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.

"We don't call them elitists for nothing"

. . . quoth Joe Scarface.

Yes, who oh who will be held accountable?

Wow

Can it get any more corrupt? Has anyone attempted to compare our current era of sleaze with those in the past? I wonder how we'd compare. Bob Dole once famously quipped in the 80s or 90s (I forget which) that politics in Washington had become much cleaner than the good 'ol days. . . can that be true even today?

Anyhoo, I still am blown away by this:

Here's a bit more from Paul Kiel on Norquist's money-laundering tax, at least the one he charged Abramoff for the service of making the gambling money spick and span so it could be passed on to Ralph Reed. Take a look. There're some great email quotes.

"Grover kept another $ 25K!," says an exasperated Abramoff at one
point.

Unbelievable -- is it possible to be cynical enough to just take this in stride?

The inmates are taking over the asylum

Oh, those crazy guys and gals in congress. Will they never stop with all these kooky, out-there antics?

"What the president did by consciously and intentionally violating the Constitution and laws of this country with this illegal wiretapping has to be answered." [Senator Feingold] added, "Proper accountability is a censuring of the president, saying, 'Mr. President, acknowledge that you broke the law, return to the law, return to our system of government.' "

Senator Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee and the majority leader, called Mr. Feingold's proposal "a crazy political move."

That Feingold, he's so zany!

I Love/Hate The Economist, Part II

And now for the long-awaited follow-up to my previous post in which I declared my intention to embark, quixotic, on a mission to unmask certain fiendish intentions of The Economist and the modus operandi by which it would seek to accomplish them!

In a subsequent post, when I thunder j'accuse!, I will reveal why this humble exercise in muckraking -- or, to coin a phrase, sterilisation by sunlight -- might be considered worthwhile by anyone paying attention to the extent of the media's aiding and abetting of the Bush administration's spectacular failures which we as a nation, long after the rest of the world, are just beginning to appreciate.

But for the moment let us focus not on the mens rea but rather on the actus reus.

Lexington's columns abound with examples of an unfortunate tendency to pander to a certain readership, a bias that can be displayed sometimes subtly, sometimes egregiously. This last week's column is of the more subtle variety: it's the usual tripe in which Lexington lifts the curtain on the supposedly rampant hypocricy of "intolerance" as committed by professed practitioners of "tolerance" on the American left (que the usual stuff about the P.C. police and universities conspiring to exclude different viewpoints, etc.).

A more egregious example of this tendency can be found in "The paranoid style of American politics" (5th January) in which Lexington accuses the American left of transgressions that he/she/it always fails to observe in the right. Here Lexington explains that since the rise of John Birch the "paranoid style", which is defined as "heated exaggeration", "suspiciousness" and "conspiratorial fantasy", has been over the decades appropriated solely and exclusively by the American left.

Lexington seems to have slept through the entire 1990s. Who can explain? Perhaps Lexington failed to notice the relentless attacks on President Clinton -- when the American people were subjected to daily barrages of increasingly outrageous accusations, including petty corruption, murder, drug smuggling and rape -- all of which were false -- and which in many cases were ascribed to imagined plots of Godless liberals. Perhaps Lexington didn't read or hear about William Bennett's "The Death of Outrage" or the myriad other calls to arms that helped ignite the conservative right. Perhaps Lexington was on sick leave when her/his/its own newspaper called for the resignation of President Clinton for, of all things, lying about irrelevant testimony in a civil depostion.

Lexington seems to think it is "paranoid" to expect a congressional a Senate Intelligence panel to investigate a president who can't be bothered to explain why a law such as the FISA statute -- a clearly articulated law intended to protect fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution -- does not apply to him.

It gets worse.

In "Pants on Fire", 19 November 2005, Lexington sniffs, "Mr. Bush starts with one big advantage: the charge that he knew all along that Iraq possessed no [WMD] seems to be a farrago of nonsense." Lexington naturally fails to point out who, exactly, is saying such a thing. Need it really be said this is not even close to the gravamen of the criticism being leveled at the president for his adventure in Iraq or of the way in which he chose to prosecute America's Global War on Unspecified Threats?

In a later post, I'll explain why The Economist's failure to do its job is, like The New York Times's, CNN's and The Washington Post's, so much more imporant than the vacuous and obvious duplicity of Fox and Friends.


Late Update: This weekend's Financial Times Magazine contains a revealing interview (one of their "Lunches with" series) with the departing editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott. Worth reading . . . I detect a hint of contrition, but not near enough, of course.

Remedial Epistomological Despondency

If all the right-wing hacks in the the forest collapsed under the collective weight of their bloated egos could you still hear yourself scream? Discuss.