If I Had Infinite Hours in the Day: 20051227

If I had infinite hours in the day...

First, I hereby apologize to every left-winger whom I have spanked over the years for saying something like "you know the neoconservatives are really fascists." They really are fascists:

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/12/index.html#008734 Matthew Yglesias writes: "THE RULE OF LAW. Bill Kristol doesn't really care: 'Now, General Hayden is by all accounts a serious, experienced, nonpolitical military officer. You would think that a statement like this, by a man in his position, would at least slow down the glib assertions of politicians, op--ed writers, and journalists.... Was the president to ignore the evident fact that FISA's procedures and strictures were simply incompatible with dealing with the al Qaeda threat in an expeditious manner? Was the president to ignore the obvious incapacity of any court, operating under any intelligible legal standard, to judge surveillance decisions involving the sweeping of massive numbers of cell phones and emails by high--speed computers in order even to know where to focus resources? Was the president, in the wake of 9/11, and with the threat of imminent new attacks, really supposed to sit on his hands and gamble that Congress might figure out a way to fix FISA, if it could even be fixed? The questions answer themselves.' This is honestly just dumb. The story we're all talking about isn't a story about how, in September and October 2001, the president authorized some kind of illegal program on a temporary emergency basis before getting things sorted out. That would arguably be forgivable, depending on the details of the hypothetical. The story we're talking about is that today, on December 27, 2005, more than four years after 9/11, the president is still authorizing some sort of illegal, secret surveillance program. The administration has had ample time to make his case.... If the program is really so wonderful, there's every reason to assume Congress will approve it. If the White House really has no intention of abusing whatever it is they've implemented, then they have nothing to fear from the implementation of some oversight or safeguards..."

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/12/index.html#008736 Ezra Klein: "THAT'S...NOVEL. This argument, being rapidly replicated across the right but here coming from David Rivkin and Lee Casey, is very odd: 'Although the administration could have sought such warrants, it chose not to for good reasons. The procedures under the surveillance act are streamlined, but nevertheless involve a number of bureaucratic steps. Furthermore, the FISA court is not a rubber stamp and may well decline to issue warrants even when wartime necessity compels surveillance. More to the point, the surveillance act was designed for the intricate "spy versus spy" world of the cold war, where move and countermove could be counted in days and hours, rather than minutes and seconds. It was not drafted to deal with the collection of intelligence involving the enemy's military operations in wartime, when information must be put to immediate use.' Put another way, although the administration could've followed the law, it chose not to because the law is cumbersome and dusty. So, of course, is the Constitution (which was fully ratified in 1790, when they didn't even have e-mail!) and any number of largely uncontroversial statutes. The question here is whether the Bush administration is really prepared to brandish a theory of law that renders legislation optional when it requires procedural steps and was enacted 30 or more years prior..."

Next, I'd ask what the "Iraqi army" that we are training is going to do--besides fight itself:

http://www.mightymiddle.com/index.php?/archives/543-guid.html The Mighty Middle: "Peshmerga Don't Need No Stinkin' Training. Knight Ridder is the little engine that could on Iraq news. While the New York Times was getting it wrong on WMD, Knight-Ridder was getting it mostly right. But on this story, let's hope they're wrong: 'KIRKUK, Iraq - Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan. Five days of interviews with Kurdish leaders and troops in the region suggest that U.S. plans to bring unity to Iraq before withdrawing American troops by training and equipping a national army aren't gaining traction. Instead, some troops that are formally under U.S. and Iraqi national command are preparing to protect territory and ethnic and religious interests in the event of Iraq's fragmentation, which many of them think is inevitable.The soldiers said that while they wore Iraqi army uniforms they still considered themselves members of the Peshmerga - the Kurdish militia - and were awaiting orders from Kurdish leaders to break ranks. Many said they wouldn't hesitate to kill their Iraqi army comrades, especially Arabs, if a fight for an independent Kurdistan erupted. "It doesn't matter if we have to fight the Arabs in our own battalion," said Gabriel Mohammed, a Kurdish soldier in the Iraqi army who was escorting a Knight Ridder reporter through Kirkuk. "Kirkuk will be ours"...'"

And last, I would stand dumbstruck like a deer stuck in the headlights at the stupidity of Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell:

http://sideshow.me.uk/sdec05.htm#12271245 The Sideshow December 2005 Archive: "Deborah Howell is deep in the right-wing, to the point that any minute I expect to see her writing things like 'Democrat Party'. This week's article could only have been written by someone who is completely in thrall to the right-wing machine. Observe: 'Ann Scott Tyson, a respected military reporter just back from Iraq, wrote in a front-page story Nov. 4 that "newly released Pentagon demographic data show that the military is leaning heavily for recruits on economically depressed rural areas where youths' need for jobs may outweigh the risks of going to war." The story said that more than 44 percent of military recruits come from rural areas, most from the South and West. "Many . . . are financially strapped, with nearly half coming from lower-middle-class to poor households, according to new Pentagon data based on Zip codes and census estimates of mean household income."' Now, you'd think this one fell into the category of 'not even news'... But in winger-land, this kind of analysis sets all the alarm bells ringing, apparently. [Howell:] 'In looking at the story, I talked to Curt Gilroy, who, as director of accession policy for the secretary of defense, has oversight of all active-duty recruiting; Tim Kane, a Heritage researcher; Betty Maxfield, demographer of the Army; Bruce Orvis, director of the Manpower and Training Program at the Rand Corp.'s Arroyo Center, and Robert Brandewei, director of the Defense Manpower Data Center in Monterey, Calif.' We have noted before that Ms. Howell thinks that right-wing "think tanks" that make up excuses are equivalent to mainstream think tanks (original usage) that do actual research - and that she regards the latter as "liberal".... Howell doesn't tell us, by the way, why she felt the need to research this particular story... the facts presented in the article are pretty uncontroversial..."

Comments

[christofay]

Remember back in the "Contract w/America" days of the Philanderer Newt Gingrich standing on the capitol steps putting that important document in his breast pocket, one of the provisions was following and honoring the Constitution just as a dutiful wife should follow her husband.

Boy that 9/11 changed everything just as Dorothy's life changed when that tornado swooped down.

[ogmb]

Knight Ridder seemingly stopped feeding their news on RSS. At least I don't get them anymore on my.yahoo. I had to switch back to the moron boys from Reuters to counterweigh the AP feed.

[ivan]

Ehm, did you ever spanked a left-winger for calling the neoconservatives fascists?

[BroD]

Today's assignment: Make a convincing case for the Peshmerga to abandon its separatist inclinations. Any takers?

[BroD]

Regarding the Kurds, see
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/12/are-kurds-trying-to-influence-us.html

[bakho]

"Today's assignment: Make a convincing case for the Peshmerga to abandon its separatist inclinations. Any takers?"

It could bring war with the Turks. That might not be a good idea. Ask the Armenians.

[John Emerson]

I'm an effete liberal, but my niece and her husband fall into the category described. The husband retired with 20 years in, but he had a business failure and is thinking of returning.(He was born dirt poor to a migrant family, and the service was good for him.)

They have a one-year-old. The father's specialty is disabling explosive devices. It's been a family nightmare for two years now.

The centrists and hawks talk about Democrats being disconnected from the common people, but the hawk relationship to the commoners is extractive and exploitive. They will take as long as the people will give -- it's the same with the conservative Christians that Abramoff and Reed conned into working for the gambling interests.

[tom f]

I wonder if Kristol finds the Patriot Act to be a redundant codification of what the Executive already has the power to do, given the terrorist threat to the USA?

[anne]

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/12/26/staying_the_course?mode=PF

December 26, 2005

Staying the Course
By James Carroll - Boston Globe

AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE was proving itself inadequate to the challenge. The president appointed a special commission to make recommendations. The year was 1954. The commission chairman was James Doolittle, the retired bomber general who had led the first air raid against Tokyo.

''It is now clear," he stated in his report to President Eisenhower, ''that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, longstanding concepts of 'fair play' must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counter-espionage services, and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may be necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand, and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy."

Sound familiar? Again and again, in the year now ending, the American people have been told by their leaders that strategies based on a new ''repugnant philosophy" are required if the nation is to survive the challenge facing it. Forbidden incendiary weapons must be used in urban settings. Prisoners of war must be deprived of Geneva protections. Aggressive interrogations of enemies must approach torture. Commitments to provide US combat forces with adequate protective gear must be forsworn. Extrajudicial kidnapping of bad people must be justified. Allies must be pressured into joining secret networks of detention camps.

Human rights standards must be jettisoned. Traditional obligations to the United Nations must be ignored. Treaties that limit action can be cast aside. Distinctions between foreign and domestic espionage must be left behind, with US citizens subject to unmonitored surveillance by military agencies. Public libraries must be regarded as government peepholes. The lawyer-client privilege must no longer be regarded as sacrosanct. The press must be recruited into the project of information management. Dissent must be labeled as treason.

A great American erosion has occurred this year, and only now are the contours of what is lost becoming apparent. Much more is at stake than the abandonment of ''longstanding concepts of 'fair-play' " of which Doolittle wrote. To ''subvert, sabotage, and destroy" what threatens us, we have begun to subvert, sabotage, and destroy what protects us: the mutuality of solemn compacts abroad, fundamental safeguards of the Constitution at home....

[anne]

Then, if we have a war, an ongoing even forever war, against an enemy that knows no constitutional limits, does this mean we are forever through with Constitutional safeguards?

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/opinion/l24cheney.html

Security and Rights

To the Editor:

It's often said that a people get the government they deserve. President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Republicans in office are acting the way they are because the American people appear willing to trade fundamental rights for more security.

The governing party is not doing this at the barrel of a gun, rather by the force of ideas (that is, the politics of fear). But if the people do not wake up to the reality of their government's actions, they may lose both rights and security in the bargain.

S. Izaz Haque
Westford, Mass., Dec. 23, 2005

[Howard]

Anne, that is, of course, the logical implication of the bush approach, which is why this is such a severe constitutional crisis.

we have a president proudly and pugnaciously breaking the law in an attempt to contravene the 4th ammendment, and short of impeachment (which has no realistic chance of happening), there is nothing to make him stop.

[Ari]

The supposed war that's being fought is a self-imposed war. In fact, it really is not a war. We are not fighting a country or government but sporatic individuals and unconnected cells (groups). We do not need armies but police and good intelligance to safeguard us. There is no need to suspend constitutional freedoms any more than we do in this country to protect citizens from criminal activity. We should spend our time going after those responsible for 9/11, rather than invading other countries.

[anne]

"A self-imposed war," that is not really a war. This is what we are about, about needlessly and wastefully in the extreme of material and more importantly of life. This forever war that should be no war is what we are asked to give over decency and democracy for.

[anne]

John Murtha has offered us a way from war that would seem to answer every question of enabling the Iraqis to rebuild while regaining our sense of respect for law and security and peace. I do wish we might take such a way. This Christmas I was struck by how little mention there seemed to be of a wish for peace; but the wish is nonetheless there.

[hirvi]

Howard (or anyone):

"...impeachment (which has no realistic chance of happening)..."

Excuse my lack of knowledge, but how does impeachment happen?

Would it make a difference if the Democrats won the Senate next year?

[howard]

hirvi, as that famous constitutional scholar, gerald ford, once said, "high crimes and misdemeanors" (the basis for impeachment) "is whatever a majority of the house of representatives thinks it is."

Which answers your basic question: impeachment (which is the "indictment" of the process), must begin in the House, and as long as we've got the kind of gop control of the house that we currently have, impeachment will never get started.

even if the dems won the house in 2006, the odds are that: a.) not all dems think that impeachment is a good idea (i'm not a fan of doing it, it's simply the only way i can imagine making bush stop violating the law); b.) even if they did think it was a good idea, the notion that "it's already 2007 and next year is a presidential election year, so why bother" will rule out impeachment. (I realize that that didn't make any difference to tom delay in 1997, but then again, tom delay is a very sick human being.)

the composition of the senate would speak to whether there might be a conviction on the charges, but by itself is irrelevant to the question of impeachment.

[John Emerson]

I've thought for a long time that neither Iraq nor the terrorists are the main enemy.

Liberals are the main enemy. None of the rightwing shits seems terribly upset that the Taliban is reviving, or that the Shias will rule Iraq, or that Iraq is descending into chaos, or that Osama is still free.

But if we snark at them, they start talking about decapitation and the like.

[David Lloyd-Jones]

The usual objection: to call Bush and Company fascists is unfair to fascists.

[hirvi]

Howard, thanks.

So is it that the House decides an indictment, and the Senate decides a verdict?

[John Lopresti]

For impeachment to happen there would have to be some embarrassing finding. I think part of what pushed Nixon out of office related to the accumulation of many reported illegal ways of information gathering and the misguided over-stepping in how the information began to be used against people as individuals, and as groups, which would be protected by the Bill of Rights guarantees of privacy and dignity.
True enough, in modern Bush times pressure in new ways is exerted on both areas, with some new bent approaches, like putting pressure on news reporters and the parent news organizations to withhold news, or paying bribes to get the news told in cookie-cutter frameworks. Fortunately, the news processes are so amorphous now the underpinning story is revealed quickly.
I think this is what is producing the curiosity and worry now about the four-year long program to avoid a legal way to conduct secret wiretaps; it is almost a technicality in these times when we pretty much take for granted whatever we say on the telephone passes through a data-mining filter as surely as web-blog typing does.
In an ironic way some of the captioning in the leading article, above, fairly describes the efficiencies of totalitarian rule; it is nimble until its own factions get rigidly compartmentalized, and, in a sense, the compartments develop in parallel to the leadership, even serving as bureaus that keep the leaders in touch with their own effectiveness.
I, too, would like to hear more about civil peace as we turn to the new year. But I hear no understanding from the leadership concerning what we can do to reverse the processes of unilateralism and bellicose hositilities in which the US has engaged. The Bush administration's responses as a newly elected minority government in 2001 were a new form passive aggression, new on these shores, that is. In old Europe parliamentary systems minority governance is a given; the two-party system has survived in the US based on a legal construct and a very spirited people, who have had the wisdom to preserve this new context and prove it works as a form of nationhood and polity, even when frequently over the years it has seemed all too clearly to be in essence a one-party system when differences between the two parties are minimal.
The repressive and religious commentary are topics this post does not touch. There is freedom to be religious privately. There is no freedom to be repressive privately: the Bill of Rights serves as a safety net for people to redress harm caused by repression.
There is a lot more to this discussion, especially to put middle east foreign affairs in historical context
But in a way Bush got us in a pickle and relied on his most trusted advisors to extricate the US from that bind. Hopefully, their implementation of the prefabricated Iraq plan, and the Afghanistan adventurism, will yield the anticipated results.
Meanwhile, Congress already is drifting toward assessing how the wiretap policy extra-legal approach to prosecuting these two wars could have endured for four years. Now retired leaders of Congress, who received some secret briefings on the unusual tack the administration decided to take, have emerged in recent days in the news explaining how ineffective and actually incomplete the briefings were. Although the new Chief Justice of the United States, J. Roberts, Jr., has voiced deference to Congress as the hub of elected representatives of the US' citizens, the contention likely to appear during hearings and debate about how the president was permitted to go four years with a circumvention of congress to gather secret wiretaps certainly will test the mettle of CJ Roberts, if the matter is ever sent to the Supreme Court. One hopes that in addition to Roberts' making good on his promise, that similarly the next nominee to the Supreme Court will share a comparable measure of respect for letting Congress perform its checks-and-balances responsibilities during the assessment of whether anything is wrong with what the president did to preserve that secret datamining program for so many years in clear contravention of existing laws already inplace to handle exceptional needs such as 48-72-hour turnaround time guarantees for authorizing secret wiretaps.
Given congress' recent track-record in repairing other defects in administration policy, I hold forth only a minimal hope that the congress will do much new, and in fact, if what it has done recently is a fair guide, it is likely to take a skewed direction: look at how congress decided to handle the matters of Patriot, detainee habeas, and torture. The administration maintains all three of these policies must be immutable, and has declared it will veto the McCain torture provision in the law, although I would expect the administration to use this warning as a bargaining position, now that the wiretap policy has been reported; on the habeas matter congress arrived at what was a fairly repressive position supportive of the administration; and on Patriot congress gave the administration until February 2006 to re-state its arguments. Maybe the bartering which will be taking place behind the scenes is actually about Patriot, with the administration's best leverage being an offer to agree with the McCain policy on torture. Actually, I expect that in a subtle way, many of these negotiations are going to be discussed publicly but in carefully crafted terminology: during the nomination hearing for Alito in the Judiciary Committee in the senate beginning in the second week of January 2006. Surely, most of the hearing will be about Alito's own outlook and his personal agenda, the latter if some reports about his history prove to be true: he needs to be fair minded on the Supreme Court. What he did in the Appeals court had to follow Supreme Court precedent, though he found numerous crannies in which to insert some pretty regressive thoughts and opinions in his writings and other public pronouncements.
The entire matter of the administration's use of pressmembers to disclose a spy's identity is set for hearings in 2006 once more, as well, although the Republicans are attempting to keep some of the testimony secret, and the administration is refusing to produce documents, as usual for the Bush administration.
Then there is the matter of the civil rights division of the Department of Justice having a new rule dictated just last week banning writing reports that disagree with political appointee policymaking: this debacle came to be when the Washington Post leaked a 73-page civil rights study group from inside the DoJ unanimously agreeing that the TX redistrict engineered in 2003 by Tom DeLay was in violation of the 1-person, 1-vote precedent; and the Supreme Court on March 1, 2006 will allow argument in that case, although already the Court has set forth a kind of filter rule that will make off limits some topics, as the argument it has certified to entertain is a composite from seven separate TX cases. Both Roberts and Alito have voted against the TX redistrict case when serving on the appeals court, so, although there is a leak scandal involved, and a followup DoJ coverup policy to obliterate the information trail and keep further leaks from happening, the Supreme Court argument nevertheless should provide an interesting setting, given the administration's likely travails in the other contentious matters set to be in the news around the same time as the TX redistricting case: the spy outing hearing, the Alito hearing, the wiretap policy and avoidance of the existing FISA court by the administration
Looks to be an interesting year.

[JRossi]

Prof. Delong, Could you define fascist, as you use the term?

[Howard]

hirvi, exactly right: the house effectively "indicts" the president through "impeachment," the chief justice oversees the "trial" that takes place in the senate, and the senate then votes to convict or not.

Bill K, shouldn't you be spending your time with the other children in the playpen?

[jon livesey]

"Today's assignment: Make a convincing case for the Peshmerga to abandon its separatist inclinations. Any takers?"

Nope. As far as I can see, it is unlikely that there will be stability in the Middle East until national borders are redrawn along ethnic lines.

I recently read "Europe and Ethnicity, edited by Seamus Dunn and TG Fraser". The contributors make a case that Wilson's ideal of self-determination "worked" in the sense that it liberated a bunch of people from the Austro-Hungarian empire, but then it backfired and became the most potent cause of instablity in Central Europe by replacing one huge multi-ethnic empire with a bunch of small multi-ethnic states that quickly developed their own problems of internal instability and mixed loyalties.

I think we made the same mistake in breaking up the Ottoman Empire. We created multi-ethnic states, and divided ethnicities between states. Ultimately this has to be fixed. I hope it can be fixed peacefully, but I think it will be fixed whether we like the process or not.

Sooner or later we have to start asking the Turks, for example, why they need to hang on to a Kurdish minority that - judging from their behaviour - they dislike and persecute. What exactly is the point?

[tom f]

off topic:

Roger Noriega, formerly in the Bush II State Dept., just said on NPR's Talk of the Nation that the attempted coup against Chavez in Venezuela was Chavez's own doing after the military refused to follow orders to fire on Venezuelan citizens.

Two other guests, both introduced as experts on Latin America, failed to correct him.

[jon livesey]

"The supposed war that's being fought is a self-imposed war. In fact, it really is not a war"

I'm sorry, but this is just not true. Wars of terrorism are wars, and they have a rational strategy. Part of this strategy is to place a government in a vice, between the demands of ordinary people to be protected - at almost any price - and the demands of the constitutionally aware to see the rule of law applied.

The ugly fact is that you cannot protect your population effectively and still keep the "civics 101" constitution. Sooner or later there has to be a rational debate concerning which civil liberties you are willing to suspend in order to be safe.

Americans are still in denial about this. They could learn something from talking to British people who lived through the Northern Ireland emergency - and who, I may add, took a lot of abuse from the US press as they tried to resolve the conflict between rights and safety.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/09/international/africa/09letter.html?ex=1265691600&en=c9bfdca6b7b21df2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

February 9, 2005

Lands Carved for a Colonial Feast: What of the Borders?
By LYDIA POLGREEN

KHARTOUM, Sudan - It is a truism of Africa that the borders bequeathed by white colonial powers, drawn in the 19th-century scramble for Africa at the convenience of London, Paris and Brussels, became the black man's burden.

Like most truisms, this one holds a large measure of truth: the division of the spoils of African conquest created a continent of malformed states that cross ethnic, religious and tribal lines, an elaborate set of booby traps that have exploded into mayhem over the past 50 years.

The consensus seems to be that those borders have stuck because the alternative - a fractured map of Africa with thousands of tiny states, constantly at war - is even worse.

But that consensus view is being put to the test in Sudan. When the Arab-dominated Sudanese government signed a peace deal with the African and mostly Christian south, ending Africa's longest-running civil war, the agreement included a truly historic concession: If after six years southerners so wish, they may secede from the north by referendum, remaking the map of Africa essentially for the first time since the end of the colonial era.

But few people here really think that will happen, which raises a difficult question: why should breaking a country up - into two or three parts, not a thousand - be so hard to do, even when it seems to make so much sense?

With the long, bitter history between south and north, one that includes centuries of slavery, war and discrimination against African Christians by Arab Muslims, it is perhaps not surprising that many southern Sudanese say they have no plan to stick with the north.

"How can a people who have been subjugated by the north for so long accept unity?" asked Adam Cholong Ohiri, a professor at Juba University, a southern university in exile in Khartoum. "Many will conclude it is better to go our own way."

But many northerners, including the current government of Sudan, aware that a great portion of Sudan's oil is in the south, press for Africa's largest nation to stick together.

"Sudan must remain united," said Adam Mousa Madibo, vice chairman of the opposition Umma Party in Khartoum. "Sudan is at the heart of Africa, and if it split it would send shock waves across the continent."

Indeed, the breakup of Sudan, which is by no means assured, would set a significant precedent.

"This would be the first time there was a real colonial boundary that would be broken to form something entirely new," said Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, an anthropologist at Rhode Island College who has been studying Sudan for three decades, in an interview here....

[tom f]

jon livesly:

"The ugly fact is that you cannot protect your population effectively and still keep the 'civics 101' constitution"

I'm failing to understand your definition of fact.

[anne]

We may think national dissolution is inevitable or logical or desirable; dissolution may even be readily accomplished, yet dissolution seldom happens.

[anne]

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/12/26/staying_the_course?mode=PF

''It is now clear," [General James Doolittle] stated in his report to President Eisenhower, ''that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, longstanding concepts of 'fair play' must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counter-espionage services, and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may be necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand, and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy."

[anne]

James Doolittle wrote in 1954, but there have been other threats to America before and since and other advisers who have found the enemy forever implacable and a grave danger unless we are willing to become as the enemy. We have somehow almost always turned away from becoming as our enemies, we have kept to our principles, and support of these principles has in time proven a prime source of our strength. Are we to give over our principles for scattered bands of stateless thugs? This would seem to be madness.

[anne]

Fall 2003, a New York Times column spoke of the threat in Iraq in terms beyond those of James Doolittle, and told of the necessity and warned us to be prepared for fearsome action by American soldiers. A Yale professor wrote in turn to say that the column was in effect suggestion the commission of war crimes. Months later, we came to understand....

[tom f]

anne:

"We have somehow almost always turned away from becoming as our enemies, we have kept to our principles, and support of these principles has in time proven a prime source of our strength"

Yes, such high principles as those in Vietnam in the fifties.

What high principles at work in Indonesia and E. Timore.

What lofty values are attested to by the Vietan war memorial in Washinton D.C.

What generosity in our vision of democracy and rule of law is attested to by the corpses of Nicaraguans and El Salvadorans.

What a faithful pillar of Constitutional rectitude were Nixon, Reagan and Bush.

What trust in liberal principles engendered CoIntelPro.

USA! USA! USA!

How comfortable the thought the Bush represents a departure rather than a culmination.

[hirvi]

Howard, thankyou

[Randall]

Tom

The last statement that you are criticizing was fairly and properly expressed.

[anne]

Thank you, Howard :)

[hirvi]

Anne:

"We have somehow almost always turned away from becoming as our enemies, we have kept to our principles, and support of these principles has in time proven a prime source of our strength"

It does help to differentiate...

[tom f]

Randall,

I don't know about fair and proper. I'm interested in true.

Have we, politically, almost always held dear to our principles? Let's say our principle is the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of hapiness. Let's say our principle is the belief in national self-determination in governments of, by, and for the people of that nation. I cannot but conclude that the United States does not hold to these principles.

In what post-War era has the United States Government upheld the principles of human rights and democracy?

How do we decide whether such historical events as coup's against foreign democracies, attacks on civilians during wars of choice, or Executive subversion of the Constitution of the United States constitute minor exceptions to the observation of the aforementioned lofty principles, or whether such shameful episodes in our national history are so numerous and on-going as to constitue a seperate, more evident political principle?

[kharris]

One particularly illegitimate approach to debate is to define terms advantageously and then declaring victory.

Here, on one side we have the claim that a self-imposed war is not a war, and the response is nothing more substantive than "yes, it is." Ridiculous.

So, let's see. If it isn't war, then one set of policies is justified, but if not, another set of policies is justified, so once you know which set of policies you favor, you know whether to call it war or not. And that is how we are going to reach optimal policy decisions? I know, this is about winning, not about getting he right answer, but still, we could try harder to keep up appearances.

Then, we have argument by pure, unsupported assertion. "The ugly fact is that you cannot protect your population effectively and still keep the "civics 101" constitution."

Says...who..? I recall that Ben Franklin had rather different ideas. By the way, to the extent I understand these things, there is no "civics 101" constitution. All we have is the Constitution of the United States, which many of us think is the best justification of individual sacrifice on behalf of the nation. Absent the set of liberties established in that document, a collection of liberties unique in the world at their inception, what exactly is so special about this patch of land?

What makes for even more fun is the next line - "Sooner or later there has to be a rational debate concerning which civil liberties you are willing to suspend in order to be safe." This is just priceless, since the question assumes that half the debate is over. Jon's view that the constitution is just a nice thing we use to indoctrinate school children is already established. Now all we need to do is examine the menu of liberties that is our Constitution and decide which ones are too troublesome to protect and defend. A "rational debate" presupposes that we won't take the world according to Jon as our starting point. What is being offered is a rigged debate, rigged so Jon's preferred outcome is well on its way to being inevitable. No, thank you. I think I prefer a real debate. I think I prefer a real Constitution.

[Barry]

jon livesey:

"Bush Jr. is really nothing special, and a lot of the current outrage is what psychologists call projection."

The outrage by the right against Clinton was certainly projection; most of the defenses of Bush Jr are better called revisionism. To be polite.

"Ben Franklin was like Ghandi. He was dealing with the British. You aren't."

Ah, where to start....when Franklin was dealing with the British, they were operating a bit more in 'kill them all!' mode than they could get away with against Ghandi.

As to the present day USA, that's true - we're not dealing with the British. We're dealing in a situation where the main threat is screwing it up ourselves. Either by allowing corrupt factions within our country to take advantage of the crisis, or by helping out Al Qaida by sheer stupidity/corruption.

[tom f]

jon livesly:

"Bush Jr. is really nothing special, and a lot of the current outrage is what psychologists call projection."

Bush Jr.'s policies represent a culmination of hypocracy and cynicism; I, for one, wouldn't want to imply he was simply another modern American President, or "nothing special".

" Well, history is made up of facts, and one of those facts is that the real world has no obligation to preserve a consistency between threats and constitutional propriety."

I agree that the real world has no such obligation. But I don't accept the assertion that observance of the Constitution makes us more susceptible to terrorist attacks or that undermining civil liberties established therein offers protection. This was stated as fact. I hope you'll agree that it is rather a hypothesis.

I think this is what kharris is getting at when he alludes to a "rigged debate". You assume your premis as if it's self-evident.

[anne]

Ari:

"The supposed war that's being fought is a self-imposed war. In fact, it really is not a war. We are not fighting a country or government but sporatic individuals and unconnected cells (groups). We do not need armies but police and good intelligance to safeguard us. There is no need to suspend constitutional freedoms any more than we do in this country to protect citizens from criminal activity."

[Oskar Shapley]

Let's discuss this whole presidential constitutional prerogative a little bit.

Does Kristol believe that if the Congress did lower the budget for military operations so as to make them impossible, the President has the right to impose by executive order his own military budget because he sees it necessary to "protect the American people"?

How far does this Kristolian interpretation reach?

[tom f]

Me thinks its a purely functional interpretation. Whatever gets Bush through the night.

[nate]

Given infinite time, would you ever give any thought to the recent move in the stock price of United Airlines?

see graph at following URL if interested:

http://simurl.com/mamfiv

[John Lopresti]

ERRATA; ADDENDUM: re: my post, above, which begins For impeachment to happen Regarding my discussion of the challenges facing Bush policies and his circumventions of ordinary legal frameworks, I wrote, above "bribes". However, it is unproven that the payments were bribes; I understand Congress has announced hearings on the matter of paying media to publish administration-flattering news; until absolutely proven to be bribes, the payments should be assumed to have been all above board, part of the budget, like our radio stations have for decades, blasting signals through the jamming devices. In the administration's case, though, if memory serves, Fox was paid to air certain favorable stories; and other news organizations were involved. The story trailed off in the press when congress jumped onto it with an announced hearing, and the administration proffered some vague apology for its adventuristic spirit. There is redacted budget line-itemming as well, for standard propaganda and the like; but using budgeted expenditures to target domestic onshore US media is an innovation of the Bush world-outlook. Perhaps it is only an idiosyncratic trait of our political system that campaign expenditures are permitted if the message sponsor is named, although the name can be that of a fictitious entity. My post skips election law for the most part: my personal predilections are for lots of publicity, partisanship, debate, infusions of cash; the art is in keeping the reporting forthright and regulated; this is the end of this expansion on the "bribes" comment. We will let congress decide whether they assess that administration policy as over the line in our political system: taxpayer money to underwrite secret funding of campaigns to promulgate, for example, converting social security bookkeeping to a stockmarket investment account portfolio. That was one deserved loss of the administration early in 2005, right after their second term commenced; they should have recognized there, that the second term is going to be less autocratic. It is welcome that Time and the New York Times stepped forward boldly and denied the jawboning by Bush in the Oval Office, regarding his pleas to protract further their complicit suppression of the NSA eavesdrop program, now four years into its existence. It will be interesting to hear congress' view of when it would have become safe enough within our society for Bush to have come forth honestly to request a FISA-ish process so the eavesdrop would be assured of respecting civil rights. I think the administration was thinking fairly boldly all throughout the eavesdropping effort. Besides their seeming failure to recognize the importance of their policy defeat in their sham plan to redesign social security, they also seem to have disregarded the import of the patent futility of their nomination of Bolton to the UN. The moment Bush made the fallback recess-appointment of Bolton to the UN in a way that avoided letting the nomination face a guaranteed rejection in the Senate, Bush added fuel to the disillusion and dissent within his ranks. Of course, there is a natural reciprocity if as a second term commences and a lot of good people desert, people on the outside will recognize that even the group that has managed affairs four years throughout the first term has dissension with regard to the group's own perspective of what a second term portends. We are fortunate that in the State Department are a lot of career officials whose numbers far outbalance the eccentricity of policies likely to be enunciated in the UN by a nominee whom the Senate intended to reject. This in a way is part of the reason cloture served that upper chamber so well for most of the XX century. Let's hope Reid and associates are safeguarding that process for future congresses and a final stroke of Fristian-Cheneyesque disrespect will fail miserably if cloture ever again becomes target. Actually, I suspect it will be another fierce confrontation, launched by Republicans if only for the effect of its histrionic overtones, to obfuscate the vacuity of the arguments by the party which would do away with the cloture rule.