Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong

Todd Gitlin Reports on Meet the Press

Todd Gitlin says that Meet the Press is vastly improved now that Tom Brokaw has replaced Tim Russert as its moderator:

CJR: Sunday Watch 7-20-08: Imagine! Almost an entire installment of Meet the Press devoted to an interview with a private citizen who is not running for office—who receives the attention not only because he is famous but because he…knows something... Al Gore...

Tom Brokaw sat still for this rampant seriousness. He did not force Gore to debate a crackpot from cloud-cuckoo-land who is still waiting for the evidence to arrive about human sources of radical climate change....

Brokaw broached a doubt: cost. “Let’s talk about the cost.”... The cost question is legitimate, as is the question of how those costs will be paid. Brokaw rightly inquired.... Brokaw could have nitpicked around the edges. To his credit, he didn’t. So, for a change, we got a TV talk show for grown-ups, where a burning issue of our time was discussed without a single gotcha moment, a single accusation of flip-flopping, a single objection from a representative of the Flat Earth Society. Hallelujah.

Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki's Endorsement of Obama's Withdrawal Plan

Ilan Goldenberg writes:

It's Over: Not much to say here.  Other than the fact that this is a huge huge huge deal.  Article speaks for itself.

In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible. "U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes"

And

Asked if he supported Obama's ideas more than those of John McCain, Republican presidential hopeful, Maliki said he did not want to recommend who people should vote for. "Whoever is thinking about the shorter term is closer to reality. Artificially extending the stay of U.S. troops would cause problems."

And

"The Americans have found it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit because it seems like an admission of defeat to them. But it isn't," Maliki told Der Spiegel.

Is there anything left to say?

Yes, there is. Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now.

Spencer Ackerman on Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki's Endorsement of Obama's Iraq Withdrawal Plan

Ackerman is shrill:

ATTACKERMAN » Fight War, Not Wars: Last fall was really the high-water mark for the surge in terms of public opinion.... [P]olling data -- too lazy to Google that now -- never actually reflected a shift in favor of the war again, but the surge did a good-enough convincing elite opinion to consider the surge a success outside the context of the larger war. Nevertheless, the electoral picture still clearly favored a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, both of whom would be elected on a platform of ending the war if they were to be elected at all. Bush's answer was to declare that he and Maliki had agreed on an enduring U.S. troop presence.... The surge had worked so well, in other words, that its just reward was the ownership of Iraq....

That was only the first phase of White House overreach. Immediately, the administration announced that it would not submit its long-term occupation deal to Senate approval nor Congressional oversight.... In order to serve the legal fiction that the permanent-occupation deal wasn't a treaty -- which the Senate must approve -- the administration said that "friendship and cooperation" meant that the U.S. wouldn't even come to the defense of the Iraqi government if attacked (too treaty-esque), which didn't exactly sit well with the members of that government. Even before negotiations began in earnest, the Bush administration succeeded in offending Congress and the Iraqi government.

When those negotiations began, the U.S. reportedly presented the Iraqis with terms so breathtaking that they'd embarrass Lord Curzon. Bush wanted unilateral control of Iraqi airspace; legal immunity for all U.S. troops and contractors; the unilateral right to arrest and detain any Iraqis his commanders desired, and for unspecified periods; and several military bases. When Maliki indicated discomfort over acting like Gaius Baltar on Occupied New Caprica, Bush gave another indication of his "friendship and cooperation" -- blackmail.

All this came in a political context that Bush was either unattentive to or dismissive of. Despite spotty media coverage in the U.S., the deal prompted a massive backlash in Iraq, where basically every organized political force not part of Maliki's government rejected it.... Maliki has read the tea leaves and evidently realized what the rest of us considered obvious: that the only one demanding that he turn Iraq to permanent foreign domination is a president thoroughly discredited in his own country who'll be out of office in a few months....

And so Maliki flip-flopped.... He has forced George Bush to accept what Bush and McCain has said for years would lead to doom, ruin, humiliation, catastrophe -- a euphemistic "time horizon" for withdrawal.... [O]nce again Bush's attempt at denying reality only creates a trap for McCain. If McCain embraces the time-horizons, he shatters his own previous argument that such a thing will bring national ruin and indicates a certain moral and strategic turpitude on the part of its advocates. His only solution is to magically pretend that Bush's move isn't politically motivated and hope no one laughs at him. But now... Reuters reports that Maliki has embraced Obama's 16-month withdrawal plan.

The Iraq war is and has always been... a filthy lie born of avarice and lust for power masquerading as virtue.... [N]ow [Bush] is impotent, unable to impose his will, and the nakedness of his attempted imposition has led the American and the Iraqi peoples to wake up and end his nightmare. May his war-crimes prosecutor be Iraqi; may his judge be American; and may he die in the Hague.

Why Deficit Hawks Shouldn't Vote for Republicans

"He talks a good game in private. He always talked a good game in private," said one of my lunch companions a few weeks ago. "But then [Senator Pete] Domenici would vote the Republican Party line on the budget every time. His deficit hawkishness is just to make me and people like me feel good."

EconomistMom explains why the only real deficit hawks left are in the Democratic Party. I don't know what to call these Republicans: Deficit doves? Deficit chickenhawks? Deficit chickens?

EconomistMom.com: According to this new policy paper on the Senate Republican Policy Committee’s website, the reason (or rather the latest reason) the Senate Republicans have refused to pay for tax cuts a la the PAYGO rules is not “just because,” and not because they don’t believe in fiscal responsibility, but because PAYGO isn’t fair to tax cuts. 

Apparently they buy into the line of argument made on the Tax Policy Center’s TaxVox blog by Rudy Penner.... There’s so much to point out that’s wrong in this piece that I don’t know where to begin.... [W]hat I really want to scream about is their last couple paragraphs in the executive summary, where they first chastise Democratic lawmakers for not complying with PAYGO “again and again” (gee, why was that?…) and then scold those same lawmakers for complying with PAYGO with increased taxes (aha, there’s the real problem…).

And then the last paragraph in the summary refers to lawmakers using PAYGO as just a “mask of fiscal responsibility.”  Mask?  That would mean a facade–something used to hide one’s true character, as if those members of Congress who have been insisting on PAYGO (such as the Blue Dogs) are actually engaged in some grand deception, fooling the American public into liking them for their popular(?) positions on raising taxes and restraining spending, when all they really want to do is increase the deficit.  Wow.  Really?

I like to think of PAYGO as a “fig leaf” rather than a “mask.”  It seems that it’s the only shred of anything to cover our vulnerable fiscal parts, the only little thing that’s keeping the fiscal situation from getting even more obscene.

Rules of War

John Ashcroft says that it was perfectly OK for the ChiComs to use the water torture on American servicemen captured in Korea:

Waterboarding ‘Consistently’ Seen As Legal: During a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee today, former Attorney General John Ashcroft falsely claimed that waterboarding has “consistently” been defined as “not torture” and refused to agree that the use of enhanced interrogation techniques — including waterboarding — on captured U.S. soldiers is “unacceptable” or “criminal.”

REP. MAXINE WATERS: Do you think that if these techniques were used on American soldiers that they would be totally unacceptable and even criminal?...

ASHCROFT: My job, as Attorney General, was to try and elicit from the experts and the best people in the Department definitions that comported with the statues enacted by the Congress and the Constitution of the United States. And those statutes have consistently been interpreted so as to say, by the definitions that, waterboarding, as described in the CIA’s request, is not torture....

Impeach John Ashcroft. Impeach Richard Cheney. Impeach George W. Bush. Do it now.

What All Schoolchildren Learn/Those to Whom Evil Is Done/Do Evil in Return

Both the Israeli and the Palestinian governments have very bloody hands.

But there is a special circle of hell reserved for those who gleefully boast of their bloody hands--like Mahmoud Abbas today.

Dan Nexon:

The Duck of Minerva: That's just sick, or "we haven't had a good Israel-Palestine flamewar here yet... let's hope I don't start one": I don't post a great deal on Israel-Palestine issues. I basically want to see a peace deal that involves an equitable variant of the two-state solution and that empowers moderates on both sides. I don't have much sympathy for those who want to paint the conflict in black-and-white terms, and I get sick of the way that advocates of one side or the other spotlight the various infractions of their opponents.

But f*ck it, this is just sick:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is currently visiting Malta, welcomed the prisoner exchange and sent his greetings to Kuntar upon his release from Israeli prison. Abbas's Fatah party organized a rally in Ramallah.... "This is an historic victory over Israeli arrogance," said Ahmed Abdel Rahman, a top Fatah official and advisor to Abbas. He described Kuntar as a "big struggler."...

To understand what's wrong with this picture, read this....

The Israeli government should never have agreed to this swap. No matter what the Jewish religion holds about the remains of its adherents, they've taken another step towards... demonstrating that violence is the best way to extract concessions from them...

Why We Need a Different Opposition Party to Compete with the Democrats (Miscellaneous)

Matthew Yglesias writes about Reihan Salaam and Ross Douthat's Grand New Party:

Matthew Yglesias: The Trouble With Sam's Club: [T]he big flaw with Grand New Party... is that its analysis of why the GOP is the way it is.... The book is very good on the nature of the GOP's predicament and on possible ways out of the predicament, but it seems to view the "how did we get here?" issue as... [bad] luck -- Bush wasn't very bright or something.

I think that's wrong. And importantly wrong.... Republicans [do not] literally only care about their super-rich financial backers. But... other impulses Republicans might have are ultimately undermined by the stranglehold that the tax cut jihad holds over the party. At the end of the day, a political party whose politicians all need to portray themselves as "tax cutters" is going to be very limited in its ability to do anything constructive....

[T]he models Ross & Reihan point to... book were governors or mayors during the 1990s who, thanks to the robust economy, were able to cut taxes while also spending non-trivial amounts of new money on programs.... Republicans aren't congenitally incapable... [but] in order to do useful domestic policy stuff... they would need to be freed from the iron grip of tax cut mania.

How hard would it be to do this? I don't know.... John McCain's primary defeat in 2000 and his primary win in 2008 appears to confirm the idea that the GOP is first and foremost a tax cutting party.... [W]hile Grand New Party is... implicitly critical of the "tax cuts ueber alles" forces, its authors seem to believe that those forces are sufficiently powerful that they shouldn't be taken on... head-on...

As I see it, back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s the spinmasters for Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan rooted the Republican Party in three beliefs:

1. the government is not on your side--the government is on the side of the Negroes
2. tax cuts always raise revenues
3. the people outside our borders (and the people inside our borders who came from outside our borders) are not our friends

The ramifications of these beliefs have poisoned the entire party. They are the reason that smart well-intentioned Republicans--like George H.W. Bush--turned out to be mediocre presidents; that not-smart but well-intentioned Republicans--like Ronald Reagan (who with the help of his wife and her astrologer partially escaped #3)--turned out to be lousy presidents; and Republicans who were neither smart nor well-meaning--like George W. Bush--has turned out to be either the worst or the second-worst president in American history (depending on what you think of James Buchanan).

The problems are thus deeper than Matt thinks. He sees #2 as the big problem--and sees it as the insurmountable obstacle to making the Republican Party a source of strength rather than weakness and corruption for America. But as I see it, it's only one of three big insurmountable obstacles.

Hence my belief that it would be better to dear the thing down and start again from scratch. Retire the Republican Party, give it an honorable place in American history for its long, successful run from Fremont to Eisenhower. And pass over what has happened since in silence.

McCain: Phil Gramm and Fred Malek

McCain Throws Phil Gramm Off the Train/Under the Bus/Over the Side:

Think Progress: Holtz-Eakin: Phil Gramm Is No Longer ‘Giving Advice To Senator McCain’» Since Thursday, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) presidential campaign has been in damage control mode, attempting to distance itself from top economic adviser Phil Gramm’s belief that America is “a nation of whiners” that is only going through a “mental recession.” “Sen. Graham and I, as I said, we have a total disagreement on whether Americans are whiners or not,” McCain told reporters yesterday.

Appearing on PBS’s Nightly Business Report last night, McCain’s senior policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, claimed that because of the comments, Gramm would no longer be giving McCain advice:

GERSH: Is Senator Gramm still giving advice to Senator McCain?

HOLTZ-EAKIN: No.

GERSH: No.

HOLTZ-EAKIN: At — I haven’t spoken to Senator Gramm since the comments took place, and I’m not expecting to...

But the Infamous Dog-Roasting Jew-Counter Fred Malek Is Still in the Boat/on the Bus/Riding the Caboose:

Follow the Malek - Paul Krugman: It’s just a glancing mention in this Times piece on how Fannie Mae won friends and influenced people:

Fannie’s board once included Frederic V. Malek, a longtime friend of the Bush family and a former business partner of the current President Bush.

There’s a bit more to who Malek is:

• He was Nixon’s Jew-counter: he counted Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics at his boss’s behest — you see, Nixon believed that a “Jewish cabal” was distorting the economic statistics to make him look bad.
• He was the deputy chairman of the RNC during the elder George Bush’s presidential run in 1988, but resigned when the Jew-counting story came out.
• A year later, he helped the younger Bush purchase of the Texas Rangers — a supreme case of crony capitalism.
• And now he’s John McCain’s finance co-chairman.

Phil Gramm would probably make a better Treasury Secretary than any Republican we have seen since George Shultz (the jury is still out on Hank Paulson).

Fred Malek has no qualifications whatsoever, save for total sycophancy and a lack of any moral sense whatsoever.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Writes About the Burden His Parents Carried

Lynell George:

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes of father Paul in 'Beautiful Struggle': Black Pride and Black Arts and Black Awareness provided the atmosphere in which Paul Coates -- Vietnam veteran, ex-Black Panther, autodidact and soon-to-be book publisher -- had begun to raise his young family. But... [e]ven Coates' young son Ta-Nehisi... was able to discern discrepancies... that he didn't quite have language for.

If the newspapers Dad left around the house were true, the greater world was obsessed over Challenger and the S&L scandal. But we were another country, fraying at our seams. . . . The statistics were dire and oft recited -- 1 in 21 killed by 1 in 21, more of us in jail than college," writes the younger Coates in his new memoir, "The Beautiful Struggle."

There were those, like Paul Coates and Ta-Nehisi's mother, Cheryl Waters (to whom the book is dedicated), who remained steady at the task, raising their sons (Ta-Nehisi and Menelik), fortifying the foundation, buttressing the support beams of the soul, as America's inner cities seemed to collapse from within. They were at ground zero of gang warfare, wrong-place-wrong-time street violence, the escalating crack cocaine epidemic. The most vulnerable and visible target: young black men.

For Ta-Nehisi Coates, now 32, the book was a way to sketch not just time and place but an intricate support system that came into being, the other side of the story -- intact families, men who got up and went to work, young men who stayed away from drugs, black girls who didn't get pregnant, black kids who devoured books.

"Too often people tell our stories," Coates said on a recent Wednesday morning over breakfast.... "I can remember being in college being so frustrated [with the media]: 'Where is the other side?' " Ta-Nehisi Coates said. "I really wanted the full humanity of black folks to come across. That's one of the things we don't get." And so Coates set out himself to slip behind those late 1980s and early 1990s headlines, the statistics about "endangered" young black men. "A cottage industry sprung up to consider our fate," Coates writes. "At conferences, black boys were assembled. At schools we were herded into auditoriums. At home mothers summoned us to dinner tables and there they delivered the news: Our time was short."

Coates' book is many things: a tribute to his demanding, disciplinarian father... as well as an homage to the complexities of the communities that he grew up in -- in and around Baltimore as well as the metaphoric idea of "black community" itself.... The result: a lyric, hip-hop epic that meticulously evokes the period through its textures and its talismans -- headlines, break beats, back-in-the-day vernacular....

[F]ather and son did not have an easy relationship, but it wasn't without love. His father was a big man with outsize dreams for his son. He had a complicated life -- seven children from four wives -- yet he was always on the scene. Not just in name but as a constant force of accountability in young Ta-Nehisi's life.

That "beautiful struggle" is Ta-Nehisi's journey toward "consciousness," of finding his "deeper self" or "knowledge of self" in a country that had been, from slavery to Jim Crow segregation, bent on negating African Americans' sense of personhood. This "groping for manhood in the dark" was eased some by his father's basement store of literature, which grew to overtake the house, by this man who resuscitated old books by black scholars, historians, thinkers, long out of print. These books would become the backbone of his Black Classic Press....

The concern was about putting not just the discipline, but all of it, in context. "As a father, I wanted to do a job that stood the test of time," Paul Coates later reflected from his home in Baltimore, the city Ta-Nehisi grew up in. "I share the worry of most black fathers and black mothers. I wanted him to grow to manhood, and I didn't want him to end up in jail. I wanted him, and all my children, to make a contribution to their community. I wanted him to be able to stand up as a man. And whatever comes at him, to take it on."...

Now father to his own 8-year-old son, Ta-Nehisi is bent on telling stories that will broaden the view. Contemplating the future, he's still studying the past: "What I came to understand from looking at my dad was the importance of consistency and pressure. It's constant expectation. That should never flag. That should never go away."

Los Angeles Times Death Spiral Watch

From the shrill John Scalzi:

Whatever » Goldberg and Bainbridge: A Compare and Contrast: Folks have been asking me in e-mail if I had any thought about Jonah Goldberg’s recent assertion in the LA Times that Barack Obama’s proposed requirement of public service for teens and college students is not unlike slavery. The answer: No, not really; once the man declared that Mussolini was really a Socialist all his life, despite ample historical evidence to the contrary (Mussolini leaving Italy’s Socialist party, founding the Fascist party as an explicit right-wing refutation of Socialism, ordering the murders of prominent Socialists and then bascially daring anyone to do something about it on the floor of the Italian parliament) I recognized that Jonah Goldberg is kind of like the conservative movement’s special younger brother, the one that drank a pint of lead-based paint at age six, utters sentences where the verbs and nouns don’t quite match up, and gets moody and throws things when you gently try to explain that actually, no, goats did not land on the moon in 1983. In this context, of course Jonah Goldberg would suggest youth public service contributes to a “slave mentality.” It would be surprising if he hadn’t, frankly. It doesn’t mean such an attention-seeking comment merits serious consideration on my part.

(No doubt Mr. Goldberg’s rejoinder to this would be to point out that the book in which he gets lots about fascism wrong has racked up some lovely sales numbers; the obvious rejoinder to this is: well, you know. At this point on its downslope into minority, the conservative movement has a lot of special younger brothers.)

That said, while I don’t want to have to unpack Goldberg’s nonsensery, I would commend to you Stephen Bainbridge’s take on Goldberg’s column, as an example of someone who is a conservative with libertarian leanings, has serious reservations about Obama’s plan, and, heck, even hauls out the “S” word, yet does not descend into paint-quaffing madness. Aside from the quality of Professor Bainbridge’s comments, it’s worth noting the small irony that Goldberg’s platform for his gouting silliness is a newspaper, while Bainbridge’s rather more sensible discussion is hosted on a blog, and yet it’s the electronic medium that gets hammered for hosting bloviating ninnies. Funny about that.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Ezra Klein on the Disloyalty of the Clinton Staffers

Ezra:

Ezra Klein | The American Prospect: Yesterday, Howard Wolfson started as a Fox News political analyst, where he'll join Lanny Davis. Today, Mark Penn announced he's going to “create a bipartisan consulting organization to advise corporations in crisis.” His first hire? Former Bush administration PR flack Karen Hughes.

The most powerful case against Clinton's candidacy was always her political advisers. They were, and are, the sort who sign up with Fox News, and enter into business partnerships with Karen Hughes. And they do all that while they're still associated with Clinton, and when their services might still be needed in the near future.

Clinton's domestic policy instincts often seemed better than Obama's, but her political instincts, as evidenced by the folks she gathered around her, were far worse. It was hard to believe anyone who's internal compass pointed progressive would nevertheless spend millions of dollars asking Mark Penn for advice. The answer, from Clinton supporters, was always that it was about loyalty. These folks had been in the foxhole with Clinton, and she trusted them.

But there's nothing loyal about Penn's decision to partner with Hughes, or Wolfson's decision to rush to Fox -- these moves hurt Clinton. They make her a less likely choice for vice president and ensure there will be yet more ammunition against her if she ends up running in 2012. Similarly, there was nothing loyal about Mark Penn continuing to run his unionbusting PR firm Burson-Marsteller while serving as chief strategist for her campaign. Even Karl Rove had to give up his other jobs before becoming Bush's Svengali.

The political professionals clustered around the Clintons have acted like self-interested operatives, not altruistic loyalists. Their presence has hurt Clinton, their conflicts of interest have hurt Clinton, and their professional decisions and public statements have emphasized all of her political weaknesses and all of the base's fears about her campaign. Frankly, she deserved better.

The performance of Penn, Ickes, Wolfson, and company in February--happily dishing dirt, blaming the others for the failure to wrap up the nomination on Super Tuesday, in the hope of getting brownie points with reporters--was the most staggering and astonishing act of political disloyalty I have yet seen...

Jed Lewison on Why America Cannot Afford to Elect John McCain

My line used to be that John McCain was the best possible Republican candidate--he was, after all, the only one not enthusiastically in favor of torture. But Jed Lewison has now convinced me that McCain is worse than I could previously have imagined. How has he done this. By firing up the Wayback Machine and taking us back to 2002 to listen to John McCain on the virtues of preemptive wars:

McCain's chilling defense of preemptive war against Iraq - The Jed Report: If you're like me, it can be hard to get fired up about something John McCain says, but earlier this evening I spent twenty-something minutes watching John McCain's October, 2002 Senate floor speech in favor of launching a preemptive war against Iraq. It was chilling... his foreign policy judgment is both terrifying and dangerous.... [I]t's impossible to... [avoid] the conclusion that he is a trigger-happy war monger....

What stunned me most was that oil played a crucial role in McCain's rationale. Speaking of Saddam Hussein, he said: "his ambitions lie not in Baghdad, or Tikrit, or Basra, but in the deserts of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia." Explaining the reluctance of other powers to support the war, McCain said that Saddam had dangled "the prospect of oil contracts for friendly foreign powers." Finally, McCain said, "We contemplate military action to end his rule because allowing him to remain in power, with the resources at his disposal, would intolerably and inevitably risk American interests in a region of the world where threats to those interests affect the whole world."

Here are key quotations....

It is a question of...whether our morality and security give us cause to fire the first shot in this battle...

[Saddam Hussein's] ambitions lie not in Baghdad, or Tikrit, or Basra, but in the deserts of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia...

[Saddam Hussein] is using opponents of war in America, including well-intentioned individuals who honestly believe inspections represent an alternative to war, to advance his own ends, sowing divisions within our ranks that encourage reasonable people to believe he may be sincere...

The burden is not on America to justify going to war. The burden is Saddam Hussein's, to justify why his regime should continue to exist as long as its continuing existence threatens the world. Giving peace a chance only gives Saddam Hussein more time to prepare for war - on his terms, at a time of his choosing, in pursuit of ambitions that will only grow...

It's a safe assumption that Iraqis will be grateful to whoever is responsible for securing their freedom. Perhaps that is what truly concerns some of our Gulf War allies: that among the consequences of regime change in Iraq might be a stronger demand for self-determination from their own people...

We contemplate military action to end his rule because allowing him to remain in power, with the resources at his disposal, would intolerably and inevitably risk American interests in a region of the world where threats to those interests affect the whole world...

Failure to end the danger posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq makes it more likely that the interaction we believe to have occurred between members of al Qaeda and Saddam's regime may increasingly take the form of active cooperation to target the United States...

By voting to give the President the authority to wage war, we assume and share his responsibility.... We have a choice. The men and women who wear the uniform... and... might lose their lives in service... do not. They will do their duty, as we see fit to define it for them...

Ross Douthat Says That He Is Not Now Nor Has He Ever Been a Jesse Helmsian

But we liberal webloggers want more! We will not let Douthat evade the key question: What, exactly, is Ross Douthat's position on "To His Coy Mistress" and "A Horatian Ode Upon Oliver Cromwell's Return from Ireland"?

We will not be denied.

We do, however, wish Ross luck as he tries to construct a decent non-Helmsian anti-Limbaughian right in America:

Ross Douthat: The Case of Jesse Helms: The liberal blogosphere wants to know: Why have conservatives lined up to say kind things about the late Jesse Helms?... [L]argely because Helms was an sometimes-effective, always-steadfast champion of conservative causes for decades, and there's a sense on the right that the liberal case against Helms-the-awful-bigot is really just the latest manifestation of the long-running liberal attempt to argue that... "the essence of conservatism is and always has been Dixiecrat-ism ... [and] that everything that conservatism has accomplished and stood for since 1965--Reagan, the tax revolt, law-and-order, deregulation, the fight against affirmative action, the critique of the welfare state...everything--is the poisoned fruit of the poisoned tree."

Regular readers will know that I... [am] sensitive to the way that liberals cry "racism!" in an effort to disarm conservative arguments.... I should note that I'm not convinced that Helms' famous "white hands" ad merits the sort of outraged denunciations that Andrew and Max Boot have offered up today....

But a specific ad is one thing; Helms himself is another. He simply was an awful bigot, and worse he was an awful bigot who never expressed a shred of remorse, so far as I know, for his toxic approach to issues ranging from civil rights to HIV to foreign affairs. Far from being the sort of politicians who conservatives ought to defend, out of a sense of issue-by-issue solidarity, he's the sort of politician conservatives ought to carefully distance themselves from, because his political style brought (and continues to bring) intellectual disrepute to almost every cause with which he was associated. Inherent to conservatism is the responsibility to stand up and say to bien-pensant opinion: Just because a bigot opposes something doesn't mean it's a good idea. But the necessity (and difficulty) of making that case, whether the issue is affirmative action or "comprehensive" immigration reform or the NEA and Piss Christ, is all the more reason for conservatives to keep their distance from actual bigots, even (or especially) when they're representing the great state of North Carolina in the U.S. Senate....

I'm happy to defend Helms' views on a variety of issues, but the man himself has no business in the right-wing pantheon, and the conservatives who have used his death as an occasion to argue that he does are doing their movement a grave disservice.

Ezra Klein on the New York Times on Rush Limbaugh

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Yet another edition in the New York Times death spiral watch.

The ethics-free New York Times reporter who should be fired is Zev Chafets. The ethics-free editor of the New York Times Magazine who should be fired is Gerald Marzorat. The Deputy Managing Editor who should be fired is Jonathan Landman. The Managing Editors who should be fired are Jill Abramson and John Geddes. The Executive Editor who should be fired is Bill Keller.

Outsourced to Ezra Klein:

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect: If you happened to be unaware that there's a guy named Rush Limbaugh who hosts a popular program on AM radio, then this New York Times's profile will be an incredibly illuminating read. But if you happen to be aware of that guy already, and are wondering about the implications of the most popular radio host in America being a global warming denialist and self-described "defender of corporate America," then the piece stands as an extraordinary act of editorial cowardice.

The profile reads a bit like Gadsby, the famed novel written entirely without the letter "e." Here, the Times appears to have challenged itself to write 8,000 words on Limbaugh without saying anything that could be even remotely interpreted as critical.... [T]hey wrote a puff piece. See? Liberals can be fair and balanced too!

But deep within the article are glimmers of a more interesting profile about Limbaugh and the state of contemporary conservatism. Limbaugh -- and Karl Rove, and Jay Nordlinger, and a host of others -- believe Limbaugh to be the intellectual soul of contemporary conservatism. Liberals learn about conservatism from David Brooks, but conservatives learn conservatism from Rush. And we're talking two entirely different conservatisms. Here, for instance, is what Limbaugh describes as his presidential platform:

1. Open the continental shelf to drilling. Ditto the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
2. Establish a 17 percent flat tax.
3. Privatize Social Security.
4. Give parents school vouchers to break the monopoly of public education.
5. Revoke Jimmy Carter’s passport while he is out of the country.
6. Abandon all government policies based on the hoax of man-made global warming.

If liberalish conservative intellectuals seek a Sam's Club Conservatism, then #2 and #3 are the more traditional variant: Mercedes conservatism. #4 is a bad public policy idea, but it is a public policy idea. But #1 #5, and #6... [a] bankrupt movement: They're pure resentment politics mixed with a toxic distaste for empiricism. The stereotypical liberal loves the environment, so Limbaugh will drill up the shelf, a policy that won't do much to increase the oil supply, but will presumably piss off Al Gore. And you know what will really piss off Al Gore? Doing nothing about global warming. Denying its very existence. Oh, and for good measure, screw Jimmy Carter.

So what does this mean for conservatism? Who cares!? The point of this piece was to leave Limbaugh relatively happy once it was published. In that, the Times succeeded. But Limbaugh fits into an interesting and long-running tension in the conservative movement: Where is its soul? Was it Jesse Helms, a stone-cold racist and bigot? Liberals, in good faith, sort of assumed Helms a marginal figure, and have been informed, in recent days, that he was in fact a key figure. Were Limbaugh to drop dead tomorrow, the obituaries would no doubt extol him as a leading conservative thinker and actor. What does that say about conservatism?

Hilzoy Speaks Ill of the Living

She speaks ill of all those conservatives who praise Jesse Helms, that is:

I haven't written anything about Jesse Helms' death, since I don't like speaking ill of the dead. However: every so often, conservatives wonder: why oh why do people think that the Republican party, and/or the conservative movement, is bigoted? I think that the conservative response to Helms' death ought to settle that debate once and for all.

More below the fold. Note that I have largely restricted myself to conservatives' own words (and not random bloggers, but people and magazines with some standing in conservative circles), and to Helms' words and actions.

For my part, I'll just echo Matt:

"Conservatives are taking a line that I might have regarded as an unfair smear just a week ago, and saying that Helms is a brilliant exemplar of the American conservative movement.

And if that's what the Heritage Foundation and National Review and the other key pillars of American conservatism want me to believe, then I'm happy to believe it. But it reflects just absolutely horribly on them and their movement that this is how they want to be seen -- as best exemplified by bigotry, lunatic notions about foreign policy, and tobacco subsidies."

And Ezra:

"Some of my conservative friends often complain about the difficulty of constructing a "usable history" out of the movement's recent past, and I sympathize with their plight. When leading exemplars of your political tradition were trying to preserve segregation less than four decades ago, it's a bit hard to argue that your party, which is now electorally based in the American South, is really rooted in a cautious empiricism and an acute concern for the deadweight losses associated with taxation. That project would really benefit, however, if more of them would step forward and say that Helms marred the history of their movement and left decent people ashamed to call themselves conservative. The attempt to subsume his primary political legacy beneath a lot of pabulum about "limited government and individual liberty" (which did not apparently include the liberty of blacks to work amongst whites or mingle with other races) is embarrassing. But if it goes unchallenged, what are those of us outside the conservative movement to think?"

Some conservative reactions:
George W. Bush:

"Throughout his long public career, Senator Jesse Helms was a tireless advocate for the people of North Carolina, a stalwart defender of limited government and free enterprise, a fearless defender of a culture of life, and an unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty. Under his leadership, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a powerful force for freedom. And today, from Central America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember: in the dark days when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their side.

Jesse Helms was a kind, decent, and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called "the Miracle of America." So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July. He was once asked if he had any ambitions beyond the United States Senate. He replied: "The only thing I am running for is the Kingdom of Heaven." Today, Jesse Helms has finished the race, and we pray he finds comfort in the arms of the loving God he strove to serve throughout his life."

John McCain:

"At this time, let us remember a life dedicated to serving this nation."

Mitch McConnell:

"Today we lost a Senator whose stature in Congress had few equals. Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in."

Trent Lott:

"He was one of the giants of the '80s and '90s in the United States Senate"

Bob Dole:

“He was a conservative icon,” Bob Dole, the former senator and Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview on CNN. “He was a good, decent human being.”

The Corner:

"Death of a Conservative Great [Mark R. Levin]

I wish the Helms family peace, and I thank Jesse Helms for helping to ensure the election of Ronald Reagan, being a warrior against the Soviet Union and for the release of Soviet Jews and other abused minorities, and being a voice for millions of unborn babies.

I have noticed some of the smears lobbed at William Buckley in other places since his death; Jesse Helms is in for even more of it. Other prominent conservatives will face the same. Unfortunately, such is the nature of these things now."

The Weekly Standard reposted this article in response to Helms' death:

"Reagan, as candidate and president, was conservatism with a happy face. Helms is conservatism with a stiffened spine. Reagan's success as a conservative leader, however, wouldn't have happened without Helms's bracing him. The Republican party needs another duo like that. What's missing, obviously, is a new Reagan. Helms is still here, operating at full tilt."

The Heritage Foundation blog:

"Jesse Helms, U.S. Senator and Conservative Champion, Dies

Conservative Sen. Jesse Helms, 86, a truly great American and champion of freedom, died at 1:15 a.m. today. Helms, who gave our country three decades of service as a U.S. senator from North Carolina, was ill in recent years.

Heritage President Ed Feulner (pictured at right with Helms and his wife Dorothy) presented Helms in 2002 with the Clare Boothe Luce Award, Heritage’s highest honor, calling him a “dedicated, unflinching and articulate advocate of conservative policy and principle.”"

John Fund, WSJ:

"If Ronald Reagan was the sunny and optimistic face of modern conservatism, the uncompromisingly defiant exemplar of it was Jesse Helms, who died yesterday at age 86."

The American Conservative's blog cites, without comment, someone saying:

"On Capitol Hill, conservatives had no finer champion than Jesse Helms, the longtime Republican senator from North Carolina."

Commentary's blog reposts an old article (pdf), which says, among other things:

"Yet the "racism" of which Helms is accused turns out on inspection to consist of nothing more than an opposition to quotas and other forms of racial preferences."

Commentary's blogger adds:

"His controversial political career has been chronicled in numerous obituaries, but few recall the severity of the demonization to which Helms was subjected by many liberals–who accused him of being a one-man “pantheon of evil.”"

See below to judge Helms' racism, and whether he was just a "controversial figure" who was "demonized" by the left. The quotes below might also provide some useful background for judging this, from The Corner:

"The first sentence of the NYT obit:

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina Senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday.

He "opposed civil rights"? Uh, no. He opposed a particular vision of them."

And, of course, RedState:

"He was a warrior and a patriot. The date of his death is fitting indeed."

***

Here are quotes by Jesse Helms himself. As you read them, bear in mind all those lovely quotes above, the ones about how he's a conservative champion, a fighter for conservative ideals, etc. They said it, not me. Like Matt Yglesias, I would have thought it was a completely unjust smear against conservatism to have said any such thing. [UPDATE: To be clear, what I would have thought was unfair was not to take him as a part of the conservative movement, but to think of him as an exemplary figure or a champion. END UPDATE.]

On respect for the President:

"Just days after Mr. Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, created a furor by saying that President Clinton was not up to the job of Commander in Chief, he told The News and Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh: "Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard.""

On race:

"From the beginning, Helms was schooled in the political device of using race to propel white conservatives to the polls. As news director for WRAL radio, Helms supported Willis Smith in his 1950 Senate campaign against Frank Porter Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina. The campaign theme was that Graham favored interracial marriages. "White people, wake up before it is too late," said one ad. "Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races."

The campaign's further contribution to political notoriety was a handbill that showed Graham's wife dancing with a black man. (...)

But before long, Helms found his real calling as a nightly television commentator for WRAL in North Carolina, a post he held from 1960 to 1972. He blasted the "pinkos" and "Yankees" in Washington, and criticized King's inner circle of civil rights leaders for "proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion." He railed against Social Security, calling it "nothing more than doles and handouts." (...)

In the 1972 race, pitted against a Democratic congressman from Durham, Helms used code words that enraged liberals. The congressman's name was Nick Galifianakis. Helms' slogan: "Elect Jesse Helms -- He's One of Us.""

And:

"Helms warned that, "Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced."

He suggested that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist dupe and refused, even decades after King's death, to honor the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

He dismissed the civil rights movement as a cabal of communists and "moral degenerates."

As the movement gathered strength -- and as murderous violence against activists in particular and African-Americans in general increased -- Helms menacingly suggested to non-violent civil rights activists that, "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights.""

A personal favorite, worth remembering when you read things about how courteous Helms was in person:

"When Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first African-American woman to sit in the Senate, Helms followed Moseley-Braun into an elevator, announcing to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch: "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries."

Then, emphasizing the lines about how "good" things were before the Civil War ended slavery, Helms sang "Dixie.""

And another:

"His disdain for people of color (exemplified by his "humorous" habit, in private, of referring to any black person as "Fred") continues to find ways of expressing itself. He is the Senate's most reliable opponent of any measure aimed at securing the rights or improving the conditions of African-Americans. In 1994, when Nelson Mandela visited the Capitol, Helms ostentatiously turned his back on him."

Humorous? Referring to any black person as "Fred"??

And (Helms himself, h/t Majikthise):

“No intelligent Negro citizen should be insulted by a reference to this very plain fact of life. It is time to face honestly and sincerely the purely scientific statistical evidence of natural racial distinction in group intellect. ... There is no bigotry either implicit or intended in such a realistic confrontation with the facts of life. ... Those who would undertake to solve the problem by merely spending more money, and by massive forced integration, may be doing the greatest injustice of all to the Negro.”

And:

"Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced."

And:

“To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.”

And:

""Martin Luther King repeatedly refers to his 'non-violent movement.' It is about as non-violent as the Marines landing on Iwo Jima.""

And:

"I was a senior when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Roughly 2,000 of us joined a vigil on the quad for several days. (...) Jesse Helms came on the television and said that all of the students sitting on the quad at Duke should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to "marry a Negro" (Duke students were practically all white in those days). Unless the student's parents approved of that prospect, Helms advised, he or she should go back to class."

And:

"As a television commentator before running for the Senate, Helms said, "Dr. (Martin Luther) King's outfit ... is heavily laden at the top with leaders of proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion, as well as other curious behavior." He called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress.""

Later, his views had not changed. (This is a transcription of a video; it doesn't say when the interview it shows is from, but I'd guess the late 80s or 90s, from his appearance. It's the video linked under Martin Luther King.)

"I thought it [the Civil Rights Act] was very unwise. It was taking liberties away from one group of citizens and giving them to another. I thought it was bad legislation then, and I have had nothing to change my mind about it."

Helms also "staged a filibuster against the establishment of a national holiday to mark the birthday of Martin Luther King, having called King a communist and a sex pervert", and "was one of a small number of senators who opposed extending the Voting Rights Act in 1982, eventually giving up a filibuster when then-Majority Leader Sen. Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, said the Senate would not take up any other business until it acted on the extension."

And:

"Appearing on “Larry King Live” in 1995, Jesse Helms, then the senior senator from North Carolina, fielded a call from an unusual admirer. Helms deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, the caller gushed, “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.” Given the rank ugliness of the sentiment — the guest host, Robert Novak, called it, with considerable understatement, “politically incorrect” — Helms could only pause before responding. But the hesitation couldn’t suppress his gut instincts. “Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” he said."

One of his home state papers sums it up:

"Helms was an unceasing foe of the 20th century's social movements -- the drives for equality by blacks, women and gays. While others saw groups striving for a piece of the American dream, Helms saw threats to the social fabric.

Along with former gubernatorial candidate I. Beverly Lake Sr., Helms was a leading voice for segregation in North Carolina. Unlike other well-known segregationists, such as Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Thurmond, Helms never repudiated his views or reached out to black voters.

He portrayed the civil rights movement as being planned in Moscow, dismissed Martin Luther King Jr. as a Marxist and a pervert, and called racial integration a phony issue."

On gays:

"He fought bitterly against federal financing for AIDS research and treatment, saying the disease resulted from “unnatural” and “disgusting” homosexual behavior.

“Nothing positive happened to Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said, “and nothing positive is likely to happen to America if our people succumb to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle.”"

And:

"Helms practically invented the modern conservative politics of sexuality, along with the electoral mobilization of white conservative evangelicals, starting back in the 1970s. In 1977, he seized on Anita Bryant's successful campaign to overturn a gay rights ordinance in Miami and began building a national backlash against antidiscrimination laws. As early as 1979, he was making speeches about the terrible threat of "secular humanism" to Christianity, making the wonky Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies an unlikely villain. When the AIDS epidemic emerged in the 1980s, Helms began an extended and violently worded campaign to "protect" Americans from the "perverts" whose "disgusting" habits were responsible for AIDS, while attacking efforts to find effective treatments. (...)

But other aspects of Helms's personality cannot be ignored, particularly his venomous assault on Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy and his virulent hatred of gays and lesbians. For years, as part of his campaign against the NEA, this "courtly" Christian carried around portfolios of homoerotic Mapplethorpe photos and showed them to reporters and (male) citizens with the question, "How do you like them apples?" And as late as 1995, when an old friend wrote him to recommend compassion for people like her gay son, who had died of AIDS, Helms wrote back to say, "I wish he had not played Russian roulette with his sexual activities.""

And:

"1993: On the nomination of a gay rights activist to a federal post: “She’s not your garden-variety lesbian. She’s a militant-activist-mean lesbian, working her whole career to advance the homosexual agenda. Now you think I’m going to sit still and let her be confirmed by the Senate? … If you want to call me a bigot, go ahead.”"

And:

"As a senator, he explained that he voted against Roberta Achtenberg, President Clinton's nominee for a Housing and Urban Development position, "because she's a damn lesbian." When Helms encountered protesters during a visit to Mexico in 1986, he remarked: "All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction." In 1990, Helms stayed away in protest when Nelson Mandela addressed a joint session of Congress."

And:

"The Bible is unmistakably instructive on the sin of sodomy," he declared in 1994. "I confess I regard it as an abomination." Aids, he suggested, was acquired through "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct" and he became an ardent opponent of government funding for Aids research and education. In 1987 he described Aids prevention literature as "so obscene, so revolting, I may throw up."

In his own words:

"The government should spend less money on people with AIDS because they got sick as a result of deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct."

And:

"Over the years Helms has declared homosexuality "degenerate," and homosexuals "weak, morally sick wretches." (Newsweek, 12/5/94) In a tirade highlighting his routine opposition to AIDS research funding, Helms lashed out at the Kennedy-Hatch AIDS bill in 1988: "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy." (States News Service, 5/17/88)"

(Take that, Ryan White!)

On foreign affairs, he was an almost wholly malign force:

"His obstinacy in foreign policy, where pragmatism often guides debate, was remarkable. Few administrations escaped his wrath. He condemned President Nixon's historic 1972 trip to Beijing as "appeasing Red China." He castigated President Carter, saying he "gave away the Panama Canal." And after the newly elected President Clinton proposed that gays be allowed to serve openly in the military, Helms said that Clinton "better have a bodyguard" if he visited North Carolina. (...)

Because of Helms, several major treaties never became law: The Kyoto Protocol against global warming, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the proposed land mine treaty -- all were stopped at his insistence."

He also had a thing about governments with death squads, and the appallingly brutal South African-funded guerilla groups in Angola and Mozambique. He supported the apartheid regime in South Africa.

***

And here's a random quote from 1966 (cited in the Boston Globe, 11/21/1994), just because I like it:

"The nation has been hypnotized by the swaying and the gesturing of the Watusi and the Frug."

Let Us Now Speak Ill of the Living...

Jesse Helms is dead. We will not speak of him. We will speak ill of the living--of all the living "conservatives" who are currently lionizing Helmls.

Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein sum it up.

Matt:

Matthew Yglesias: One might expect that Helms' death would prompt from conservatives the sorts of things that I might say if, say, Al Sharpton died -- that he and I had some overlapping beliefs and I don't regard him as the world-historical villain that the right does, but that he's a problematic guy... marginal to American liberalism. But... conservatives are... saying that Helms is a brilliant exemplar of the American conservative movement.... [I]f that's what the Heritage Foundation and National Review and the other key pillars of American conservatism want me to believe, then I'm happy to believe it. But it reflects just absolutely horribly on them and their movement that this is how they want to be seen... bigotry, lunatic notions about foreign policy, and tobacco subsidies.

Ezra:

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect: Jesse Helms... was an awful bigot with a secondary interest in destroying international institutions and increasing tobacco subsidies.... Some of my conservative friends often complain about the difficulty of constructing a "usable history" out of the movement's recent past.... When leading exemplars of your political tradition were trying to preserve segregation less than four decades ago, it's a bit hard to argue that your party, which is now electorally based in the American South, is really rooted in a cautious empiricism and an acute concern for the deadweight losses associated with taxation.... [So why don't] more of them would step forward and say that Helms marred the history of their movement and left decent people ashamed to call themselves conservative?] The attempt to subsume his primary political legacy beneath a lot of pabulum about "limited government and individual liberty" (which did not apparently include the liberty of blacks to work amongst whites or mingle with other races) is embarrassing... and] it goes unchallenged, [so] what are those of us outside the conservative movement to think?

A Republic--If We Can Keep It. Happy Fourth of July

The Honorable Vaughan R. Walker:

Judge Rejects Bush’s View on Wiretaps: A federal judge in California said Wednesday that the wiretapping law established by Congress was the “exclusive” means for the president to eavesdrop on Americans, and he rejected the government’s claim that the president’s constitutional authority as commander in chief trumped that law....

The Justice Department... citing the president’s constitutional power as commander in chief to order wiretaps without a warrant from a court under the agency’s program. But Judge Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President George Bush, rejected those central claims.... He said the rules for surveillance were clearly established by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to get a warrant from a secret court.

“Congress appears clearly to have intended to — and did — establish the exclusive means for foreign intelligence activities to be conducted,” the judge wrote. “Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch’s authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities”...

Washington Post Death Spiral Watch (Yet Another David Broder Edition)

Matthew Yglesias reads David Broder:

David Broder: I have not worried about the fundamental commitment of the American people since 1974. In that year, they were confronted with the stunning evidence that their president had conducted a criminal conspiracy out of the Oval Office. In response, the American people reminded Richard Nixon, the man they had just recently reelected overwhelmingly, that in this country, no one, not even the president, is above the law. They required him to yield his office. That is not the sign of a nation that has lost its sense of values or forgotten the principles on which this system rests...

And Yglesias worries:

Matthew Yglesias: I don't think anyone can seriously dispute that the current President of the United States violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or any number of legal commitments to refrain from torture. Some people think these violations were good policy. Many of those who regard those violations as good policy, also maintain that higher constitutional principles grant the President the right to break the law. Which is precisely what you could say on behalf of Richard Nixon.... But Bush won't be hounded out of office. I'm not exactly sure what accounts for the difference.... I have a vague sense that at that time America's elites operated with some sense of conscience and dignity, and it was taken for granted even among Republican leaders that one couldn't just break the law. These days, a misleading deposition taken in the course of a frivolous lawsuit aimed at avoiding the revelation of an affair is a grave national crisis, but it's taken for granted that only a lunatic would believe that Bush or any of his henchmen should be held accountable in any way for repeated violations of the law. I don't really know what changed, or why David Broder and other gatekeepers of elite consensus can't see that something's gone wrong here, but I'm not happy about it...

I think Matt is (a) right to be worried, but (b) wrong in thinking that things were very different back in 1974. His problem is that he assumes that David Broder does not casually lie--that back in 1974 David Broder really was pleased at the prospect of "the American people remind[ing] Richard Nixon... that in this country, no one, not even the president, is above the law..." and really was worried "about the fundamental commitment of the American people," but has not been worried since is simply a lie.

Broder wasn't.

He seems to have thought that it would be exciting if impeachment would fail, and looked forward to the prospect of Richard Nixon getting his political revenge.

Let's roll the videotape:

David Broder, July 10, 1974: David S. Broder (1974), "If Congress Refuses to Impeach..." Washington Post (July 10), p. A 30: [T]he case of Richard Nixon is moving... toward... the House vote on impeachment.... Suppose... few Republican defections... enough Democrats cross the line to exonerate Mr. Nixon...?... The cloud over Mr. Nixon's future would disappear... go back to being a full-time President. Congress could go back to legislating. Messrs. Doar, Jenner, and St. Clair could return to their firms.

But politically, the fireworks would just be starting.... [T]he anti-impeachment majority [would] lash... out against the Judiciary Committee members for spending $1.5 million and uncounted thousands of manhours.... [T]he tidal wave of public sentiment... sweep over the Congress... the White House charge [that the impeachment investigation was nothing but a partisan assault on the integrity of the presidential office] would surely have been proven.... The President's supporters in the country would cry vengeance....

Democratic candidates would find themselves on the defensive... a 93rd Congress which did little but posture on impeachment.... Resurgent Republicans... vindicated President... predictable public reaction against the press and the Democratic Congress....

Republican congressmen... who had broken ranks to vote for impeachment would find themselves pariahs.... If they managed to escape repudiation by the voters this year, they would be guaranteed strong pro-Nixon primary opponents in 1976. Many of them would undoubtedly wonder whether there was any way to remain in public office as Republicans.... Political scientists would... [ask] whether the friends and foes of President Nixon would not constitute themselves into separate parties, obliterating past affiliations.

All this is well within the realm of possibility. All that has to happen is for the House to exonerate the President by voting no bill of impeachment.

Note what Broder does not say: he does not say that it would be a bad thing for a majority in congress to vote that Nixon's crimes--illegal as they were--did not warrant impeachment, and thus to vote that the president was in a sense above the law. He doesn't say that at all. If he was worried "about the fundamental commitment of the American people" back in 1974, he did not think those worries were worth sharing with the Washington Post's readers.

When dealing with the Post these days, you simply have to fact-check everything.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Atlantic Monthly Death Spiral Watch

Tim Burke reminds us of what may have been the worst article published by the Atlantic Monthly, ever:

Easily Distracted: Political Notes: I keep flashing back to Mark Bowden’s willingness to be a front man for security functionaries eager to normalize torture. Bowden’s article assured readers that “harsh interrogation” had reached a point of trust-worthy technocratic professionalism in Israel and now potentially the United States. Don’t worry, he said: professionals only use it when they need to, only against those individuals who have knowledge that our trusted leaders must have. It’s won’t be as if some sweaty thug in a filthy gulag is ripping off fingernails just to intimidate a political dissident, that’s only a danger with unprofessional regimes that torture unnecessarily. I mean, it’s not as if we’d be doing something that an infamous authoritarian regime used extensively against dissidents. Besides, who needs moral capital when you’ve got stealth bombers, right?

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (John F. Harris Edition)

John F. Harris of the Politico, formerly of the Washington Post, confesses that he doesn't even try to do his job of informing Americans about which politicians would make good presidents and legislators--furthest thing from his mind:

Media hype: How small stories become big news: The signature defect of modern political journalism is that it has shredded the ideal of proportionality. Important stories, sometimes the product of months of serious reporting, that in an earlier era would have captured the attention of the entire political-media community and even redirected the course of a presidential campaign, these days can disappear with barely a whisper. Trivial stories — the kind that are tailor-made for forwarding to your brother-in-law or college roommate with a wisecracking note at the top — can dominate the campaign narrative for days... modern journalism as hyperkinetic child — overstimulated by speed and hunger for a head-turning angle that will draw an audience. The truth about what Clinton said — and any fair-minded appraisal of what she meant — was entirely beside the point....

On Friday afternoon, I heard my colleague, Politico reporter Jonathan Martin, bellow in excitement as he called me over to his desk. Martin was furiously typing away, not looking up as he told me the latest: Clinton had given an interview to the editorial board of the Argus Leader newspaper in South Dakota in which she answered inquiries into why she is staying in the race by citing the fact that it’s only May, and RFK had been shot and killed in June. Here is what I was thinking: Wow. Maybe she has come unhinged?... for Clinton to give public voice to such a scenario is bizarre. This is going to be a big story.... Here is what I said: Martin, quick get that item up! He needed no prompting....

The way to build traffic on the Web is to get links.... The way to get links is to be first.... We are unapologetic in our premium on high velocity... we are not different from nearly all news sites these days, not just new publications but established ones like The New York Times.... Martin was quick getting the item about Clinton’s Argus Leader comment up on his Politico blog.... I urged Martin to keep his foot on the gas: Be the first to post reaction....

Perhaps half an hour after the story broke Martin called me back over to his desk. It turned out the Argus Leader had video of its big interview. I huddled over Martin’s computer as we watched. It was a deflating experience. The RFK remarks were deep in a 20-minute clip of an otherwise routine conversation... hardly an electric moment. Clinton does indeed mention the Kennedy assassination, speaking in a calm and analytical tone... Clinton’s error was not in saying something beyond the pale but in saying something that pulled from context would sound as if it were beyond the pale.... It is a small story if Clinton said something like this: “Everyone talks like May is incredibly late, but by historical standards it is not. Think of all the famous milestones in presidential races that have taken place during June.” It seems pretty obvious that the latter is what Clinton meant, and not too far from what she actually said. It was not surprising that the Argus Leader’s executive editor, Randall Beck, put out a statement saying, “Her reference to Mr. Kennedy’s assassination appeared to focus on the time line of his primary candidacy and not the assassination itself.”...

Clinton’s clumsiness does not excuse news media clumsiness in making a minor story seem like a major one.... Keeping one’s journalistic bearings amid a hype storm is a challenge.... In the early months of this publication... a short news item broken by Ben Smith about John Edwards’ $400 haircut became one of our most-trafficked stories... we handled that news nugget with a decent sense of proportion. The item, for instance, never led our site.... Velocity is a virtue in the Web world, and we are not going to stop trying to be fast off the mark — for relevant and fairly reported stories. What Clinton said about Robert Kennedy, whether it was cold or just a bit clueless, was newsworthy, and Martin’s original blog post was responsible in framing the context of her remark. He was equally quick to post her clarification and apology. The uproar was never the lead of our site....

Once, the elite papers and network news set the agenda, and others followed suit, following up on what these establishment pillars deemed important. Now it’s just the opposite. The conservative old voices increasingly take their cues from the newer, more daring ones... a news culture in which — like the amplifiers for “Spinal Tap” that go up to 11 — everything is exaggerated may not seem like a big deal.

But the consequences are more serious than meets the eye.... Only a news media with the focus and discipline to distinguish a big story from a small one can hold politicians accountable — and produce the work that deserves an audience.

I do wonder how he can look at himself in the mirror in the morning. It is a mystery.

Ulysses Simpson "Sam" Grant Blogging

Hoisted from Comments: MacHeath:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong: On distinguishing valiant fighting by Confederates from the horrors of slavery, you can't do better than U.S. Grant in his Autobiography:

I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse...

John Yoo Lies Again

From Spencer Ackerman:

In last week's interminable Yoo/Addington hearing, John Yoo accused Vanity Fair reporter and Torture Team author Philippe Sands of lying about interviewing him. Brian Beutler... tracked Sands down....

The idea, of course, is that someone who hates America so much that he's willing to fabricate all sorts of untrue allegations about Yoo (and, perhaps, other administration veterans) is not to be believed. When I heard this interchange, though, I emailed Sands and asked him to clear the air. He was fairly unambiguous: "I never claimed to have interviewed him! As set out in my book: we debated. " So who's telling the truth?

Well, Yoo's right about approximately one thing: Sands did testify before the very same House panel, on May 6 of this year. But that's about the extent of it. In his prepared remarks, Sands submits that, "[o]ver hundreds of hours I conversed or debated with many of those most deeply involved. They included... the Deputy Assistant Attorney General at DoJ (Mr Yoo)"...

Straws in the Wind and Lines in the Sand

Louis Uchitelle, two weeks ago:

The Rubin camp and the group loosely led by union leaders also differ on which should take precedence: balancing the budget or public investment. The Rubin camp gives preference to budget balancing, but Mr. Rubin says the choice is no longer as stark as it was when Bill Clinton came to office in 1993...

Brad DeLong, today:

Project Syndicate: Ever since the 1928 work of Frank Ramsey, economists have accepted the utilitarian argument that a good economy is one in which returns on investment are not too great a multiple — less than three — of the rate of per capita economic growth. An economy in which profits from investment are high relative to the growth rate is an economy that is under-saving and under-investing. This idea has also given rise to a very strong presumption that if an economy as a whole is under-saving and under-investing, the government ought to help to correct this problem by running surpluses, not make it worse by running deficits that drain the pool of private savings available to fund investment. This is why most economists are deficit hawks.

Of course, governments need to run deficits in depressions in order to stimulate demand and stem rising unemployment. Moreover, a lot of emergency government spending on current items is really best seen as national savings and investment. Franklin Delano Roosevelt could have made no better investment for the future of America and the world than to wage total war against Adolf Hitler. Likewise, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton ought to have recognized in the 1990’s that something like a Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe to help with the transition from communism would have been an excellent investment for the world’s future. But the rule is that governments should run surpluses and not deficits, so various American presidents’ economic advisers have been advocates of aiming for budget surpluses except in times of slack demand and threatening depression. This was certainly true of Eisenhower’s, Nixon’s, and Ford’s economic advisors, and of George H.W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s economic advisers.

It was true of Reagan’s economic advisers as well. Some of Reagan’s advisers sincerely did not believe that the tax cuts of the early 1980’s would generate the large deficits that they did (Beryl Sprinkel and Lawrence Kudlow come to mind). Others, like Martin Feldstein and Murray Weidenbaum, understood the consequences of the Reagan tax cuts and were bitter bureaucratic opponents, even if they did not speak out publicly.

In fact, since WWII, only George W. Bush’s economic advisers have broken with this consensus. A few have done so because they are making careers as party-line Republicans, so their priority is to tell Republican politicians what they want to hear (Josh Bolton and Mitch Daniels come to mind here). As for the rest, their reasons for supporting the Bush administration’s savings-draining policies remain mysterious. It is not as though they were angling for lifetime White House cafeteria privileges, or that having said “yes” to George W. Bush will open any doors for them in the future.

But their failings do pose a dilemma for Democratic deficit-hawk economists trying to determine what good economic policies would be should Barack Obama become president. Those of us who served in the Clinton administration and worked hard to put America’s finances in order and turn deficits into surpluses are keenly aware that, after eight years of the George W. Bush administration, things look worse than when we started back in 1993. All of our work was undone by our successors in their quest to win the class war by making America’s income distribution more unequal.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and it seems pointless to work to strengthen the Democratic links of the chain of fiscal advice when the Republican links are not just weak but absent. Political advisers to future Democratic administrations may argue that the only way to tie the Republicans’ hands and keep them from launching another wealth-polarizing offensive is to widen the deficit enough that even they are scared of it.

They might be right. The surplus-creating fiscal policies established by Robert Rubin and company in the Clinton administration would have been very good for America had the Clinton administration been followed by a normal successor. But what is the right fiscal policy for a future Democratic administration to follow when there is no guarantee that any Republican successors will ever be “normal” again? That’s a hard question, and I don’t know the answer.

There is, however, one fiscal principle that must be respected at all costs. Fiscal deficits so large that they put the debt-to-GDP ratio on an explosive upward trend do not merely act as a drag on long-term economic growth; they also create the possibility that at any moment the economy might face an immediate macroeconomic and financial disaster. A more hawkish fiscal stance may no longer be possible in future Democratic administrations, and might not be good policy if it were, given the likely complexion of successor administrations. Stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio is thus the line in the sand that must not be crossed.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Him Now

Tim F. of Balloon Juice:

Balloon Juice: Message to all of those rightwing net warriors who demanded over the years that I accept that THERE WAS A PLAN and the Rumsfeld/neocon warhawks are not a bunch of criminal incompetents: you were completely f---ing wrong. Give up. Let’s hear from patchouli-soaked hippies at the Army War College:

“The transition to a new campaign was not well thought out, planned for, and prepared for before it began,” write Wright and Reese, historians at the Army’s Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. “Additionally, the assumptions about the nature of post-Saddam Iraq on which the transition was planned proved to be largely incorrect.” The results of those errors, they add, were that U.S. forces and their allies lacked an operational and strategic plan for success in Iraq, as well as the resources to carry out a plan.

The capsule summary is not entirely accurate in that Rumsfeld certainly did have a plan. He and the neocons planned to install a friendly strongman and leave. To guage just how stupid the war planners were, a useful question is who. Unless we had in mind a Saddam cousin or Muqtada Sadr, who wasn’t on our radar at the time, the only credible option would be a friendly exile. Aside from Ahmad Chalabi, how many of those can you name?

It really was Chalabi or bust. We got bust.