaking Blogiquette

I realize I should be linking, but instead I'll just respond to the panopoly of defenses of Bush's illegal wiretapping of Americans simply.

The defense is "he's using it against bad guys, and we can trust him not to use it against political opponents".

My question?

What the hell WOULDN'T this justify? You could play apologist for anything, up to and including secret police death squads, using this argument or one like it. It's a call for absolute executive power.

It's not even Orwellian, because even 1984's party was a little more subtle than this.

Debate

For those following Canadian politics, they had their first english-language election debate tonight. The format was unimpressive and stifled real exchanges, but it highlighted the three issues that grab me about Canadian politics right now: the difficult relationship with the United States, the wrangling over whether to embrace european-style social democracy or American-style capitalism, and the threat of the province of Quebec seperating from Canada.

(One of the four parties during the debate, the Bloc Quebecois, openly advocates seperation... showing just how different Canada treats seperatists than the vast majority of other countries.)

The most striking moments? Both involved Prime Minister Paul Martin: his argument over whether he'd send troops to Iraq, and his passionate attack on the sovereigntists for their often-dubious legal claims of the right to unilateral seperation. It's not often that you see a Canadian prime minister so incensed as Martin was with Duceppe's claim that Quebec could leave whenever and however it wishes, in contravention of Canadian law. With Martin, it's even rarer, yet there it was.

The best commentary on the election online? So far, the "CalgaryGrit", a Liberal supporter who nonetheless asserts his independence and avoids clear partisan apologetics.

(Unlike, say, Paul Wells, whose obvious personal loathing of Martin weakened his election analysis considerably, leading him to side with Martin's America-friendly opponent Stephen Harper on thin grounds over the Iraq issue. Or the Grit's largely conservative commentators, who sound like Harper's spin doctors.)

Go, man! GO!

Sirota ripping on the DLC:

Less than two weeks ago, the Democratic Leadership Council said that people like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Vietnam War Hero Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA) were "offering surrender" by supporting an exit strategy from Iraq. This followed on the DLC's long record of slamming anyone who it disagrees with (for more, just see the DLC's treatment of Howard Dean in the 2004 presidential primary). Now, the DLC is desperately attacking those like Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) who have been critical of Sen. Joe Lieberman's (D-CT) support for the Iraq War, and in the process, actually claiming the DLC has always been for "inclusion" in the Democratic Party and against "polarized politics."

This is how pathetic and corrupt it has gotten in Washington. The nation's capital has become a place where corporate-funded institutions like the DLC can one day viciously stab courageous progressives, and then the next day turn around and claim they are actually for "inclusion" - all without batting an eye, or thinking twice about how dishonest and hypocritical such behavior really is. What an insult to the public's intelligence.

Apparently to the DLC, "inclusion" is defined as being in lockstep with their far-out-of-the-mainstream views, and the only thing important to them is preserving their status on the D.C. cocktail party circuit by issuing press releases touting their "friendship" with those who undermine the Democratic Party.

The bolded bit is, as always, the key to this. It's groupthink--hardly a new thing--and the groupthink is clearly being exploited to ensure that the right thoughts are held by the right people. It's also, however, the loose party structure in the United States; when the connection between partisans is so weak, and the "bipartisan" ties of power and circumstance are so strong, is it any wonder that people choose the latter over the former?

All the DLC does, in the end, is reverse Milton. Better to serve in "heaven", than to rule in "hell". That these things are defined by their supposed opponents is immaterial.

Digby on Richard Pryor

A great and insightful man passed away from us today, and digby gives him the moving eulogy he deserves.

(Or perhaps I should say "elegy": it is definitely a lament... but I think more of a lament for all the things that we never learned from him. Or, perhaps, forgot.)

Growing Radicalization in America

I'm going to take a step back and look at the broader picture in the United States, because I think we have some clues about where things are going to go in American politics.

First, no matter what happens, it's unlikely that foreign policy is going to be fruitful for either party- the dominant Dems are those that are stuck between their votes for the war and against it, and the Republicans are too identified with the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq to really run on foreign policy. Yes, there's still the terrorists, but let's face it: as a means of mobilizing the people, the war on terror has had its run barring another attack. (Even then, the results would be predictable- it would have happened on the Republicans' watch.)

Second, take a look at this important column from Paul Krugman on monday. he calls it ""The Joyless Economy" for a reason: the economic growth that is raising GDP and average income isn't doing a damned thing about median income, which is actually declining, implying that the gap between the wealthy and the poor is widening, not closing. This isn't new, but it is creating a huge disconnect between public perceptions and elite perceptions of the economy- the latter is worried more about inflation than anything else, whereas the former perceives that the economy is in a recession. To them, it is.

The most important part of this, however, is that Krugman acknowledges that this is not President Bush's fault:

It's much harder to explain why. The disconnect between G.D.P. growth and the economic fortunes of most American families can't be dismissed as a normal occurrence. Wages and median family income often lag behind profits in the early stages of an economic expansion, but not this far behind, and not for so long. Nor, I should say, is there any easy way to place more than a small fraction of the blame on Bush administration policies. At this point the joylessness of the economic expansion for most Americans is a mystery.

Thus, this isn't really good news for the Republicans, because if they aren't responsible for it, they can't really do much about it.

(The Dems could, through income redistribution, but the actions of the DLC's proxy candidate Hillary Clinton shows that they have no intention whatsoever of veering leftward.)

So, where are we? The people are pissed off about the economy, foreign policy is unlikely to serve as a distraction, and the government can't really do much about it.

So what happens in 2006/2008?

Enter Thomas Frank. Remember, Frank's thesis about the culture wars is that those who are being hurt the worst by these economic trends are paradoxically the most likely to embrace social conservatism- it's a way of gaining self-respect, political relevance, and moral superiority for those who have no other avenue for it. There is an element of deliberate deception by those wealthy Republicans who want to distract the people from the economic issues, but they've been the victims of their own success, as the socially moderate apologists for wealth get elbowed aside by the growing power of social conservatism. This is only going to increase- while the social conservatives are ticked about Bush's behavior, they aren't going anywhere.

The Dems aren't willing to tack left on the economy, though, not really: they're still trapped in the "triangulation" paradigm that they think helped Clinton in '92. They'll probably push for some level of socialized healthcare, but unless they're willing to go up against the most powerful lobbies in Washington, it's not going to go anywhere, and the base is unlikely to be impressed by it. Thus, unless the power structure in the Democratic party shifts, they aren't going to be able to "shift the debate" to economic issues. The core economic problem is, as Krugman said, something that they probably can't do much about.

Without a serious debate on economic issues and with foreign policy off the table, though, what's left?

Frank's culture war.

Hence the title of this post. Dem leadership is clearly trying to move right on social issues, so as to (supposedly) reassure the elusive swing voters that they aren't Godless Liberals and refocus the debate on economic issues. This is going to lead to two effects: the social conservatives on the right will pocket the advantage and move further to the right on pretty much every issue but abortion....

...assuming that Roe V. Wade isn't dead: if it is, it becomes a huge election issue in every state in the country...

...while the urban liberal Democratic base, abandoned by the leadership, gets more and more ticked off at what they see as the creeping dominance of social conservatism, with honest libertarians likely to follow suit.

Frank's effect will ensure that even more people become more radically socially conservative, so as to regain the respect and moral foundation that they once enjoyed as prosperous middle-class workers. They sense, rightly, that something's wrong with the country, but many will blame it on collective moral failings instead of impersonal economic forces- the flip-side of the "can-do spirit" that Americans laud themselves for is that they don't easily believe in structural responsibility.

Since the economic debate won't address the real problems, it won't go anywhere or "hit people where they live", and it will be vulnerable to a social policy counterattack. The Dems, true to form, will try to triangulate by moving right on social policy and attempting to reframe the debate on "the economy, stupid"... but this isn't 1992, and even Hillary Clinton isn't Bill Clinton, so all it will mean is "moving goalposts". The base will see this, get ticked, and likely get really, really loud about it, both online and offline.

(The libertarians will too, but I imagine their days as movers and shakers in the Republican party are very much numbered.)

What I can't predict, however, is what America will look like at the end of the day. It depends on how far this goes. If things just kind of muddle along, then it'll probably look a lot like now, just more so. If things get really bad, though, then the scapegoating may well shift from liberal political philosophy to other convenient "Others".

Considering the current atmosphere about the "war on christmas", "borders under siege", and "the Chinese threat", it doesn't take much imagination to think of who those scapegoats will be.

Again, I'd suggest looking to the controversy over video games as the canary in the coal mine. The attacks on games are a proxy for attacks on secular culture, as it's the newest and thus most vulnerable form of expression of that secular culture.

Rest assured: what starts in Silicon Valley will end up in Hollywood.

"Those People"

Courtesy of Atrios and Ailes, one of the dumbest lines I've heard since the last time I read Townhall:

"But the dirty little secret in America is that anti-Semitism is no longer a problem in society; it’s been replaced by a rampant anti-Christianity."

The best part?

This is from a jewish guy.

Incredible.

(Me, I'll be spending the holidays with Jon Stewart at Osama's Homobortion Pot 'n Commies Jizzporium.)

Once Again, a Quick Tip for Hillary Clinton:

No matter how ludicrous your attempts to reposition yourself to the right become, you're still going to be a Stalinist to Republicans.

Yes, that includes backing anti flag-burning legislation, as Jon Tasini points out.

I personally find it deeply disturbing that of all the rights that the American people have, it seems the the right of free speech seems to be the one that the DLC's surrogates seem most willing to jettison for popularity.

Kevin on Those Who Were Correct:

From Kevin Drum:

I'll have more to say about this over the next few days, but for now I'd just like to mention one thing. I've seen a lot of lefty critics who have hammered Packer because he supported the war and, in their eyes, hasn't been forthcoming enough about admitting he was wrong about that. Michael Hirsh led the charge here in these pages a couple of months ago. I have three words for these critics: get over yourselves. Perhaps someday we'll ship Packer and his fellow liberal hawks off to reeducation camps and force tearful confessions of doctrinal error out of them, but for now partisans on both sides could do worse than admit that the world comes in shades of gray and neither success nor failure in Iraq was quite as preordained as you might think. A little bit of difficulty figuring out where you stand on the war isn't quite the moral failing some seem to think it is.

Kevin, that isn't what happened and you know it. Yes, there are shades of grey, but that doesn't mean that a person who hasn't been blinded can't tell the difference between off-white and near-black. That failure wasn't practically preordained is definitely an open question too: a violent insurgency had been a strong possibility from the beginning, and it could easily have been worse than it has been.

Considering what has happened, though, what on earth is the reason to "get over ourselves"? Critics were derided then and are (incredibly) derided now that they've shown they were right, and were the enterprise successful, the "liberal hawks would not be defending the "anti-war left" now. That they weren't right, yet expect forbearance for mistakes of judgement that could easily happen again, simply doesn't make sense.

The comment, by the by, was contained within a review of Assassin's Gate, a book by George Packer on the war and what happened. I haven't red the book and don't presume to be able to judge it, but there was one other thing related to it that I wanted to mention;

Blog readers know a fair bit of this history already from magazine articles and newspaper reporting, but as I was saying a few days ago, the only way to really know a subject is to read a book. It's true that most of us don't remember everything we read in books, but that's not the point: only when you get the whole story, in all its glorious detail and told all at once, do you really get a narrative sense of what happened. That's what Packer has done in Assassins' Gate.

Don't get me wrong- I love books, and narrative especially. That said, there is always a danger of a book like this forcing events and motivations into fitting said narrative. Real life is often random at best, and history often doesn't fit convenient narratives.

I'm not saying this is a weakness of Packer's book, I'm not able to judge: but this is a potential problem with any attempt to take a complex event and summarize it in 200-300 pages. I think Drum needs to be aware of this.

Edit: The commentators on Drum's site are engaged in an all-out war over this. There is a good point there that needs to be made, though: the "liberal hawks" have never admitted that they were wrong. They have admitted that Bush is incompetent and that they shouldn't have put their faith in him, but their faith in the idea that it was a good idea to go into Iraq, period, has seemed to have never wavered. This issue still very much matters, because any future administration doing this is going to argue that they will "do it right", and the danger exists that the liberal hawks will roll right back in and back these guys.

(Especially if they're Democrats.)

Admitting that Bush screwed it up is very different than admitting that the whole thing was a bad idea. Mixing those up doesn't get anybody anywhere, because it's the latter point that is important.

Further Edit: Greg Sargent argues that the problem was not doctrine, but judgement. He does a good job of highlighting why judgement is important, but there's a fundamental problem.

The problem is that doctrine can cloud judgement, and the question remains as to whether or not doctrine did in the eyes of the "liberal hawks" (not, as he seems to suggest, merely Bush and his friends.) The doctrine in question, I'd say, is that of being "reasonable", "mainstream", and "bipartisan" over all else, and that classic doctrine of American exceptionalism, but these things are open to dispute.

What isn't open to dispute, however, is that the judgement was flawed, and that the question of "why" needs to be addressed more deeply than "whoops, I didn't realize that Bush's crew were incompetent".

The CIA: Working Together With You for a Brighter Future!

How? By making innocent people disappear.

[Innocent prisoner Khaled] Masri was held for five months largely because the head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center's al Qaeda unit "believed he was someone else," one former CIA official said. "She didn't really know. She just had a hunch."

The best part? He was kidnapped (what other word is there?) from Germany! Apparently, the CIA can grab you from free, democratic countries (he was travelling to Macedonia) and send you to some dictatorial hellhole (ah, sweet Uzbekistan) where, because you aren't an American citizen, you have no rights!

Then, if you aren't actually a terrorist, you'll get sent to Gitmo.

About a dozen men have been transferred by the CIA to Guantanamo Bay, according to a Washington Post review of military tribunal testimony and other records. Some CIA officials have argued that the facility has become, as one former senior official put it, "a dumping ground" for CIA mistakes.

Hey, at least you'll get a free Quran.

Ok, enough joking. As the article implies, there appears to be a disconnect in the CIA between the intelligence analysts (who seem to be by and large intelligent, careful people) and the operations group, who have been playing fast and loose. This isn't exactly a new thing. Anybody who's done any reading on the CIA's involvement in the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, or their history in Central America, is going to be familiar with the attitude of the some in the operations group. Most are careful professionals, of course: but the nature of the game means that overly enthusiastic agents can get away with a lot if it's politically justifiable.

But what is new is the appetite for flashy covert operations in the White House, and the political environment they occur in. The White House (and too much of civilian DoD) is being run by people that embrace a view of covert ops informed by Tom Clancy novels and "Plan B" paranoia. That's bad. What's worse is that the natural check on covert operations--the possibility that they'll be found out and no longer be covert--isn't really a check anymore, because the White House doesn't care and the rest of the world can't or won't do a damned thing about it.

Fortunately, Masri was released. What worries me are the ones who haven't been.

(Oh, and by the by? Secret detention and torture of Sayyid Qutb was one of the main radicalizing influences on fundamentalist Muslims in the first place. The guys who get out aren't going to be big fans of the United States.)

Game Violence, part 2

A law in Illinois that regulated game sales, the Safe Games Illinois Act, just got shot down by an Illinois judge.

(Linked article found at the increasingly interesting Gamepolitics site.)

In reading his ruling, Judge Kennelly obviously grasped what games are about:

"Video games are one of the newest and most popular forms of artistic expression. They most resemble films and television shows by telling stories through pictures, text, and sound, but they also parallel popular books, such as the Choose Your Own Adventure series, which enable readers to make decisions about how the plot and characters will develop. Video games are generally designed to entertain players and viewers, but they can also inform and advocate viewpoints. They are therefore considered protected expression under the First Amendment. See Am. Amusement Machine Ass'n v. Kendrick, 244 F.3d 572, 579 (7th Cir. 2001)."

Regarding testimony on behalf of the Illinois video game law by Dr. Craig Anderson of Iowa State University, Judge Kennelly said:

"Dr. Anderson testified that playing violent video games is one activity that primes aggressive thoughts and teaches aggressive scripts... As a result of regularly playing violent video games, Dr. Anderson testified, these scripts or knowledge structures become 'chronically accessible' and ultimately become 'automatized.' The research underlying Dr. Anderson's testimony, however, does not support such a stark and sweeping conclusion."

There's more...

"Even if one were to accept the proposition that playing violent video games increases aggressive thoughts or behavior, there is no evidence that this effect is at all significant. Dr. Anderson provided no evidence supporting the view that playing violent video games has a lasting effect on aggressive thoughts and behavior – in other words, an effect that lingers more than a short time after the player stops playing the game."

I'd suggest reading the ruling itself- the judge completely destroys Anderson's argument, and (by extension) the bases of the "games make people crazy" argument.

The important part is the bolded one, though, because the key question is whether or not electronic games count as protected speech, not whether they're harmful, as there's no way that they could approach the level of harm that would warrant ignoring protections (as in, say, child pornography.) That they were clearly identified as such settles the issue.

It also makes sense. Any number of games' underlying plots could count as political speech through analogy. Some, like the popular Metal Gear Solid series, are very much overt about it. Even controversial games like Grand Theft Auto series, however, can have underlying themes and messages that could count. The ultra-controversial GTA: San Andreas draws heavily on films like Menace II Society and Boyz in the Hood, and makes many of the same points about urban violence and the abandonment of urban African-Americans and the communities they live in by society at large. It also supports the (admittedly controversial, but popular) idea that authenticity and family loyalty is more important than success and lawfulness. This led to one of the odder thematic transitions in gaming history, but the underlying message was reasonably clear.

(Don't get me wrong: GTA:SA isn't Citizen Kane, but it can easily be considered protected speech, and there are underlying themes.)

Finally, to those who'd wonder why this matters: it's clear by now that video games are the new proxy in the culture wars, and are the vehicle by which DLC Democrats are going to burnish their social-conservative cred. They're almost certain to be a punching bag in 2008, so this question of protection needs to be settled now. Fortunately, it seems that it has.

"Craven" and the Chickenhawk

I've never been a huge fan of the "chickenhawk" label. It's used constantly to describe anybody who supports the war (or even the concept of war) who isn't actually a veteran or a member of the military. While it's always funny to torture Jonah Goldberg, and Dick Cheney really is evil, the validity or invalidity of their case has nothing to do with service.

That matters. If you're trying to argue against that case, using the "Chickenhawk" label can be counterproductive. You aren't going to sway anybody who understands (explicitly or implicitly) that there's no connection between the argument and the arguer. You might even hurt your case, because they'll be less inclined to believe anything else you say.

That said, there are cases where the "Chickenhawk" label is valid. This is one of them. Check the bolded comment in the quote:

This insane calculus—which is the position of the Democratic leadership, at least in the House—argues, in essence, that going to war puts a strain on our troops, and that protecting ourselves is impossible if our troops are stretched thin from protecting us.

Again, I’m not sure how this message has gained any traction whatsoever; but then, I’m stunned each passing day by the number of people who throw their support behind a political party whose base is so obviously and unabashedly craven that it refuses even to find a workable rhetorical mask for its power-at-any-cost message that doesn’t insult the intelligence of anybody paying close attention.

Now, this is all twaddle, of course, and I wouldn't expect anything different from Goldstein. He's clearly just throwing red meat to Bush's dwindling base of support. It's not like he can change horses at this point. The point he's attacking is perfectly valid: a military that is overstrained and overworked due to lack of manpower and an overly ambitious mission is going to be less effective. He attempts to say that it's somehow invalid because in both cases they are "protecting us"... neatly dodging the legitimate question of whether or not they're protecting a damned thing, and whether the manpower can be more effectively used elsewhere.

(That's why you can tell it's red meat: it's only a valid argument if you share Goldstein's assumptions. Either he's aware of this or he's not- if he is, he's pandering, and if he's not, he's dumb.)

But again, look at the bolded section:

a political party whose base is so obviously and unabashedly craven that it refuses even to find a workable rhetorical mask for its power-at-any-cost message. "Craven" is a synonym for "cowardly". This is where the chickenhawk label should go. While he dresses it in nonsensical complaints about "rhetoric", the meaning is clear: he's saying that everybody who doesn't support the war is a coward.

Jeff Goldstein, you don't get to call anybody cowardly, least of all the Democratic base. You're not out there fighting and dying for a mistake. You aren't responsible for any lives, or forced to accept orders that you disagree with that may end up getting you killed. You aren't the one who has the nightmares about the lives you've taken.

You aren't even politically brave. You're speaking power to truth. You're defending the easy, safe, and scurrilous idea that if only enough of the bad guys get killed (by someone else) we'll be safe. You're doing it in the face of all evidence to the contrary, because to disagree would leave you ostracized. Andrew Fucking Sullivan is braver than you are, and David Brock leaves you in the dust.

(To forstall an inevitable defense: That you use your own name means nothing when you choose those positions that require the least courage and extract the most gain. You'd actually be braver using a pseudonym, because it would demonstrate that you say things because you mean them, not because it will make you the right friends. I may hide behind a pseudonym, but you hide behind power, Jeff.)

Every one of us (even the pseudonymous bloggers like myself) who have been saying since 2002 that this war was a mistake are braver than you. We've suffered, to mangle Shakespeare, "slings and arrows of outrage"; endless maligning of patriotism, of bravery, of sanity, even, from those like yourself who took the easy and profitable path of apology for liars and scoundrels.These were and are attempts to stifle dissent, and the media's behavior during the buildup to the war, and its treatment of those who disagreed, shows that the attempts worked very well.

(There is, for example, no other reason for Horowitz's "Discover the Network" and Pipes' Campus Watch to exist; the latter has led to threats to safety and is little more than character assassination. As is everything Ann Coulter has ever written.)

We've suffered it and continued, because we understood what the American people have finally realized: that the United States' children should not bleed to death in the desert for a pack of lies about WMDs and the regional ambitions of the neo-conservatives.

You are a Chickenhawk, Jeff. You are every inch the coward, Jeff. Not for the quality of your argument, although it was poor, but for this pathetic attempt at accusing others of cowardice in order to mask your own.

But, at least, you're an excellent object lesson. Use the label Chickenhawk wisely, folks, because leveling it at everybody means you don't have it when you need it.

Edit: Credit should go to Oliver- got it from this post.

Dave GIbbons is Smarter than Tom Shone- Another Aside

In the vein of Ebert's earlier nonsense about games comes this review of the uber-influential and provocative comic series "The Watchmen" (a deconstruction of the tropes and shorthand that underlie superhero comics).

Predictably, it commits the same error that these things always do: it mistakes a faux-sophisticated and self-consciously ironic surface reading of the material for understanding of any deeper themes and concepts. Shone namedrops Postmodernism and modernism without bothering to check how or whether these frameworks are being used; the old game of saying "it's deconstruction!" without trying to figure out the problematic that it's supposed to deconstructing in the first place.

The worst error, though, is missing the fact that Watchmen is, by its nature, a visual medium, and completely ignores the visual elements involved.

The suspicion lingers that Watchmen was more a triumph of writing than draftsmanship. The graphics were by Dave Gibbons, one of many artists who made their name on Judge Dredd, although he always felt a bit like the fill-in guy, lacking the ravaged punk impudence of Mike McMahon or the ebullient absurdity of Brian Bolland.

Already we see the warning signs: why "draftsmanship"? If you aren't willing to concede the term "art", you probably aren't going to get the visual element of the work. And why the hell is Judge Dredd relevant to discussing Watchmen? There's a lot there, you don't need filler references.

Gibbons' style was neat, tidy, and strong-jawed, which lent his work for Watchmen a flicker of irony, although it was unclear whether the hokey costumes he came up with for Moore's superheroes were deliberately hokey or just the kind of stuff he came up with anyway. In which case, the joke was on him and the irony was all Moore's. A typical comic script is 32 pages; for Watchmen, Moore's ran to 150 pages, heavy with voice-over narration and speech balloons.

Cripes. The visual design is very much deliberate, hearkening back to the classic character and costume design of golden-age comics: characters Watchmen was designed to superficially resemble. Were he to use any other kind of style, the connection would not only fall apart, but the wild discontinuity between the character design and the events would disappear. Nobody blinks at gore, say, Preacher, because the design makes you expect it. Comics Code era "cape books", on the other hand... that's shocking. And, yes, the work of the artist.

Also, who on earth actually thinks that the character design in Watchmen is "hokey"? Rorschach's ever-changing (and suggestive) black-and-white mask (along with his classic 50's "detective" fedora-and-trenchcoat) is one of the best character designs in the field! All of the character designs are reminiscent of golden-age comic characters, without being derivative, which is completely in tune with the general visual theme!

Edit: I had forgotten that the Watchmen were based off of DC's acquired Charlton Comics characters. Another important point that was lost by Shone amidst the carping about Judge Dredd. That Gibbons was able to take what most consider second-rate characters and turn them into icons that rival DC and Marvel's own is another testament to his skill.

(The art in the "black freighter" comic-within-a-comic illustrates this:Gibbons completely changes the visual design to fit the different themes and history of "EC"-style horror comics, and contrasts it with the general Watchmen visual style in order to emphasize the severe limitations that were imposed on comics by the CCA.)

Gibbons found himself cramming his graphics into a neat box-arrangement of nine frames per page, and the result was a minimalist, Philip Glass-y, metronymic tone. Watchmen also took comic-book chronology to new levels of complexity.

Proof positive that Shone Just Don't Get It, but is working hard to fake it. (Nice namedrop, by the by.)

Edit: waitasec, I didn't catch this at first. The word Shone wants is "Metronomic", isn't it? A "metronymic" is a name deriving from one's mother! I had just assumed that no editor would let that by, so went with his spelling. Whoops.

First rule of using big words, Tom, is to make sure you're using the right ones. I use ten dollar words all the time and I will not apologize for it, but at least I use the right ones.

The design of the panels was very much deliberate, and not simply for a "metronomic tone". The regular progression of 9 panel pages, evenly spaced, was chosen to contrast to the wild and chaotic design the panels of your typical superhero comic. The simplicity and regularity emphasizes the mundane world that the characters live in, and the fundamental mundanity that invades the lives of people who are considered to be synonymous with novelty and action.

(It's also used for emphasis: panel designs were set up as mirrors for earlier pages to reinforce themes and concepts, were regularly alternated to create thematic connections between "A" and "B" plots, and when full-page panels WERE used, as in the beginning of last issue, the effect was tremendous. Having wild panels means that you can't make them wilder- Gibbons' use of mundane arrangements meant that when he changed the style, it was arresting.)

Yes, panel design indicates time, and on that Shone is correct in the even procession of panels, but it's a hell of a lot more important than that. Using space to denote time is at the heart of the medium, and provides enormous possibilities to blend time and space together to make a larger point.

It features an elaborate flashback structure and a fascination for slo-mo simultaneity that wouldn't have embarrassed your average Modernist—when they coined the term "graphic novel" nobody mentioned that the novel in question was Ulysses—although how well this technique melded with the more straightforward dynamism of traditional comic-book panels is open to question.

Funny- most of the discussions of The Watchmen I've read have noted that there's no way that it could be anything but a comic, and that the movie project is doomed. The flashback structure, and juxtaposition of different viewpoints (I assume that's what he meant by "slo-mo simultaneity".. using terms appropriate to the medium would have been helpful) are probably impossible in any other medium, as Watchmen makes a point of using the tools that comics employ to denote time (panel size, shape, and position) to also engage in thematic juxtaposition, meta-commentary and reinforcement.

The pirate comic-within-a-comic, again, shows this theme most clearly... the seemingly unrelated story eventually resolves itself as a way of showing how different genres of comics address the same themes; how ideas that must be explored through allegory in one genre are directly addressed in another, using visual juxtaposition and timing that simply wouldn't work in either cinema or straight literature. The symmetrical design of chapter 5, for example, would also be utterly impossible.

It's honestly not that hard to pick up all this stuff, either. All that namedropping and faux-analysis and Shone appears to miss the very visual elements that make Watchmen a classic to begin with!

And finally, the piece de resistance?

Before Moore came along, comic books were not generally in the habit of quoting Nietzsche, or scrambling their time schemes, or berating their heroes for their crypto-fascist politics, or their readers for reading them. It was Moore's slightly self-negating triumph to have allowed it to do so. But did the comic book have to "grow up"? The last time I looked, the only ones reading Ulysses and quoting Nietzsche were teenagers. No adult has time for aesthetic "difficulty" or "self-consciousness." Life is too short. Frankly, we'd much rather be watching The Incredibles.

Emphasis mine, because it's really, really funny. Unlike the main point of this section, which appears to be "I don't have time for anything challenging, I'm gonna go watch the tube". That is, honestly, just kind of sad.

Kinda like this whole piece.

Not so Final Edit: This is making me really, really miss Prisoners of Gravity.

Possibly Really Final Edit: A commentator on a Bugsy Banana complained that I was attacking an overall positive review because it was not positive enough. I had thought about this when I decided to write this, and I do agree that it has an overall positive tone.

What bothered me is the dismissive attitude towards the work, the tone with which it was addressed, and (most vitally) with the treatment of Gibbons' work. Gibbons' art is as important as Moores' writing; without Gibbons' work, the Watchmen simply wouldn't have been able to accomplish what it did. Shone's attitude towards the artwork maligns the work itself. That he's ignorant of this doesn't change it; that The Watchmen is one of the most important works in the medium makes it matter.

Bush and the NSC's Non-Strategy

I'm with Matthew Yglesias- the NSC's "victory strategy" for Iraq isn't about strategy at all, but about containing the political fallout of the war. There are any number of specific examples (just look under the "progress" sections for any number of cherry-picked indicators of progress), but the best evidence is that every single challenge that they bring up have absolutely nothing to do with US actions or their fallout, despite everybody and his dog noticing that there have been counterproductive US activities. They are about the "ruthless enemy", the "inhospitable neighbourhood", Saddam's "vicious tyranny", and (most bizarrely) "Sunnis coming to terms with the reality that their community no longer monopolizes power in Iraq".

(You know what other community had to come to terms with that? THE TUTSI IN RWANDA. That didn't end well.)

The descriptions of progress are all predicated with "our [buzzword-filled] strategy is working"... they never mention setbacks and never describe anything as a problem to be solved.

The "challenges" they do mention are laughably generalized and impossible: "building political movements based on issues and platforms, instead of identity", for example, is not only near-impossible, but ignores the fact that the "issues and platforms" will be about forced Islamicization!

Hell, according to this document, the United States doesn't actually know who they're fighting! Yes, they lay out the "enemy's strategy", but how can we believe this when one of the challenges that is stated is "getting an accurate picture of this enemy [and] understanding its makeup and weaknesses?" This admission of ignorance makes it sound like the terrorists' agenda is being made up out of whole cloth!

(Which it probably is.)

The "enemy lines of action" section is filled with convenient justifications for the United States' current strategy, and breathes not a word about the classic terrorist tactic of provoking an overreaction to turn people against the government.

The very first bulletpoint in the section is about the enemy "weakening the Coalition's resolve, and our resolve at home". This bleating has been the defense of every repressive regime in history. It's a cliche, and they're falling right into it!

I've said it before, I'll say it again:

Somewhere in Pakistan, Osama Bin Laden is laughing his ass off.

Bad Politics, Bad Policy

Is Hillary Clinton deliberately trying to alienate the 18-25 demographic?

Yes, kids shouldn't be playing violent video games any more than they should be watching violent movies. The fact that this bill singles out games, however, brings back strong memories of the Comics Code Authority and the movie censorship of the past. It smacks of politicians trying to exploit parents, and all it will do is alienate game consumers (who are likely to behave as single-issue voters in this case) without swaying parents (who have other things to worry about.)

(If Sen. Clinton wants to fix something that screws with teenagers' values and identity, she should look to commercials, rather than video games. The unrealistic expectations born and bred of advertising do more harm to more young people per day than violent games will do per decade.)

The Elephant in the Room

Over at Americablog:

Hope to see you soon in Iraq. The weather is warm. Wish you were here. And if you elect a conservative pro-Bush government next month, you very likely will be.

Signed, George

See title. The biggest understated fear that Canadians have is that the Conservatives will, in the interests of good relations with the United States, send Canadian troops to Iraq (or Iran, or wherever else the United States goes next.) Canadians are very aware that they came very close to being involved in the last war. They're aware Canada stayed out due to stridently anti-war public opinion- along with Chretien's willingness to support that opinion in the face of pressure by Americans, Canadian pro-Bush conservatives and those Canadian elites that don't give a damn about anything but access to the American market.

They have good reason to believe this. Conservative leader Stephen Harper (along with former leader Stockwell Day) are not only stridently pro-American, but went to the extent of criticizing Chretien's decision in the Wall Street Journal and claiming that Chretien's views were not in line with Canadian views on Fox News. Whether this may have been true at the time (it wasn't), it certainly doesn't cut him any slack now.

And therein lies the problem: for better or worse, the Conservatives are seen as Republicans without the drawl. Canadians who would have voted for Republicans would vote for the Conservatives, but those who would never vote for Republicans and dislike (or actively loathe) George W. Bush are going to be a tough sell, even with the Liberal party so transparently vulnerable.

The only way that Harper will be able to break through this is if he has his own "Sistah Soulja" moment with Bush. He needs to hammer George W. Bush hard, and disassociate himself with the Republicans as drastically as possible in both words and deeds. Yes, that will probably tick off Republicans and probably Republican-sympathetic voters, but he's got their vote anyway, and Harper must ensure that Canadians don't associate him with George and his ruinous war.

Absent that, no matter how weak the Liberals are, there is no possibility that Harper will govern Canada.

Here they go again..

It's official: the Canadian government fell, and an election has been called for Jan. 23.

The dynamic this time is going to be interesting.

The Liberals have been largely ineffective and are hobbled by scandal, but appear to have (with a key caveat) the most popular policy positions.

The Conservatives, having never governed in their current incarnation, can claim uncorruptability, but their socially conservative supporters have made many Canadians distrust them and fear that their policies will be equally conservative.

The seperatist Bloc Quebecois owns Quebec, period. Little more needs to be said about that. They don't run outside that province, so cannot form a government, but dominate the one they do run in.

It's the NDP that really throws this thing off. Arguably they have been the most successful party of the last Parliament- the "NDP budget" that they negotiated with the Liberals was actually more popular than the Liberal budget that preceded it, and NDP leader Jack Layton is easily the most popular leader of the four parties. The "caveat" I mentioned above helps them as well: many (if not a majority of) Canadians are perfectly comfortable with the idea of an NDP/Liberal coalition, with the centrist Liberals providing fiscal responsibility and the leftist NDP ensuring that Paul Martin doesn't govern as a Liberal In Name Only.

The problem, though, is that there's no way for people to actually vote for this coalition, and there is a distinct possibility that NDP votes could lead to victories by Conservative candidates. So many small "l" liberal voters are faced with a dilemma: do they vote for the Liberals, despite the problems of that party, or do they vote for the NDP and possibly hand the government to the Conservatives, who can count on a geographically concentrated base of support that inflates their seat numbers in a way that neither the NDP or Liberals can enjoy?

How people decide that question, as well as the traditional question of centrists choosing between the Conservatives and Liberals, will determine what kind of government Canada has in January.

The Moral Case Against Torture- With Nazis!

Over at his similarly titled blog entry, Kevin Drum relates a frustration with the discussion of torture:

.Over at Unfogged, Ogged picks up on my biggest frustration with the current state of the torture debate: namely that it's almost impossible to convincingly make the moral case against torture to anyone who's not already predisposed to think it's immoral. Stripped to its core, I realize that the only real argument I have against torture is "But don't you see that it's wrong? Don't you?" And that's just immensely frustrating, because if you don't see it then I have no ammunition left.

Well, no, not if you aren't willing to assert any sort of universal basis for morality and/or ethics. You can't call something "wrong" if you can't define "wrong" in a way that both you and the person you're talking with agree on. That's made difficult by the fact that, for many, their moral outlook is less a case of conscious decision and philosophy than a learned set of sometimes-contradictory rules.

That's one of the reason why political theory and philosophy are important, so that you can precisely define where you stand and what your assumptions are...and, more importantly, correctly identify the same stances and assumptions in your opponent or listener. Most people's rule sets do roughly follow some sort of moral and philisophical guideline, even if it's contradictory and they're unaware of it. If you know those guidelines, you can get past Kevin's barrier.

I wish I could do better. In the end, though, the strongest argument I can make is the one Dick Durbin made: if you didn't know better when you hear about U.S. practices in the war on terror, you'd think we were talking about Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union — and a big part of the reason that we judge those regimes to have been immoral was because of their use of routine, state sanctioned torture. Is that really the company we want to keep?

The unstated problem with the comparison between the United States and Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany is that although people (almost) universally find the latter two morally outrageous, they very rarely can agree as to why, outside of the issue of genocide. Some hate them because they're (supposedly both) socialist, some hate them because they're totalitarian, some hate the nazis because they're fascists (and define that as extremely right-wing), some hate Stalin because he's internationalist, some hate the Nazis because they're nationalists... there are simply too many possible reasons to hate both that extend far beyond "they killed a lot of people".

That matters, because on those things that they don't consider as important or as objectionable, they aren't going to accept any attempt to equate the United States with, say, Stalin's Soviet Union. Someone who believes the ends justify the means, but disagrees with Stalin's ends (or even the degree of violence , without condemning the act itself) are simply not going to accept the comparison. They'll believe that since the United States cannot be equated on some grounds, the United States cannot be equated, PERIOD.

It's like the idea that Vietnam and Iraq can't be compared because one is jungle and the other is desert. Yes, that IS a difference- the point of contention is whether it's a substantial one. Since that meta-debate is rarely acknowledged and never engaged, it means that you end up with the same old situation...

...two people yelling past each other.

Edit: Although I can understand why Avedon Carol would say "just keep repeating 'torture is wrong'", I'm deeply skeptical as to whether it'd help. It's far more likely to simply cause others to dig in their heels, and considering that the pro-torture position is the easy one, that's not likely to win any converts.

Copyright laws and you

Those who are long-time readers (I mean, really long time) know that I'm irritated by the stifling effect that IP laws inevitably have on creativity.

That the creator of this needs to hide behind a pseudonym is a more eloquent argument than I could ever make. I'd never paid attention to the mash-up scene before: I'm a convert now.

It's called "American Edit", it's brilliant, and it would probably be a very good idea to download it as soon as possible.

Ok, maybe I'm wrong here..

...but saying that blowing up news stations that disagree with you is fine and dandy is not going to help the cause of democracy much. Whether by Bush's friends, or by the man himself.

Even Putin just arrested them.

Then again, the fact that Blair made talking about the whole thing a violation of the Official Secrets Act doesn't help much, either. Free tip to Mr. Blair: doing that is going to make it sound, well, official, and you don't want to do that when it's Bush saying "let's blow up journalists who don't toe the line!"

A Digression on Gaming

I know I rarely discuss things outside politics, but I was struck by this comment by Roger Ebert in his "Answer Man" column, and felt like bringing it up.

Q. I've been a gamer since I was very young, and I haven't been satisfied with most of the movies based on video games, with the exception of the first 'Mortal Kombat' and 'Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.' These were successful as films because they did not try to be a tribute to the game, but films in their own right.

I have not seen 'Doom,' but don't plan to, nor do I think that it's fair to say that it pleases all gamers. Some of us appreciate film, too. That said, I was surprised at your denial of video games as a worthwhile use of your time. Are you implying that books and film are better mediums, or just better uses of your time?

Films and books have their scabs, as do games, but there are beautiful examples of video games out there -- see 'Shadow of the Colossus,' 'Rez' or the forthcoming 'PeaceMaker.'

A. I believe books and films are better mediums, and better uses of my time. But how can I say that when I admit I am unfamiliar with video games? Because I have recently seen classic films by Fassbinder, Ozu, Herzog, Scorsese and Kurosawa, and have recently read novels by Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, Bellow, Nabokov and Hugo, and if there were video games in the same league, someone somewhere who was familiar with the best work in all three mediums would have made a convincing argument in their defense.

This comment honestly surprised me. That it has been said by a film critic, for one, as their medium had been dismissed as unserious and unimportant for decades before it gained what recognition it has... and some people still dismiss it compared to other artforms. It was even more suprising coming from Roger Ebert, considering his love of animation, which is another artform that has been generally dismissed as unimportant trifles for children.

That it's a clear logical fallacy also surprised me. This sort of basic argument from authority (if it were important, somebody in authority would have told me) is beneath Roger. The simple possibility that the argument in games' defense doesn't exist because nobody Roger knows has made it yet does not mean that it has not been made, and cannot be made, and that it were somehow incorrect in both cases. If you extended this logic to its conclusion, there could be no new art forms, because everybody would be referring to a lack of an authoritative argument, including the authorities that could make it!.

If he had said "I don't have the time to check", that would be lazy, but true. Trying to make a blanket statement based on this sort of reasoning smacks of intentional know-nothingism, however, and is truly disappointing. It's especially disappointing because the games cited actually are excellent examples of what the medium can do: Rez is an work of narrative ambiguity, symbolism, and synaesthesia that has the additional benefit of being a lot of fun to play, and Shadow of the Collossus is one of the most subtle, minimalist, yet effective examinations of moral ambiguity, power and futility, responsibility, and even (to a certain extent) viewer intersubjectivity I've ever experienced. It's also visually arresting; the game takes its name from the enormous (hundreds of feet tall) stone creatures that the main character is tracking down and destroying, and the sense of scale takes ones breath away.

(I'd say more, but don't want to spoil anything. I will say that the ending of that game features some of the most tragically brilliant moments in narrative fiction, and yes, I'm serious.)

David Cage's Fahrenheit is a great example of the possibilities of gaming as well, although being self-consciously cinematic in presentation. Ebert brought up Kurosawa? I'd argue that it out-Rashomons Rashomon.

The two playable characters in the game (to simplify it tremendously) are a possibly insane (or possibly innocent) fugitive who has unwittingly committed a murder and the police officer trying to catch him. Often the decisions made by the one affects the other, and having to play both sides forces players to balance their sympathies between fundamental antagonists in a way that is difficult in to replicate in any other medium, due to the greater involvement gamers have with the protagonists. In Rashomon viewers are forced to choose who to believe; in Fahrenheit viewers are forced to try to reconcile themselves with being both. I am an enormous fan of Kurosawa, but I think Cage has done something important too.

And these are just games that are popular right this second (except for Rez). There are a ton of other examples. It's a pity that Roger is so unwilling to try new things, because I feel that with this past generation, gaming really came into its own. At the very least, the best games are better than 99% of what one sees at the theatre nowadays. If Roger could give 3-1/2 stars to Anaconda, I think he might just find some value in Shadow of the Colossus.

A followup on intelligence

I hadn't got around to watching the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares until recently, but it brought up something relevant to my earlier discussion of intelligence agencies: outsiders' desire for relevance and insight.

The documentary discussed (among other things) the idea that the Soviet Union was supporting terrorism around the world back during the Cold War- an idea championed by neoconservatives as proof that the Cold War really was a Manichean conflict between Absolute Good (the United States) and Absolute Evil (the Soviet Union), and that the forces of darkness were intertwined in everything they did. They thought they had proof of it in Claire Sterling's book "The Terror Network". Unfortunately, Sterling's "proof" was largely the result of CIA black propaganda- that is, information that is covertly published by an intelligence agency that purports to be from its enemies.

This highlights a major problem: outsiders want information, and can in turn gain the ear of the powerful. Even if an intelligence agency isn't ideologically driven (or isn't ideologically driven enough for outsiders) the simple fact of secrecy and the difficulty of analyzing intelligence can lead to enormous problems, because outsiders can take what information is available publicly and draw wildly erroneous conclusions from it. This is especially likely when they're looking for proof of something, rather than trying to interpret the data on its own terms. If intelligence agencies are manipulating the openly-available data, then the whole thing can become disastrous, because said agency simply cannot correct the outsiders on their mistakes.

We also saw this with the "stovepiping" of intelligence to the White House in the Iraq runup, and that showed an interaction effect that can exist. If outsiders gain the ear of politicians and convince them that the intelligence is wrong, this can provide a powerful unstated incentive for intelligence agencies to walk the line, an incentive that the agency and its analysts will obey in fear of the risk of losing their relevance. This is probably what happened at the CIA; aside from the direct pressure that almost certainly existed (but which no career-minded professional would EVER admit to) there would be this powerful indirect pressure. Analysts aren't superhuman. Maybe not all will bend, but enough will bend, and the individuals who say "no" will not speak for the organization.

As I said, intelligence agencies are a dangerous but necessary tool; covert ops are even more so. The most dangerous actor, however, can be the outsider with an axe to grind and an ear to bend. At least intelligence agencies are supposed to speak truth to power. Richard Perle sure as hell doesn't need to.

Drum on Secrecy

No, this isn't about bongos, but your friend and mine Kevin Drum, who points out the biggest problem with the "nobody disagreed about the WMDs" defense: secrecy.

One final word on this: the issue here is not who was right and who was wrong, or even whether the overall weight of the evidence was sufficient to justify the war. It would have been perfectly reasonable for the White House to present all the evidence pro and con and then use that evidence to make the strongest possible case for war. But that's not what they did. Instead, they suppressed any evidence that might have thrown doubt on their arguments, making it impossible for the public to evaluate what they were saying. In fact, by abusing the classification process to keep these dissents secret, they even made it impossible for senators who knew the truth to say anything about it in public.

Ok, in order to understand why this is important, stop and think about what an intelligence agency actually is, and what it does. It finds out secrets, and has to protect how it does it so that it can find out more. Because these things are secrets, an intelligence agency wants to keep it close to their chest.

The problem, though, is that there isn't one intelligence agency, there's TONS of them, and some are more powerful than others. They need other agencies' intelligence to be effective, and if one agency has the most intelligence, it gets to have the biggest say about the conditions under which it's shared and poses the greatest threat of cutting the whole thing off.

That most powerful agency is, naturally, the CIA (or NSA, depending on what kind of intelligence you're talking about). They're the most powerful, so they are the sellers in a buyer's market, and know it. A lot of the intelligence that's out there comes through them, and if other agencies have problems with the quality of the work or the analysis, they're going to shut the hell up about it in public, or the intelligence flow will get shut off. This isn't just a political problem; a shutoff can become a threat to national security for smaller countries dependent on the US. So they aren't going to disagree.

Thus, saying "everybody agrees" is irrelevant, because either the information they get is coming from the CIA/NSA already, or they're going to be publicly silent about their concerns for fear of repercussions at the hands of the Americans.

(The greatest exceptions to this rule are probably the British, who are masters as HUMINT (human intelligence), and the Israelis, where the Mossad's intelligence gathering abilities are legendary. Neither, however, had any reason to dissent, and may well have done the same thing to the Americans.)

Naturally, this isn't as big a problem as it sounds like, because intelligence agencies are certainly going to discuss and debate privately over intelligence, in order to serve their vital role of speaking truth to power. When they become politicized, however, and the "truth to power" role gets submerged in a pool of ends-justifies-means ideology, they become dangerous; if this happens concurrently with politicians moving in that direction, it becomes extremely dangerous. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, stopping a ideologically driven intelligence agency in the service of similarly ideologically driven politicians from being able to say whatever it wants to say, and if it's the big player, that includes other countries' intelligence agencies and the politicians they serve.

The media and public are near-helpless in this situation to do a damned thing, at least until the mistake becomes obvious to everyone. There will always be some sort of official "oversight" that supports the ideology in question (witness the intelligence committee and it's report), creating easy rhetorical cover for fellow-travellers, and national security is a goldmine of opportunities for draping oneself in the flag. The end result is what we have now.

Intelligence agencies are a necessary tool. We should never, ever forget, however, that they are a potentially dangerous one.

A thought experiment (Edit: Jeff Goldstein thinks the founding fathers are pussies!)

Courtesy of The Poor Man's ongoing forays into complete barking madness on the right (as well as other sources, but I'll stick to TPM), a post from Instapundit defending Bush's McCarthyist speechon Veteran's day:

The White House needs to go on the offensive here in a big way -- and Bush needs to be very plain that this is all about Democratic politicans pandering to the antiwar base, that it's deeply dishonest, and that it hurts our troops abroad.

And yes, he should question their patriotism. Because they're acting unpatriotically.

The desire of so many on the left to relive the Vietnam era is Karl Rove's secret weapon.

Bolding mine, and here's why. Now, I'll move aside from Instapundit's pathetic attempt to spin Bush's comment into being about politically opportunism among Democrats.

(Free hint: he never mentioned political opportunism, and that's because this wasn't about political opportunism, and if your definition disagrees with the president's then you NEED TO STATE THAT in a post broadly agreeing with him.)

Instead, I'll look at that last, bolded line.

Stop and think about it. If there were blogs back during Vietnam, if the development of the computer had gone a little faster and the Internet had still risen as a side effect of ARPA's work (if somewhat faster), does anybody honestly believe that any of the conservative bloggers out there, including Glenn, would be doing anything but loudly supporting the war? Every overinflated count of VC dead, every irrelevant statistic, every backhanded admission that victory was impossible, every DoD obfuscation, every bleating about "police actions", every political justification... does anybody think that Glenn 'n Co wouldn't be defending the war with everything they had?

The Vietnam war was far more popular at this point in its lifespan than the Iraqi occupation is, and at that point the United States had a real enemy that was a real superpower that was pushing an ideology a lot of people that wouldn't ever vote for Republicans found very appealing.

Glenn would be calling for a bureau of censorship, I'm absolutely sure of it.

Glenn, it's not that the left wants to relive the Vietnam era. There's no "want" about it- they think they are, because the same style of governmental logic is being used, with a far worse president than Nixon at the helm. The side that wants to relive it is yours, because you want to win the war that you lost. Not the war in Vietnam: the war for "hearts and minds" in America.

Pity that it seems that you've already lost. The president wouldn't have needed to engage in such desperate acts of flagwaving were his administration not going down in flames. You're arguing from weakness: never a good place to be.

Oh, and by the by?

You don't get to define patriotism, and neither does the president, and neither does this idiot. The position has existed since before the war began that the intelligence was unsound and that the "consensus" was a mythical artifact of selective quotation and political pressure. That those of us who believe it disagree with you doesn't not make us unpatriotic (even if that mattered... what happens when the critic isn't American? Are they enemies of the state?) and that Democrats are finally figuring out that they were hoodwinked doesn't make them unpatriotic.

It makes them something even more dangerous to the president:

Someone who's willing to admit they made a mistake.

Edit: Wow, that was fast. Upon skimming the comment thread of the post by the aforementioned idiot (sorry, Jeff, but if you act like one, you get called one), I find out that he started calling a liberal critic using the pseudonym "early" a "pussy" for not using his real name, and implied that everybody who does use a pseudonym is a "pussy" too.

Quick question: who wrote the federalist papers, and did they use their real names?

Give up?

Answer: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay... and no, they used the pseudonym "Publius".

Guess what, Jeff? You just called Hamilton, Madison and Jay pussies!

I don't know about you folks, but that sounds pretty unpatriotic to me. Maybe you should be a little more considerate of the values that are supposed to make the United States different, and less about "pandering to the base", like your buddy Glenn is accusing the Dems of doing.

America: We Leave the Bodies to Rot

I'm sure that black Americans will love the fact that their government apparently doesn't care about finding the rotting corpses in New Orleans:

On Oct 3 the search for bodies in NOLA was called off despite the knowledge that bodies remained in unsearched homes in NOLA's 9th Ward (see previous post) The plan was for people to call 911 if they found a body despite the fact that people were not even allowed into the 9th ward. On October 12th, parts of the 9th Ward were opened for a "look and leave." The death toll rose as bodies were found. And the lower 9th ward, perhaps the most devastated area of NOLA, will not open to residents until December...

...It is a disgrace that this is happening in America. This is the country that took great pains to recover every little bit of human remains at Ground Zero after 9/11. Now we won't even bother to search homes in which we know bodies remain. This is not a matter of time or resources. The authorities simply chose not to take the time or allocate the resources to Do the Right Thing.
And more disgraceful is they are getting away with it. I have seen no reports of this other than 2 on CNN. Yet given the dozens of links and comments from my previous post I know people do care and were shocked to learn of this.

From Scout Prime.

What's sad is that there's probably no malice in this. It's just the horrible byproduct of the systemic short attention span. NOLA was a big event at the time, a real ratings machine... but now the people have moved on to chattering about that crazed woman on Trading Spouses, and their leaders to chattering about Bush's approval ratings.

Warhol was right, and we're living in his time, but he got it neatly reversed. He said that everybody gets their 15 minutes. He's wrong. Most people get nothing. What happened is that unless you're in the business of fame (ie: politics and entertainment), all you can get is 15 minutes.

That, and that this isn't television we're talking about, it's everybody.

(Link cred: Atrios.

The dumbest thing I've ever heard the president say

Honestly, this takes the cake:

President Bush prodded China on Wednesday to grant more political freedom to its 1.3 billion people and held up archrival Taiwan as a society that successfully moved from repression to democracy as it opened its economy.

In remarks sure to rile Beijing, Bush suggested China should follow Taiwan's path.

"Modern Taiwan is free and democratic and prosperous. By embracing freedom at all levels, Taiwan has delivered prosperity to its people and created a free and democratic Chinese society," the president said.

Is he INSANE? Is he deliberately trying to piss off the Chinese government and stir up Chinese nationalism?

I mean, Bush has said some dumb things. Really, really dumb things. He's legendary for it. Precious few, however, could start World War III... this is on the order of Reagan's "we're launching" comment, and that was a joke.

Actually, I kind of hope it was a mistake. I hope he is ignorant. I hope he doesn't realize that the government of a China bereft of ideological foundations and tiptoeing around the edges of fiscal calamity is going to be looking for other means of reinforcing its identity. I hope he doesn't realize that praising Taiwan as an example for the Chinese to follow is infinitely worse than a thousand Koizumi shrine visits.

(That this statement has followed on the heels of such a visit isn't exactly the best timing, by the by.)

I hope he's just stupid, because the alternative is that he's quite aware of the repercussions of what he just said, and said it anyway. That he doesn't care, or is deliberately provoking a Chinese response. That'd be far worse.

Hu Jintao isn't the only state leader whose domestic problems make foreign scapegoating look really, really attractive.

Edit: A nice succinct summary by watching the detectives:

"Thanks, asshole".

Strange Agreement

Matthew Yglesias points to a Tom Oliphant column discussing the curious fact that Bush appears not to care whether or not Iraq had WMDs- that in justifying the war now, he says that "he would have invaded Iraq even if he had known it posed no threat."

This is a kind of strange point of agreement between the president and his critics. We're saying Bush was committed to the invade-Iraq policy, never mind the evidence, and that this attitude led him to dramatically overstate the threat in a variety of ways. Bush, in essence, concedes the point that, for him, evidence regarding the scope and imminence of the threat was besides the point.

It's part of that weird disconnect in the Republican party that's going on right now- Bush and his defenders seem to be saying different things. The defenders are saying "we didn't know, nobody knew, but we have to stay the course for freedom and whatnot", while criticizing the anti-war types for defeatism and being willing to let Iraq burn. It's not the most accurate claim (people DID say it was nonsense back in 2002), but it can at least be defended.

Were Bush able to stick to this talking point, he'd be able to shore up his weaknesses and burnish his strengths. By telling an unpleasant truth and admitting to a mistake, he'd make people more confident that he's telling the truth about other things. After all, the perception that he's a liar is rooted in the belief that he simply cannot admit that he has done anything wrong- that his "resolve" has gone absolutely berserk and become dangerous. Admit to a mistake and resolve to fix it and you keep the positive reaction to the resolve and shed the negative perception of zealotry.

(Yes, I'm aware that you're never supposed to admit to a mistake in politics. There are exceptions, and this is one of them.)

That he simply can't do this when every other Republican is doing so (aside from the serious loons) only confirms the perception. He really is unable to admit to a mistake, and really is a zealot. Either that, or he's so frightened of what he's done that he won't admit to anything in fear of the consequences. Both of these are really, really bad traits in a leader, and I think people subconsciously understand that.

Another good bit on trade

Oddly enough, it's not the actual post in this TPMCafe post that struck me, but one of the responses.

The issue is Wal-Mart. David Sirota (the big anti-trade boogieman in these debates, and oh boy is he being treated like it by trade's defenders) points out that documentaries like "Wal-Mart: the high cost of low prices" show that low prices for consumers aren't always a good thing. The response, from Jason Furman?

Some people on the left verge on paranoia in blaming trade for absolutely everything that ills us. Now trade is being blamed for the low wages at Wal-Mart.
Huh? Trade has certainly hurt many steel and textile workers, but how are service sector employees at Wal-Mart hurt by trade?

What's particularly depressing about this obsession with trade is not that it's misguided, but that it diverts well-intentioned progressive energy away from issues that could make a much bigger difference for workers at places like Wal-Mart.

It's not that post that grabbed me, though, but one of the responses:

Jason, the real point that is illustrated by your last post is that you are not really doing a very good job of stepping back from your point of view long enough to see the other side of the argument.You say Now trade is being blamed for the low wages at Wal-Mart. Huh? Trade has certainly hurt many steel and textile workers, but how are service sector employees at Wal-Mart hurt by trade? and I can't help but wonder if you even thought about it before you typed it.
The point is that there's an awful lot of workers who now have no other choice than taking a low wage job at Walmart. Walmart has used the power of corporate-centric trade policy and decimated portions of the economy ranging from small mom and pop owned businesses to all manner of US based manufacturering operations which have had no choice but to offshore in order to "compete" (in the rush to the bottom.)

Wal-Mart benefits from being the Lowest Common Denominator for employment, but there is (or should be) a tension between having this role and being so absolutely ubiquitous. The pool of unskilled labour with no other options should have dwindled enough that Wal-Mart's workers would have leverage, and Wal-Mart would have to choose between its rampant expansion and paying higher prices.

That isn't happening, because that pool is huge and growing. The question is why, and if the "why" is trade, that should be engaged fairly.

Stolper-Samuelson

Well, I may have spoke too soon. Over on Maxspeak, L. Josh Bivens points out that a lot of economists understand exactly what trade can do to wages:

At the risk of sounding unbearably obnoxious, I'm going to help Gene figure out the net impact of trade of the majority of American workers, because, it turns out that trade textbooks tell us precisely how to assess this. The most straightforward explanation is called the
Stolper-Samuelson Theorem, and it says, in a nutshell, that expanded trade harms, in absolute (not just relative) terms, and permanently (not just through tough "transitions"), the incomes of a nation's "scarce" factor of production." The scarce factor" in the US is generally considered to be workers without a college degree.* This is a little non-intuitive, but these workers are scarce in the US because the ratio of them to degreed workers is lower than the equivalent ratio in our trading partners.

There was a big debate about this in the economics profession in the early 1990s. Not one single economist argued about the direction of trade's effect -- it was universally agreed that it was negative for these workers. Some said that trade's effect was small, even very small. Some said it was large. But again, there was absolute unanimity that the net effect of trade on these workers was negative, and that trade had exacerbated inequality.

(He goes on to say that "This is actually the best-case scenario for maximizing the 'winners' from trade. Original versions of Stolper-Samuelson predicted that all workers would lose out to capital-owners from expanded trade."

The problem isn't that the theory isn't there, then. The problem is that too many economists (if, I guess, not all) seem to shrug their shoulders and go back to chasing efficiency. They aren't affected by this, the people who pay attention to what they're saying aren't affected by this, and, to be blunt, the people that they are even aware exist aren't affected by this, just the invisible unwashed hordes.

Which is fine, if they admit that they do have a bias in that direction, but instead we tend to hear that anybody who doesn't share this focus is a "dirty, unwashed hippy communist" or, more damning, "just doesn't understand economics".

Which just goes to show you that, the evolution "debate" aside, science (especially social science) is rarely as cut-and-dried as one would believe.

Median

Kevin Drum's written a lot of good posts today, but one stands out: his post on the meaning and importance of economic growth. He highlights something that has been bugging me for a while: that it's not average growth that matters, but median growth.

Over at TPMCafe, Gene Sperling is defending his new book, The Pro-Growth Progressive, from a determined onslaught led by the redoubtable David Sirota. Unfortunately, amid all the fireworks over the meaning of fair trade, the meaning of progressive, and the meaning of straw man, there hasn't been time yet to discuss the meaning of the most important word of all: growth.

If I could have one wish in arguments about the economy, it would be for the default definition of "growth" to be changed. Normally, it's taken to mean overall GDP growth, and it's certainly true that steady GDP growth is a good thing. But really, what's the point of economic growth if all the extra money is going to Donald Trump and the average guy is just treading water? What's the value of growth like that?

If I had to choose one single thing as the most important determinant of a genuinely strong economy, it would be median wage growth. After all, if median wages are increasing smartly, it's a sure bet that the economy as a whole is growing too and everyone — including Donald Trump — is doing well. It's quite possible to have strong GDP growth that still leaves two-thirds of the country stagnant — which is roughly what's happened for the past 30 years — but it's almost impossible to have strong median wage growth and not also have a booming economy.

I'd argue that headline writers should stop paying so much attention to inflation rates, GDP growth rates, and unemployment rates — as important as they are — and spend more time highlighting median wage growth. That's the single biggest sign of a healthy economy.This is one of the most annoying ways that the neo-liberals tend to misinterpret the arguments of their left-wing counterparts, and is the big blind spot in neo-classical economics: the problem of distribution.

Neo-classicists don't care about distribution, except in that they care about efficiency. They're concerned with how the market can distribute resources to maximize efficient usage. This is a fine and worthy goal, as the growth of an economy eventually benefits everybody to some degree. The problem is that if you ignore distribution, you end up in situations where average income can rise, but median income can dip or remain stagnant... especially when inflation or interest rates get factored in.

(The median consumer, I'd wager, is far more likely to be a net debtor than a net creditor, and thus high interests rates would lead to a growing gap between median and average income.)

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if neo-classicists said the problem was unimportant, but they don't. They simply ignore it, or pretend it doesn't exist. Then, of course, they wonder why they're seen as apologists for power, and why the comparative advantage that they hold so dear is savaged so viciously.

The real question for the cynic, of course, is whether they care.

Intelligent Design won?

See here.

Revisiting a topic that exposed Kansas to nationwide ridicule six years ago, the state Board of Education approved science standards for public schools Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.

The board's 6-4 vote, expected for months, was a victory for intelligent design advocates who helped draft the standards. Intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.

Critics of the proposed language charged that it was an attempt to inject creationism into public schools in violation of the separation between church and state.

The board's vote is likely to heap fresh national criticism on Kansas and cause many scientists to see the state as backward. Current state standards treat evolution as well-established — a view also held by national science groups.

The new standards will be used to develop student tests measuring how well schools teach science. Decisions about what's taught in classrooms will remain with 300 local school boards, but some educators fear pressure will increase in some communities to teach less about evolution or more about creationism or intelligent design.

"National" criticism is only if they're lucky. It's more likely to be international, although aspiring biologists worldwide are probably more than a little happy about the news. That much of the United States seems poised to refuse to believe the biological equivalent of gravity has got to make the job hunt easier.

Impeachment

Apparently a majority of Americans now support impeaching Bush "if he did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq", according to Zogby. 51% of likely voters support impeachment, 53% of all adults.

Not sure if this is an outlier or not--Zogby has been criticized for that before--but it's still striking.

What else is striking is how weak the Bush White House seems to be now. It's still got three years left, but it feels already like the whole thing is effectively over. I can almost understand why the American public favors impeachment (aside from how utterly appropriate it is)...there's this sense in the air that the party is over and that Bush really just needs to go. Republicans are already starting to distance themselves from him, Democrats are clearly no longer afraid of him (even while they're still afraid of his supporters), and the cult of personality, as Paul Krugman pointed out, is long dead.

Even Alito appears to be simply a way of trying to keep the base happy and curry support by angering liberals.

On the other hand, maybe things will change when/if the troops leave Iraq.

Chaos

What the hell is going on in Paris?

Rioting youths opened fire on police and set dozens of vehicles ablaze in a seventh night of violence in Paris.

In escalating unrest, shots were fired at police and firefighters, while gangs besieged a police station, set fire to a car showroom and threw petrol bombs.

At least 15 people were arrested and nine injured across north-east Paris.

France's government is facing mounting criticism of its handling of the riots, triggered by the deaths last week of two teenagers of African origin.

Bouna Traore, aged 15 and Zyed Benna, 17, were electrocuted at an electricity sub-station. Local people say they were fleeing police during a disturbance, a claim the authorities deny.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy met with the boys' families on Thursday, as a criminal investigation and an internal police inquiry into their deaths were opened....

...Mr Sarkozy has caused controversy by labelling the rioters as "scum" and saying many of the suburbs need "industrial cleaning", but Mr de Villepin has preached a more conciliatory message, urging ministers not to "stigmatise" vast areas....

...French politicians are facing up to the reality that many of the mainly immigrant populations in cities have long been in a state of chronic tension, says the BBC's European Affairs correspondent William Horsley.

Immigrants and their offspring make up 10% of France's population, but many are without French citizenship and the right to vote. They also suffer the highest rate of unemployment, and their relations with the police are generally difficult or hostile, our correspondent says.

France needs to recognize that its growing Muslim minority is not going anywhere, and that things like unofficial job discrimination are simply not acceptable. Yes, French Muslims (as well as any ethnic group, majority, minority or otherwise) should make efforts to avoid insularity and xenophobia, but these two things are interrelated.

After all, in the end, I think all Frenchmen (and -women) can get together and agree on the one thing that really matters:

they, really, really don't like Dubya.

And if you've got shared interests, that's the first step towards a fruitful relationship!