Jon Lucks

Success!

2006-11-06T20:48:00.000-08:00

I can't help but feel a tinge of guilt in limiting my Haggardgate thoughts to commenting on this. But as it's plausible that a few in the array of marriage initiatives appearing on state ballots tomorrow will succeed, some framing of the intellectual background is called for.

As if the elections were still weeks away, an ugly meme is readied - noting what a pity it would be if Haggard's sad duplicity would tarnish the reputation of authentically heterosexual homophobes and gay-baiters. The cynicism of this particular piece really is overwhelming. If a sane, secular conservative lacked a reason to dismiss the Republicans tomorrow, this ought to suffice.

The most obvious question begged by the piece - and I'm prepared to dismiss out of hand the several questions Klinghoffer himself asks "rhetorically" - is this: what would the author construe as success for his comrades in the culture war? By what metric does Klinghoffer decide that Haggard - the closeted, homosexual drug-user at the sword's point of the theocon movement - "ably fought against" the opponents of gay marriage bans and theocracy? What do the religious Right have to gain from not discrediting Haggard? This 'defense' of Haggard's gay-bashing credentials ranks right alongside George Bush's estimation of Donald Rumsfeld's "fantastic" job performance. If this is what the theocons are willing to settle for, I'm not sure that gays or secularists have much to fear. Next question: given Klinghoffer's befuddling assumption that law and government are naturally, traditionally fit to "endorse" one normative conception of marriage, is Klinghoffer really satisfied with the result of this endeavor? Is Klinghoffer actually persuaded that the average straight adult is growing more and more "in control of his sexual appetites" as the church-state courtship matures?

Since it is apparently National Borat Week, I couldn't make it through the piece without hearing Kazakhstan's #2 journalist's catchphrase: "Succeeeess!"

The Importance of Torture

2006-10-29T14:40:00.000-08:00

As US efforts to reform intelligence-gathering seem for now to satisfy lawmakers, whose recent solution to the endemic problems of terror-suspect interrogation have drawn the official debate to a close, the 'fog of war' reveals this humiliation. The necessary inference can and will be shaped into something like, 'if only the evil of torture had been resisted, we wouldn't now be drawn intractably into the mistake of Iraq regime change.' To say the invasion of Iraq is the result, or evidence, of sadism is risible. But it is now, pervasively, a property of the policy and at least a shadow of this first decision. If this account is accurate, it is our indulgence of hubris - even more so than abject cruelty, which is the definition of torture - that has hurt America most. A piece of legislation - one that proceeded from the Taquba report, the Army inquests, the periodic calls for Rumsfeld's resignation, the Abu Ghraib furor, deluges of press revelations on the CIA's classified purview over these policies - might have been expected to overhaul the policies it affects. I can find almost nothing in the Military Commissions Act to suggest that policymakers know a policy defect when they see it.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sulivan.)

Defining Despicable Down

2006-10-18T15:28:00.000-07:00

I've been on an Andrew Sullivan kick recently - just began reading his new book, of interest to fans of his blog but of greater benefit to everyone else. Today he links to an excerpt of Bill "Lou Dobbs Ain't Got Nothin' On Me" O'Reilly's recent interview of the president, where O'Reilly questions him on torture. Almost incredibly, a single, simple question from the principled advocate of torture sends the president into a frenzy of obfuscation and doublespeak - prompting viewers to marvel at the spectacle of Bill O'Reilly being lectured by anyone on the strategic sine qua non of waterboarding:

"But if the public doesn't know what torture is or is not, as defined by the Bush Administration, how can the public make a decision on whether your policy is right or wrong?"

We can't possibly, of course. Bush's inscrutable answer is also damnable - specious as the day is long. The president's rationale is buttressed by the demonstrably false claim (which Sullivan calls such) that we've only subjected active combatants "we've picked up on the battlefield." We already know of straightforward cases of the contrary, and if Jose Padilla's lawyers aren't lying, we have yet another. Bush again manages to summon impressive rhetorical prowess when prevarication is called for. And, of course, he again proves himself unable to speak of the political aspects of his presidency, even on the morally ponderous question of torture, without partisan inflection.

The moral question having been asked and decided, I think, rather conclusively, the question begged is how to weight the moral answer. It seems pretty obvious, setting aside the substantive definition of torture, that the greater moral hazard lies in this administration's conscious endeavor to make fact seem like fiction. Equivocation is the original sin in question.

More on the Libertarian Democrat

2006-10-13T11:23:00.000-07:00

The phrase "libertarian Democrat" implies a segment of a political party adopting a philosophical viewpoint - not an ideology adapting to the different predominant ideology of a political party. On this score, the Kos essay to which I linked days ago is confusing, probably, because it is confused. He castigates the Republican spending binge, but only in virtue of single issues on which Democrats have always taken a comparatively libertarian stance. A liberal Democrat who, go figure, supports gay and reproductive rights isn't much of an evolved species, not to say libertarians aren't happy to agree with them. But Kos rather adamantly doesn't bother with offering a libertarian endorsement of points on which Democrats and libertarians universally disagree. Wealth redistribution is actually opposable on principle, and that would be libertarian principle - but the "and healthcare, and so on..." approach seems to suffice for Kos. The appeal to the right to healthcare and free education and a deeply regulated workforce and smaller, cuter puppies isn't modified at all toward anything resembling a plausible libertarian argument. Because in Political Philosophy I everyone learns that egalitarians are egalitarian with respect to social goods while libertarians are egalitarian - radically so - with respect to individual rights, it isn't even prevarication to call his general position a libertarian one. It's a falsehood to do so, a factual misunderstanding of political thought. (You can't deprive a person of his right to a college education in the same way you can deny him a right to free speech. Who in the former situation is doing the denying, and by what means?...)
This may become a trilogy...

Outing the Republicans

2006-10-12T16:22:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan makes the critical point about the political conundrum the Republicans face amid the Foley scandal. However, I'm not sure this is the fork in the road that it ought to be. It's no exaggeration to say that the modern Republican Party has transformed obfuscation from a tactic to a principle. I never would have thought it would be Chris Shays - never in my recollection prone to grandstanding hatchet jobs - to be the first Republican to burst out of the Chappaquiddick gate. But decency and honor are not even counted as political options for the current Republican cadre at the moment.

UPDATE: Via Sullivan, Cliff Kincaid, of the specious "media watchdog" outfit Accuracy in Media, does a bang-up job of explaining Foleygate. What happened, you see - and listen closely - is that the Republican Party withheld accounts of Foley's indiscretions, not in the interest of partisan bulwarking. Goodness, no - this is the result of the incontrovertible fact that the gay agenda has overtaken the Republican Party, replacing honest, hard workin', straight-as-an-arrow conservatives with gay impostors ("so-called Republicans") such as Foley, only to watch flabbergasted as the entire strategy collapses in a Benedict Arnold moment. Game over, can we say?

He Wants YOU!

2006-10-02T17:12:00.000-07:00

Months after a casual post at his namesake Daily Kos, advocating for a libertarian species in the Democratic Party flock, Markos Moulitsas takes another opportunity, this time at Cato Unbound, to convey a definition. For several reasons, I don't anticipate many serious libertarians coming around. It hardly requires a resurrected Murray Rothbard or Robert Nozick to come to grips with the confusion of the argument. This will take two posts, one for each revelation. (I haven't read the Cato Unbound piece, so that will come next.)

The Moulitsas post both neglects libertarianism as a political philosophy, and makes light of this by foisting on it some barely-concealed false premises. Kos charges "traditional libertarianism" with insouciance toward the potential in corporations for mischief against the principles and actions of the free market. I have no idea why - the classical liberal economic literature is replete with critiques of the modern corporation's monopolistic and anti-competitive proclivities. So why should an unaffiliated libertarian "join up" with the Democrats? Leaving out the general principles which Kos doesn't think a libertarian needs help with...well, you see, the Libertarian Democrat is unique, and wholely non-traditional, because he believes that the government should act in some instances, but not others. A little more explanation of his criteria on this point wouldn't have killed him. The point at which Kos avers that "it begins to differ, and shouldn't" - well, it should. The style of the writing itself removes doubt that Kos hews to the now-redundant and unconvincing argument that the problem with libertarianism is that it fails to grasp one philosophical principle: since rights are good things, more of them is a better thing. Thus, the distinction between asserting a right to free speech and a right to free healthcare lacks a difference ("the same with healthcare. And so on.") What obtains is as far flung from libertarianism as conservatism or socialism or any other political theory that deserves to be taken seriously, but this is no matter for Kos. The foundation of the argument is the assumption that libertarianism shouldn't be taken seriously by anyone as a coherent political theory until it surrenders most of its philosophical territory. You can't do a hatchet job to a valid ideology and then endorse its molested result as if it has merely evolved into its truest self - especially if you're behind that conceptual growth spurt. He affords his reviled conservative opponents more respect than this. To stipulate that libertarianism should endorse the redistribution of wealth doesn't upgrade libertarianism. Nor does it advance argument; it circumvents it. Kos makes it blithely obvious that he isn't merely attempting to persuade libertarian-minded people to vote Democrat. He is, rather ambitiously, calling on such people to ditch their system of principles without expecting persuasion. This is a tall order for anyone - but especially for someone who considers Jon Tester "libertarian."

Your Concerns Are Important To Us...

2006-09-25T19:59:00.000-07:00

TPMCafe updates Colorado District 4 voters on what their mercurial Marilyn Musgrave considers to be the most important matter on the national agenda today - "today" being this past Friday, when The Family Research Council gave the FMA proponent the pulpit at the social-conservative Woodstock, the 2006 Values Voter Summit. Those opposed to values? You will be taken care of: the congresswoman apparently loathes tiny animals as well. (Meanwhile, according to the Colorado Farm Bureau president, the ESA "is broken and it needs fixed". The art of public speaking might 'need fixed' at least as much as the ESA.)

Straight From the Horse's Ass's Mouth

2006-09-17T17:08:00.000-07:00

From Andrew Sullivan - a perfect, well-synchronized response to the Pope's recent claims about Islam, from the seat of Muslim officialdom. To put it gently, it's not clear who is resting whose case.

I am neither a scholar of the Koran nor the Bible, but even so I am certain that what Sullivan points out is accurate. I understand the vagueness in the definition of jihad - this is irrelevant, and to argue onward from this is simply callow. The point can and should be simplified to the purely literary. Muhammad, the high prophet of Islam, accomplishes what is conveyed in the Koran, at several turns, through violence and coercion, and I'm aware of no doctrinal effort developing any "interpretation" of this fact. Jesus kills no person in the course of his literary life in the New Testament. This is not a matter of faith or virtue or spirituality, but rather of noticing words on pages. Of course this doesn't mean that to be a faithful Muslim you must morally endorse what the prophet is implicitly agreed, by faithful Muslims, to have done. This is hardly a point worth making. Why Islam cannot lay claim to the "religion of peace" mantle is precisely what Sullivan points to elsewhere - the growing inextricable role of the reactionary reflex in the Islamic world. Tolerant and humane impulses in Islam are increasingly forced into the periphery of its own institutions by those who forge their meaning. Equally true is Sullivan's point about evolution. There is plenty for which the various hierarchies of Christian churches ought to hang their heads in shame, at present, but there is nothing in modern Christianity like the world-historical synthesis of radical Islam and violent tyranny. That this shouldn't be rubbed in every Muslim face on earth goes without saying. But it is anything but civilized to deny what is in front of our eyes. The above remarks of Pakistan's Foreign ministry spokeswoman are archetypal - Islam is peaceful, and I dare you to say otherwise. As I can think of no other way to evaluate a religion's social value system (into which peace and tolerance obviously fall) than the conscious decisions and behaviors of its dominant figures, I can see no real argument to be had in this conflict. We torture ourselves to keep validating the argument that all religions are created equal, any more than this is true of all forms of government or ideology or culture.

Nothing Exceeds Like Excess

2006-09-02T14:39:00.000-07:00

From David Weigel, blogging over at Andrew Sullivan's site, a restrained, careful, and substantive defense of the president offered by a blogger at NRO (again, apologies for no hyperlinking):

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NGFiMmExMjEzOWI0NTY3ZTA5OTNmNWI4NTNjNmE5MWQ=

"[L]ike rain on parched earth" - blog journalism's answer to panegyric verse. It almost feels right to ask if Mario Loyola is truly who he poses as, as opposed to some hacker-satirist Trojan Horse. Where to begin? When a question put to the president asks, "Do you think you're right, or do you think you're right?", it's difficult to say what a courageous response would be. But credulity is, if nothing else, comfortable. And self-sustaining - is he really meaning to contrast this president with some other one whose policies would be defined by incoherence or incompetence or arrogance? Could a White House smell much higher to heaven of these than this one? But, as Loyola suggests, do consider the president's response, and follow that by considering Loyola's response to Bush's response. All Bush said was that he isn't a poll-chaser. It's the new, propriety-driven Bush answering here. And we know this without it being said. He is as extreme opposite of a poll-chasing president as it gets - why it's worth wondering if he cares at all about what any given American voter thinks of anything he does. Or rather, worth it if you're a normal, rational person living under a representative government, as opposed to a professional partisan with a propensity to overdo it. So professional a partisan, in fact, that he easily extols Bush in ways that even his paid functionaries haven't ventured. A mere few sentences, for instance, separate the point of praise over Bush's defiance of popular whim from the point of helpful suggestion that he and the vice president should turn up "every week" in front of press cameras - "if only to strengthen the viability of his agenda." The coda to this symphony speaks for itself:

"But it was not so long ago that Americans could only wish for a president who was obviously trustworthy, upstanding, and principled. And the day is not far off when we will think ourselves lucky to have seen this President defend the honor and integrity of his office—and the American people—for eight years. The times are difficult, and nobody could have gotten through the last five years without making mistakes. But in that station to which God called him, George W. Bush has been himself honestly, and thank God for that."

The president, reading this, might thank God for restraining orders.

Bueller? Bueller?

2006-07-31T10:34:00.000-07:00

One hopes, maybe against hope, that this absurd strain of thinking stays where it belongs: under John Podhoretz's thankfully infrequent byline. That the last piece of his to be archived by the prestigious and always dead-on National Review Online is this paean to Will Smith's cinematic career is instructive.

What to make of the litany of questions that comprise the editorial? Are they to be understood as rhetorical? I can't see how any thinking person would assume so, so I'll try to answer a few (with an occasional rhetorical question, of course):

"What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?"

Is Podhoretz holding that what is really making this long war so difficult to win is a burdensome excess of "humanitarian concern?" In light of the recent tragedy at Qana (which ought for now only to be called that), could this be any less prescient as a framework for comprehending these incomprehensible things?

"What if the universalist idea of liberal democracy - the idea that all people are created equal - has sunk in so deeply that we no longer assign special value to the lives and interests of our own people as opposed to those in other countries?"

In other words, the root cause of our plight is that because the equal rights of all people has become axiomatic, it's becoming increasingly difficult for us not to mind killing each other? This is what makes fighting long wars against despicable enemies so excruciating? Of course, claims Podhoretz:

"Didn't the willingness of their leaders to inflict mass casualties on civilians indicate a cold-eyed singleness of purpose that helped break the will and the back of their enemies? Didn't that singleness of purpose extend down to the populations in those countries in those days, who would have and did support almost any action at any time that would lead to the deaths of Germans and Japanese?

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?"

There you have it - the "singleness of purpose" which enabled us to triumph in previous major wars never was derived from strategic ingenuity, or from the constancy of our commitment to defending the nation against an impending, amassing threat of global violence and coercion. It came from the ephemeral decisions, at the bleakest moments of these wars, that impelled us to kill rather indiscriminately. Because, after all, better safe than sorry.

Podhoretz asks but one truly useful question: "Where do these questions lead us?"

He seems to think he knows.

Some Mid-Afternoon Impropriety

2006-07-24T12:41:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure when the statute of limitations expires for negatively commenting on dead people. Here's hoping it's less than 19 days. Via this Gene Healy post, I came across the record of former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay's political contributions. (Apparently I'm a faster mouse-clicker than Gene; I only wasted 5 or 6 minutes of my life on this.) I expected to see that of a GOP shill. I was a little surprised. Martin Frost? Sheila Jackson Lee? Both of the Clintons? Chuck Schumer? Apparently Ken Lay really wasn't beholden to partisan rigidity. Just abject mediocrity.

Bill Buckley Hates America, Freedom, and Our Troops

2006-07-24T10:33:00.000-07:00

Unsurprisingly, the crux of Saturday's CBS News interview with William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, (and perhaps of modern American conservatism, may it rest in peace) seems to have bypassed every influential American conservative: as a foreign policy president, or wartime president, George W. Bush faces the legacy either of a cipher or a failure. Iraq, to Buckley, is of course the axial event:

"I think Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as an absence of effective conservative ideology, with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress...[a]nd in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge."

"There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush. I don't believe his successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious. So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable."

I mostly disagree with the latter points. I would expect this president's legacy to calcify quicker than most, as I'm inclined to think that the Bush record will ease successive future ones out of any qualms preventing them from (mis)behaving as Bush has. Where has been the challenge or the rebuke, the checks and the balances and everything else? In the opinion polls, and there only. And as luck would have it, this is one president who won't be shoved around by polling data. Too bad it had to be a presidency defined by enormity, negligent of the bonds of tradition, convention, or law - an administration for which the ends justify the means so long as raw political power is in its highest possible concentration. And with that, he has granted himself a conservative wing in philosophical and electoral crisis, and inspired in the country something to hope for - short-term memory loss. Buckley is growing sanguine in his old age if he really thinks this president's legacy will prove "indecipherable."

I'm eager to read a reply to Buckley from any one of the neoconservative stalwarts who have been living it up in the house that Buckley built. In light of this, Jonah Goldberg's recent debate with Reason Magazine's Nick Gillespie seems far, far beside the point. The future of conservative-libertarian "fusion" is a lofty matter, and as my politics hardly resemble Buckley's, this for me is really a matter of objective curiosity. But any proud conservative with an optimistic view of this president, like Goldberg, ought to worry first about reconciling true conservatism with whatever the president's current partisans wish to call their political standpoint. It's the internal consistency, stupid.

UPDATE: On National Review Online's site, I count not one, but two banner advertisements for the Cato Institute. Ha, appeasers.

The Open Society and its Rugrat Enemies

2006-07-16T21:38:00.000-07:00

Everyone agrees that today's Right stands as a historical paragon of intellectual rigor, honesty, and sophistication. But, hey, kids these days, am I right?

Not to oversell the outrage, but I'll be darned if this doesn't inherit every ounce of the the initial problem of crudity and pettiness in current conservative politics - they are just exactly this puerile. I clearly recall a good several hours at some point late in my high school career when I thought myself probably suited to march alongside my generation's "Hipublicans." So it goes that I'm becoming more and more acclimated to standing with lefties of the Campus Progress model with every passing day. I can't even claim to mind much. One of Ben Franklin's less remembered entries into Poor Richard's Almanack was the eloquent axiom "Force shites upon Reason's back." There is argument, and there is cowardice. The late drift of the Right has been toward the latter. With each successive Mattera, each new self-promoting, place-holding hack disguising force as reason, we'll soon come to suspect that the kids are not alright. And unless some basic objections one day irk the Right without provoking a snide "LOL", or some cognate, this will, in the good Lord's great phrase, always be with us. What true conservative can any longer tolerate this obvious fact of fundamentalism replacing principle? Grow the hell up, in other words.

Hat tip Julian Sanchez.

Quote for the Day

2006-07-12T13:16:00.000-07:00

As congressional Republicans ponder new and innovative ways of ostracizing the press into submission (but only because, if you haven't heard, our country is at war), here's the author of our Constitution:

"...to the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression."

Is Madison treading gently here, in speaking of those "abuses"? Probably. So should we. Give it a rest. We need, and should venerate, a free and independent press. It isn't a luxury or an appurtenance, despite what this administration insinuates. Before the likes of Rep. Duncan Hunter sink their teeth into it, we should remember Madison also said: "It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties."

Sullivan vs. Ponnuru

2006-07-07T16:27:00.000-07:00

If you've been following the late bickering between NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru and Andrew Sullivan, I think you can stop now. Here's the KO punch, from Sullivan:

"I'm for balanced budgets, low taxes, cuts in entitlements, welfare reform, more military manpower, privately run healthcare, free speech, religious liberty, a stronger commitment to Iraq, and gun rights. I'm against affirmative action, federally-funded abortion and embryonic stem-cell research, protectionism, hate crime laws, the Medicare prescription drug program, pork barrel spending, torture, an untrammeled executive, and censoring anyone anywhere to appease Islamist extremists. And, according to Ponnuru, no "serious" conservative regards me as a conservative any more. What does that tell you?"

Say uncle, Ramesh. I count precisely one issue above on which the current president has staked a genuine, unequivocal conservative claim - denying federal funding to abortion and stem-cell research. He has either directly opposed, or failed spectacularly to effect, every other policy position above. Every single one. If that is not a failed presidency in general, there is no way out of saying it is a failed presidency for conservatism. But the naked intent of Bush partisans like Ponnuru is to hide the corpse of political principle long enough to exculpate George Bush - to be a meager functionary rather than a thinking human being, in other words.

Thank You Sir, Can I Have Another

2006-07-06T15:54:00.000-07:00

And now, the political commentary smackdown of the week. Coming out swinging against private charity is Jonathan Chait, writing in the LA Times. After an obtuse swipe at estate tax-cutters, we get the most logically-challenged argument I have read, on any topic, in any outlet, in - let's just say - recent memory. Warren Buffett shelled out $31 billion to the Gates Foundation. Chait avers that, to "put that number in perspective," we must - must - understand that "the federal government spends 1000 times as much money every year." That's it. No, really. The whole argument. Look. There you have it. One number is bigger than another number. Which, cryptically, demonstrates to Chait "the limits of private fortune compared with public policy."

Had Chait taken but a minute to read Wilkinson's recent post on the fairly uncomplicated phenomenon of "confirmation bias", he might have saved the "happiness policy" maven the trouble of responding, by pointing out that this is "like sniffing at a $100 million yacht because it costs a mere 3% of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier."

But still, the public-spiritedness - what about that? You know, because the government is the public sphere. And charity is the private sphere. But for the patient reader, there is an entertainingly ornamental remainder of the article. He goes on to say that "the overarching problem is that American business has become rapacious and narrowly self-interested." This doesn't quite explain what is deleterious about the business class behaving in exactly the opposite manner. Why Chait doesn't at this point come right out and say that he simply prefers coerced, standardized corruption and graft and negligence to the "narrowly self-interested" same I have no idea. But then again, how any public policy argument against voluntary generosity could make its way into a major publication is a complete mystery. Unless we take the premise that public policy is inherently good, and thus more of it is better - which seems to be the implied logical premise of this piece.

Strike Three for Gitmo

2006-06-29T08:50:00.000-07:00

From the makers of Rasul v. Bush, and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld...

The ruling in the Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld again dismisses core claims of the administration's detention policy. When the administration attempted to claim that, in Guantanamo, the government held inherent authority to 'offshore' the detention and trying of combatants out of the bounds of judicial appeal and review, the assertion was repudiated by SCOTUS. The government, in setting forth its case in Hamdi, assented to the constraints of the Rasul decision, yielding to the right of habeas corpus review held by the federal judiciary. The Hamdi case, while more forceful on the legal principle of extending due process and habeas corpus to detainees, left wide open the broad issue of the parameters of that due process, particularly in what circumstances a detainee's case warranted a higher or lower degree of evidence-bearing and legal recourse. Having not yet finished reading the Hamdan decision, it seemed inevitable beforehand. Legal theory aside (to say I'm no expert is gross understatement), the case's real victory reveals one of the structural benefits of the separation of powers (and proves that the Bush administration hasn't dismantled the thing entirely) - the turf-war incentives of checks and balances. Without triumphalism, the appalling standard of judicial deference to executive authority - the bedrock principle uniting the pomposity of Justice Scalia with the cloying "extra-legal" legal theories of John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington and so on - now appears to have bitten off more than it ever could chew.

Killing the Messenger

2006-06-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

One accidentally side-splitting column from Heritage's Peter Brookes, and I'm suddenly gulled into acknowledging the ungainly, ongoing issue of this latest abhorrent act of sedition against our government at the behest of Bill "Vanzetti" Keller.

In Brookes' defense, he places the word "treasonous" in quotes, which suggests the sardonic. Or the illiterate. But far beyond the absurd false choice raised by Bush-partisan hawks, that between a society that can defend itself and a government that can explain itself, there is a true and crucial decision for the decider-in-chief and his advisers to consider, which the same officials have taken extraordinary pains to escape. An argument from the neoconservative position might be advanced that the jihadist menace is insurmountable if not for the possibility of abandoning the norms of an open society - if not, in other words, for the boon of the pliable, all-purpose crackdown. If the state is to sever all ties with obligations beyond militancy against enemies (the seeming aspiration of Brookes and fellow hawks), then recognizing good strategy in the maxim "know thy enemy" follows even more smoothly. The issue put to hawks is then this. Do bin Laden and his comrades expect the state apparatus of the Great Satan to shape-shift intractably into a blunt instrument of war, never again to handle certain other tedium - answering to its citizens, for instance? No, but that certainly is an ambition. And certainly the president has proven himself in the walking-and-chewing-gum category - and has a record-decimating budget to prove it. Then - for all's well that ends well - if an optimal war effort has sufficiently detracted from our government's ability to preside over an honest debate about a perfectly lawful program (in the case of the financing policy), or to bother with justifying a breach of a basic statute (as with warrantless wiretapping), does this expedite victory for our side? If spurring a discussion of a perfectly lawful policy by means of a perfectly legal "leak" of information through the press qualifies as an inducement to al-Qaeda, does it not give immense assurance to the enemy for those who prosecute this just war against terrorists to excoriate this rather mundane process of ordinary deliberative democracy? Prior to the matter passing into the realm of crisis, might not have bin Laden simply assumed that the United States was tapping his phones and monitoring his purchases? That the matter has been vaulted from process to crisis, by the hand of those whose impresive mental functions shape this war - doesn't this give greater aid and comfort to the enemy than, say, a news article about the policy? More pointedly, is what the war effort needs to the nursed back to health a maelstrom of seething hysteria issuing from the likes of Peter Brookes? Well, at least grant the point that the survival of the New York Post must surely assuage a few prominent theocratic barbarians.

Senators Don't Read, Exhibit A

2006-06-25T13:28:00.000-07:00

A simple way to test the worth of a political or economic idea is to run it by politicians. And, carefully, watch it run by them. Over and over, for a century or two. If the editors of the Onion were political theory students, they'd be hard pressed to do better than the recent embarassing posture of Sen. Hillary Clinton, who has just aligned herself with those at the receiving end of Frederic Bastiat's satiric reductio ad absurdum of trade protectionism, The Candlemakers' Petition. David Boaz drops the Acme anvil on the unfortunate presidential hopeful here.

Key sentence from Clinton's statement on the tariff:

"Our manufacturers deserve a level playing field and we owe it to them to make sure that others do not unfairly circumvent our fair trade practices."

To be fair, how shameful that those foreigners, many of whom probably don't even speak American, should dare hatch plans to sell lengths of wax at a lower cost to the American people than Americans are willing to sell them. The American people deserve the pride of place that comes with being told by the federal government whom they sure as hell had better buy candlesticks from. For it is this deep-seated principle that yields "our fair trade practices." Meaning, those trade practices politicians lapse into defending when circumstances turn them unwilling to speak honestly about their motives. It isn't much more complex than "if you trade deficit us, we're gonna trade deficit you right back!"

But remember, we are talking about foreigners. Rotten, stinkin' foreigners. So the trade debate rages on.

Good-For-Something Hippie!

2006-06-12T19:36:00.000-07:00

For a while at least, the good, honest people of Hollywood will keep their peace of mind. The cyber-dragnet spearheaded by anti-piracy enforcers at the MPAA has paid off at last. But the bandits do not rest, twisting their mustaches in smoke-filled living rooms, camcorders unsheathed. The menace even has the gall to show its sneering face in public and speak up for its loathsome trade. Just days after the Crime of the Century is dragged into the light of justice, cyber-bandit John Perry Barlow dueled with MPAA head Dan Glickman, who, astonishingly, appears to have sold his soul only after an interval in Bill Clinton's Cabinet. The edifying (or maybe stultifying) moment comes when Barlow recalls how much money he's banked as an unofficial member of the Dead, to which the callow Glickman responds, impressively, that entertainers aren't absorbing profits. Translation: the law should regulate media technologies up to that point at which the entertainment industry - that hailed egalitarian bulwark against common, vulgar American capitalism - belches from its own avarice. Apparently the "greed is good" axiom only lacks the heft of regulation and criminalization - what makes America great!

Barlow is a name fans of the Grateful Dead, including myself, know well as the semi-talented successor to Robert Hunter. Since leaving behind the acid-daze (or perhaps not) he has emerged as, arguably, the world's foremost spokeshippie for technological freedom and privacy. Sticking it to The Man is slightly more than schadenfreude, in this case at least.

Get FEMA On the Horn

2006-05-20T15:25:00.000-07:00

"If I heard the Lord right about 2006, the coasts of America will be lashed by storms."
- Reverend Pat Robertson (who else?)

Brownie never had that kind of info.

After Reading "No Soldier Shall...", I Got Tired And Fell Asleep In Someone Else's House.

2006-05-10T14:07:00.000-07:00

Tim Cavanaugh over at Hit and Run adds to the blogospheric browbeating of Gen. Michael Hayden with an unsurprising revelation - the former administration go-to on warrantless (i.e. illegal) domestic wiretapping hasn't the foggiest idea what the Fourth Amendment says:

http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2006/05/would_you_belie_5.shtml

Let the spy games begin. To force the issue even further (say, over the cliff) - without looking, try to guess how many abstract, ambiguous Legalese words lead from the hopelessly nebulous phrase "shall not be violated" to the positively Surrealist "no Warrants shall issue." If you guessed somewhere in the ballpark of zero, you've read more of the Constitution than the probable next spymaster-in-chief.

The Hard Line vs. The Bottom Line

2006-05-06T14:39:00.000-07:00

I've been turning over the implications of the article penned by my former bosses at Cato, Justin Logan and Ted Carpenter, on the Iran impasse. I am, unfortunately, persuaded. The perils of this sordid business are so morally and strategically crippling that it seems however our global authority might be defeated by military strikes, the future of permitting a nuclear Iran will be just as punishing to our influence in world affairs. And not merely in the respect that Julian Sanchez anticipates, pointing out that negotiating toward normalization will make a farcical spectacle out of America's non-proliferation policy. This move will force into light a terribly difficult dilemma for the sculptors of our war on terror. With this possible shift in policy, we will clumsily be renouncing basic premises of the neoconservative solution to terrorism. We have for years been vowing identical recourse to terrorists and the states who sponsor them. A deal with Iran is this proposition's antithesis. Right now, these are the only set of cogent principles on which our government seems capable of operating - this is not to indict a fact, but to state it.

But here is where things darken. Why not to strike at Iran is even more debilitating. It cannot accomplish anything. Unlike in Iraq, the initial strategic mission will almost certainly fail. It makes no sense to shred the tireless experimenting, war-gaming, and empirical analysis that goes into what is now an approximate (and fastidious) consensus among experts that the military option is anything but. That Fox News manages to trot out every Gen. McInerney copycat on its list of contacts to parrot the same non-information is not contrary evidence, but rather propaganda. What begins with narrow, well-defined priorities would very likely compel a nebulous ad hoc policy shift toward full-on regime change - for which hawkish policymakers are even less prepared than they were in the case of Iraq. That a preemptive shell game played with a maniacal regime would hedge its bets against the deployment of nuclear weapons within range of America's only strategic partner in the Middle East ought to be called what it is: a fool's errand. The military option is not an option. Politics must prevail, or the West is helpless against a nuclear Iran. The last two words of the previous sentence mean far more than they would in the absence of such steadfast commitments forthcoming.

Here's the Carpenter-Logan piece, in case you wish to avoid sleep tonight:

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6366

'I Got a Fever....'

2006-05-04T09:39:00.000-07:00

Here's something I can forgive myself for missing, preoccupied as we all are with the other priorities brimming over in the Republican agenda -"closing" the borders, grappling for cogency on Iran, scuttling the Rumsfeld coup, scrubbing away lobbying chicanery with the greased elbows of federal regulation, bribing consumers to calm down about oil prices and so on:

http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Business/101205_hospital.html

Sen. Grassley, standing athwart history, yelling "down with specialty hospitals!"

Everything you need to know about the state of Republican politics is supplied by the single issue of health policy. An enervated Republican president in a dismal state gets the opportunity to flex his muscle and make an eloquent case for something he's been promising to do for years - reform Social Security and expand HSAs - and decides, apparently after some careful deliberation, to drop that political clout into the hands of nimrods of Grassley's ilk, and instead work to defend the indefensible prescription drug entitlement. Impressive.

Small wonder that Democrats keep their brash confidence in running on issues like health policy, on which they have absolutely no position of any kind, period.

More righteous indignation, including a well-deserved shot at what seems to be the emerging Republican consensus on federally mandated (read: rectally administered) health insurance purchases, from Cato's Michael Cannon here:

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6380

Medic!

Another One Bites the Dust

2006-05-03T20:58:00.000-07:00

And it's about time. If you haven't heard, Christopher Hitchens is now amidst verbal fisticuffs with the pompous and very often terribly unpersuasive history professor/blogger Juan Cole. The substantive matter is over Cole's apparently shoddy, laughably naive take on Ahmadinejad's designs for Israel. Cole's writing frequently bears the all too familiar affliction among foreign policy commentators of various schools of thought, which causes him to infer out loud some sophisticated political collusion among a quiet Jewish cabal in our government. I wouldn't attribute this idiosyncrasy to what is at issue between Hitchens and him - necessarily. Especially because what Cole seems especially incensed over is how Hitchens managed to 'pilfer' an e-mail he wrote laying out his apparently mistranslated interpretation of Ahmadinejad's statement about wiping Israel off the map. No biggie, says Cole; wrong, says Hitchens.

But the embarassing e-mail came, according to Hitchens, in an unsolicited forward from one of Hitchens' readers. Even assuming Hitchens' correspondent is an adroit hacker, what is obvious is that, while his fluency in Persian might be perfect, Juan Cole could benefit yet from looking up the meaning of the English word 'pilfer' in an English dictionary.

Progress Report

2006-04-29T18:10:00.000-07:00

Brevity is the soul of wit - and, sometimes, of honesty:

"Let's put it another way: a territory controlled by U.S. forces accounted for 50% of deaths caused by terrorists on the planet last year. If that is a successful military occupation, then I'm not sure what failure would be. I guess I should ask Powerline."
- Andrew Sullivan, on Iraq.

Please Don't Finish That Sentence

2006-04-27T12:49:00.000-07:00

Flipping on C-Span just minutes ago, here's what I first hear from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), arguing against fat wads of cash for fishery subsidies,during floor debate on emergency supplemental spending for Hurricane Katrina recovery:

"I'm not objecting to the fact that we should be trying to increase demand for seafood, but..."

I didn't catch the rest. And if you think that's a scream, realize that Coburn is the lone voice in the wilderness arguing against funding a marketing campaign for seafood businesses in an emergency spending bill.

Strategy - The Remix

2006-04-26T07:09:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, the president declared in his flashbulb-shattering speech to the Renewable Fuel Association that "the long-term strategy" with respect to 'energy independence' was to run automobiles "on something other than oil." Any questions?

Not anymore. The word 'strategy' has played an axial role in Bush's vision of his policymaking job. Political visions, as Julian Sanchez explained in a recent column, are defined in Thomas Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions" as belonging to two categories: constrained and unconstrained. The constrained vision observes certain intractable limits which human nature imposes on the intrinsic potential of people and institutions when faced with historically constant and infinitely complicated crises. The competing unconstrained vision sees no such permanent limitations on knowledge or action, and instead insists that fortitude, patience, and ingenuity hold limitless potential in personal and social affairs. So repairing humanity is the simple visceral matter of summoning the courage of convictions necessary to take action and stay the course, whatever features the course may exhibit. While scrupulously fair to both visions and ultimately suggesting that some equilibrium is ideal, Sowell clearly depicts the latter political vision as dangerous, reckless and delusory.

Moments such as this scrub away any ambiguity as to which vision captivates Bush's mind. Returning to the above example, was it not obvious to audience members that whatever the merits of the aim of replacing oil with "something other than oil", this description of an aim suggests no obvious relationship to any kind of strategy (especially a 'long-term' one)? But in the unconstrained vision, as in the long and rusty chain of this administration's decisions and rationales, a strategy is just a goal in which elites and leaders earnestly and persistently believe. Ends are vital, means are ornamental. In ordinary life this is a troublesome assumption. In political activity it is a disastrous one. This has yet to dawn on the president, and I wouldn't predict an epiphany before 2008. But, with mid-terms in view, the fact that conservatives climbed to power espousing a constrained vision in politics might be worth reminding Republicans up for re-election.

"Cordially, Nicola Sacco"

2006-04-25T15:05:00.000-07:00

Now who wants to call the Sedition Act a "pointless law?" Or "repressive and unconstitutional?"

http://www.reason.com/links/links042506.shtml

"You have insulted the very government that employs you." To the stockade with you, writer of letters.

So That's the Problem?

2006-04-23T20:39:00.000-07:00

I think I've announced it on this blog before, but I am and have been for a long time a great admirer of Christopher Hitchens. He's as brilliant a polemicist and observer of world affairs as any, and to have survived dyed-in-the-wool Trotskyism with the full sum of his intellect is itself an impressive feat. Of all the critiques to saddle him with, laziness is not one. So what is exactly going on with his recent NYT letter to the editor I have no idea. In a rejoinder to the realists par excellence Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, whom he recently took to task for what I agree was a rather lazy and "smelly" assumption regarding the Jewish lobby, he writes:

"And if Osama bin Laden were moved principally by the suffering of the Palestinians - rather than by his demand to impose a caliphate on Afghans, Iraqis, Turks, Egyptians, and others - then he would be at least morally in the right."

Really? So, if he hadn't long ago proven his words of allegiance to Palestinians to be duplicitous, and instead was moved, "principally by the suffering of the Palestinians", to murder 2,700 innocent people in one day, "then he would be at least morally in the right"? I had presumed that the World Trade Center bombings had put the question of ideological motive somewhat beside the point, and that Hitchens thought so, too.

Living Constitution Suddenly Braindead

2006-04-22T15:59:00.000-07:00

One might expect a persistent and rather well-practiced movement in American jurisprudence, dedicated mainly to inventing schema of rights, inventing constitutional definitions, inventing legal precedent, to have by now evolved into something remotely inventive. Not so, ironically, when it comes to that piece of constitutional text which jurists of virtually every conviction agree is the basic axiom on which the document bases its entire argument for political rights, the First Amendment. The Ninth Circuit Court, that mass producer of dubious legal logic, has just ruled that a San Diego public school district was within its rights to bar one of its students, Tyler Harper, from wearing to school a t-shirt displaying a biblical message decrying homosexuality during a gay awareness event at the school. According to the school's assistant principal, the Day of Silence sought to "raise other students' awareness regarding tolerance in their judgement [sic] of others", and she believed the shirt was "inflammatory under the circumstances and could cause disruption in the educational setting." The principal helpfully explained to Harper that he was being ordered to remove the shirt to preempt "the threat of physical violence." Harper filed suit against the school in June of 2004, and after appealing his case all the way to the Ninth Circuit, the decision upheld the district court claim that Harper's case "failed to demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits of his claim that the School violated his First Amendment right to free speech", arguing as such on the grounds that the speech in question "intrudes upon...the rights of other students."

The dismissiveness on the part of the court of Harper's free speech claims is only one link in the chain of seemingly implausible and unconstitutional arguments this case exhibits. It is virtually impossible in this decision to locate a logically constistent conception of individual rights implemented by Judge Reinhold, who authored the opinion. Just try to sort out the actual premises regarding what rights are presumably at stake here. As to the positive argument, we have, implicitly, two constitutional claims in play - the individual's right to free public education, and the right to be shielded from invective by unspecified official action, where such speech might be construed as a distraction from the learning process. Suffice it to say that the fact that the first claim has survived judicial muster for so long puts the approval of the second in fairly proper context. But the "cooperation" of these two "rights" certainly puts the explicit constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech in as precarious a place as can be imagined. Judicial moves like this seem to respond to this by saying, "well, what's the problem?" What, indeed? No problem that a court can, in one motion, affirm a right's status as such, only to foreclose on that right's prospect of actually being enforceable. The fluid motion is really stunning and can be summarized in a single sentence. The assurance of a student's free public education (not a constitutional right) demands protection from personal humiliation and distress (not a constitutional right) against another student's offensive speech (certainly a constitutional right.) Sorry, can't resist: 'Two wrongs don't make a right.'

This court has come under repeated castigation for advancing the odd suggestion that if rights are a good thing, more of them is a better thing. Judge Reinhold, with this decision, has surely done away with the first half of that syllogism.

How Do I Love Thee? None Of Your Business.

2006-04-18T12:57:00.000-07:00

As has been the case in the war on terror, the brave souls on the front lines of the marriage war have come to depend very much on strategic secrecy for the success of that noble cause. The effort's planners and policymakers have a difficult task in balancing the freedom of speech with the security of matrimonial sanctity, in which all Americans have a stake. I'd say this is evidence of a job well done:

http://www.marriageforcolorado.com/educationgreatthings.jsp

Very hush-hush.

(Hat tip: Hit and Run).

Globalization For Hipsters

2006-03-27T10:39:00.000-08:00

From Hit and Run, I've come across this very interesting 2003 Reason interview of George Mason economist Tyler Cowen. Seeing as I just lost $20 to a friend on a bet against George Mason, a school which (as they point out at H&R) boasts a long libertarian pedigree, a mention of the article seems in order (apologies for the formatting - my browser is acting up):

http://www.reason.com/0308/cr.ng.really.shtml

Among the many dubious theoretical and empirical bones of contention held by opponents of free trade and globalization, one especially useful for its ambiguity is the complaint that the global growth of capitalism homogenizes all cultures, thereby eviscerating the very idea of culture itself. As the argument runs, global trade, monopolized (naturally) by American corporations, subverts human diversity, forcibly and 'world-historically' gathering up every nation of earth into a Starbucksian new world order in which local custom and tradition is efficiently annihilated. If my characterization of the argument sounds unfairly cartoonish, you probably haven't heard Naomi Klein speak. While I've read some of his other writings, I haven't read this book. His insight about culture's fascinating way of remaining an actually different thing from commerce is as solid as the economics of comparative advantage - an idea equally crucial in understanding globalization's economic component and its cultural component. Trade has the opposite effect on culture than what perennial protesters of the "No Label" variety assert. Few economists would strongly disagree that free trade naturally induces a given country to invest its social energy into producing what it can produce more and better than another country - regardless of that other country's absolute advantage over them economically, socially, or politically. In other words, trade promotes and sustains that which is singular and special in a country's economic system (comparatively speaking). What is different about the exchange of cultural goods? If Singapore is evidence that free trade is a good thing economically, then Bob Marley is evidence that it does wonders for the flourishing of cultural diversity.

Bill O'Reilly, Stalinist

2006-03-13T11:54:00.000-08:00

Chalk it up to an early St. Patrick's Day shindig. On last Wednesday's taping, Fox's answer to Lou "Dey Took Ar Jobs" Dobbs invited Cato polymath Dan Griswold for another few rounds on immigration policy. Things were plodding along. O'Reilly once again refuted Griswold's case with the breathtaking analytical argument that "we gotta do something about this", his sermon responsibly tempered in rhetoric ("the hordes", for future viewers, referring to 'those people'). Griswold diligently faked respect, clinging to frivolous points about basic economic truth and the political process and the rule of law. Whatever that all means. It was almost over, and then came this:

O'REILLY: "And unless you put stringent...(inaudible)...And you go to any country in the world, and you watch how they do it, it's doable. Nobody gets into North Korea...(inaudible)....alright? They watch that border. They seal that border so that you don't get in there. And the same thing in Bosnia, and the same thing in those chaotic Bal...Bal..."

Balkans. Yes, THE Balkans. I'm giving myself dandruff scratching my head as to why, if "any country in the world" has adopted a more "doable" immigration policy than ours, O'Reilly came off the top of his head with the world's most brutal police state as an enviable case. It could be that O'Reilly loathes foreign illegals slightly more than Stalinism. I guess it is these particular immigrants who make for a perfect national security panic, because after all, 11 of the 13 9/11 hijackers...oh, nevermind, wrong glib retort. What I meant was, dey took ar jobs. But I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt on this, so that I'll assume instead that Bill O'Reilly simply hasn't the faintest idea of what he thinks should be done about immigration policy - beyond his clear endorsement of ''something".

I wonder if Cato wouldn't be better served by a simple public-relations overhaul. From here on, standard-bearing intellectuals like Griswold ( for neophytes, that's under "pinheads" in the O'Reilly glossary) ought to try to belch more in public, lead off with a trite insult in any debate, and always, always, contrast the United States to North Korea when the former's policies are somehow disagreeable.

Historical Mash-Up

2006-03-09T13:38:00.000-08:00

"Security trumps everything else in this country. If you don't have security, you don't have anything."
- Sen. Richard Shelby, today, celebrating the non-resolution of the Dubai port non-controversy

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
- Benjamin Franklin, to the Pennsylvania Assembly, 1755

Yet Another Drug War Victory

2006-02-27T14:28:00.000-08:00

This time, in what may yet send the menace of dreadlocked, Deadhead evildoers reeling into its last throes, a five year federal investigation culminates in this:

http://www.phishhook.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=550448

Exhibit A: A house. With plants in it. Evil ones. Sleep soundly tonight.

In all seriousness, realize that whomever runs this horticultural terror cell will probably spend a good few years in prison. Prisons are awfully expensive to build and maintain, and of course, the entire cost diffuses to many, many people who are probably more deterred from marijuana use by its association with hirsute, ne'er-do-well hippies than by its criminal ostracism. If I were to dictate justice, instead of imprisoning the offenders, I'd say the government ought instead to compensate them for the burden of having to build an elaborate underground facility to hide a bunch of plants from the government. Crime doesn't pay. But if this is crime prevention, than crime prevention steals.

But I don't run things. This genius does. And of course, this is against the law. And we are, after all, a nation of laws and not of men. Right?

(hat tip Andrew Sullivan)

The Fracas in Caracas

2006-02-20T08:08:00.000-08:00

The normally composed and reserved Hugo Chavez now eloquently puts the Secretary of State in her place.

No word as of yet on what Secretary Rice has to say about the Venezuelan socialist's babymama.

Pot, Meet Kettle

2006-02-15T20:13:00.000-08:00

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein quotes Antonin Scalia's take on the argument of flexibility (sometimes called the "living Constitution argument") as saying that one "would have to be an idiot to believe that."

Really, Justice Scalia?

In other schadenfreude-related news, according to a 2005 FindLaw survey, "only 43% of adult Americans can name at least one justice" on the Supreme Court. The highest name recognition went to O'Connor, the second to my personal favorite, Justice Thomas. I'm certain that had everything to do with his brilliant dissent in Raich, and nothing to do with his potty mouth.

Keep Hope Alive

2006-01-23T21:00:00.000-08:00

Good satire is effective satire, and it's only effective if truth and fiction can be mistaken for each other. Take this piece of reporting from 'America's Finest News Source'.

Karl Rove should already have put something like this on the political conveyor belt. Having already done a brief interning stint at DC's finest think tank, I'm sure could make a worse career move than to send in my resume to the Please Oh Please Institute.

The New Ad Hominem

2006-01-08T21:07:00.000-08:00

I had hoped that with the plateauing of tempers in the torture debate would come the end of a particularly vacuous and sleazy technique of argumentation the Right has used rather liberally in discussing this issue. But as the FISA/NSA debate plods on, so does this cheap trick. I'm too tired tonight to fish out any of the many, many articles and blog posts of Republicans who have pushed their luck with it, but here's the script:

Civil Libertarian: Bush's affinity for secrecy is troubling. First the secret CIA torture prisons, now the news that Bush has all along been playing fast and loose with the law on wire-tapping and surveillance.

Conservative: We are talking about terrorists, damn you! How much of his finite time and energy should the president devote to ensuring that probable terrorists have their day in court?

How does anyone expect progress in the war, let alone progress in legal understanding or other ostensibly less volatile issues, when all conservatives hear, when we libertarians say "the Constitution", is "Protect terrorists now!" Why is solving a basic legal problem such as the constitutional status of American citizens suspected of terrorist activities considered by conservatives tantamount to surrender? How much of the whole cloth of law and civil justice is completely subordinated to the imperative of combatting terror? And for how long?

Gaining Perspective

2006-01-08T20:20:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Rauch's new column is typical Jonathan Rauch - fair, dispassionate, analytical:

http://nationaljournal.com/rauch.htm

As egregious and unreasonable (and, frankly, opportunistic) as some of Bush's transgressions against fundamental legal and constitutional protections have been, he has been positively fastidious compared to previous presidents. Realizing that Harry Truman, the man whose prudence bore on the decision to obliterate two major Japanese cities, actually thought that nationalizing the steel industry was not only a good idea generally, but that it was plausibly bolstered by the Constitution, ought to, say, contextualize Bush's thinking. But it also ought to scare the sanguinity out of Bush's partisans over the corroding of checks and balances, and other constraints on unencumbered executive authority, that Bush has contrived for his presidency, and his war policy.

But for God's sake....nationalizing steel? I'd compare that to Bush claiming that victory over al-Qaeda is contingent on constitutionally stewarding the sanctity of marriage. Astounding.

Little Jerk...

2006-01-01T19:08:00.000-08:00

I'm sure he's a hero and a brave soul to some. But for God's sake, he's got parents:

http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20051229230809990008&ncid=NWS00010000000001

I'd strangle him.

No, No, The Cloud is Silver!

2005-11-20T11:23:00.000-08:00

From today's National Review Online, the main-page header to Victor Davis Hanson's piece:

"Fair-weather war supporters forget their own history."

I must've been catatonic during this fair-weather interval, where everything about the war was falling into place, going off without a hitch. But that aside, articles of this sort are now the hard archetype of hawk commentary - a partisan, face-saving rescue mission sneaking past any serious argument about the reasoning and execution of the Iraq war. Hanson has always struck me as a little too big for his britches - learned, erudite, and wrong in just about all his meaningful opinions.

The whole article reeks of despair. Of the cowards in Washington who have begun the chastening work of rethinking their early support of the war, Hanson has this to say:

"This is the mantra of the extreme Left: "Bush lied, thousands died." A softer version from politicians now often follows: "If I knew then what I know now, I would never have supported the war." These sentiments are intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible for a variety of reasons beyond the obvious consideration that you do not hang out to dry some 150,000 brave Americans on the field of battle while you in-fight over whether they should have ever been sent there in the first place."

Leave aside that the mantra of the extreme Left he cites happens to be incontrovertible - that dishonesty prevailed at several intervals, especially on the part of the vice president, in whom the president has reiterated his complete trust. What can be culled from this paragraph is a simple suggestion: now that soldiers are in Iraq for a long, long time, Congress ought to do the patriotic, noble thing and presume its own rightness in sending them there, and it's own imperviousness to objections. Because, after all, this sort of thing is little but the heckling of Marxist saboteurs.

Operation No Speculation

2005-11-04T14:50:00.000-08:00

Why watching C-Span can be a vertiginous experience - I wish I hadn't missed this (from Justin Logan and Gene Healy's new Reason column on what staying the course in Iraq actually means):

"During recent congressional testimony, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was asked, "Do you think five years from now some American forces will have come out?" She replied, "I don't want to speculate." Then a softer version of the same question: "What about 10 years from now?" After some brief wrangling, Rice replied, "I don't know how to speculate about what will happen 10 years from now." "

TRANSLATION: "Who knows? Ten years from now it won't be my problem!" Seriously, though - "I don't want to speculate about what will happen 10 years from now." It escapes me why one inquisitive Democratic senator didn't respond with the obvious point that speculation is what enveloped the Iraq question from the very beginning. Or that public policy in general is inherently speculative. I see her point though. Sure - if you started speculating, you couldn't really avoid saying something falsifiable. And you'd have to actually make the regime change policy a real policy, as opposed to another of George Bush's pie-in-the-sky profusions of compassionate conservatism.

It's really ashame that a truly brilliant guy like Christopher Hitchens has to resort to hackery like this.

One wonders why betrothing himself to the liberation of Iraqi Kurdistan hasn't led him to think that maybe those same Kurds might actually eventually come to think of stability and Scowcroftian realism as a good thing.

Jerk of the Week

2005-11-02T12:14:00.000-08:00

This is unbelievable:

http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20051101154809990006&ncid=NWS00010000000001

"Not genuine"? How could you tell, your honor?

The Pursuit of Happiness

2005-10-31T14:28:00.000-08:00

Will Wilkinson has for some years written one of the most consistently interesting and sophisticated blogs I've ever seen. He's got a new one now, devoted to research and thought on the effects of political and economic change on personal happiness. I could be burning the midnight oil tonight.

Right = 'Far Right'

2005-10-31T13:42:00.000-08:00

Like Julian Sanchez and others, I have really no sense that those who've taken up the task of inveighing against Judge Alito are basing their criticisms on any decisions or certain beliefs of his.

Reading this Slate article, I'm immediately distracted by the first sentence - since when did opposition to abortion become skewed to the "far right"? I'd hazard a guess that many moderate Republicans were pleased as punch with Alito's dissent in Casey. A minor point. But I really have no idea what to make of the implication that Alito's contrast to O'Connor in philosophy and politics is an inherent problem:

"And Alito's split with O'Connor involves not only abortion but also marriage. She worried about wives who might be victims of domestic violence. He put first the rights of husbands to know what their wives are doing."

I can already hear Senator Schumer parroting this sort of charge. The contrast would be worrisome if it had anything to do with the legal logic that generated the decision in question. It seems to me that Alito's intellectual emphasis was toward a deference to precedent (the operative precedent being Roe), and not on attending to the resolution of hypothetical conflicts that might arise from restricting abortion access. Isn't this essentially what pro-choice courtwatchers have asked for? His controlling precedent in his dissent was the text of Roe itself, and in arguing for spousal consent, he appears more than attentive to the issue of how it submits to this precedent. So how exactly does this presage a dismantling of abortion rights? Is a "husband-centered" legal perspective on Roe really likely to be the tactical key to the "far right" blitzkrieg on the venerable institution of abortion?

Those of us who think Randy Barnett should be an inevitable shoo-in for the Supreme Court most likely will find good reason to heap criticism on Alito. (For some counterpoint, check this out from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Soothes the mind a little.) The first thought that came to my mind was what the interval between Harriet Miers' nomination and Alito's says about President Bush's legal philosophy. No reiteration is needed there.

Senators Say the Darndest Things

2005-10-27T12:08:00.000-07:00

"I want the president to look across the country and find the best man, woman, or minority that he can find."
- Sen. Trent Lott, on the Miers mulligan.

Hat tip Andrew Sullivan.

Take A Day Off, Boss

2005-10-17T11:03:00.000-07:00

So it's a crowded bandwagon, but one worth riding. Here's how former Senator Dan Coats - Harriett Miers' Beltway sherpa during her nomination process - responded to critics of Miers' non-credentials:

"If a great intellectual powerhouse is a requirement to be a member of the court and represent the American people and the wishes of the American people and to interpret the Constitution, then I think we have a court so skewed on the intellectual side that we may not be getting representation of America as a whole."

As Eric Cartman would say, "Weeeaaak." Someone should have reminded Coats that "representation of America as a whole" sounds an awful lot like all the "legislating from the bench" business that President Bush so opposes. Or, uh, used to oppose hypothetically, before actually opposing it became politically ungratifying. It's not easy being President.

God bless David Frum. You can sign his petition to request Miers' withdrawal here.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

2005-10-10T20:27:00.000-07:00

So this has already been pointed out on the Daily Show, and by Tom Palmer, but I'll jump on the bandwagon, if you haven't seen it. I give you the FEMA Continuum of Disaster (an actual flowchart purporting to convey FEMA's approach to disaster relief.)

Good Lord.

Better Late Than Never

2005-10-10T19:53:00.000-07:00

"There is a gaping disproportion between the stakes associated with this vacancy and the stature of the person nominated to fill it."
- Bill Kristol, on the Miers nomination

That sounds right - shame on Bush for expanding the Bremer Model. Otherwise known as the Gonzales Model. Or, if you like, the Brown Model.

Lunatic Watch

2005-10-03T19:55:00.000-07:00

"I’ve watched the law for a long time and I don’t know of a more heroic resistance of an individual, under every form of adversity, who has stood up tall and resisted [like Milosevic has]....And, more than those that hurt him can understand, he is one who has demonstrated that the real criminal acts were by those who were breaking up the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and not those who were trying to preserve the union....Those who heroically resist - as President Milosevic did - the aggression and domination of their countries, pay the price."

- Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General under Jimmy Carter

Demons Out!

2005-09-28T17:19:00.000-07:00

This might be the funniest thing I've seen in months - intended for immature audiences only:

http://gorillamask.net/fartingpreacher.shtml

Amen.

Martin "I'm Still Here" Scorsese

2005-09-27T16:08:00.000-07:00

After watching the Scorsese/Dylan "collaboration" on PBS last night, I have to agree with Devin McKinney's assessment. The film is more than comparable to 'The Last Waltz', the one is a template of the other - in cinematic inertia, soporific interview-narrative, and an utter contempt for aesthetic and emotional effect. Obviously loathe to take an expansive view of Dylan's body of work, or to draw some kind of inspiration from anything interesting Dylan ever said or did as a youth, he opts instead for trotting out weathered folkie-chums, uninteresting childhood acquaintances, and most atrociously, Allen Ginsberg. Like Dylan (and other idols of the '60s experience), Scorsese lusts after his own departed muse, and gives up any chance he has of capturing the humanity and complexity of a figure whose art is as humane and complex as any in contemporary music. That the film's most inspired moment was circumventing the annoyingly sentimental story of a young Dylan rushing to the deathbed of his own inspiration, an infirmed Woody Guthrie, while probably a deft directorial move, suggests something about Scorsese's creative state.

The Pence Wing Lashes Out

2005-09-25T11:50:00.000-07:00

With the spine of the federal government pressed desperately against the fiscal floodgates, Fred "Big Government Conservatism" Barnes reports that a proposal by Republican Study Committee to cut federal spending by $102 billion in one fiscal year was shot down by the House leadership and the White House's budget director - for being "politically unrealistic." If it is politically unrealistic, than so is the prospect of renewing fiscal conservatism in future Republican congresses and administrations.

As an exercise, try and find a recent Fred Barnes article that doesn't contain a conspicuously illogical sentence such as this:

"Bush has been called a big government conservative (by me), but that label is inapt because it implies he's a liberal."

I see, so a big government conservative is really just a liberal, but George Bush isn't a liberal, nor is he a small-government conservative. If for the sake of argument we were to call this a logical proposition, what does one even call Mike Pence, Jeff Flake, John Sununu and the motley few, fiscally conservative, limited-goverment gadflies in the Republican Party?

Galloway Returns

2005-09-13T09:38:00.000-07:00

The always-astute New York Times calls him "a gifted orator with a flair for the verbal showdown." For his own part, he is famed for his effusive praise of Saddam Hussein, Bashar Assad, and Yasir Arafat, once assuring the first that he was resolutely "with you until victory, until victory until Jerusalem!" His monomaniacal ego and propensity for self-flattery is possibly unmatched in Western politics (no mean feat).

And now, at long last, George Galloway - The Book!! (Subtitle: 'The Man Who Set Congress Straight About Iraq). Yes, come one, come all on September 24 to witness what some lost minds truly believe it means to be peace-loving in America today. He'll be speaking at DC's First Congregational Church along with the first and only mother ever to have a son perish in war, THE Cindy Sheehan.

Tomorrow he'll be debating The Hitch, whom he recently castigated as a 'drink-soaked popinjay'. Something tells me Galloway will need a stiff drink after Hitchens is done with him.

UPDATE: Listen to the debate here. As expected, Hitchens got away with a little sophistry, but then again, he was arguing with a complete and utter buffoon, liar, and - as Hitchens points out - sadist. The Hitchens finale was plenty rewarding:

"And with that, that's the end of my pro bono bit. From now on, if you want to talk to me, you'll need a receipt, and I'll be sitting selling books, because this is, after all, America."

I think it was Florence King who said "If Christopher Hitchens is a Trotskyist, I want to be one too."

Bastiat Goes to Basra

2005-09-12T16:47:00.000-07:00

I was talking to a friend recently, and the discussion turned to Bastiat, whom I've read in relatively small part (I'd first known him for his Swiftian swipe at trade protectionism, 'The Candlemakers' Petition'.) But he's probably better-known for his analysis of the 'broken window fallacy'. Talking about it, I got to wondering where President Bush, Secretaries Rice and Rumsfeld, and certain strident war-hawks would be without it.

What they would be, however, is honest. It at least makes some sense to wonder what the combined images of our beleaguered occupation of Iraq and the despair of the victims of Katrina recommend to the jihadists. Bush's rhetorical triangulations around whatever 'staying the course' actually implies do not affect the present condition of the country. But what they do permit, as Ivo Daalder observes over at TPMCafe, is claiming as evidence of military success the total number of terrorists killed in three failed attempts to secure the strategically important Iraqi city of Tall Afar.

In this respect, Bastiat's famous fallacy (at least a cognate of it) has become a distinct talking point for the administration.

No Diplomacy For Oil!

2005-09-01T11:32:00.000-07:00

In one corner, The Reverend Pat Robertson thinks we should kill Hugo Chavez to get at his oil. In the other, less illuminated corner,The No Less Reverend Jesse Jackson believes we must maintain a cordial bi-national dialogue and progressive diplomatic relations with the Castroist tyrant...to get at his oil.

Hat tip Julian Sanchez, who's written a great piece on Venezuela's Great Leader for Reason.

One Illusion Goes Out the Window

2005-08-31T12:08:00.000-07:00

AP has its eye on what the stupidest, most despicable and fanatical 'people' you can shake a stick at are up to these days:

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050828/D8C8JGIG0.html

Would it be fair, since the post 9/11 Right has all but claimed Patriotism as its exclusive province, to count this as a strike against them?

Vox Populi

2005-08-30T15:05:00.000-07:00

Via the Paul Wolfowitz of the theocons, Marvin Olasky (don't ask), this Pew survey on religion and political identity caught my eye. Apparently almost half of Democrats think their party is too secular, and the same percentage of Republicans think their party is too faith-based. So all the furor over the role of religious faith in public life seems to beg the question of to what extent religious identity is actually transmuted into political action and policy. I am not as fearful as many fellow secularists, though the thrusting of every angle of this debate into the public consciousness, (brought on, in my view, entirely and superfluously by Republican governance), must at some point have an enervating effect on political behavior.

While on the Pew main site, I took this 'Typology quiz'. Somehow I came out as an 'Enterpriser', which the survey defines as those who believe in free enterprise and individual responsibility (check), and tend to reject economic regulation and welfare policies (check). But then it goes on to claim that we Enterprisers are as religious as the average American, and that we support a conservative social agenda (wrong on both counts). It also says Enterprisers are supporters of an "assertive foreign policy", and display "nearly unanimous support for the war in Iraq", even though my answers were at most realist-hawkish.

Ah, polling.

To Train and To Harden?

2005-08-30T13:03:00.000-07:00

One of the more ardent and decent partisans of the Iraq war has been Christopher Hitchens. Among his great gifts as a writer and observer of human affairs is his ability to corner an opponent without appearing the petulant bully or the intellectual tyrant. He is also possessed of a thicker skin than most - it is hardly possible anymore to watch a Hitchens tete-a-tete without feeling as though whatever is at issue will fall away at the first mention of Leon Trotsky or Johnnie Walker (respectively, Hitchens' former and current compatriots). That he presses on is due respect, I think. This essay of his (hat tip Justin Logan) is the most extensive he's written on the matter in a while. I think it's fair to say that whatever high ground exists on the pro-war side has not been better defended than by Hitchens. For what it's worth, as a much weaker supporter of the same war, the points worth arguing are made well here, and I can't say I share Justin's out-of-hand dismissal of the article's argument in toto.

As a fan of Hitchens, I don't mind saying that the argument is just a little convoluted. Just a little. Take this excerpt, aimed at skeptics of both the Iraq and Kosovo wars.

One is not mentioning these apparently discrepant crimes and nightmares as a random or unsorted list. Khomeini, for example, was attempting to compensate for the humiliation of the peace agreement he had been compelled to sign with Saddam Hussein. And Saddam Hussein needed to make up the loss, of prestige and income, that he had himself suffered in the very same war. Milosevic (anticipating Putin, as it now seems to me, and perhaps Beijing also) was riding a mutation of socialist nationalism into national socialism. It was to be noticed in all cases that the aggressors, whether they were killing Muslims, or exalting Islam, or just killing their neighbors, shared a deep and abiding hatred of the United States.

It's not always a great idea to paraphrase, but let me try. I think what he's getting at here is that both Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein were dangerous men, with a dangerous arsenal of power and the surplus of depravity needed to do horrible things to many people. As far as incontrovertible assertions go, this is a good example. But as an article of argument or persuasion, it has become par for the Hitchens course as a defense of 'wars of choice'. In this essay he manages both to offer an ostensibly reasonable case for internationalist interventionism:

"One should have no problem in accepting this concept. As they cannot and do not deny, there was going to be another round with Saddam Hussein no matter what. To whom, then, should the "choice" of time and place have fallen? The clear implication of the antichoice faction--if I may so dub them--is that this decision should have been left up to Saddam Hussein."

And inadvertently draw some healthy skepticism toward it:

"It has also induced him to give hostages to fortune. The claim that if we fight fundamentalism "over there" we won't have to confront it "over here" is not just a standing invitation for disproof by the next suicide-maniac in London or Chicago, but a coded appeal to provincial and isolationist opinion in the United States. Surely the elementary lesson of the grim anniversary that will shortly be upon us is that American civilians are as near to the front line as American soldiers."

I can yield to this somewhat - in Iraq, it is my belief that the 'laissez-faire' position was and remains untenable, arbitrarily privileging one disastrous posture hinging on the refusal of certainty (and not the absence of it) over another disastrous policy proceeding at least from a decent, organized view of potentialities and probabilities. Such was not the case in Kosovo. But to Hitchens this is a distinction without a difference, because as with the fatal flaw of his Iraq argument (the Kurd conundrum, which Justin points out), what mattered was the particularly altruistic substance of that war, not in what position it placed the United States. The Kosovo war wasn't simply a war of choice as Hitchens contours the term, but a war of welfarism. Dislodged from this motive, the most salutary principle that can be gleaned by the craven realist from that 'struggle' is this:

The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat.

Judging from recent appearances, it looks like Hitchens could benefit from some training and hardening himself (couldn't resist).

State Governments Want Revenue (A NYT Exclusive)

2005-07-30T19:01:00.000-07:00

Most observers with a meager interest in the affairs of the Supreme Court could have predicted right off the bat that the court's Kelo decision was a spark in a tinderbox. But a 365-33 House vote condemning the decision is pretty astonishing, if you ask me (although I hate commending politicians. Here it goes: Thank you, Rep. DeLay. Good for you, Rep. Waters.

A survey of the madness here, in what I believe is the only newspaper in the country to print a salutary analysis of the decision:

http://nytimes.com/2005/07/30/national/30property.html?ei=5094&en=a2632ae228739398&hp=&ex=1122782400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all

In a particularly unsurprising commentary on the relationship between tyranny and the flattery of the ego, one of the most blowhardish outfits in the history of professional sports, the Dallas Cowboys, has slimed its way into collusion with the Texas state government to have a swath of homes and residences demolished, in order that this stellar franchise (2004 record: 6-10) can seat both of its remaining fans in a fancy new stadium.

Vengeance isn't one of my most conspicuous traits, but I can't help but cheer on these folks:

http://www.freestarmedia.com/

The gentleman spearheading this effort, one Logan Darrow Clements, appeared the other night on the new Tucker Carlson show (a program which I seem to be the only person in the country to like), and he appears to be a very congenial, even-tempered fellow. Just the sort of guy you'd want to see beat the living snot out of twits like Souter.

Know Your Rights

2005-07-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

Tom Palmer, of the Institute for Humane Studies and the Cato Institute, has posted lecture notes for a seminar he is presenting in Varna, Bulgaria, on a variety of topics pertaining to classical liberalism, here:

http://www.tomgpalmer.com
(scroll down to the July 22 entry)

In related news, I'm pleased to report that I am now twice as smart as I was 20 minutes ago.

Half a League Onward

2005-07-18T18:45:00.000-07:00

For some time it had been difficult to gauge how serious President Bush and his trade policy team are about pressing the case for CAFTA. Jeff Taylor of Reason Magazine, in his article today, gives free-trade partisans (who on more than one occasion have been memorably betrayed by the administration) a reason to revive a little optimism:

http://www.reason.com/links/links071805.shtml

The president seems not to mind offending the isolationist, protectionist Buchanan Right that still retains a considerable Republican constituency. Good for him. Particularly significant, and a revealing triumph, is Bush's confident debunking of protectionism's retarded cousin, xenophobia, on the question of the commie Chinese. Taylor interestingly points out how expansive trade policies are concomitant with stable, sensible immigration policies.

Incidentally, I have been to North Carolina; they do indeed grow a lot of hogs there.

Questions about the Schmidt Report

2005-07-14T13:08:00.000-07:00

With all the analysis of the recent Schmidt report on detainee abuse in Guantanamo Bay at hand, a pretty elementary question comes to mind. Considering that it is now fairly certain that an institutional tendency toward what Marty Lederman has called "defining inhumane down" now pervades the entire hierarchy of the armed forces, wouldn't it make sense to ask what quality and quantity of actionable intelligence the detainers and their supervisors had expected to eke out of the more amateurish, neophyte detainees whose cases have now become cause for concern? As it seems fairly clear that determining a standardized, enforceable upward limit to what we can do to any suspected terrorist is to be considered nowhere in the agenda of the federal government or the top military brass, shouldn't we worry about such things as the symptoms of prison backflow, overcrowding, "hyper-interdiction" in general? What happens if we catch bin Laden and al-Zarqawi at once but can only fit one in? This is figurative speech, but it's a concern, I would think.

On Pape-ism

2005-07-13T17:45:00.000-07:00

The question of what baits the hook that lures aspiring jihadists is a sine qua non in the war against terror. Answering it would come a long way in determining jihad's strategic agenda and rational criteria for our own success and failure. A sobering thing to wonder is to what extent those in charge of prosecuting the war have arrived at any consensus at all on this. President Bush, it has been observed, received an thorough scolding for letting slip the statement that the war on terror is unwinnable, and a thorough scolding for apparently stepping back from this mentality. The event is an important one to consider in a political critique of the war on terror.

Chief among the elements of war skepticism is the belief that military incursion into the Middle East is automatically translated from within the 'Arab street' to be an act of aggression, provoking an immediate escalation of terrorism. University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape has formulated what appears to be a sophisticated argument to this effect in a new book (which I haven't read), 'Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism', summarized in these newspaper articles (hat tip Justin Logan):

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/09/opinion/09pape.html?

http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/05/18/opinion/edpape.php

That the argument is familiar is a relief. But I confess I am not much in agreement with it. Though I have not read the book, the above articles do not encourage me much. Pape opens the Herald-Tribune article positing that the fact that the successful Iraqi elections were followed by a spike in terrorist attacks amounts to a "contradiction", and that the contradiction can only be resolved by concluding that "there is far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than most people think" - and that American intervention is the one assured constant at the root of it all. As Ronald Bailey notes in his response to this theory over at Reason, bin Laden 'stipulated' an end to American intervention in the Middle East as a basis for an al-Qaeda ceasefire in his 2002 tape.

Justin, my former boss (and a damn smart one), argues that policymakers in Washington should follow Pape's argument to its natural conclusion and withdraw from Iraq, or risk an even greater swell in bin Ladenist ranks. Is that the full logical extent of the conclusion, though? If any military mobilization in the Middle East is bound to rain fire on us, how is it possibly that any conceivable war against terrorism could amount to anything more than a case of the US playing tag with mass murderers? How is any response to terrorist aggression not destined to exacerbate rather than secure?

Because war against terrorists has to be an unavoidable, intractable one in order for it to any justification to be convincing. I would hold that it is. I would reject the argument that the risk of arousing jihadist rage is prohibitive of armed conflict against them. Government of a free people has an implicit moral obligation to respond to credible foreign threats to American lives, articulated clearly and forming in plain view, by attempting to render them powerless through military action. So, more to the point, how might Pape's recommendations be heeded in Washington? Where is the appropriate strategic equilibrium, balancing the intrinsic threat of inaction with the permanently side-constraining threat of inspiring further terrorism? Do we limit the scope of militarism to responding to threatening parties that have already made their move, thus establishing a policy of 'get shot first, ask questions later'? Pape's thesis would argue 'yes'. How does the very likely emboldening of committed terrorists witnessing the apparent retreat of the Great Satan correlate to overall threat of terrorism against us, and to the consideration of a policy of non-intervention?

To state my basic intuition, I do not believe that the relationship between American militarism in the Middle East - past and present - and the provocation of terrorism should obscure the "positive argument" of bin Laden and his ilk in determining our war policy. I do not believe that the risks we've yet accepted in confronting Islamic terrorists can be held to eclipse the danger posed by the perverse and proactive imagination of the terrorists themselves. I do believe that the most significant animating principle of the terrorist mind is a hatred of the West, of liberalism, of civil society, of secular constitutionalism and representative government, and an obsession with the singular wish of eradicating any elements of these in the Middle East. I believe that America regrets its past and present follies a great deal more than bin Laden does, and that within this psyche, the casualties of American intervention serve only as useful simulacra for this 'revolt'. Militant Islamism is in my view a delivery mechanism for raw, simple totalitarianism.

This surely isn't an original argument, obviously. Anyway, Ronald Bailey's recent Reason article states my own view of the argument better than I can - I retort, you deride:

http://www.reason.com/links/links071105.shtml

The Spectre of Ownership

2005-07-12T14:46:00.000-07:00

I had thought to leave well enough alone and not say more than has already been said about the rash of borderline-insane Supreme Court decisions that ended the last Court term. But this Julian Sanchez column was motivation enough:

http://www.reason.com/hod/js063005.shtml

and especially the NYT article to which he links:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/opinion/24fri1.html?ex=1121313600&en=c8887de78041569e&ei=5070

Typically great Sanchez - and typically lousy Times. There isn't an absurd defense of the decision this op-ed, fatuously titled "The Limits of Property Rights", forgoes - it is so fawning, you would think Castro wrote the opinion. From the first sentence it reads like a high-schooler's work, praising the Court for relieving the enfeebled federal government of the responsibility of defining any objective criterion for claiming eminent domain over the objections of greedy homeowners and their insidious cohorts in the " 'property rights' movement". Not to be confused with the property rights movement, of course (I'm here reminded of Sanchez's resolution to dub the Washington Times a "newspaper", with "journalists", in light of its incessant use of scare quotes to refer to "gay marriage".) Together, the Court and the Times admonish us, this unholy alliance of people who live in homes they paid for and people who think people ought to be able to live in homes they paid for pose a mortal threat to the public interest, the raison d'etre of which is "reasonable zoning and environmental regulations." The journalistic CYA comes in the acknowledgement that, per the O'Connor and Thomas dissents, "eminent domain must not be used for purely private gain." Using it against purely private gain, though, is not only alright but both inherently noble and, now, the implicit moral imperative of the state. Thus, the editorial celebrates, "The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, sided with the city." And against the people who live in it.

I don't think it's too glib to wonder if anyone on the Times editorial board would find themselves consoled by such a riveting defense of the public good if they were to be standing in the shadow of a Coast Guard museum that used to be their home.

First Principles

2005-06-29T18:58:00.000-07:00

With all the blogging that prattles on about such trivial matters as the future of American jurisprudence, the limits of constitutional government, and the ethics of war and peace, I am thankful for BanTheBan.org. I am only half-kidding - the dismissive treatment given this matter by certain high-minded voices doesn't obscure what honest, steady observation learns from the anti-smoking movement and similar cabals of good nature. It learns that egotism, ambition, and, yes, tyranny choose the disguise of inocuous helpfulness and goodwill before any other. It isn't out of paranoia that I worry that a distracted, complacent public resigning itself to this collectivist mentality (and collectivism is its essence) threatens our society materially.

See for yourself:

http://bantheban.org

Gene Healy of the Cato Institute (where I interned and inherited the lion's share of my political education) is somewhat of a spokesblogger for the anti-ban movement. I'm right behind them.

'Something Is Coming Together'

2005-06-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

I'll make the disclaimer to this one quick. Anti-war leftist activism has nothing to do, per se, with anti-Americanism or any other form of moral idiocy. Per se. But in the wake of Dick Durbin's risible non-apology today for his likening of US detention policy to the killing fields of Pol Pot, it becomes just a tiny, tiny bit easier every day to shirk the distinction. Leave it to The Nation's editor-in-chief and resident bag of hammers to do the aligning for us.

In a profoundly moving blog post today, Katrina "I Willingly Dress like Susan Sontag" van den Heuvel joyfully relates this anecdote concerning a message from a fellow anti-warrior:

'Just ten days earlier he told me that he was more depressed about our politics than at anytime in the last 40 years. "Hello, this is..." he said. "I was in Washington yesterday at the rally and at the Conyers hearings. And since I laid a heavy statement on you last week, I just wanted to make a correction. It's finally over. My despair is over. Something has happened these last ten days that has revived the antiwar issue. It has to do with public opinion polls and casualties and Republicans like Walter Jones and more Democrats standing up. I won't say how optimistic I am. But something is coming together--you can feel it." '

"...[P]ublic opinion polls and casualties and..." The gentleman ought to be thanked not to say how optimistic he is. Chaos, bloodshed, agony, dread, and raw, cosmic evil plunging at the very heart of human dignity and hope and progress. Sweet relief.

Aw, Shove It

2005-06-14T18:53:00.000-07:00

I may come to regret posting the following; 20 years from now, I can just see some jerk in some law office or newsroom (depending on where I end up) dredging this up and trying to ruin my career with it. So be it.

I've been a Catholic my entire life. Since that life has only spanned 22 years, it's fair to say that well over half of my experience of religion and faith has been at least partially involuntary - I was put into Catholic grade school and followed everyone I knew into Catholic high school. This had quite a bit more to do with the relative quality of Philadelphia Catholic schools and private schools than with faith, but I have fashioned a religious experience of my own nonetheless. I despise much about the Catholic Church, but beyond that, struggling with the most elemental aspects of Christian faith is an increasing ordeal, as my curiosity about the world and its complexity intensifies. I'm not certain I buy any of it (Christianity) anymore. I'm not certain, to cite one conundrum, that I can much longer accept a moral system which segregates itself into two components: the precepts to which Christian morality binds mere mortals on one hand and the blanket exoneration of the omnipotent divinity from any coherent moral responsibility of any kind on the other. (To put that more simply, doesn't God have any rules to follow?)

So I am an "agnosto-Catholic" - because there are aspects of my life as a Catholic which I not only am unable to abandon but which exert a visceral and even an intellectual power over me I can't explain. That, to me, is the crux of my own faith - the imagining of a space of inexplicability - bringing me directly to my point.

I'll try not to bandy about much rhetoric. In the debate between creationists and atheists, the latter have won. No contest. This article explains why (via Julian Sanchez):

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D4FEC-7D5B-1D07-8E49809EC588EEDF&pageNumber=5&catID=2

Science is everyday proving huge swaths of religious conviction dead, flat wrong. But here is what I do not see budging on my side of the fray. When at a given point in history, the total aggregate quantity of scientifically-vindicated knowledge X reaches the point X+1, how does this inestimable achievement of human ingenuity and reason prove (scientifically, mind you) that what lies far, far, far beyond this frontier will not eventually defy those very faculties of ingenuity and reason completely? Because that proof is the primary necessary premise of the claim "There is no God." As best as I can reason through it, it cannot supply this proof, it can only augment skepticism. The chasm between the two is huge, particularly if science is the blunt object purportedly bludgeoning Christianity to a pulp. Taken as a theory (as the article defines the non-scientific sense of the word) the narrative of creationism - that God created all that exists in a matter of days and from that point nothing quantifiable about the physical universe has changed - has been obliterated completely. This proves what God didn't do. Science has always proven what God didn't do, and thus what God is not. The Earth wasn't placed at the center of the universe by this omniscient being, or even at the center of this galaxy. And science argues persuasively that Christianity had better think about reformulating its teaching of God's relationship with the human condition if it actually wants to lay claim to a semi-plausible doctrine.

But here is what the methodological precision of science and reason is, in my view, unable to prove. It cannot prove that God is a fictional contrivance. It does not prove that the causal links that explain science naturally are not themselves causally linked to something unaccountable to human intelligence. It does not prove that this divine entity wishes to cover his tracks, never to be 'found out' by the intelligence of humanity - an undeveloped supposition of atheism, it seems. (To put it differently, couldn't the very spontaneity of the Big Bang, punctuated evolution, etc. be this divine creator's precise intention?) It does not prove that whatever body of verifiable facts the human race can freely deploy as truth are not the result of God's design. As much philosophical argument as I have read disputing these conclusions (the breadth of such writing has dwindled in recent years), I am having a hard time being convinced. And I am looking to be convinced. If anything, my faith is the result of gravitation toward, not away from, skepticism. I am deeply skeptical of the faith that invests itself in the assumption that there is no realm of existence beyond what is provable, definable, quantifiable. Reasonable believers are not looking for science to validate our beliefs. We are just looking for them not to mock us in public. This mockery, for the reasons I've stated, seems a little on the presumptuous side.

For the record (and not to be conciliatory), I admire much about atheism and find great wisdom in it, much to contend with in its ethical/ontological/teleological collisions with theism. Christopher Hitchens is far and away my favorite journalist working today. And this is only one simple component of how I conceive of the entire question of God and faith - I am completely adrift in this regard. I am far more settled and confident in the thoughts and intuitions that persuade me against religious faith than in those that draw me back in. I am in full acknowledgement of the fact that my faith is predicated on a pervading sense of confusion and limitation. But that's the single most personally attractive thing about believing in the supernatural.

But then, my favorite song is Kansas' "Carry On, My Wayward Son". So an anti-ontological defense of belief might be biting off more than I can chew. Weekly reports on my sanity to follow.

Free Bernie

2005-06-12T19:07:00.000-07:00

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is long overdue for a Republican clobbering, and in light of the March conviction of former milkman and Worldcom CEO Bernie Ebbers, fiscal conservatives ought to start making animal sacrifices to the gods in hope of this. I'm not at all optimistic in this regard. I become more mystified every day as to what exactly the congressional Republicans (and the Bush Administration) intend to do with their 2004 mandate, aside from feigning moral clarity at the mention of stem-cell research, bankrupting the federal government with aid to African countries (i.e. oligarchs), and pretending half-convincingly to know what's going on in North Korea before the next poor saps have to whip up an actual policy. But returning to 'corporate reform' - this AEI article by former Reagan counsel Peter Wallison says more than needs saying about the crass silliness that went into, and came out of, this frantic legislation:

http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.22648,filter.all/pub_detail.asp

Wallison makes eminent sense in dispelling the fog of regulatory incoherence that has long controlled federal economic policy: "The strongest case for regulation can be made in cases of market failure, where competition or other market activity will not provide an optimal outcome, particularly in terms of product quality, price, and overall efficiency of production. Natural monopoly markets are the classic case for the efficacy of regulation, since in such instances regulation acts as a kind of substitute for competition. Regulation, as in local zoning laws, can also be appropriate when used to obtain socially useful ends that cannot be achieved by market activity alone...

In some circumstances, regulation can also be an effective substitute for the tort system--especially in cases where horrific losses can fall on some who cannot be adequately compensated by legal action after they have suffered a loss. The FDA’s pre-testing and licensing of drugs is an example of this. Its costs, paid by all companies and ultimately included in the cost of pharmaceuticals, are appropriate because neither financial compensation nor prosecution of wrongdoers can adequately place victims back where they would have been absent the loss or can effectively deter subsequent, equally costly, errors by manufacturers. Pre-emptive regulation of this kind, however, is (or should be) exceptional, because it is highly inefficient; it imposes regulatory costs on everyone to prevent a few cases of loss...

Sarbanes-Oxley does not fall into any of these categories. There is no indication--except in the fevered imaginings of the far left--that fraud and financial manipulation are endemic to corporate America. The losses in Enron, WorldCom, and other well-known cases were caused by fraud and other forms of deception by managements. These losses could be and are being compensated by civil actions under the securities or tort laws--many of which are currently underway--and it is highly likely that similar wrongdoing by others will be deterred in the future by civil and criminal actions against the wrongdoers, Bernard Ebbers being the most recent prominent example. The punishments have been severe. The managements involved are now unemployed, indicted, or convicted--and in some cases all three. The companies have suffered major stock market losses, collapsed, or merged. There is little reason to believe that other managements in the future, having seen these results, will have much incentive to follow the same path."

Sarbanes-Oxley is almost certainly the most intrusive and hyperactive piece of corporate legislation in this country's history: it's interesting to note that the grand-daddy of corporate law, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890), prescribed a maximum penalty of $5000, OR 1 year in prison. Yes, I agree that Ebbers' actions are weightier than the net moral implications of most anti-trust cases. But Bernie Ebbers will spend the rest of his life in prison and his family is broke. Fair? Maybe. But the explosion of criminalization that will surely be among the most prominent legacies of the Bush Administration isn't. Amid all the president's posturing on corporate responsibility, and for all the bipartisan muscle-flexing that attended this much-ballyhooed crackdown, some conservatives have become irritable in urging a sign of political responsibility from their party. I wouldn't be expecting much, if I were Peter Wallison.

Bucks County: Worse than CANADA

2005-06-08T10:57:00.000-07:00

Came across this article over at the Volokh Conspiracy:

http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-a1_2bombjun04,0,6959490.story

One wonders what has happened to the good old-fashioned tantrum. Secondly, is Bucks County so awful that it can bore Canadian teenager to the point of violent fantasies? I won't answer.

'A Fundamental Coarsening of Public Life'

2005-05-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

My hood is off to Tony Blair: just a few days into his third prime ministerial term, and he and his Labor Party are already knee deep in the brave work of 'halting the march of disrespect.' But the Guardian deserves even more congratulations; this article must break any existing word-count record for articles about how teenagers sometimes like to get rowdy. Though I would draw the line at 'happy slapping.'

The kids are alright.

Hangin' Ten on the 'Democratization Wave'

2005-05-16T12:05:00.000-07:00

This Weekly Standard piece on the May 13 anti-state uprising Andijan, Uzbekistan is a good example of what is good, bad, and ugly about the magazine. The revolt, which some commentators have been quick to declaim as a destabilizing event in the war on terror, has evidently perplexed the hell out of the mainstream media (I refuse the acronym), so much that I can scarcely find a major network TV or national newspaper article to have covered it at all. While it is too early to tell whether this revolt was the work of reactionary jihadism or a loose aggregate of disgruntled anti-state interests, I'm leaning toward the latter - the charge that the detained businessmen are in fact operatives for Hizbut-Tehrir seems too convenient for the challenged authorities, and given that this is the only official source for the charge, I'm skeptical of it. As far as deceitful jihadist rallying points go, "unjust taxation" is a relatively novel one, and particularly as a rallying point in the relatively infertile ground of Uzbekistan. On the other hand, Schwartz's immediate dismissal of the claims against the imprisoned businessmen - that they were instead members of "a spiritual and charitable circle" - is unnerving. It seems more likely that they actually are neo-Wahabbists in disposition, just with a legitimate day job. In any case, this populist strike against a tyranny located in neighborhood of both Arab radicalism and leftover Stalinism shouldn't go unnoticed. The money quote from Schwartz:

"The appeal of radical Islam in Uzbekistan is highly overrated; the resentment of local bazaar merchants against unjust taxation and other abuses in the Ferghana Valley is not."

Gauging the Newsweek Effect

2005-05-16T09:50:00.000-07:00

Such moments of chaos as we've seen in the outbreak of violence following the incendiary May 9 Newsweek article on internment practices in Afghanistan invite broad questions and vague insights into the nature of wartime 'unknown unknowns.' It is in such times especially that commitment to a priori principles matters most, even more than prudent apprehension.

That the administration has responded to the Newsweek story only with contempt for the possible overstatement of its own semi-covert policies in Afghanistan and elsewhere reflects a slew of long-developing vices, of which a polite contempt for a free media and a tight-lipped ambivalence toward the bloody chaos wrought by some rotten American soldier-torturers (however few) are the most obvious. It is well past time for a scrupulous inquiry into media organs' methods and standards in employing anonymous sources. Those for whom the liberty of the media in transmitting potentially dangerous information in the midst of global war nullifies demands for either factual accuracy or regard for life-threatening outcomes should of course be taken with more than one grain of salt. But the constant tension between the virtue of freedom and the perils of the unknown is no more likely to be sorted out in newsrooms or editors' offices than in the edifices of Congress or anywhere else in political society. This is, it seems to me, an irreducible and permanent conundrum. The frenetic pace of calling for a heavy-handed remedy and assigning blame is a greater danger than the apparently misguided information-gathering by Newsweek. If some demonstrable breach of standards in information-gathering turns up, it should be quickly decried and corrected at the immediate personnel source. As Andrew Sullivan notes though, it seems a little implausible that the claim of Koranic desecration, in the midst of the other amoral and puerile abuses surfacing from interrogation centers, is a pure concoction of a subversive media. Whenever the truth of this debacle sees the light of day, we must hope that the administration quickly shuts up and turns inward in rethinking the policy of extreme interrogation methods and rendition standards. Because if Newsweek took a single disastrous step in the wrong direction with this article, the step comes at the end of a long and painstaking path toward reality. When it becomes apparent that the export of American detainees to Uzbek prisons has been halted, when news agencies no longer turn up photos of piled-up corpses outstretched beside gleeful Western interrogators, I'll calm down about the administration's reflexive preference for secrecy and its hostility toward purported media histrionics. I'll calm down even more when the folks at National Review (part of the media, I am assured) hurl themselves into the media flagellation binge without resorting to multiple NRO references to "Newsweak." Leave the awful puns to Michelle Malkin, guys. You're better than that.

Weekly Standard Gets Soft On The Evildoers

2005-05-09T15:25:00.000-07:00

I was only half-surprised to see a well-known PNAC/AEI scholar writing in the Weekly Standard against the administration's self-evident, self-contradicting, and self-defeating ambivalence toward the liberalization and exportation of official torture to such nations as Egypt and Uzbekistan. My first reaction is that such outcry from neoconservative quarters may be too late, and it will take a herculean political effort to rid ourselves of the strange fruit borne of the government's present posture. But it still delivers powerful medicine to the moral psyche of those, among whom I include myself, with relatively hawkish proclivities. The article's recommendations do not venture into what now seems the dismal reality - that the covert, extreme policies practiced in countries which, we have it on President Bush's assurance, "say they are not going to torture people" are now the long-term political and moral province of the State and Defense Departments. Not a comforting scenario, to say the least.

So Intense

2005-05-02T12:56:00.000-07:00

Dead horse-beating isn't a favorite activity of mine, but here goes: Boy, some Hollywood celebrities sure are stupid. Take a gander at this Slate article if you are a skeptic on this salient matter (hat tip to Gene Healy):

http://slate.msn.com/id/2117125/

Why someone like Drew Barrymore is unattached is beyond me, what with her restless spirit and affinity for important endeavors such as tree-touching.

When Conservatives Turn to Populism

2005-04-27T15:52:00.000-07:00

One particularly unpleasant social behavior of prominent commentators is the tendency to topple from from their coherent ideological perch into crass populism when public opinion seems to smack them in the mouth. Michelle Malkin, still stewing over the lack of sensitive, probing media attention given to Terri Schiavo (whoever that is) was irate yesterday over an ABC news polling question which to her mind was worded so deceptively and inscrutably (in Democrats' favor) that no intelligent person could answer with their actual position on the issue of the filibuster. Read this very, VERY carefully, then pop a few Advil:

"Would you support or oppose changing Senate rules to make it easier for Republicans to confirm President Bush's judicial nominees?"

Full disclosure: as a primetime cable news-banter junkie and having read her latest book, I have heard enough of Michelle Malkin to be mystified as to why, with all the true brilliance there is in this world, I have heard of Michelle Malkin at all. Now that that's out of the way - she goes on, bemoaning the fact that "[N]ot surprisingly, given the wording of the poll, a huge majority of respondents said they oppose the Republicans." Huh? 'Given the wording of the polling'? Try this on: 'Not surprisingly, a majority of respondents said that they are against changing Senate rules to make it easier for Republicans to confirm President Bush's judicial nominees.' It's pretty obvious that Malkin doesn't really believe her own speciously anti-bias line when you read the question she would rather have been asked: ""Do you support a minority of Democrats preventing Bush's judicial nominees from being voted on, when a majority of senators have indicated their support for those nominees?" Not only is this a completely different question touching on a completely different issue, the wording of this question vaults past 'bias', and verges on the Michael Moore-esque as compared to the one ABC put to its respondent pool. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Michelle Malkin has no ethical qualm with media bias, so long as it doesn't flatter liberals.

Conservatives and the Filibuster

2005-04-27T14:38:00.000-07:00

Now that the Republicans seem to be gaining at least some rhetorical meekness on the exercise of the nuclear option (under some duress from the opposition), I'll swear to the fact that I knew they would. Honestly. Not that is is of much political consequence -they'll certainly still lord this threat over the Democrats' heads (a huge political mistake in my view) - but now that they've recently sidelined some of the more zealous judicial sermonizing, I'll swear to the fact that I knew they would. Honestly. But Bill Frist has apparently dug in his heels at the front line of the cadre calling for a ban on filibustering judicial nominees. It doesn't need to be said that this makes their previous threat to ban gay marriage look like a minor estrangement from constitutionalism. Not that retaining the legacy of Jesse Helms should be a top priority for the party, but the March 29 memo circulated by Republican activist Jim Boulet, Jr. (thanks go to Gene Healy) observes the centrality of the filibuster to the conservative principle of legislating according to constitutional "strict construction", and paints a lucid picture of how dim the prospects for conservative policymaking would be without the filibuster option. One wonders in light of all this if Republicans will ever again esteem the principle of "standing athwart history, yelling 'stop.' " The Frist/DeLay leadership has of late grown increasingly adept at shooting itself in the foot politically, but few tenured Republicans in Congress could likely forget the potency of relatively recent filibuster threats in impeding Democratic flights of lawmaking fancy. To say that the Democrats' use for the filibuster in this debate is unconventional and unfair is a great understatement. But the designs of the Republican leadership can only further isolate the Congress from its constitutional mandate.The opportunity is dwindling for the zealots to heed the moderates.

Apology to...Me

2005-04-06T15:13:00.000-07:00

Second post and I'm already apologizing - but at one point prior to creating this blog I did promise myself I'd go at least a week without using the word "Orwellian." Sorry, Jon.

House WHAT Committee?

2005-04-06T14:11:00.000-07:00

Since this is my first blog post, I hesitate to rattle on about a subject to which so many pixels have been devoted - but what the heck. The recent study on academia's lefty ideologues is given good treatment today by blogger and the incomparable Reason magazine's assistant editor Julian Sanchez. The basic points made in the study range from the patently obvious to the highly implausible. As Julian notes, it seems very unlikely that, with all the ebb and flow that our political culture has undergone in the past 20 years, the ranks of professedly liberal academia would spike as much as the study claims. Taking Julian's point about the problem with trying to integrate mercurial political circumstances with relatively static ideological convictions, it strikes me that studies of this nature are not only biased toward error, but, if ideological neutrality in academia is chief among desired outcomes, are quite counterproductive. Among other pitfalls, such publicly-hailed studies threaten to tempt principled conservatives to fall for promoting the dubious notion of "viewpoint diversity." A very potent idea indeed - clicking on over to Glen Whitman's post yesterday on the same subject, the eye is caught by the name of a "legislative" organ with (dare I say it) a downright Orwellian ring to it: the House Choice and Innovation Committee. Now I suppose I'm willing to put my credibility on the line by saying that I can't recall ever hearing or reading the words "House Choice and Innovation Committee" before. In any case, it seems that congressional Republicans are completely averse to affirmative action methods which claim racial diversity as a compelling state interest, but ideological diversity - well, the government better get to work on that right away, since the US Congress clearly has a more sophisticated understanding of the intellectual poisons that threaten today's bright young minds than they or their parents do. Time to Innovate, apparently.