Dysblog

How to Read a War Criminal

2009-11-25T20:33:00.016-06:00

Inquiring minds want to know precisely how much John Yoo was paid to offer his opinions to the Wall Street Journal. We can assume it was less than his rate at the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, where he produced among the most toxic professional opinions in American history.

It was John Yoo, of course, who opined that the President was perfectly within his rights to have a child's testicles crushed in the presence of the father, depending -- and here's where lawyerly nuance comes in -- depending upon what the President intended by this act. There are those who would argue that the President's intent here would be relevant only to determine the President's culpability as a war criminal. But those people are probably not tenured at Boalt Hall, Berkeley's prestigious law school. And those people certainly would not be paid to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.

The headline on the WSJ site is not shy: "The KSM Trial Will Be an Intelligence Bonanza for al Qaeda." Here we have Professor John Yoo, legal expert, offering us a reasoned professional response to a news story: the decision to hold the trial of the terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York. My first impulse upon stumbling over Yoo's piece was to do a page search for the word "torture." My browser informed me that this word was not found in the document. I tried "enhanced interrogation." No results. "Waterboard"? Nada. So I skipped to another news story. Nobody's interested in John Yoo's opinion -- a confession, on the other hand, would be worth reading.

The rigorous reader in me, however, eventually returned to the op-ed page. What sort of thing does the WSJ pay good money for these days? We know that the Washington Post is willing to give William Kristol a column (for which he is presumably paid); that the New York Times flirted with this notion for a bit, before deciding that money on Kristol was ill-spent; so what do we think of the Wall Street Journal, as an institution, for upping the ante here? William Kristol may be criminally wrong, quite predictably, but he's not precisely a criminal. How does this reflect upon the WSJ under its new management: their bold willingness to offer money and a prominent soapbox to the man responsible for providing legal cover for official war crimes?

To properly evaluate this involves, unfortunately, reading the piece itself. The text proves really quite vapid: nothing here requiring a law degree, or any particular expertise for that matter -- most first-year students of political science at lesser schools than Berkeley could probably grind out an op-ed of this quality. The subtext, on the other hand, proves fascinating. I recommend this piece to anyone with a passing interest in how evil, in its fullness of banality, insinuates itself into governmental reasoning.

From the very beginning, we sense a certain pattern of thought. It was not so long ago, remember, that the Department of Justice was considered fully subordinate to a sovereign Executive-in-chief. Those nostalgic for the subservience of Alberto Gonzales will recognize Yoo's first opinion: that the decision to move Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's trial to Manhattan is not even partially a prosecutorial decision -- it is fully a presidential decision. The subtext here: yes, the Department of Justice may have arrived at this decision, but that's only because the DoJ is by definition told what to decide by the Executive. That's how it works. (Note to Mr. Yoo: the current administration has decided to revive whimsical notions of judicial independence.)

The crux of the matter -- the deepest part of John Yoo's considered opinion -- is announced in the second paragraph: this decision is "about the hard, ever-present trade-off between civil liberties and national security."

That old chestnut. Civil liberties are all well and fine, but when it comes down to the hard decisions -- crushing children's testicles, for instance -- rights are always superseded by questions of national security. The key term here is "ever-present." Certainly, in terms of classified information, for instance, this is a constant nagging issue: the tension between the First Amendment and national security. On the other hand, the issues addressed here: the wholesale suspension of the Bill of Rights, the decision to ignore treaties enforced by the Constitution (the Geneva Conventions) -- these are not ever-present issues. They are, thankfully, extremely rare: Lincoln's (very brief) suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, for instance, whose propriety is still debated.

What differentiates America from lesser polities is precisely this fact: that the Constitution is paramount and sacrosanct, and that any emergency deviation from the Constitution is itself an emergency, and rare. For Yoo, the state of emergency is permanent: it is an "ever-present" concern (and the permanence of the War on Terror lends respectability to this interpretation -- one reason that Obama's decision to drop the word "War" is far from mere semantics).

The political theory supporting Yoo's cavalier approach has a quasi-reputable lineage: it came to the Bush administration via students of Leo Strauss, who himself inherited the notion from his intellectual mentor, Carl Schmitt. Unfortunately, it is simplistic to dismiss Professor Schmitt wholesale as a Nazi jurist (which he was); far less controversial figures than Leo Strauss took his ideas seriously, and still do. Nevertheless, in this context, the Schmittian argument has to be examined with extreme care: do we really want to give the Executive wide-ranging dictatorial powers, at all times, in the name of national security? (Hint: we tried that under Bush, and many other nations have tried it under much nastier sovereign leaders, and the answer is no.)

Here we are, in the second paragraph of Mr. Yoo's opinion, and we're already treading old and dangerous territory. The rest of the piece is an escalating alarm, concentrating suspiciously on things that, were they revealed, might compromise Yoo himself in front of a war crimes tribunal. A telling bit: "Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information, and his relationships to fellow al Qaeda operatives." How much of this truly concerns our friend Yoo? Properly classified information will of course be presented in camera -- that sort of thing isn't trotted out before the public. This alarmist reasoning dominated the Bush administration's reign of secrecy: virtually everything was protected by executive privilege -- even judges had to have their eyes shielded from delicate information.

Even though the Obama administration has not fully renounced this shady practice, the truth is that nobody's really concerned that CNN will be permitted to broadcast the names of undercover sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan. No, the concern is not the "sources;" the concern is the "methods." Damn straight, Professor Yoo: it will be difficult to argue that the methods of KSM's interrogation are classified. Anyone who has read a newspaper in the past year is probably aware that the man was waterboarded 183 times in a single month. Anyone truly interested in this issue will almost certainly have encountered the evidence -- very convincing -- that none of those sessions revealed anything new or important. What ordinary readers do not know -- what I, for instance, am dying to find out -- is what precisely the chain of command was, leading from John Yoo's personal approval of this species of technique, down to the sorry grunt who was ordered to strap KSM to the waterboard and drown him.

Please, argue the apologists. We didn't drown him. We simulated drowning. The guy's still alive, isn't he? Well, no. Waterboarding is not a near death experience: it is a death experience. The human response is entirely neural; it is not rational; when you are being waterboarded, you are effectively dying. You are experiencing death: the full terror of death, unmitigated by any notions of truth or fiction. That you emerge from this experience miraculously undead is not the point: psychologically speaking, this man was effectively executed 183 times in a month. Or, if you want to get pedantic, an average of six times per day.

Fine, argue the apologists. Let's accept this bit of sophistry for the moment. The undeniable fact is that KSM is a bad guy. Nothing done to him should be regretted for a moment.

I have no issue with the first part of that statement: KSM is, almost certainly, a terrible man. Not much you could say about him would be hyperbolic: yes, he is a true enemy of the state, a vicious brute responsible for the slaughter of innocents, a genuinely evil man.

The second bit is a bit more of a problem.

Should we regret what we did to KSM? In a remarkable 2007 piece in the Washington Post, interviews revealed that the soldiers at Fort Hunt responsible for debriefing Nazi prisoners prided themselves greatly on refraining from brutality: "'During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone,' said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. 'We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I'm proud to say I never compromised my humanity.'" According to many of today's conservatives, these decent men were -- what? -- weaklings? Naifs? For adhering to American principles? For not compromising their humanity? For being decent?

Some of the prisoners at Fort Hunt were at least as repulsive as KSM. And a man like George Frenkel -- an old-fashioned patriot, concerned with quaint notions of honor -- decided that it was best, for the state of his soul, not to descend to the level of these brutes. So yes, we should regret what was done to KSM. Not because of what it did to him, but because of what it did to America. It diminished the nation. It reduced our collective humanity. This is not a pragmatic calculus -- it is entirely independent of the question whether the torture accomplished anything (which it almost certainly did not).

Our regrets should be multiplied by our knowledge that the same techniques were practiced on the innocent. We know that innocent people were tortured in precisely the same way -- and different ways, resulting in death -- because they were presumed to be very bad men. This is the problem with the denial of due process: it nets you guilty men, sometimes, and crushes the innocent alongside them, always. Even if we accept that KSM deserves to be made to watch his child's testicles crushed (and think hard before you decide, with John Yoo, to accept that); do we accept that the child deserves this? Do we accept that the innocent father of an innocent boy deserves this? That his son deserves this? Precisely how accepting are we, before we have lost any shred of humanity?

The only decent answer, of course, is that we accept none of it. It's a unique kind of slippery slope: once you take the first step, you are already at the bottom. And, thanks to John Yoo, America took that first step. We do not know that anyone was specifically made to watch his child's testicles crushed; we do know that innocent men were tortured, and threatened with the torture of their families. We know that they were tortured in order to elicit false information to justify the Iraq War. We know that they were tortured to death. You don't have to ponder this too long to realize that these latter cases, if less sensational and immediately gut-turning than the approved castration of a child in front of his father, are no less evil.

It doesn't take great skill to parse the rest of Mr. Yoo's opinion piece. "The lawyers in the Bush administration—I was one—understood that military commissions could guarantee a fair trial while protecting national security secrets from excessive exposure." Read: "Even I, a middling legal sycophant, understand that a proper trial exposes me to criminal liability."

Yoo: "The Supreme Court has upheld the use of commissions for war crimes. The procedures for these commissions received the approval of Congress in 2006 and 2009." Translation: "If I make a great show of approving of this commission business wholeheartedly, perhaps these procedures won't be turned on, uh, me."

Yoo: the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (the "20th hijacker") was completely foiled by the defense: "All they had to do was demand that the government hand over all its intelligence on him." Translation: "In the helpful age of the sovereign President, people like me were protected by radical executive privilege, and nobody was going to hand over information that might send me and those I enabled to prison." (Irrelevant footnote: Moussaoui was convicted, despite this travesty of justice, and is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.)

In short, the entire op-ed by John Yoo (was he paid by the word, or a lump sum?) can be boiled down to a single essential opinion: holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Manhattan is very, very bad for John Yoo.

Yes, Charlotte, Some Women are Stupid

2008-03-02T17:11:00.006-06:00

It has become impossible not to argue that the mainstream media is conspiring against the right wing. Charlotte Allen's wondrous piece in the Washington Post -- arguing (mostly without irony) that women are "dumb" -- clinches it. Most of us should have become aware of this pernicious conspiracy when the New York Times hired Bill Kristol. The more perceptive might even have caught on when David Brooks achieved tenure at the Gray Lady.

The plot is simple, but nefarious: give conservatives a voice in the MSM, but make sure that you hire only those who can't actually write.

Certainly one can make the case that the conservative movement has run out of ideas (or never had particularly exciting ideas from the start). To test that thesis, however, you'd have to weigh the best and the brightest, and find them wanting. Putting lightweights on the scale is not good science.

And oh how very much lighter than air they are. Brooks offers us fluff upon fluff: one breezy sociological conceit after another, each cutely named, each less substantial than the last -- it's like watching one of those machines that generates candy floss. Bill Kristol manages to fail Journalism 101 in his very first piece for the Times: he misattributes a quotation. And then, as if it couldn't get any less impressive, we get Charlotte.

Charlotte Allen is certainly in a very good position to demonstrate the inferiority of the female intellect. The more rigorous among us wonder what might have happened, however, if she'd studied a larger sample of women than the magnificent ditz who stares back at her from the mirror.

Take her statistical acumen: "A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women."

The crucial words here -- call it the nexus of stupidity -- are "even though." Um, Charlotte? We're talking about accidents per million miles. Hence, Charlotte, the extra miles driven are *irrelevant.* If you were to derive any meaning from that extra 74 percent, it would be this: men drive more, hence practice their skills more, hence drive with greater skill -- a classic case of nurture over nature.

Another exquisite Allen observation: "The theory that women are the dumber sex -- or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents -- is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence."

Well now. Which is it, Charlotte? That women get into more car accidents -- trivial -- or that women are the dumber sex -- not quite so trivial? I accept that you're being "witty" here, but inquiring minds do in fact want to know. Say, the kind of mind borne by the average WaPo reader -- of either sex -- who is confronted with intelligent liberals, page after page, before being whacked in the temple by you.

The tests, in fact, are not quite so cut-and-dried when it comes to the less trivial question. "I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills, two areas where, researchers agree, women consistently outpace men." Only a creature of Allen's peerless intellect would insist that "superior verbal skills" are unimportant in the evaluation of genius. (And only a creature of Allen's exquisite vanity would imagine that her writing is evidence of superior verbal skills.)

Ms. Allen is capable of the occasional big word or two: "parietal cortex" is apparently something she looked up for this article. The size of this bit of brain -- related to visual and spatial capabilities -- differs between the sexes. Einstein's brain was an average size, but his inferior parietal lobe was about 15 percent wider than normal. This excited researchers, yes (particularly Sandra Witelson, the very brilliant woman who made the discovery), and they found that male brains tended to have larger IPL's. On the other hand, women tend to have 23 percent more volume in Broca's area, and 13 percent more in the superior temporal cortex: both areas associated with linguistic skills. This kind of research, it has to be pointed out, is essentially phrenology, a long discredited science: it may mean something; it may mean nothing. The correlation between size and capability, neurologically, remains annoyingly mysterious.

But let's grant that these differences exist. Now, Allen's argument seems to be that women, by virtue of their inferior spatial skills, are more likely to swoon at the sight of Obama. They're more likely to act stupidly in their choice of entertainment. Etc. Excuse me, Charlotte -- you surpassing neuroscientist, you -- wouldn't this sort of behavior, if it were sexually divergent, depend more upon language-oriented skills than, say, mathematical and spatial capacity? Just sayin'.

As for those spatial skills... well, Charl, many in history have shared your casual bigotry. Bobby Fischer, the greatest chess player who ever lived, had soaring contempt for women's abilities in this department: he insisted that he could go without his queen and still beat any female alive. Nice, huh? Unfortunately for you, Charlotte, there's a coda to this story: Fischer then decided to personally tutor a friend's daughter, Judit Polgár, who went on to become the world's youngest Grandmaster.

Anyway, this isn't really about women's intelligence. It's about Charlotte's gifts. Were she not the victim of a clever affirmative action policy on the part of the mainstream media, designed to offer prominent gigs only to second-rate conservatives, she'd be hard-pressed to publish anywhere not subsidized by Dick Scaife.

Tony Snow Denies Reports That He is "Tony Snow"

2007-07-28T11:47:00.000-05:00

Embattled White House spokesman Tony Snow distanced himself today from earlier remarks, by dismissing reports that he was "Tony Snow." Yesterday, in the growing uproar over the US Attorney General's widely perceived perjury, Mr. Snow found himself stressing that Alberto Gonzales' lies were not "lies," but truths which looked a lot like lies because they dealt with matters of national security that ordinary Americans were not allowed to know about and hence could not understand.

Faced with bipartisan outrage over these statements, Mr. Snow insisted that the remarks were made by "Tony Snow," who was a different person from him. "I cannot, obviously, take responsibility for remarks made by someone else, who by definition does not speak for me," Mr. Snow said about the controversial Mr. Snow.

Yesterday's earnest statement - that Mr. Gonzales' lies were not lies but complex truths - was apparently concocted whole-cloth by Tony Snow, said Tony Snow, and while he had not looked fully into the matter - and could not comment on an ongoing investigation - Mr. Snow sought to distinguish himself from the unpopular Mr. Snow. "I know that some people find Tony Snow's defence of perjury somewhat... difficult to swallow. I know that. And I... well, I might feel the same way, if my job did not require me to not have personal feelings about this matter. But it is a mystery why so many people are asking me to comment upon Mr. Snow's remarks."

When confronted angrily with the commonly held notion that Mr. Snow is Mr. Snow, Mr. Snow sneered contemptuously: "This is just the sort of stunt we can expect from people who do stunts. You guys can get twisted up in semantics if you like, but America faces real problems, which require decisions, not questions. I mean didn't we just go through this with all those questions about whether the Vice President was part of the Executive? Didn't you get tired of asking all those? Aren't you sick of this stuff?"

The reporters did not seem entirely willing to forego questions. "What," asked Benny Bonnet of the Sacramento Bee, "do you make of the president's recently issued statement, that subpoenas are merely 'suggestions?' That he would take subpoenas under serious consideration, but honor them only if he saw fit? In fact, didn't you make that statement yourself?"

Mr. Snow nodded. "Yes, that was me, of course. And I don't really want to say much more on the subject, as it looks as if this may come to a constitutional show-down. It looks as if this issue may have to be decided by the Supreme Court, which is the third branch of the Executive after Congress."

At the increasingly raucous press conference, Mr. Snow was pressed to clarify his own precise function in the administration: he was asked whether he, for instance, was the one who spoke officially for the White House. His answer - which did not seem to satisfy everyone present - was: "It depends."

Encouraged to elaborate, Mr. Snow explained that, "It depends upon whether the White House wishes to express something direct and obvious, such as 'we do not torture.' Such statements are in my purview, and I can assure you that I speak directly for the White House when I say this. Now... when you ask whether certain things constitute torture, then you're on precarious ground, and I tend to refer such questions to Tony Snow, who may or may not speak directly for the White House, depending upon the tone of the question. Of course, when you ask such questions - and people do!" he laughed, "such questions as 'is torture torture?' I refer you to the relevant documents - without further comment - and then you know everything you have to know, except for things you're not allowed to know."

Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post, a consistent critic of the current administration, and generally dismissed as such, pressed the point: "Mr. Snow. Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario, in which you were subpoenaed by Congress, and were asked to comment on the Attorney General's grotesque perjury. Let's further assume that the president chose for you to comply with that subpoena. Would you yourself be committing perjury if you stood by the Attorney General's laughable statements? And by extension, would the White House be, as it were, lying to Congress? And what if your remarks conflicted with, say, remarks before Congress made by 'Tony Snow?' Given that scenario, who precisely would be the bald-faced liar?"

Tony Snow, who - like White House spokesman Tony Snow - cut his teeth in the sometimes boisterous "news" division of Fox, offered a cutting response: "Do we really have to go back to the dark days... of Clintonian dithering over the meaning of the word 'is'?" You elected a Republican administration for a reason - and that reason is, among other things, moral clarity. Okay? We know what 'is' is. And if you don't, we'll be happy to explain it to your congressmen in a closed session, as long as they don't take notes."

The press did not appear entirely convinced by Mr. Snow's responses, and many reporters continued to make noises. Looking increasingly exasperated, Mr. Snow finally held up a hand. "Look, folks, we're running out of time here. It seems you all have questions for Tony Snow, and why don't we give him a chance to explain himself?" Mr. Snow then handed the microphone over to Mr. Snow, who explained that he would be taking no further questions.

A Book To Damage Children

2007-07-17T10:26:00.000-05:00

While taking the occasional breather from pounding the Worst President Ever, it's a netroots tradition to promote a book, preferably one's own. So, having put in my time pounding, I'd like to briefly promote. My novel has been published just this week by Doubleday, and it has an unhealthy, unwieldy title, impossible to remember: Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help. Doubleday calls it "Young Adult." I don't mind. It is aimed equally at Old Adults, but my real purpose is to is mutilate the minds, souls, and political sensibilities of innocent children.

Now, I don't believe in politicizing kid lit -- mostly because edifying fiction puts even the most Ritalin-addled youngster into a coma. But I could not resist devoting half a sentence to the barbarism of the Toxic Texan.

This half-sentence might seem innocuous, at first sight. You might even miss it. A child certainly will. Yet it is designed to plant a pernicious seed: the zygote of a bad bad thought. The children of Bush-lovers, in particular, will -- when this seed quietly sends tendrils into their vulnerable, receptive crania -- slowly become their parents' worst nightmare. They will grow, right before Mom and Dad's blinkered eyes, into drug-addicted homosexual Stalinists, promiscuous and pagan, with FULL HEALTH INSURANCE.

Nothing to be done about this. It's a hardcore half-sentence. And, as we know, gay card-carrying crack-addicts -- dedicated to UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE -- tend to vote Democrat.

When read by a child lucky enough to be born to decent parents, however, Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help accomplishes something slightly less malignant. This half sentence (potent, and potentially illegal), causes such children to look up terms like "habeas corpus." It makes them write papers -- in sixth grade! -- about the perils of a unitary executive. Worst of all, it moves them to oppose torture in all of its forms; and they will cruelly ostracize classmates who pull the wings off flies.

Again, despite this subversive agenda, Milrose Munce is designed primarily as a twisted novel for smart, sarcastic kids. It will probably amuse adults (who can be almost as intelligent). It will appeal, I hope, to those who cast a wary eye upon Harry Potter (except for that series' SUBLIMINAL SATANISM -- which is a joy to encounter, however you feel about popular kids who are really good at sports).

Children of gun-toting autocrats are, of course, innocent. We should not condemn them for the sins of their womanizing fathers. No, what we must do is quietly eat away at the foundations of their nascent, numbing ideology. We must rescue them from their personal Guantanamos. It is only through rigorous literary subversion, I submit, that we can turn these children into pot-smoking, Mao-loving, same-sex-addicted Radical Democrats, with FULL HEALTH INSURANCE. And that is the goal -- the subversive raison d'être -- of this potent and virtuosic half-sentence, subliminally inserted somewhere in the otherwise harmless pages of Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help. I fully expect this Extraordinary Sentence to win me Extraordinary Rendition, but it will have been worth it.

Okay, I'm lying. The half-sentence isn't really that good. But the rest of the book is pretty swank, and I hope you'll buy it.

(Milrose was published last week in Canada; the UK pub date is next spring, and the American date has yet to be nailed down. So for now you'll have to buy it on amazon.com: Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help. But hey: we netroots types have that technical savvy required to shop on the interweb.)

Incompetence, and A Remedy

2007-05-05T12:34:00.001-05:00

An astonishing piece in the Wall Street Journal (subscription only), offers noted academic Harvey Mansfield casually rejecting -- believe it or not -- the rule of law. He's not arguing that we should all be able to act in blissfully lawless ways, of course -- simply that the laws of the nation should not be permitted to rule over (and occasionally over-rule) the president.

It's wartime, you see (always seems to be, these days), and while we're involved in this (perpetual) war, the Harvard professor favors a manly alternative. You guessed it: the strong, unitary executive. Now, it's not as if we haven't encountered this formula before, via John Yoo -- that other manly professor -- and his less academic henchpeople. Bush's enemies have been saying all along that "unitary executive" is merely code (and cover) for the president's illegal policies -- but I believe that Mansfield is the first guy sympathetic to the administration to be this blunt: yes, it's an invitation to extra-legal activity, and that's a good thing.

This tiny, perhaps inadvertent blurt of honesty -- Straussians are not famous for being honest, much less explicit -- has caused more than a little perplexity and outrage in the blogosphere. Allow me to contribute a modest spoonful of bile to the latter.

Surely the best argument against Harvey Mansfield's prepotent presidency -- a particularly relevant argument, just now -- is the possibility of incompetence. A unitary executive might be more efficient than a sluggish democracy should the absolute leader be something of a philosopher-king, or -- more Mansfieldian -- a prince quietly manipulated by a philosopher. But what if the supreme executive is neither? What if he is ignorant, and constitutionally incapable of exposing himself to reason? Do we really want such a figure to lead the nation in the absence of institutional checks upon presidential hubris?

Democracy is famously inefficient, yes, but it is also famously useful when it comes to curbing latent tyrants. And democracy -- unimpeded democracy -- is the best safeguard against executive incompetence. Should America find itself in the hands of, say, a raving presidential version of King George III, are we sure we want this man to have unfettered extra-legal privilege? Impeachment is always an option (until declared illegal, or rendered impossible -- generally the next quiet step in a creeping tyranny); but do we really want this to be the only option?

And there is little reason to believe, despite Mansfield (and his mentor, Leo Strauss, and his mentor, Carl Schmitt), that a plodding democracy is incapable of pulling itself together to act brutally and efficiently during wartime. America, Canada and Australia -- to name a few reasonably democratic nations -- were crucially effective in the last century's complex wars. On the other hand, an incompetent absolute leader in the same situation (see under "Mussolini") might well be brutal, but is unlikely to prove even remotely effective.

Time For Andrew Sullivan To Come Out Of The Closet

2007-02-08T12:25:00.002-06:00

This is an open letter to Andrew Sullivan:

Sometimes, when a man is consistently correct in his moral thinking, he is forced to change his language. Some words will no longer do. Believe, me, I admire the stance you've taken; I'd go so far as to say that I agree with ninety percent of what you say on your blog. You've held a merciless mirror to this administration, and it can't have been boundless fun: you've predictably lost a few friends in the process. No, I have no argument with the essence of what you do. My complaint is that you continue to cloak yourself in disreputable adjectives.

Andrew, you're not "conservative". Or rather, that word no longer describes anything you remotely want to associate yourself with.

Full disclosure: I once called myself a conservative. My change of language (but not of heart) was in response to rancid harpies like Ann Coulter and lying ideologues of the Limbaugh flavor -- any foul club with that title wasn't going to include me as a member.

I once drew a fanciful distinction between "conservative" (a word I associated with the British Tory tradition) and "right-wing" (more appropriate to American bigotry). Which led me to perhaps the stupidest argument I've ever made (and there have been many): many years ago, I tried to convince David Frum that he was "conservative," but not "right-wing." The dialogue ended with David laughing, "Doug, I'm very right-wing."

What he meant (and he was correct) is: "Doug, you're a fool."

(And yes, since I enjoy fool's errands, I'm now engaged in a similar -- if not precisely analogous -- effort to persuade. That's okay: I once spent an entire drunken night in a Newfoundland bar trying to persuade a US Marine to vote for John Kerry, war hero. I'm fairly sure he ended up pulling the lever for the empty flight suit, poor bastard. I hope he's still alive. I liked him.)

David is right-wing. He is also -- since the word is synonymous, in America -- conservative. You, Andrew, are neither. What you are, in fact, is what the loathsome Christopher Hitchens is dying to be: the heir to George Orwell. It's crucial to remember that Orwell was not, finally, an ideologue of any stripe -- he famously came to reject all "smelly orthodoxies." He was, fundamentally, a truth-teller. And it may seem tautological, but to tell the truth requires two distinct steps, both in the correct direction: you must first identify the truth, and then have the courage to announce it.

(Hitchens has the courage, but not the intellect: Orwell, when he abandoned his benighted leftism, immediately came to devastatingly lucid moral conclusions; whereas Hitchens' drunken path away from Trotsky has put him into bed with such wondrous buffoons as David Irving and George Bush. Where Orwell identified Stalin as the enemy, Hitchens finally determined that the real Satan was... Cat Stevens.)

As the heir to Orwell, your duty is not to any one party or position -- quite the opposite. Your duty is to language. Orwell (although he consistently rejected Toryism), stopped using revolutionary rhetoric when he recognized the enormity of Stalinism. The first generation of neocons, likewise, stopped calling each other "comrade" -- and had a long run on the decent side of history, until they sold their souls to George Walker Bush.

I know that you're celebrating the publication of a new book, Andrew -- and that the word "conservative" appears in the title -- but it's no longer your word. It's not a question of whether you still own it -- you don't -- it's a question of whether you finally have the will to disown it.

I know how hard this is. It's a matter of radical public redefinition. Imagine, if you will, a gay man coming out of the closet.

It means leaving behind more than a few friends (although, as I mentioned before, they already seem to have left you). I understand how you wanted to love the movement -- I did -- but let's face it, American conservatism has been a piebald mongrel from the start.

The libertarian stream has a particularly vulgar intellectual pedigree: as many have pointed out, trace New World libertarianism back far enough and you'll always find, standing ignorantly at the wellspring, Ayn Rand. A proud and talentless semi-intellect, whose sole claim to perspicuity was recognizing the evils of collectivism. The objectivist recipe for the atomic self should have been, from the start, anathema to any serious conservative agenda.

The Straussian stream (which we've both lilly-dipped in, at one point or another), is infinitely less vulgar; after seeing what that way of thinking has accomplished for this administration, however, it deserves no claim on your soul. The last few years in Washington have been, in fact, an almost scientific test of the Straussian thesis, and the results are not impressive.

Bush, unknowingly, was utterly faithful to Leo Strauss, whose work is the modern statement of a certain radical moral stance: hypocrisy reinterpreted as virtu. I am not being even slightly sarcastic here. The Straussian hermeneutic claims this as its greatest insight -- the necessity of the lie. (Second greatest would be the necessity of cruelty: if you think Allan Bloom would have abhorred waterboarding, then we'll have to sit down some day and discuss some of his lectures on Machiavelli.)

Libertarianism has never really had much legitimate claim to the word "conservative," but Strauss owns that word. And from Strauss, via hypocrisy, you get the theocons. The word "conservative", as it is understood today, means this: trumpeting God and family, even if you secretly believe in neither. Doing whatever it takes to prevent the evils of pacifism and collectivism from polluting society -- lie, cheat, war and waterboard. The ends will justify even the most sordid means.

Strauss has been soundly refuted by Bush: even if you swallow the means (and I don't), the ends are a disaster.

And the means have long featured, prominently, a deliberate employment of what Orwell in 1984 termed "Two Minutes Hate." Leo Strauss (via the Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt), recognized the importance of having an Enemy, always. Constant threat from a well-defined "other" is the only way to unify a polity. And so you have the Republican bogeymen, trotted out and burned in effigy -- with breathtaking hypocrisy -- whenever fealty to the administration develops cracks: the dread atheist (Strauss was of course an atheist) and the dread homosexual (Bloom was gay).

This is final, irrevocable, and central to the definition of the word "conservative" in the wake of George and his advisors: in a conservative world, you, Andrew, are the Enemy. And even if your book sells a million copies -- I hope it does -- you won't alter the lexicographical truth one iota. Actually, you won't find this particular definition in the dictionary; you'll have to turn to, well, reality: as the later Wittgenstein taught, "the meaning of a word is its use in a language."

Even before you took on this administration, the unpleasant truth is that Republicans -- this generation of Republicans -- defined you as the Enemy. It's not that, as a gay man, they disagreed with you, or disliked you: they hated you, with loud and useful passion. And that hatred is no longer separable, practically or theoretically, from the word "conservative."

Words are not wholly ours to define in the public sphere. The editors of Marxism Today, after years of trying to square that name with increasingly Thatcherite beliefs, finally realized that "Marxism" means what it means. Some historians are trying to quasi-rescue the word "fascism" from conflation with Hitlerism: they argue that the movement founded in Italy may be repulsive, but it's nowhere near as evil as its Austrian counterpart. Frankly, these academics don't have a hope: nuanced or not, "fascism" is wedded to Hitlerism in the English language.

And "conservatism," no matter how you dress it up, is dining on barbecue with George Bush.

It won't be easy to embrace redefinition. Although, as I say -- given your admirable crusade to deliver mis-defined men from the closet -- you're in a unique position to wrestle with the complex psychology of the matter.

The first step is to recognize that your fellow Enemies -- as defined by Bush, freerepublic.com, and Strauss -- are not really so vile. Nobody's asking you to become a leftist -- in fact, were you to choose to do so, I don't know where on this side of the Atlantic you'd turn. Certainly not to Daily Kos, where I've never seen a single post in favor of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky or Mao -- where I haven't even encountered arguments for socialism (unless you disingenuously conflate the New Deal with revolutionary collectivism -- a favorite trick of the right). Kos himself, in fact -- the demon leftist, the benighted moonbat pacifist -- is, oddly enough, an Army veteran, and a prime mover behind James Webb's campaign in Virginia.

Ah, Webb. Those who call themselves "conservatives" (and who currently lament having sold their souls and good names to a big-spending, tariff-loving, combat-dodging plutocrat) are drooling with envy at the Democrats' latest faithful conscript: a Reaganite, a (benign) neo-Confederate, an actual warrior. And Webb would not have stood a chance, had he not been relentlessly championed, from the start, by one Markos Moulitsas.

No, you won't find much support at Daily Kos for John McCain (a man I admired hugely up until a couple of weeks ago); but you're much much more likely to find praise for James Webb than you are for Sacco, Vanzetti, or Kropotkin. (True, Moulitsas probably thinks more highly of the late Archbishop Romero than you do, but that's not quite the same thing as advocating gulags.)

So. "Conservative." I'm not entirely sure what I'm suggesting you embrace, linguistically, once you've burnt that wart from your profile. I've danced with the world "liberal" for a while, but let's face it: it's an almost meaningless term these days. I'm hardly the first to point out the various ironies: that "neoliberalism" is what Europeans call "neoconservatism," that "liberal" is what freepers call Stalinists. I'm wary of the word, for this reason, although it reeks far less than "conservative," and in fact can be defined to mean all of the things that used to be respectable about conservatism.

Obviously we can't embrace a "third way." In their Orwellian simplification of political terms, the right has managed to damage this term beyond repair: thanks to their rigorous contempt, it means something like "self-loathing closet fellow-traveler."

I wish I could be happy with "The Radical Center." A solid construct, with Aristotelian nuances. Unfortunately, those agitating for a political party under that name are viciously anti-immigrant.

Perhaps it's time to dispense with the geometric metaphor entirely. The insistence upon a linear graph -- left, center, right -- has become nothing more than stubborn faith in a Euclidian absurdity. (Just as an "axis" cannot have three endpoints, unless you're cross-eyed.)

There are those who believe in torture, and those who do not. Those who promote a unitary executive, pace Schmitt, and those who do not. Those who are willing to cover for hypocrites, thugs, and profiteers... and those who are not. The rest of it -- from government spending to abortion to affirmative action -- is negotiable. Tyranny is not.

The place you want to stand -- the place where you do stand -- is that place of negotiation. (It's hard to escape from topographical metaphors.) It's not a bad place to be: where red Tories and blue Democrats can establish common ground with various congenial allies -- classical liberals, actual Christians, self-critical modernists. You'll meet some accomplished people there (Bob Dylan recently expressed his admiration for Barry Goldwater!) I'd go so far as to say that this is the domain now occupied -- as defined at the voting booth -- by mainstream America.

You've given a voice to this group for some time now: all I'm saying is that it's time to recognize your constituency, and give it a name. The word you finally choose is your call -- I give up -- but I'm sure you can find us something that doesn't start with a "c."

There are LAWS against this?

2006-12-07T12:42:00.000-06:00

From the LA Times:

"The son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor was indicted in Miami on U.S. charges of committing torture as chief of a paramilitary unit during his father's regime...

"...The indictment marks the first time a 12-year-old federal anti-torture law has been used, U.S. officials said.

"Charles McArthur Emmanuel, 29, also known as Chuckie Taylor Jr., was charged with committing torture overseas as a U.S. citizen as well as conspiracy. He could be sentenced to life in prison.

"Suspects who face the torture charges must either be U.S. citizens or be caught in the United States; in this case, Taylor was both."

Last I heard, retired torturer Donald Rumsfeld was a U.S. citizen, and I suspect you could find him skulking somewhere in that very country.

Filibuster Alito, You Cowards

2006-01-26T13:15:00.001-06:00

Alito is a menace. Friends, this is no time to invoke the Powell Doctrine. Sometimes you have to enter a battle without overwhelming force and without the assurance of victory: that's what's known as "courage." Conservatives are salivating for a reason: Samuel Alito's succession to the court would render the Bush era permanent. Even those who have quietly abandoned their feckless leader, are thrilled that what he stands for will live in the person of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

It's hard to align yourself with, much less love, a party that hasn't the guts or the sense to fight the one necessary battle. I hope this doesn't describe the Democrats, whom I otherwise think very highly of. If I am to believe the mainstream media, however, the most courageous statement we've yet to hear from a Democratic senator is something along the lines of: "Well, yes, in a remote corner of my mind I'm thinking that I might possibly entertain a tiny little filibuster notion, kind of, except that it would be silly, really, and after all nobody wants to, and that's a good thing, and anyway I'm busy."

This battle is everything. If you believe in a tripartite government, in checks and balances... in short: if you are committed to the Founders' wise provisions against an emerging tyranny, then you simply cannot permit this man to sit on the highest court in the land. The New York Times, bless them, has finally acknowledged this. In a negative fashion, and with great subtlety, so has Harvard's wily Straussian, Harvey Mansfield: read this article to understand some of the thinking behind the administration's hubris. Mansfield, a theorist suspicious of democracy, has nicely reinterpreted the Framers' intent to justify a Hobbesian supreme executive. And many of the thinking members of this administration (yes, they quietly exist), were influenced by Mansfield's mentor, the closet Nietzschean Leo Strauss.

Mansfield and his school of thought deprecate liberal democracy as inherently weak and potentially self-destructive: in times of war, you want a proud leader who will circumvent the vulgar rule of law in order to act decisively, with cruel Machiavellian virtu. You want a president who is not squeamish about torturing captives, denying habeas corpus, quietly ignoring the quaint fetters placed upon the executive by the masses (read: Congress).

The Straussians, if you're not familiar with them, stress the necessity of esoteric writing: read this article carefully, with an eye to the hidden "dark teaching." Andrew Sullivan, who studied with Mansfield, nails the pivotal assertion (without fully taking Mansfield to task for his pernicious intent): with this ill-defined War on Terror, the state of war is now permanent, meaning that the Executive's unrestricted power to act efficiently is now -- if you believe this perverse reading of the Framers -- a permanent fact. In short, the United States has become a benevolent tyranny.

(For a nice refutation of this reading -- one that concentrates upon Madison's profound fear of arbitrary powers in a time of war -- read John Nichols' superb article Samuel Alito v. James Madison.)

Alito's confirmation is an absolutely crucial step in the completion of this new regime. (And a new regime it is: we will have passed out of an era of pure liberal democracy, into something which looks similar, but is in fact horribly different.) Mansfield does not address Alito specifically, but it is clear that the redefinition of the executive requires the Supreme Court to retreat behind a screen of quietism. As the New York Times points out, Samuel Alito's entire career points towards a strategy of castrating the judicial branch, in favor of a Brave New Presidency. In particular, the tactic of "signing statements" -- in which the president is encouraged to take acts of Congress as pleasant advice, rather than binding legal stricture -- is Alito's personal contribution to the decline of a free republic.

I want to call myself a Democrat; I really do. Decency has long pooled almost exclusively in the center; the Republicans have become as vicious and unprincipled as the far left. The problem -- and Mansfield's thesis is unfortunately dead accurate here -- is that the vicious and unprincipled tend to be much more effective. I'm not calling for the abandonment of principle, of course: I'm insisting that principle be pursued, now, with ruthless conviction. Filibuster this dangerous man. Just do it. Even if you have become utterly infected by the weeping defeatists -- even if you buy the (by no means certain) inevitability of failure -- do not go gentle. Everything that we believe in depends upon this. And history demonstrates that many battles fought in this way -- in the teeth of almost certain failure, by virtue of the absurd -- prove our finest hours.

An Image

2006-01-08T02:32:00.000-06:00

Now Here's Intelligence

2005-12-17T20:01:00.000-06:00

It would be difficult to quantify how much I love this piece:

Everything the NSA Needs to Know About My Indian Mother (But Was Afraid to Ask)
by Sandip Roy, in New America Media

"The National Security Agency is listening in on international calls without warrants, says the New York Times. Just in case their eavesdropper's Bengali is a little rusty, here is what I talked about with my mother last week. I am putting this down to save them the money needed for translation and transcription, and also because when it comes to my filial calls to India, my mother and I pretty much have the same conversation every weekend.

"My mother is doing OK after her recent cataract operation. She is needing drops less frequently in her eyes. If the NSA likes, they could send her a get-well card. She would love that, and would tell all the neighbors.

"Another cousin just got married. A major part of the conversation listed the biryani, fried and curried fish, three kinds of sweets and every other item on the menu at the sit-down dinner for 500 of their closest friends and families. Yet another cousin is going to get married at the end of December. Forecast: more menu details, what-to-wear dilemmas and what-to-give predicaments coming up.

"My nephew has done very well in his school finals. My niece has her exams coming up. I wish the NSA fortitude and patience as they listen to a fond grandmother gushing about her grandchildren's endless achievements. Did you know the little boy once played a snowflake in a dramatic rendition of Oscar Wilde's "The Selfish Giant" at school? That might have been before the spying order went into effect, but it's a useful backgrounder for the NSA...."

I heart Mr. Roy. A candidate for extraordinary rendition, if ever I spied one.

How You Know You've Been Kidnapped by the CIA

2005-12-04T16:29:00.000-06:00

At last we have details regarding "special rendition" (or, if you prefer, "extraordinary rendition" -- a phrase which is even more doubleplusgood). This is important. If you are mistakenly kidnapped and tortured by the CIA, it's useful to know what to expect. The intrepid Dana Priest (WaPo's new star, now that Woodward has become Dubya's pet hack), has written yet another remarkable exposé of the Cheney/Bush reign of (t)error -- Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake. Don't read this simply because it's fascinating, and nauseating. Read it because it may come in handy:

"Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe."

Right. So, let's say you've just had a spat with your wife, and you take a spontaneous trip across the border to "blow off steam" -- oh, and you happen to have an ordinary Arabic name -- then this is a possible outcome. It is in fact what happened to Khaled Masri, an innocent German citizen.

Let's try to picture this. You've taken a quick trip to clear your head, and suddenly you're surrounded by guys dressed like ninjas, who blindfold you, cut off your clothes, give you an enema, and put you in a diaper. Which is, okay, sort of humorous. Right? Until they take you to a cell and torture you.

"Masri said his cell in Afghanistan was cold, dirty and in a cellar, with no light and one dirty cover for warmth. The first night he said he was kicked and beaten and warned by an interrogator: 'You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know.'"

Now, it's hard to argue, in this case, that the coverup is worse than the crime, but it sure competes. And the suggested coverup is nothing short of mind-boggling -- by comparison, enough to render credible any conspiracy theorist at his most paranoid. When the CIA recognized that they'd kidnapped and tortured the wrong man -- something they've done a fair bit of, recently -- it was crucial to figure out the PR ramifications. (Perhaps they consulted Rove.)

"At the CIA, the question was: Now what? Some officials wanted to go directly to the German government; others did not. Someone suggested a reverse rendition: Return Masri to Macedonia and release him. 'There wouldn't be a trace. No airplane tickets. Nothing. No one would believe him,' one former official said. 'There would be a bump in the press, but then it would be over.'"

Unbelievable. (Perhaps they consulted Ludlum?) Ah, but it didn't happen. Well, not quite. It's true that when Masri was released -- after five months in isolation -- they told him "that he would not receive any documents or papers confirming his ordeal. The Americans would never admit they had taken him prisoner." The compromise, however, is that the German interior minister was told about Masri's case. Of course, this polite tip came with a specific request: "that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public."

I hope you're taking notes. This is what can happen to you, at the hands of the Bush administration (let's remember that this is policy): you can suddenly, for no reason, find yourself bound and stripped by masked men, drugged and imprisoned, held for an unspecified period of time -- during which you will be tortured -- then released with the suggestion that you keep this unfortunate business to yourself, because nobody's going to believe you if you try to complain.

The problem is that this kind of story is no longer incredible. We do believe you. I can't imagine that anyone seriously questions whether Masri's tale is true -- in the Age of Cheney, this is how the United States is expected to act abroad. (Not at home. If the masked men pick you up here, you'll be shipped off to a "black site," perhaps in Romania, where they cannot hear you scream.)

Remember when fatuous Republicans were constantly huffing, "where is the outrage?" I believe that the most fatuous of them all, the swinging gambler Bill Bennett, wrote an entire book with a title something like that. Well, I think it's time to revive that question. Where, for Christ's sake, is the outrage?

The Poetics of Jake

2005-11-25T16:35:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I stumbled upon an entirely new genre of literature. While searching for a Sonny Rollins disc on amazon.com, I happened upon the following customer review of Saxophone Colossus:

"Among the finest jazz works ever. Typically, I order mayonnaise as my condiment of choice on a sandwich. But after my cat's death, I can't seem to come to terms with mayonnaise anymore. Silly right? It's not like I blame mayo for my cat's death -- I think it has something to do with the opening of the jar. "Buttons" would always run into the kitchen if she heard me opening the mayo jar. But now, I open the jar and there's nothing. Just me and my empty apartment. My life didn't realy end up how I thought it would. I thought for sure Sonja would say yes when I asked her to marry me and I'd have a better job. But she looked so disappointed when I asked that I knew that she was going to choose Greg instead of me. He was already successful and had his own car. I was an aspiring writer, not much to bank on there. Now years later, I'm still aspiring, while she's driving a big Mercury SUV. Sonny Rollins rocks."

Now, I was not entirely sure that this customer, Jake, hadn't perhaps had a small psychotic break in the midst of assessing Rollins for Amazon; nevertheless, I was impressed. I began to wonder about Jake. Has he finally published outside of amazon.com? Well, this I don't know, but what I do know is that he has published considerably more within amazon.com. When I clicked on "see all my reviews," I found that Jake had, as I say, created an entirely new genre of literary text: the small confessional narrative, hidden within the Amazon merchandise review. The following small masterpiece appears on the page devoted to Welding Metallurgy by Shinto Lu.

"But don't most of us already know the basics of metallurgy? It reminds me of the time I saw my brother smoking cigarettes behind the garage. He had stolen them from my mother and didn;t really seem to be enjoying himself. But he smoked the whole pack. As he finished, I thought to myself, "what a loser." But the fact was I had sat there for 45 minutes watching him smoke all those cigarettes. So, I guess I was even a bigger loser. A moniker that stayed with me most of my teenage life. I didn't dislike school, I got to see a lot of pretty girls that would never have sat next to me anywhere else. I didn't get good grades, as I was addicted to after-school cartoons like Tom & Jerry. Even well into my teens. If I see them now, I watch them in totality looking for what appealed to me when I was younger. I can't find it. "

While Jake's Welding Metallurgy review is to be commended for having attached itself to such an inspired book, I do find that it represents a decline in structural nuance: Jake's Saxophone Colossus review returns, in the final sentence, to the actual merchandise at hand -- if nothing else, this is a more successful attempt at hiddenness, which is the essence of all esoteric writing. And the Jakean narrative is, most certainly, esoteric.

Perhaps Jake's most successfully esoteric piece is the tender Stiletto T114MC Titanium, Milled Face, Curved Handle Framing Hammer. Here Jake employs the circular structure so powerful in Saxophone Colossus, yet -- in a subtle twist -- makes the deviant narrative relate, tangentially, to the merchandise reviewed:

"Great hammer. Makes me yearn for the days when putting up drywall and drinking brew were a carpenter's obligation as much as his desire. Nowdays, you get these wannabe carpenters staying lucid and not double charging. Frankly, they've ruined the industry. I mean, I try to keep an open mind and all, but there comes a time in a man's life when he has to look in the mirror and take stock of himself. I don't judge a man by his choice of friends or what he does when he's not at work. But golly, if you're a carpenter, be one. Great hammer."

For a moment, the reader believes that he or she may have just read an actual review of the Stiletto T114MC Titanium, Milled Face, Curved Handle Framing Hammer. (Which is $69.99, and ought therefore to be a pretty fine hammer indeed.)

I must confess, however, that I found the actual sentiments expressed in Stiletto T114MC Titanium, Milled Face, Curved Handle Framing Hammer a touch less moving -- less deeply considered, in fact -- than those apparent in Jake's finer efforts. While it stands as a superb example of hiddenness, Stiletto T114MC Titanium, Milled Face, Curved Handle Framing Hammer remains a slight opus -- a triumph, finally, of mere technique. Compare it with the delicate Massacre ~ 50 Cent, surely the most affecting piece in the Jakean ouvre:

"50-Cent is the grooviest. Early in my life I thought for sure I'd find someone who'd love me and I could love back. It hasn't worked out that way. I've had a spell of bad luck that seems to have lasted for years. I hate my boss and I have thoughts about quitting, but fear grips me and I can't do it. My gosh, what a failure I am. Working 35 hours a week, going home to an empty apartment, no friends. Heavy debt. My only outlets for creative expression are my synthesizer and watching late-night TV. Though I always wake up in a bad mood 'cause I stay up watching 1980s sitcoms that I didn't even like the first time I saw them. 50-Cent is the real deal."

It is impossible to overstate the importance of this body of work. Jake (who goes by the name "Jake," mystery augmented by quotation marks) has issued in a new era -- not simply in genre, but in means of publication. We may soon see entire epic poems lying coyly hidden within CNET reviews; picaresque novels masquerading as users' comments at various software sites; haiku inserted into responses on this very blog.

While We're Fighting Terror, We May As Well Take Down A Few Artists

2005-11-17T22:53:00.000-06:00

This is a story that gets little play outside the insular world of tech artists, but it remains one of the most egregious abuses of power in the War Against Criticism. For months, the Department of Justice has been ruining the life of a respected artist and professor who employs scientific equipment and (harmless) biological samples in his work. Steven Kurtz, whose use of bacteria is in fact a pointed critique of American biowarfare, was initially arrested and charged with terrorist activity. When those charges proved ludicrous, government zealots hit him with mail fraud, arguing that he had mishandled specimens. It is mind-boggling to see how far the DOJ is willing to go in the harrassment of a citizen (a critic of the administration) who is no longer remotely suspected of terrorism. Note that these bastards pressed mistaken charges against Professor Kurtz on the day that his wife died, and have refused to acknowledge their error. Below is the press release from a group involved in his defense:

November 17, 2005
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contacts:
Edmund Cardoni 1-716-812-9237
Gregg Bordowitz 1-312-420-6092
Lucia Sommer 1-716-359-3061
mailto:media@caedefensefund.org

ARTIST RELEASED FROM PRETRIAL SUPERVISION OVER DOJ OBJECTIONS
Supervisor requests release, prosecution attempts to block

Buffalo, NY - Artist and University at Buffalo professor Steven Kurtz has been released from pretrial supervision despite strong objections from US Department of Justice prosecutor William Hochul.

Kurtz's case has not yet gone to trial and motions for its dismissal are pending, but until last week the artist was subject to random house searches and drug tests, was limited in his ability to travel, and had to report regularly to a probation officer. (See "Summary of Case" below for background.)

Last week, arguing that there was no hint of criminality or risk of flight, Zenaida Piotrowicz, Kurtz's pretrial supervisor, motioned afederal court to release Kurtz from supervision. Despite vigorous and exceptional objections by Department of Justice prosecutor Hochul, Magistrate Judge Kenneth Schroeder agreed there was no reason not to release Kurtz on his own recognizance to await trial.

Kurtz's Defense Committee believes that the prosecutor's unusual and fierce opposition to the pretrial supervisor's motion to release Kurtz from probation is yet another example of the extreme prejudice with which the Department of Justice has approached the case. The Defense Committee believes the case in fact represents a deliberate attempt to intimidate and silence artists and scholars critical of US government policy, and that the DOJ's extreme prejudice is further suggested by the following facts:

* This is the first time the Department of Justice has ever tried to prosecute the alleged breaking of a material transfer agreement as federal mail fraud. In the prosecution's radical interpretation of mail fraud law, incorrectly filling in a warranty card would be grounds for federal criminal prosecution. Last July, at a hearing on the case, Magistrate Judge Kenneth Schroeder noted that such an interpretation would be akin to opening a "Pandora's box."

* The Department of Justice is completely outside its own guidelines for prosecution on this case ("9-43.100 Prosecution Policy Relating to Mail Fraud and Wire Fraud"). According to these guidelines, an alleged infraction involving $256 worth of harmless bacteria should be left to the relevant state agencies, i.e. those of New York and Pennsylvania; these, however, have declined to take action in the case. (The alleged victims of the "fraud," American Type Culture Collection and the University of Pittsburgh, have likewise declined to take any action, either criminal or civil.)

* The substances Kurtz allegedly received are harmless and are not regulated by any law or government agency (EPA, FDA, etc.), as prosecutor Hochul was forced to admit at a hearing last July. Furthermore, they are legal for any citizen to buy and possess. Their intended use was very obviously in bonafide creative work and research by a well-known artist and university professor with a long and institutionally validated record.

Kurtz is currently awaiting a ruling on motions to dismiss the entire case filed by his attorney Paul Cambria.

SUMMARY OF CASE

Almost eighteen months have passed since Kurtz awoke to find that his wife of twenty years had died of heart failure. He called the police, who, upon noticing lab equipment that Kurtz used in his artwork and teaching, contacted the FBI. The FBI detained Kurtz as a potential "bioterrorist" and initiated an investigation involving the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Department of Homeland Security, and numerous other federal and international law enforcement agencies, at an estimated cost to taxpayers in the millions of dollars.

Kurtz was finally indicted not for bioterrorism, but for "mail and wire fraud" - charges traditionally brought in weak cases when no other charges will stick. (These charges still carry a possible sentence of twenty years in prison.)

###

For more information, please contact Edmund Cardoni (716-812-9237), Gregg Bordowitz (312-420-6092) or Lucia Sommer (716-359-3061), or send email to mailto:media@caedefensefund.org.

The CAE Defense Fund website is http://www.caedefensefund.org

What "Torture" Is

2005-11-13T20:10:00.000-06:00

If you're not reading Andrew Sullivan's blog, you're not fully aware of what this administration's doing to untried prisoners in the name of The War Against Other People's Terrorism. Some technical details:

"TORTURE AND WATER: One of the experts on torture, especially that practised in Iran, professor Darius Rejali of Reed College, emails an exhaustive account of the various techniques involved, including their gruesome nuances:

This specific water torture, often called the "water cure," admits of several variants:

(a) pumping: filling a stomach with water causes the organs to distend, a sensation compared often with having your organs set on fire from the inside. This was the Tormenta de Toca favored by the Inquisition and featured on your website photo. The French in Algeria called in the tube or tuyau after the hose they forced into the mouth to fill the organs.

(b) choking - as in sticking a head in a barrel. It is a form of near asphyxiation but it also produces the same burning sensation through all the water a prisoner involuntarily ingests. This is the example illustrated in the Battle of Algiers movie, a technique called the sauccisson or the submarine in Latin America. Prisoners describe their chests swelling to the size of barrels at which point a guard would stomp on the stomach forcing the water to move in the opposite direction.

(c) choking - as in attaching a person to a board and dipping the board into water. This was my understanding of what waterboarding was from the initial reports. The use of a board was stylistically most closely associated with the work of a Nazi political interrogator by the name of Ludwig Ramdor who worked at Ravensbruck camp. Ramdor was tried before the British Military Court Martial at Hamburg (May 1946 to March 1947) on charges for subjecting women to this torture, subjecting another woman to drugs for interrogation, and subjecting a third to starvation and high pressure showers. He was found guilty and executed by the Allies in 1947.

(d) choking - as in forcing someone to lie down, tying them down, then putting a cloth over the mouth, and then choking the prisoner by soaking the cloth. This also forces ingestion of water. It was invented by the Dutch in the East Indies in the 16th century, as a form of torture for English traders. More recently it was common in the American south, especially in police stations, in the 1920s, as documented in the famous Wickersham Report of the American Bar Association (The Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, 1931), compiling instances of police torture throughout the United States.

Perhaps the main thing to remember here is that all these techniques leave few marks; they're clean tortures and so people who are unfamiliar with them are in genuine doubt as to whether there is much pain. In the absence of a bloody wound, who is to say how much pain there was?

"It seems the method that the U.S. has authorized is closest to c), the Nazi one, or d), the one developed by the Dutch and deployed in the American South. Remember that this is authorized for use in the secret black sites, exposed by Dana Priest. It is this CIA-directed torture that Dick Cheney is so adamant on retaining and codifying into law."

***
Andrew Sullivan's blog is heroic: it singlehandedly kept Captain Ian Fishback's testimony from disappearing (until Senator McCain weighed in, at which point the soldier could no longer be ignored/smeared); Sullivan in fact may well have kept Fishback himself from being disappeared. (I don't usually go in for this kind of conspiracy theory, but Cheney was reliably quoted as having said, with regard to Fishback: "Either break him or destroy him, and do it quickly.")

Something not stressed in this account of waterboarding, by the way, is the subject's firm belief that he is about to die. When Dostoevsky was led out to be executed (a "hoax," much like waterboarding), it was the most brutal psychological event in his life, and changed him forever; the condemned man standing with him, in fact, went incurably mad.

That this kind of psychological torture is not regarded as "torture," per se, says something about the shallowness of this administration. George Orwell understood (as he understood so much about today's White House) -- in 1984, the protagonist is ruined not be physical pain, but by the manipulation of his mortal phobia of rats. Gerard Manley Hopkins also understood:

"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there."

What Left-Wing Loons Were Saying In The Fifties

2005-11-07T23:26:00.000-06:00

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 11/8/54

America's Secret Dungeons: The "Black Sites"

2005-11-02T00:18:00.000-06:00

The single most important piece I read today had nothing to do with Alito or Plame. Dana Priest's astonishing feature in the Washington Post (an extended report which I'd be inclined to call a "major scoop," if the subject matter weren't so grave), reveals nothing less than a complex network of CIA-run secret prisons, strategically scattered across the globe. These so-called "black sites" would be illegal even in most of the host countries: they are places where barbaric interrogation techniques -- "water-boarding," for instance -- are standard practice. In short, the United States is running an archipelago of torture centers, in secret, on foreign soil. (And no, it's not the Gulag system -- and yes, it is an archipelago -- and no, it's nowhere near the scale of the Gulag -- and yes, the treatment of the prisoners is approximately as repulsive.)

Read this piece.

As the Buck Screeches to a Halt

2005-10-24T20:04:00.000-05:00

"He's a vile, detestable, moralistic person with no heart and no conscience who believes he's been tapped by God to do very important things."

No, that's not an assessment of George W. Bush. It's the beginning of the smear campaign against the prosecutor: the quotation is from a "White House ally... referring to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald."

I'm not the first to note the irony that the White House, which is being prosecuted for a smear job, is beginning to resort to just that tactic in response. They have to; they're not much good at anything else. But a smear campaign without Rove is like the Astros sans Clemens -- here you have a talent that comes along maybe once in a generation. Rove is the Great One, the Gretzky of Libel; can you imagine anyone else cooking up that bit about McCain's illegitimate black child? Perhaps he'll continue to orchestrate the slander from his cell, but it won't be easy.

I took that quotation from the New York Daily News, by the way, and it's a fine time to be reading the tabloids. The best sports writing is always found in the tabs; and now that Washington politics is beginning to resemble Mexican wrestling, these are the go-to papers for jazzy political coverage. (I've been getting a huge kick out of over-the-top Sox metaphors -- will get to that in a moment.)

You won't find this kind of opera in the sober, serious, unreliable New York Times; time to turn to the Daily News: "Facing the darkest days of his presidency, President Bush is frustrated, sometimes angry and even bitter, his associates say....

"Bush usually reserves his celebrated temper for senior aides because he knows they can take it. Lately, however, some junior staffers have also faced the boss' wrath.

"'This is not some manager at McDonald's chewing out the help,' said a source with close ties to the White House when told about these outbursts. 'This is the President of the United States, and it's not a pleasant sight.'"

(No, it's not the manager of your local McDonald's. If it were, the franchise would be in the red, the Freedom Fries soggy, and the burgers tainted with salmonella.)

"Presidential advisers and friends say Bush is a mass of contradictions: cheerful and serene, peevish and melancholy, occasionally lapsing into what he once derided as the 'blame game.'"

Speaking of tabloids, the National Enquirer reported recently that George has begun drinking again. Now, the National Enquirer is only marginally more reliable than the newspaper of record, but that Jekyll/Hyde description sure fits the profile. (Actually -- contrary to popular belief -- the Enquirer gave up on "Space Aliens Ate My Baby" stories a long time ago, and has an admirable record when it comes to fact checking. If they reported it, then it's likely true. Slate has a good piece on the surprisingly high standards at the tab.)

"Bush is so dismayed that 'the only person escaping blame is the President himself,' said a sympathetic official, who delicately termed such self-exoneration 'illogical.'"

Illogical, perhaps, but utterly consistent. (For a rigorous psychological assessment, read "The Children's Hour.") The president has simply never been able to take a hard look in the mirror. And do you blame him? What he would see there, especially now, is what many of us have always seen: he's a little man. A blustering peevish martinet.

In the absence of an honest mirror, I sometimes wonder which image of George Walker Bush he retains in his head: the magnanimous, folksy Texan that he puts on in front of the cameras, or the vicious bully that's emerging at the office. I suspect the former, augmented with all sorts of hilarious martial and religious virtues, too wacky even to insert in scripted speeches.

Let's face it: "not pleasant" is an understatement. Imagine some poor earnest Republican intern, straight out of a small-town Midwestern college, having to hold back tears as the most powerful man in the world dresses him down in front of his friends. (I'd be no good in that situation. I'd be inclined to say, "Get out of my face, clown." Hello, Gitmo...)

How did this happen? American historians will be pondering this for decades. How did a man with these qualities -- which were never a secret -- rise to the most important office in the land? Nixon was a dark figure, to be sure, but he was a giant relative to George. Reagan, even if you thought him asleep at the wheel, was a monument of competence beside this fumbling zero. Even Bush Sr. looks almost presidential in retrospect.

What's interesting to me is that you're hearing just this sort of talk these days from the far right. As the Harriet Miers wrecking ball smashes holes in the false front, suddenly hard-core Republicans are describing the president in terms that I could have written. God bless them.

--------------------------------

So, anyway, how about them Sox. Humble people finding unexpected success is a bit more uplifting than faux cowboys predictably biting the dust. And those hyperbolic sports metaphors -- damn. My favorite trope isn't actually from the tabs, but from John Donovan at Sports Illustrated, in his description of Joe Crede's glorious glove-work:

"Not since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a man with leather made so much noise."

Dances With Death

2005-10-17T15:20:00.000-05:00

(from Los Locos, the annual celebration of madness in San Miguel de Allende)

In Which Harriet Miers Disrupts My Sleep

2005-10-13T20:47:00.000-05:00

I had a dream about Harriet Miers the other night. (Yes, yes, I know: Cooper, get a life.) The dream -- not my narrative unconscious at its most exciting, I'm afraid -- involved George Bush withdrawing her nomination. That's all I remember. However -- and here is where this transcends a dreary "I had a dream that had nothing to do with sex" anecdote -- I woke up in a bad mood. (You think I'm making this up. I assure you, if I were making this up it would be way less banal.)

Why, I wondered to myself, would such a dream be a bad dream? After all, I've already weighed in on the Miers question -- I believe I dubbed her a "joke."

Well, upon reflection, I've decided that she's a good joke. A joke that deserves to be told. A joke at which, I strongly believe, we shall laugh last.

First of all, let's consider what would have been the least funny nomination. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Janice Rogers Brown, very much on the shortlist, who is quoted as deprecating Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal as "our own socialist revolution." (I often wonder what people who hate the New Deal think of fondly. The Great Depression? The age of the robber barons?)

It's worth concentrating upon those words, which would have done McCarthy proud. Now, the thing about a "revolution," when appended to the word "socialist," is that it tends to imply barricades and streets awash in blood. Especially in America, where the word "socialist" really means "communist" to the average non-socialist. The New Deal was, of course, bloodless, not a revolution, and not really socialist. It was, however, civilized.

For originalists like Judge Brown, of particular interest is "freedom of contract" -- which, though not in the Constitution, is treated as if it were not only there, but a very pillar of our civic structure. The notion of freedom of contract comes from the Lochner decision of 1905, in which the Supreme Court decided in favor of a bakery owner, Joseph Lochner, who felt that a New York law limiting his bakers to a sixty-hour work week was unconstitutional.

"Lochner challenged the constitutionality of his conviction on the grounds that it violated his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In a 5-4 decision, a majority of the United States Supreme Court agreed with him, ruling that the New York law interfered 'with the right of contract between the employer and employees concerning the number of hours in which the latter may labor.'

"This 'freedom of contract' is contained nowhere in the Constitution."

The New Deal was predicated on a 1937 decision, West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, which effectively put the last nail in the coffin of this putative freedom. All seems a bit dull, doesn't it, but the implications are huge. The Lochner court, which Justice Brown remembers with such nostalgia, was an enemy of many things much cherished by most Americans (not just by, you know, those revolutionary socialists):

"If 'freedom of contract' had still been important to the Court in 1937, laws like the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act (which protects the right of workers to organize into unions) and the Fair Labor Standards Act (which includes the first minimum wage and bans child labor) would likely have been ruled unconstitutional violations of this right."

This is the woman we might have had instead of Harriet Miers: a judge who explicitly endorses what many suspect that Bush has always wanted -- it's never been a question of "reforming" Social Security; it's a question of destroying Social Security, and all of its attendant "socialist" baggage. The New Deal, for Bush and his ilk, was a raw deal; and those of you who own oil companies (or sweat shops) probably agree.

So, if you're in favor of deep-sixing Social Security, demolishing the minimum wage, banning unions, and bringing back child labor, then Brown's your woman. (I like to think that even the most hardcore so-called conservatives would balk at the notion of child labor, but what I like to think has proved astonishingly ineffective when it comes to circumscribing their actual beliefs.)

Now, contrast Janice Rogers Brown with Harriet Miers. I have no doubt that Judge Brown is the superior intellect, with far far greater expertise in the area of constitutional law. In a debate, I suspect she could make puppy chow of poor Ms. Miers. But ask yourself: who would you prefer to have deciding cases on behalf of the average American?

Miers, unlike Brown, is nicely mushy. Think of those cooing love letters to George Bush, the best governor ever and the most brilliant man she's ever met. Yes, I'm fairly certain Harriet comes from the "poor Joshua" school of jurisprudence.

(Justice Harry A. Blackmun famously wrote "Poor Joshua!" in a dissent, when the Supreme Court refused to find state officials responsible for not removing four-year-old boy Joshua DeShaney from the custody of a father who beat him so badly that he was permanently brain-damaged. This is often held up as an example of judicial "sentimentalism.")

Call me sentimental: but mush trumps steel, sometimes, when it comes to justice.

While everyone is obsessing over Roe v. Wade, it's worth noting that Miers has taken distinctly liberal positions on all sorts of fetus-neutral matters:

"As the first woman president of the State Bar of Texas and the Dallas Bar Association, Harriet Miers pushed for inclusion of women and minorities."

Even though Janice Brown is both female and African-American, I suspect that's not a very Janice Brown thing to do. And there's this:

"When a black county commissioner was arrested after a physical altercation with an off-duty police officer who allegedly had spat a racial slur at him, more than 1,000 demonstrators marched on City Hall. Many feared violence until Harriet Miers, a first-term City Council member and local lawyer, spoke to the crowd. 'If it means anything to you, I want to apologize,' Miers said in her native Texas drawl. 'I want to apologize to the African American community of this city for an unprovoked and unexcusable attack on one of their elected leaders.'"

In order to wring that kind of apology out of any of the other candidates on Bush's shortlist, you'd probably have to resort to extraordinary rendition.

As for Roe v. Wade, that seems to be one area in which Harriet might actually have her mush under control. There's one person who knows Harriet even better than Handsome George does: Justice Nathan Hecht, her occasionally romantic friend. And let's look at what Hecht -- himself an arch-conservative -- has to say:

"'What they really want to know is how's she going to decide Roe v. Wade if it comes again,' Hecht said of the case that led to legalized abortion nationwide. 'And the answer is you cannot extrapolate (legal decisions) from religious feelings. If you could, the right wouldn't be as nervous as it looks like they are.'"

And this:

"'Yes, she goes to a pro-life church,' Justice Hecht said, adding, 'I know Harriet is, too.' The two attended 'two or three' anti-abortion fund-raising dinners in the early 1990's, he said, but added that she had not otherwise been active in the anti-abortion movement. 'You can be just as pro-life as the day is long and can decide the Constitution requires Roe' to be upheld, he said."

And this:

"When asked if her personal opposition to abortion would give her sufficient cause to overturn the Supreme Court's abortion precedent, Hecht said, 'I think she'll say they won't.'"

Lastly, Your Honor, I'd like to present this summary of Harriet's Collected Works:

"As president of the Texas bar, Miers also published regular columns about her priorities, offering some of the few glimpses — albeit vague ones — into her approach to the law.

"A common theme was her belief that the legal community should do more to assist people who feel shut out of the legal system, or who can't afford to break into it.

"She pressed for more money to improve legal representation for indigent defendants and said root causes of crime — poverty, lack of mental and other health care, inadequate education and family dysfunction — must be addressed."

Not only is that last bit not very Janice Brown, it's not very George Bush. It's what you'd call compassionate -- a word that actually has meaning when liberated from the slogan "compassionate conservatism."

This perhaps explains my dream. I don't admire this woman, particularly; I certainly don't respect her, intellectually; but I'm starting to like her. No, she may not have the nutcracker intellect of Janice Brown or Michael McConnell or Michael Luttig. In fact, I suspect she may well prove to be quite the opposite: a sentimentalist in the mold of Harry Blackmun. Which is fine by me. And, evidently, fine by my subconscious.

McCain Hauls America From the Abyss

2005-10-11T11:27:00.000-05:00

Remember when public figures were impressive? It's a dim, distant memory, but not a nostalgic hallucination: once there were good men, and we'd occasionally elect them.

This desiccated memory crawled back to mind a few days ago, when John McCain rammed an anti-torture bill through the Senate. Now, there are those who would dismiss McCain as a foaming imperialist: James Wolcott in particular, whose reliable judgment seems to lose its compass whenever a pol or pundit refuses to insist upon an immediate retreat from Iraq. Wolcott has denounced McCain as a "choleric hawk," borrowing his words from his good friend Camille Paglia. And Paglia derives her opinion from McCain's face, believe it or not:

The TV camera does not lie: Just as it showed from the get-go that ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was a nervous, shifty, sweaty, petulant mental adolescent, so has it exposed McCain over time as a seething nest of proto-fascist impulses. Despite his recent flurry of radiant, P.R.-coached grins, McCain has the weirdly wary and over-intense eyes of Howard Hughes and the clenched, humorless jaw line of Nurse Diesel.

Well, the television does lie. It's what it does best. The television has, for instance, on occasion portrayed Camille Paglia as sane.

Yes, McCain's a warrior. But that's not quite the same as a bloodthirsty chickenhawk. In fact, it's pretty much the opposite. Yes, he supports the current war in Iraq, but I'd be interested in knowing what that really means. He's also on record as supporting George Bush, a man he patently despises. My sense is that McCain is triangulating (even the greatest men do that, when thrown into the cesspool of Realpolitik): he needs to stand elbow to shoulder with Bush, in order to have any chance at the Republican candidacy in 2008; and I suspect he has very complex reasons for supporting the war.

Those reasons? Well, let's face it: have you heard any coherent plans for dealing with the Iraqi toxic waste dump? Those who loathe the war (and I'm one) are inclined to say "cut and run" -- but that is probably not the most intelligent strategy. The current poisonous mess could grow even more lethal: imagine a former Iraq, split into a democratic Kurdistan (nice, but the ensuing war with Turkey could prove ugly); a rogue Sunni state, constituting little more than a base and spawning ground for terrorists; and a Shiite theocracy, now tight with Iranians fellow travelers, and sitting on at least 112.5 billion barrels of oil -- the second largest pool in the world, after Saudi Arabia.

Not a pleasant thought. And no: I haven't the faintest idea what to do about it, except that "cut and run" may not be the most realistic option. If anyone in America does know what to do in this situation, it will be someone like McCain or Kerry: a proven military leader, with a long history of successful diplomacy. McCain, in particular, is as much a skilled and principled diplomat as anything else -- this is a man who went out of his way to forge peaceful relations with a nation that imprisoned him for years, and tortured him for much of it. If McCain says that we need more troops on the ground, for the moment: well, I'm inclined to value his opinion. That does not make him a "choleric hawk" -- it simply makes him a guy who recognizes the importance of cleaning up Bush's mess properly.

Which brings us back to the current bill. Christ, finally someone has had the courage to stand up to this administration's shameful embrace of utter barbarism. And McCain has done it in language that will stand up well in the history books: "The enemy we fight has no respect for human life or human rights. They don't deserve our sympathy. But this isn't about who they are. This is about who we are."

Absolutely right: it's about the soul of America. And I mean that in the full religious sense, which someone like Bush ought to comprehend (if his religion were about something more than sentimental self-esteem) -- it's about the Good, and it's about damnation.

And I Thought He Was One of the Three Stooges

2005-10-06T23:23:00.000-05:00

I find the British press particularly entertaining these days. The Independent, for instance, offers a Bush quotation from a BBC series about to air:

"I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,' and I did."

No, that doesn't make him a prophet. It makes him one of the Blues Brothers.

Come On... All She Has to Do Is Wear a Black Robe and Look Stern

2005-10-06T01:36:00.000-05:00

From The Times: "The temptation is to wonder whether Mr Bush will nominate a loyal savings bank manager from rural Texas to succeed Alan Greenspan later this year as Chairman of the Federal Reserve."

Harriet Miers: Good Joke or Bad Joke?

2005-10-03T13:55:00.000-05:00

That Harriet Miers is a joke, we have no reason to doubt. David Frum reports that Miers "once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met." David -- whatever you may think about his views; he's a very swift guy -- must have choked. I mean, it's one thing to argue that Bush is the Right man, but I can't imagine that David seriously considers him a Bright man. Either Miers doesn't get out much, or -- more likely -- she's a besotted groupie, and an intellectual lightweight. In fact, when David first floated her name, he admits, "I have to confess that at the time, I was mostly joking."

Can anybody be thrilled with this nomination? The right wing is weeping into its collective beer. The liberal center is scratching its collective head, feeling that it may have dodged a bullet, only to be slapped in the face with a wet fish. Come on folks: this is funny. The woman is not second-rate; she's not third-rate; she doesn't even rate. Harriet Miers is a nice woman, who graduated from an obscure law school, and "rose" through the Texas ranks (in other words drifted sideways and slightly downward). Here we have a candidate only marginally more impressive than the president himself. I suspect this is the problem: Bush, who has managed to convince himself that overcoming alcoholism is sufficient reason to deserve the presidency, has no concept of mediocrity. He just doesn't get it. The Roberts appointment was not about excellence (and I do believe, as I have argued below, that he is a truly impressive man): Bush accidentally chose a man with demonstrable virtues, while doing an entirely incidental calculus.

One huge supporter of Ms. Miers is none other than Joseph Allbaugh, that towering figure of competence and objectivity, who installed his good buddy at the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. So, Michael Brown bagged FEMA, and Harriet's off to the Supreme Court. We may even witness the odd sight of Democratic senators filling out the majority in support of this nomination, in the absence of full support from the right. I'm wondering, in fact, whether we'll see this appointment deep-sixed by Republicans.

So, where does this leave those of us who don't want to see the court turned into a playground for hillbilly activists in constructionist drag? Well, for one thing, I'm not too happy about becoming a cheerleader for the bozocracy. And let's not get too comfortable here: the last mediocrity appointed by the right was Clarence Thomas. It's not entirely clear that liberals should be celebrating.

On the other hand, she's sixty years old. So we're only stuck with Harriet Miers for a while, and there's a good chance the president who chooses her replacement will be a Democrat. (Republicans look as if they're not likely to have a lock on power in the foreseeable future: I never would have expected it, but Americans seem to have at last overwhelmingly recognized their shameful error in voting for this administration.)

My advice? Let the GOP hang itself. This is hardly worth wasting a filibuster on: if Republicans choose to approve this non-entity, then that's their funeral -- further proof that this clan is about little more than cronyism and myopic allegiance. If they choose not to let his choice pass, then we can sit back and watch the right wing shoot their own buffoon in the foot: the last thing George needs is to be abandoned by his loony core at this precise moment in his decline.

William Bennett, Cheerleader for Abortion Rights

2005-10-01T00:53:00.000-05:00

Aren't these people special?

"George Bush has distanced himself from comments made by a leading Republican crusader on moral values who declared that one way to reduce the crime rate in the US would be to 'abort black babies.'"

I suppose I'd distance myself too. Although it would be easier for me to do, given that I don't head up a party which once saw fit to make this drooling, crypto-genocidal caricature of a human being secretary of education. That's right, our special man of the day is William Bennett, not only secretary of education under Reagan, but also chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He conducted a little "thought experiment" on his radio show, in which he demonstrated -- convincingly, I imagine, to the kind of people who listen to Bill Bennett -- that all you'd have to do was abort every single one of those black kids, and you'd sure clean up the streets.

Bill's precise words: "If you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose; you could abort every black baby in this country."

He followed that up with the suggestion that this would be "impossible." Also "ridiculous." Thanks Bill. It would be kind of silly, wouldn't it. And so difficult to pull off.

Finally, he suggested that it would be "morally reprehensible." Well, yes.

He was careful, however, to cap this probing moral distinction with the reminder: "but your crime rate would go down." Which is what really matters, if we're going to be all daring and philosophical.

Equally deep thinkers could well argue that this intriguing hypothesis be more fully investigated. Why not abort all children? And just to be, you know, intellectually rigorous, murder their parents as well? I guarantee -- and this is incontrovertible -- that crime would be completely and permanently eradicated. (To give Bill credit, he did include in his thought experiment the race-neutral abortion of all children: yes, even those that aren't black. But he didn't properly examine the efficacy of lining up their parents and shooting them.)

Bill has a problem, though, mathematically speaking. Given that he's "a leading Republican crusader on moral values," surely he must insist -- or he'd lose this honorific -- that abortion itself is a crime. So, let's see: by aborting all black children ("murder," I believe, is how leading Republican crusaders on moral values see it), Bennett would be causing a huge spike in the murder stats -- the assumption being that this brief genocidal spike would be more than compensated for by all those murderers that wouldn't get born.

Let's do the math, however: in order to balance the books, murder-wise, this would mean that each of those aborted black babies would have to have become -- had he or she not been murdered by a leading Republican crusader on moral values -- a murderer. Or you're still seeing a bit of an uptick in crime, statistically speaking. Every murdered murderer would constitute a murder. And the murdered non-murderers... well, you see the problem. Hm. I guess it would even out if we assumed that a lot of those unborn murderers were in fact latent serial killers. I mean, the aborted murderers would have to do a fair bit of murdering in order to make up for the aborted innocents.

Luckily, the media has accustomed us, in the past couple of weeks, to think of most black Americans -- poor ones, anyway -- as rapists of babies, so I suppose it's not too hard to make this mental leap: sure, hell, they're all basically serial killers. The thought experiment works! Right? I think... Okay, I'm not so good at thinking this way. Which is why they pay people like Bennett the big bucks -- I'd make a lousy secretary of education.

Yes, I defer to the expert. Bill Bennett -- with his "multi-million dollar gambling habit" -- clearly knows a lot more about morality than I do. I mean, I have opinions, but he's written whole books about this stuff: The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals; and Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism.

Moral clarity. If I had some of that, I suppose I'd be outraged that we weren't taking clothes hangers to black children in the womb.

The Conquistador's Daughter

2005-09-29T16:25:00.000-05:00

I have yet to post anything remotely photographic on this blog; even more scandalous, I have yet to post anything remotely Mexican. I've now been in San Miguel de Allende for well over a year, and have well over a thousand images catalogued. And so I am in the midst of constructing an illuminated manuscript (all illumination, no manuscript) called "The Conquistador's Daughter."

(Note: I live in the state of Guanajuato, which was home to the semi-nomadic Chichimecas before the Conquest, and in which some 1400 of the indigenous people still speak the Chichimeca-Jonaz language, and a smaller group speak Náhuatl, the language of the Aztecs. As in most of Mexico, the religion is nominally Catholic, but in fact utterly syncretic: you don't have to look very deep to find pre-Hispanic iconography and rituals.)