Digby Roolz

. . . drumroll please: here she is.

Here's the text of the speech.

Judy's Lament

Imagine, poor Judy could have avoided "these very difficult times" if she and her like-minded counterparts throughout the main steam media had just done their jobs instead of acting as stenographers for the White House. Too much to ask for, I guess.

Nothing we didn't already know

Not surprised, just sad.

Just stop it . . .

An excellent article by Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves. What will it take to get the world's governments to focus sufficiently on contemporary slavery? How can 27 million people still remain enslaved in today's world. How can this be?

Well, it happens and, as Mr. Bales points out, it often happens right under your nose. That slavery came to church in suburban Fort Worth is an extreme yet highly ironic reminder of how comfortable westerners may be unwitting accomplices to this horror even in cases where we think we're helping.

What I don't follow entirely is Mr. Bales' resigned acceptance of the opacity of the supply chain of goods that make there ways to rich countries. Taking up Mr. Bales' example of cocoa, I would guess that slave-owning suppliers could always under-bid legitimate suppliers. I would guess it's safe to assume the law of supply and demand is encouraging slavery. Mr. Bales suggests that boycotting certain goods such as cocoa is akin to killing the patient in order to stop the disease: this is because legitimate (often family-owned businesses) would be wiped out along with the illegitimate. The only way to attack slavery, therefore, is through relentless enforcement, which means spending money. In addition, industries should be relentlessly pressured at the public policy level to step up to their responsibility to aid in this enforcement. Not sure how well big business would take to this idea. Not sure I give a damn.

So. Let's not let the beltway pundits and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal pull the wool over our eyes, yet again, with the old "consumers demand low prices" and "over-regulation" shell games. On this one, you can be sure the industries and their lobbyists would hammer at our obliging representatives in government. They will do so successfully unless there is a counterbalancing force -- which can only be at the grass-roots level -- which can keep the focus on the real issue: ending slavery.

Of course, there is a long way to go before we even get to the point of government action. Mr. Bales needs to be watched and encouraged -- who will join him in the cause?

The Wal-Mart defence just doesn't cut it, not on this one.

Digby Roolz . . .

. . . exactement, you crazy hippy.

I'm back . .

. . . life in the U.K. can be hard. Offline since June -- but it's sorted now.

Of bombs and balconies . . .

Many of my previous posts have, I admit, reflected a certain contempt for our news media, much of which I consider to be on the whole thoroughly compromised, unable or unwilling to perform the role for which it is so desperately needed.

However, there have been some heroes in this age of darkness, even in the news media -- some even in the White House press corps. Lord knows they have a hard slog. You couldn't pay me enough to listen, week after week, to the fables spun by Bush White House press spokesmen. I just think, my God, it must be depressing being subjected to Ari's or Scotty's or now Tony's ever more fantastically Orwellian flights of fancy, week after week after week. It must be soul crushing sometimes.

But it is in Iraq that examples of incomprehensible heroism among the newsmedia arise. Yes, these people must be possessed of an extraordinary ambition, but in many cases an ambition born of an earnestness about the elemental ingredient for an operational democracy: an informed electorate.

There are those who feel otherwise, of course. Such people seem to believe it is in the public's interest not to know, that truth is less important than maintaining order in the ranks, that patriotism trumps all other considerations, even if our leadership leads us all over a cliff. The lengths to which these people are willing to go to denigrate, demonize and disparage those who would seek to enlighten we, the people, have proven quite telling.

Zzzzzz. . . .

. . . . what was that? Oh, same old shit. Go back to spleep. . .

What ever happened to that Iranian offer to negotiate . . . ?

Oh, yeah, now I remember . . .

Based on the situation at the time

Well, strike me with a feather! The Economist edges towards mea culpa ville?
On reading the valedictory message of departing editor Bill Emmott and Lexington’s dangerous dance with balance and fairness (as opposed to fair and balanced?), I had to prick myself. Good thing I did: it really was just a dream.
Let’s first consider Mr. Emmott’s urge for self-examination. As I mentioned earlier, in a teaser previously published in the Financial Times, Mr. Emmott admitted his self-doubt about The Economist’s unflagging support of Dubya’s war to disarm Saddam, eliminate a terrorist safe haven and liberate the Iraqi people. Now, in his valeditory column this week, he appears to go further.
First Mr. Emmott admits The Economist essentially got it wrong in opposing NATO’s intervention in the Balkans:

. . . our cover headline was ‘Stumbling into war’. Things turned out much better than we expected.

My, isn't that refreshing! Lessons learned and all that, right? Not quite: Mr. Emmott isn't willing -- yet -- to concede making a similar misjudgment on Iraq. The Economist’s decision to support the invastion of Iraq, he writes, “was correct – based on the situation at that time, which is all it could have been based on.” Mr. Emmott goes on to explain:

The risk of leaving Saddam in power was too high, practically, legally and morally. It should be done only in exceptional circumstances, and backed by exceptional efforts. Iraq qualified on the former. George Bush let us - and America - down on the latter.

This rather lame bit of sophistry reminds me of something Josh Marshall recently wrote about an inescapable consideration as we ponder the latest chasm (Iran) yawning before us:

When I look back on my own thinking about Iraq (in 2002) and the thinking of a lot of other sensible people, the biggest mistake was considering the issue in the abstract without taking into account who was really driving the car, i.e., who was president and who would make the key decisions.
Not that I didn't think about it on some level, of course. Most of what I wrote at the time suggested that the Bush White House would screw things up. But I considered that a secondary issue whereas in fact it was the primary issue. The fact that President Bush and his advisors wanted war and shaped their actions to achieve that goal was the issue. Everything else was secondary.
Folks like me, who thought that threatening war (and being willing to follow through on the threat) made sense, assuming a good-faith commander-in-chief at the helm, were just wasting their time and making a major miscalculation.
And that is one thing I fear in the current debate [over what to do about Iran].

Read the rest of Josh’s article – it’s a strong tonic and tastes awful. But, oh so necessary.
One shouldn't dwell over-long on the bitter irony of The Economist's conversion in favour of moral wars in the post-Clinton era, this sudden over-compensation in favour of wars which happen to coincide with Republican administrations. Guess they skipped that bit about the Council of Nicea in their moral philosophy classes at Oxford.
As for Lexington, well, although I suppose I should be grateful for this week’s column (“The rebirth of outrage”) in which Lexington finally, amazingly, acknowledges the existence of the Falafel King, Hannity, Scarface and Lou (“celebrate our sameness”) Dobbs. Unfortunately, the wheels come off yet again as Lexington assaults us with patently ridiculous comparisons suggesting the attainment of some sort of delicate equilibrium in the cosmic outrage balance between “leftists” and “rightists”:

Ironically, both sides of the divide feel marginalized. Leftists feel excluded because the Republicans control every branch of government. Rightists feel left out because the left dominates so much of the cultural world – especially the movie business and the universities . . .

Note how the business world, the military and especially all our thoroughly compromised friends in the news media are left out of this particular equation.
Ah, yes: after briefly acknowledging Bob Dole’s plea for the inexplicably missing “outrage” during those halcyon days when principle triumphed over politics in the feverish pursuit of Bill Clinton in 1996, Lexington pronounces, “[t]oday the mood is sourer”. Only since 2000, evidently, has outrage been truly “reborn”.
Outrageous.

Our greatest jurist . . .

. . . truly a genius.

Teensy tip of the iceberg

In the great "jaded" vs. "complicit" debate, I vote for the latter.

Unhinged

He's really on a bender these days.

Scalia again

He's a genius, they tells me . . .

As Atrios points out, I love how Scalia orders the press around.

Yeah, yeah

Not bad . . .

. . . but it's the second comment that strikes the right chord. Here it is reprinted in its entirety:

Too little, too late (so far) (#84727)
by Peter K. Clarke on March 27, 2006 at 3:33 AM

This analysis is solid, as far as it goes, but is deficient in several crucial respects which, even in a short piece such as this cry out for mention.

First of all, the extremism of the Bush administration has been blatantly obvious ever since 9-11-01, when it trumpeted the conscious, crudely self-serving and supremely asinine decision to focus not on the clearly revealed challenges for airline safety, building codes, information, education, and dysfunctional foreign policies, but to instead pretend that the whole problem was basically a military one. So, the first matter not properly addressed by the authors is why has the Bushies "power grab" not been a central issue in America politics for the last 5 1/2 years?

Secondly, the motives behind the supposed determination "to restore the authority of the presidency" are untouched in this essay.

Thirdly, other than a vague call for the "public" to "wake up", there is no proposed solution for concerned readers to grasp as a vision or to rally around, and no action plan for how to proceed as practical matter.

Taken together, these three deficiencies all but eviscerate this article, turning what could have been a warning bell into a wind chime. Look no further than the comment of J. Callahan above for an indication of how easily flabbiness can be turned into mincemeat.

Take the second deficiency: motive. There is no consistent evidence that G.W. Bush seeks or has sought any fundamental change in the American system of government except inadvertently. He gives no indication of wanting to establish a 1000 Year Texas Reich, abolish motherhood, or ban apple pie. Despite what seems at times like obtuse stubbornness and instinctive vindictiveness, he does not appear to be operating with anything like an "Enemies List" nor is he the standard bearer of any consistent principled ideology. He is not, in other words, Hitler, Mussolini, or even Nixon, Reagan, or Goldwater. He was for a "humble" foreign policy in 2000, a pre-emptive Pax American in 2003, and now claims to be pursuing “transformative diplomacy” in 2006. These radical shifts have little to do with any strategic vision, or pratical foreign policy considerations, but correlate very closely with wanting to get elected in 2000 and 2004 and now wanting to salvage some vestige of a "historical legacy" from a disaster-laden presidency.

What Bush has been saying, instigating and promulgating does indeed amount to dangerous behavior injurious to America’s future: trashing the principle of multilateral agreements on weapons proliferation, international justice, and global climate change, wasting enormous amounts of money on an Iraqi boondoggle that has had no purpose other than to give him a "re"-election platform in 2004, sending America's finances recklessly on an accelerating one-way course towards national bankruptcy, laying waste to the principle of an independent, non-partisan civil service, in addition to the abuses of power stemming from the moronicly-mislabelled "war on terror" stressed in the piece here.

But, the real danger to the Republic is that of some future, truly power-hungry and much more clever successor, steamrolling a new tyranny down the paths blazed by the current bumbling tenderfoot scout.

Such risks are amplified by the kind of mistakes made by the authors here, in the aforementioned first and third deficiencies of the article (failure to examine the time delay in any serious challenge to the Bush administration's power grabs and the failure to indicate any practical approach for resisting and reversing those mistakes and abuses). The two deficiencies are linked: a key reason why there has been far to little effective opposition to the most egregious and reckless misdeeds of the Cheney-Bush administration lies with the lack of articulated, tangible, and effective alternatives. There is more to America than the Federalists, the Constitution, the three branches of government, and the "public." We also have political parties, a press, a university system, private companies, non profit organizations, etc. etc.. THERE is where the most serious slumbering, sleepwalking and negligence has resided and still lies.

Bottom line: The "war on terror" was a foolish croc from the start. It was never, and could never truly be, more than a metaphorical war, like the "war on cancer", the "war on poverty" or the "war on drugs". The authors rightly note this, but don't draw the critical inferences. Other countries have worse problems with terrorism than America but they haven't usually waged "war" on it, let alone used a terrorist attack from one set of scoundrels, to launch a half-assed attempt at regime change in a different wholly unrelated country run a by a separate group of scoundrels. Except, arguably in 1914, but a C average History major might have forgotten Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

Is that any reason why the rest of us have to fall asleep at our desks as well?

This Orwellian bull about a "war on terrorism" stank from day 1. Where were the Democrats? Cowering in spineless acquiescence. Where were the Republicans? Gazing at their navels, happy to see every conservative principle slaughtered in a rah-rah, our-team-winning crusade for childishly myopic self-centeredness. Where were the self-proclaimed Christians? Busy worshipping the false idol of Ignorance. Where was the New York Times? Regurgitating the propaganda fed to it. Where were the intellectuals? Trying to give new spins to arcane and obsolete social theories. Where were the university students? Blissfully ignorant and apathetic.
Where was the "progressive" and "antiwar" "Left"? Rejoicing in deliberately ineffective irrelevance. Which of these ever raised a whimper about the lazy lemming-like 40% of voters who couldn't bother to take a few minutes in November 2004 to vote?

How can one expect the "public" to "wake up" when those who ought to be waking them are as comatose, cowardly, and stupidly negligent as far too many have been for far too long?

P.S. to the kneejerk Rovians of HNN: Before trying to stuff words in others' mouths, please be aware I am not saying (nor have I ever maintained) that there is no legitimate purpose to the use of American military power. It was used multilaterally, and legitimately, and was effective in achieveing its STATED purposes in Kosovo and Afghanistan, for example.

Shaken not stirred

Want to know where our Supreme Court's heading? Justice Scalia has hardly been shy about his intent.

Here's his speech at the U of C Divinity School (2002) (you have to scroll down a bit):

If you're too lazy to click the link, here's the money quote (among many, actually):

It seems to me that the reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should be not resignation to it but resolution to combat it as effectively as possible, and a principal way of combating it, in my view, is constant public reminder that - in the words of one of the Supreme Court's religion cases in the days when we understood the religion clauses better than I think we now do - "we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a supreme being."

This, from a sitting USSC Justice. There are many other equally fantastic statements in the speech -- it's really worth reading in toto.

How should the saner among us respond to such tripe? Here's a quick take from the head of the American Studies Program at Princeton.

On the other hand, since eveyone in the fawning media falls all over themselves proclaiming what a genius Scalia is, he must be right. Maybe democracy indeed is the problem! Damn, that whole Enlightenment thing really wrecked everything! Thankfully, since Scalia's U of C speech, we've now got Alito and Roberts to help nudge us all back to those good old days when religion and politics mixed so well.

I think the logic is perfectly sound

It's simple, really: emergency war powers become permanent when the president deems us to be in a permanent state of war. I wonder if we'll be allowed to have elections? I would assume all those recently gerrymandered districts would reduce the risk of the opposition party taking control of anything, but it's best to be sure, isn't it. Karl Rove didn't get to where he is by being satisfied with half measures, did he?

Part Four -- Lexington and the Iraq War

Picking up from where I left off, let's move on to The Economist's unpardonable coverage of and support for the Iraq war.

In direct contradiction to Lexington's column about the war, no one who can be taken seriously is saying the president knew there were no WMDs. Many who should be taken seriously are saying the president presented a case as unvarnished truth when he and his subordinates knew full well the evidence supporting it was variously cherry-picked, suspect or outright fraudulent.

This, in the context of a supposed “imminent threat” of attack on the nation, from a paper which demanded another president's resignation because he lied about oral sex.

The Economist has pointedly ignored or dismissed very serious concerns relating to how dubbya and his subordinates used and presented information to the congress and the people in making the case for war on Iraq. Like an angry alcoholic, the Economist simply refuses to admit it has a problem.

Why has The Economist so stubbornly, so persistently, framed the debate about the war in this way? Why has it steadfastly refused even to acknowledge what lies in plain sight: a veritable smorgasbord of dishonesty exhibited toward the American people by the Bush administration, not to mention toward the Iraqi people, who never seem to have suffered enough. Why can't this newspaper -- of all newspapers -- bring itself to say even the minimally decent thing, i.e., “taking the country to war on a false prospectus is, perhaps, a problem.”

Instead, true to its long-standing assertion that the president’s wackiest hard-core right-wing supporters are no more obnoxious than and anyone left of John McCain, Lexington wrote (in a previous week's column) "American conservatives" are no worse than "Michael Moore and the 'I hate Republicans crowd'". It is on this basis, and only on this basis, that the Economist evades any serious discussion of such minor indelicacies as separation of powers and the administration's misuse of the nation's intelligence apparatus. As the debacle in Iraq goes from bad to unendingly worse, The Economist doggedly perseveres, FawltyTowers-style: "Don't mention the war!"

So . . . the clear message from The Economist -- either by saying so directly or by refusing to discuss the casus belli of the Iraq war seriously -- is there is no need to discuss how we got into the Iraq mess because those people who have raised questions are hate-filled lunatic Bush-haters.

Well, I challenge anyone to cite examples of legitimate, professed liberal commentators, pundits or columnists openly sliming the opposition as "traitors" or worse. Such is the vitriol commonly put forward by commentators on Fox News, various right-wing pundits and even by Republican elected officials (witness Representative’s Schmidt’s recent viciousness directed at Representative Murtha). Hell, this approach was a key tactic used by Karl Rove to defeat Kerry.

What does The Economist hope to accomplish with all this ducking-and-weaving?

My guess is The Economist, like much of the American mainstream media, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, has come to realize that it has not yet even begun to atone for its own manifold sins in the lead-up-to-Iraq fiasco. Perhaps its editors have begun to notice the increasing number of journalists in the U.S. who have started to become a part of the story about how the Bush administration so ably misled Americans in so many ways. Funny, isn't it, how so many of these journalists have been revealed to be highly reliable transmitters for Bush administration-disseminated information that has turned out to be false, misleading or intended to intimidate critics.

In other words, if The Economist were to acknowledge the validity of the war critics' concerns, it would then need to consider the media's -- and its own -- complicity in perpetrating the larger con.

Now, don't get me wrong: I don't put The Economist on par with Judy Judy Judy Miller or Timmeh Russert, but there's no doubting they do bear some responsibility as enablers of Bush administration deception. I just hold them to a much higher standard, I guess.

Right on

I couldn't agree with Kevin more. The so-called social security crisis is a charade.

Part 'tree -- Mens Rea Exposed!

The Economist is perhaps the standard-bearer of classical liberalism in the global media: it is a 160-year old magazine (scroll down) that still refers to itself as a "newspaper" and, true to the tenets of its Scottish hat-making founder, continuously evangelises about how only free markets and free trade can be counted on to build a better world. While I don't entirely buy into The Economist's vision, which I view as unnervingly utopian in its own right, I accept their sincerity of purpose and admire it.

A key to The Economist's enduring credibility is what may be perceived as the "dismal science's" inherent objectivity. If (and I mean "if") it is perceived as being stripped of emotion, irrationality, bias, prejudice or what have you, econimics can be a powerful weapon in debates over public or social policy and, ultimately, in politics.

Facts and unadorned statistical analysis don't lie: these are supposed to be, at least in theory, an economist's stock in trade. In a broader sense The Economist trace their philosophical lineage to the age of reason (see above link) and they remain firmly in that trajectory of progressive thinking that has been moving mankind forward ever since.

What I can't understand, therefore, is how such a newspaper so readily turns its back on its own principles when it comes to political analysis, particularly in relation to the U.S.

As is obvious in my previous post on this topic, Lexington really gets to me. I don't know why he/she/it - whomever or whatever hides behind that famously pseudonymous byline -- bugs me so much. Maybe it's that palpable smugness capable of being worn only by those who believe the god of statistics is on their side, and who have the added luxury of pronouncing as much anonomously.

In light of Lexington's endless harping about the supposed intolerance of the left, not a single Lexington column comes to mind in which the regular occurrence of right-wing intolerance and worse was identified or called into question. Nor can I recall a single column in which Lexington concedes any exception to the rule that liberals must tolerate anyone and anything if they hope to avoid being branded as hypocrites. Lexington mischaracterises "tolerance" by suggesting that it means caving in to right-wing demands, including those that would seek to impose on the nation out-and-out insanity enforced by blatant thuggery.

The tactic employed is hardly novel: it relies on the time-honoured tradition of mischaracterising all progressives as bereft of principles or moral constancy (both of which are supposedly in the exclusive domain of the religious right: read, religion equals morality and all else is rot).

The permissiveness of those Godless liberals, so the logic goes, is doubly perfidious because in their limitless hypocricy liberals deign to "permit" only leftist social and political norms to take root in modern cultural institutions (i.e., schools and universities, newspapers and Hollywood, the federal government) to the exclusion of traditional or religious (i.e., conservative Christian) values and morality. Of course, if one reads or listens to many conservatives, this is the charitable view: many on the right ascribe the weakening of the moral fibre of America not just to hypocricy (as Lexington appears to say) but to a conspiracy of effetes who in reality hate America. This is a regular theme on Fox and Rush Limbaugh.

To "prove" their point, conservatives engage in what appears to be some kind of crude tautology. Don't accept the recitation of the Lord's prayer in a state-financed classroom? Intolerant! Gotcha! Don't accept the teaching of "intelligent design" as "science" in state-financed science classrooms? Intolerant! Gotcha!

Like a lot of conservative pundits and opinionologists, Lexington conflates liberal "intolerance" with the liberal or moderate (or some may say sane) desire to find common ground, to maintain the separation of church and state (which evangelicals historically zealously endorsed) or to establish minimum standards for what constitutes "science" (insistence on observing the scientific method, peer review, etc.).

I, too, freely admit I am intolerant of any detractors of the heliocentric theory or of the theory of gravitation: they are, after all, only theories. I guess this makes me a liberal elistist, too.

By so circumscribing the context of the liberal conspiracy of "intolerance" (i.e., continually referring to supposed depredations inflicted by "American liberals" upon a God-fearing nation), Lexington presents an entirely unbalanced picture of the cultural and socio-political dynamic at work in America. Worse, Lexington unconscionably -- or perhaps consciously -- covers for extreme elements of the Christian and extreme right, who in obviously don't really believe the left should tolerate just anyone's faith-based application of the scientific method.

Next -- Lexington and the Iraq war.