I guess I really don't like being lectured to by rich kids about the genius of the free market

Here in what the locals like to call “Little Britain”, a nasty spat among the media elite has messily intruded on the public consciousness. The occasion giving rise to the current palaver was a recent speech darkly titled “The Absence of Trust” by none other than James Murdoch at the MacTaggart Series of lectures in Edinburgh on 28^th August. The speech was delivered on the twentieth anniversary of a memorable shot-across-the bow delivered by James’ dad, Rupert, at the same venue in which Murdoch-the-elder portrayed (probably accurately) a calcified British television media slumbering, contented and oblivious, on state subsidies as the digital media age beckoned - with Rupert Murdoch chomping at the bit in its vanguard. It was obvious that a speech on such an occasion by Rupert’s son-and-heir called for something special.

And Murdoch-the-younger delivered. In one sense, his was a tired reprise about the size and scope of the ‘beeb, whom competitors love to loathe as a state-sponsored behemoth stifling competition and distorting markets. But, by invoking Orwell, Mr. Murdoch cranked the debate up a notch. “As Orwell foretold,” he reminded us grimly, “to let the state enjoy a near-monopoly of information is to guarantee manipulation and distortion.” This certainly got people’s attention in a nation that takes its Orwell seriously indeed, as was no doubt intended.

It is important to keep in mind that the framework for this discussion – when stripped of all the accompanying sound and fury -- has been utterly upended since dear-old-Dad’s speech of twenty years ago: the debate now must be conducted against a backdrop which recognises the ascendancy of new formats, new media and the “New Media”. The last of these is dominated coincidentally by the Murdoch empire, which today wields enormous power in its own right, seizing market share in Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere, and dominating certain markets (such as television sports). It is for this reason that James Murdoch’s plaintive exhortations to throttle the BBC in order to save democracy ring a wee bit hollow.

Meanwhile, we Americans living in the UK can only shake our heads in admiration or disbelief at the chutzpah of the son of Rupert Murdoch lambasting the BBC as a “state-sponsored” Orwellian threat to the “plurality and independence of news provision, which is so important for our democracy”.

In calling for “genuine independence” in the news media, Mr. Murdoch is to be applauded, but his prescription for ensuring such noble aims errs in one crucial respect: it fails to take account a little thing called irony. When the premise of one’s thesis also happens to be utterly self-serving, irony may have an unfortunate cancelling effect. We can only take Mr. Murdoch’s earnestness at face value, which make the passages from Mr. Murdoch’s speech priceless examples of apparent complete lack of self-awareness, among them: “. . . people value honest, fearless, and above all independent news coverage that challenges the consensus,” which is an “inescapable conclusion that we must reach if we are to have a better society.”

“A better society”? Is this what the Fox Networks aspire to?

Even strident detractors grudgingly admire the discipline with which Fox News eradicates the very plurality and independence that James Murdoch now claims to champion. The reason Fox does this inevitably results from the very profit motive Mr. Murdoch claims ensures the opposite for example, there was money to be made in beating the drums of the Iraq war. When considering the alternative - providing thoughtful reporting and nuanced analysis – it was no contest. War sells, nuance doesn’t – especially in an America where attention spans grow ever more diminished. Slick graphics consisting of gauzy American flags ceaselessly waiving and jet fighters zooming across the screen between segments always help.

Can any serious observer say Fox News has elevated the level of debate over the past fifteen years? Fox News and the rest of the right-wing scream-machine have all but ensured the impossibility of any meaningful or productive debate in the United States about anything important. Fox’s fingerprints have been all over the “astro-turfed” “Tea-Baggers” masquerading as genuine “grass roots” citizen uprisings and the farcical town hall meetings that were supposed to be about health care reform, but which instead will be remembered for raising the prospect of having a president in the White House who is a Nazi.

If only we in the U.S. during the lead-up to the Iraq war had the equivalent of a BBC, which, of course, did not transcribe for public consumption White House or Downing Street diktat quite as dutifully as Fox News did. In fact, as Alistair Campbell memorably discovered, and amply demonstrated, the BBC turned out to be quite a thorn in the side of the British government. One can only wonder if Murdochs’ SkyNews in the UK has thus far stopped short of the outrageous excesses of Fox News in the U.S. as a result of being held in check by a rival state-sponsored news organization less motivated by profit. This contrasts alarmingly with the situation in the United States, where rival privately-owned news organizations fell quickly into line for fear of losing more market-share and even PBS, the once-independently minded Public Broadcast System, ran scared as Republicans cut off meaningful public funding. One can only wonder if changing this dynamic is what James Murdoch really wants to achieve. After all, as he so bombastically concluded at the end of his speech in Edinburgh (“[t]he only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit”), its all about profit.

James Murdoch’s earnest invocation of Orwell is ironic on levels too many to count: one might say it’s Orwellian.

This guy . . .

. . . is such a tool. You gotta wonder if this person's brain is capable of grasping the enormity of the irony bound up in the concept of an idiot child of a scion of yellow journalism preaching the virtues of unfettered free markets. Probably not . . . oh well, the rich are not like you and me. Sigh.

I'm lovin' Glen Beck . . .

. . . he's just the best.

Sometimes . . .

. . . I really don't miss living in that country . . . and, for the record, the NHS in the UK is far from perfect, but less not-perfect than the insane healthcare system (if one can call it that) in the U.S.

Been travellin' . . .

. . . and I admit to succumbing to temptation. Lo, to my shame I have bought The Economist. Twice. And I enjoyed it.

On economics, I've never had a problem with The Economist, but their commentary on American politics and culture seemed appallingly ignorant. In the past I attributed this to a craven desire to appeal to a certain readership who coincidentally believe everything they are subjected to on Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial pages . . .

In my defence, The Economist have had a new editor for some time now. Perhaps this explains why they have injected a bit more of a measured approach which I find bordering on readable. As I have waxed at length in the past, the previous editor is not on my list of best friends.

Advice and consultation would be welcome: should I feel dirty and foreswear further transgressions, or give in to tempatation and renew my subscription?

I'd like to say he's thinking what I'm thinking . . .

. . . but, as usual, he's ahead of me. Living in the UK as a dual national, the irony of the Labour Party's unfortunate predicament certainly has not escaped me. Brits look at me funny when I say the current crisis, really, can be laid at the now buried feet of Ronald Reagan (and those of Thatcher, I suppose). Unfettered dergulation and subsequent unceasing degradation of government capacity to regulate effectively inevitably led to massive consolidated financial services firms maximising profit and senior executive pay at the expense of meaningful risk management. The fact that New Labour and Clintonites bought into the charade hook, line and sinker only testifies to the power of the cultural shift that took place in the early '80s . . . as well as to the power of cynical political calculation, delusion and the willing collaboration of a sycophantic, incompetent and conflicted newsmedia.

As we and our children pony up to pay for this mess, don't ever forget these simple facts.

Clash of the Titans?

Krugman versus Ferguson: the Battle Royale.   My money is with the Nobel laureate, not just because he's more qualified as a proper economist, but because I feel obligated to him since I am the source of his inspiration, his muse, if you will.

Economists have sucked lately

 . . . a plausible explanation . . . 

What Matt says . . .

. . . so simple, so true:

You know, Newt Gingrich knows a lot about saying stupid things and being forced out of the job as Speaker. … But one way or the other — I mean, I wasn’t in the room, you weren’t in the room, Newt Gingrich wasn’t in the room. None of us know exactly what happened there. But whatever it is Nancy Pelosi knew about, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, they knew more. And ultimately, when we have a thorough investigation of what happened, the bulk of the blame has to lie with the architects of the policy, not with a member of the opposition party.

The GOP playbook hasn't changed a bit: destract, deny, project.  And their demographic keeps on shrinking.

Getting silly now

I really wish Dick and daughter would just let us put this whole torture thing behind us . . . 

Really gotta wonder what they are on about . . . the more they jabber the more ridiculous they look.  And the more ridiculous they look, the idea we can keep looking away-nothing-to-see-here ever less and less tenable.  I want the lawyers' heads on pikes - for starters.  I don't care what Pres. Obama says.  It's a matter of professionalism and standards . . .   

And he, too, shall be judged . . .

. . . not sure why the rats are scurrying now - the ship sank a long time ago. 

Teabagging Michelle Malkin

Love this post - good on substance, too . . .

Here's a choice excerpt at the end - really puts the empty rhetoric and paint-by-numbers faux rage of the rudderless right in perspective:

yeah, government waste sucks, it’s rampant at every level, and taxes are a vicious racket, and everyone should be pissed off . What’s hilarious about the teabaggers, though, is how they never squawk about waste until the spending actually has a chance of benefiting them. You will never hear of a teabagger crying about OPIC giving $50 million in free insurance to some mining company so that they can dig for silver in rural Bolivia. You won’t hear of a teabagger protesting the $2.5 billion in Ex-Im loans we gave to GE through the early part of this decade, even as GE was moving nearly a hundred thousand jobs overseas over the course of ten years. And Michelle Malkin’s readers didn’t seem to mind giving IBM millions in Ex-IM and ATP loans at the same time it was giving its former CEO, Lou Gerstner, $260 million in stock options.

In other words teabaggers don’t mind paying taxes to fund the salaries of Bolivian miners, Lou Gerstner’s stock options, deliveries of “sailboat fuel,” the Hermes scarves on Sandy Weill’s jet pillows, or even the export of their own goddamn jobs. But they do hate it when someone tries to re-asphalt their roads, or help bail their slob neighbor out of foreclosure. And God forbid someone propose a health care program, or increased financial aid for college. Hell, that’s like offering to share your turkey with the other Pilgrims! That’s not what America is all about! America is every Pilgrim for himself, dammit! Raise your own motherfucking turkey!

Yeah - What about a "Bill of Obligations" . . . ?

It's an excellent point, if one can forgive a sitting Supreme Court Justice for apparently having not a clue about the entire basis for our form of goverment.  

Can you believe this guy hasn't asked a single question from the bench since early 2006?  Sorry, that can't be normal.

Obama won't look into Medvedev's Soul!!!

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/04/breakthrough-on.html

Deleted Post

Took too much space

I wouldn't bet on the dollar . . .

. . . at least not in the long run.  I bid you welcome, my Chinese masters . . . (apologies for the free registration filter, but reading the FT is worth it, so just do it)

Never been a better trainwreck . . .

. . . back behind the woodshed.  

Gotta love how Stewart just eviscerates this guy . . . even if Stewart doesn't seem to understand the first thing about short-selling, hedge funds, CDS's or how any of them have anything to do with our pension plans . . . 

The state of our media

Not sure whether to laugh or cry . . . 

Being treated like grown-ups

Obama explicitly rejected some of the more egregious budgeting practices of his immediate predecessor. President Bush never included the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in his budgets, for instance, opting instead to treat those military campaigns as emergencies and fund them off the books. He took a similar approach with the entirely predictable $60 billion it cost the Treasury for each year that Congress spared 20 million taxpayers the expensive bite of the alternative minimum tax. Bush also budgeted nothing for federal disaster response, though natural disasters invariably occur. Obama included all three things in his 10-year budget.

Read the remainder -- a new era.

Report from the bunker

Some disclosure: my real-world avatar is a boring banking lawyer deeply embedded in the belly of the beast.  I can therefore confidently explain what has happened to make all the major financial institutions of the world look like a fleet of Titantics ploughing dead ahead into various icebergs. 

While it may be true, as everyone seems to have concluded, that most bankers are indeed minions of beelzebub, Satan alone should not be blamed for the current mess. Unless we want to make greed a capital offence it's pretty pointless to get all uppity about avaricious bankers. After all, we were the ones who gave them the rope to hang us all with. 

It is important to keep in mind that in the parlance of our times, thanks to Reagan revolution, it has been long accepted conventional wisdom that all government is bad, and regulators are particularly bad, which I think often explained the quality of regulators I myself have come into contact with. This is not always true: some have been astute and very good – but for a long time they have been radically underpaid and maligned to the point of irrelevance. 

So why should anyone be surprised when the end result is massive and comprehensive regulatory failure? 

The financial system, though complex, can work if risks are correctly assessed. The problem is that under conditions of large liquidity, which we had when credit was cheap, the quest for “returns” encourages excessive risk taking and exposes the system’s vulnerabilities: 

Market participants that work for fees (mortgage brokers, payments receivers) don’t have incentives to monitor the quality of loans, only to increase the quantity of loans. 


The same thing happens with the credit rating agencies which supply “ratings” for the structured products and do not face any financial responsibility to cover losses from their mistakes. 


Regulatory Arbitrage: different financial institutions undertaking similar activities face different regulations (especially capital requirements). 


Principal-Agent Problem: huge disparity in traders’ maximum loss (zero bonus) vs. investors’ losses (the full capital invested). 

The job of regulators is to ensure these risks are correctly assessed and, where they aren't, the financial system is protected. 

Guess that hasn't happened.

Stick to baseball, George

So, the global restructuring and geo-strategic recalibration is well under way.  

America's, and Europe's, historic economic predominance can be expected to slip away - with inevitable consequences for the west's ability to lead and shape events on the world stage. In other words, all of this is about something much bigger than a few poorly-managed megabanks: we've seen this movie before. The British Empire effectively spent itself into oblivion as its economic might imploded.  

In recent years foreign central banks and sovereign funds have increasingly propped up the dollar and bought U.S. Treasuries. We can't expect this to continue indefinitely: China now is diversifying aggressively to hedge away from its exposure to a country with such dire long-term fiscal imbalances as the United States. Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Prize, Economics) calculates the Iraq war will cost the US three trillion alone (all in), which puts Obama's fiscual stimulus package (roughly $800 billion) into perspective.  

In short, as a nation, we've been profligate idiots. This is more true in the U.S. than the UK (as Stiglitz himself has observed) but the UK has been far from prudent itself (as Warren Buffet has repeatedly observed since the 90s).  

Things didn't have to be this way, but, of course, rational discourse hasn't been permitted for a long time, and there certainly was no interest on the Sunday talk shows. Even today we have George Will still blathering about how the New Deal didn't work: it amazes me how many apologists for Hoover are still out there. World War II got us out of the Great Depression? Even if you concede that might be true (and I don't), it doesn't change the fact that massive public spending did the trick. Is George advocating another big war? Iraq wasn't enough?  

I laugh when I think about all those fiscal conservatives who demanded a balanced budget amendment in the late 90s, and who then promptly forgot about it with dubbya in the White House: they discovered John Maynard Keynes and suddenly deficit spending was, like, so cool! Except deficit spending as Kenyes conceived it had nothing to do with tax cuts for the rich. In contrast, fighting stupid wars that make no sense can work as a form of fiscal stimulus (as sort of a large public works project), but dubbya didn’t get the timing quite right. Yes, he’s probably the worst president we’ve ever had.  

But we, the People, put him in office, so who really is to blame?

Let me get this straight . . .

COST OF IRAQ WAR : 

• $3 TRILLION (all in) ***

RETURN ON INVESTMENT: 

• resurgent Al Qaeda 
  
• undermined multilateral nuclear anti-proliferation efforts  
• massive loss of American foreign policy and intelligence agencies credibility
• depletion of armed forces capabilities 
  
• distraction from Afghanistan 
  
• maybe someday "democracy will flower in the middle east" (like it did in Palestine, except they elected Hamas to power - oops)

REPUBLICANS OPPOSED: 

• Zero
  

-- compare and contrast with -- 

COST OF PROPOSED STIMULUS PACKAGE (Senate Version): 

• $780 billion

RETURN ON INVESTMENT: 

• Only hope for avoiding crippling global depression (tax cuts for the rich repeatedly proven ineffective as stimulus)

REPUBLICANS OPPOSED:

• All but three Senators.
  

*** see, Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia University, former chief economist at the World Bank, winner, Nobel Prize for Economics, 2001: monetary estimates may be considered in addition to 100,000 to 655,000 dead, not that many seem to care very much

Our Greatest Jurist

Why is our ever-somnolent media waking up to pay attention to what a boor this guy is all of a sudden now?

Hoover Lives!

Change most definitely has not come to the Beltway Grandees, least of all Wolfie  . . . 

Can we please, please, please have a press corps that is not entirely somnolent?  

Sigh.

Bring out your Dead!

Remember early on during the Bush years all those Republicans who suddenly threw down the mantle of "fiscal responsibility" and donned proudly the one labelled "John Maynard Keynes" as they happily pushed through Bush's tax cuts for the rich?  Yes, deficit spending was suddenly in vogue with a Republican in the White House . . . it mattered not what kind of deficit spending Keynes actually prescribed to combat a recession (needless to say, tax cuts for the wealthy were not what Keynes had in mind).  And . . . don't forget that laugher of a Laffer curve: like that unfortunate old gaffer in the "Bring out your Dead!" bit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, that little gem of Reagonomics still is not "dead yet", despite being thoroughly discredited many times over.

I really wonder what is going on the heads of Republican lawmakers as we teeter on the precipice of Great Depression 2.0.  Marshall is losing it:

I cannot say my expectations were high. But Sen. DeMint (R) of South Carolina does seem to be an even bigger ignoramus than I'd realized. On This Week this morning he actually said: "Let's don't say it's a stimulus when it's a government spending plan." A 'Stimulus plan' is pretty much by definition a spending plan, though of course it can include tax reductions as well.

As noted, my expectations are not high. But I'm wowed by the amount of nonsense and lies that are being injected into this debate.

Also, high on the list, of course, is the fact that basically all the 'wasteful' spending that's being discussed amounts to a total of what ... maybe 2 or 3 billion out of $819 billion total? Why is this point not being made more clearly?

It's enough to make one want to swing a cat around in the middle of a medieval plague!

Conspiracy Alert

Did you ever notice that the Homeland Security Dept's terror alert color-coding system . . .

. . . corresponds PRECISELY with the colors of the characters in Teletubbies?

. . . think about it.

Homeland Security Live Alert

Krugman

Yep . . . it's a priority:

Let’s talk about the magnitude of the looming health care disaster.

Just about all economic forecasts, including those of the Obama administration’s own economists, say that we’re in for a prolonged period of very high unemployment. And high unemployment means a sharp rise in the number of Americans without health insurance.

After the economy slumped at the beginning of this decade, five million people joined the ranks of the uninsured — and that was with the unemployment rate peaking at only 6.3 percent. This time the Obama administration says that even with its stimulus plan, unemployment will reach 8 percent, and that it will stay above 6 percent until 2012. Many independent forecasts are even more pessimistic.

Why, then, aren’t we hearing more about ensuring health care access?

Now, it’s possible that those of us who care about this issue are reading too much into the administration’s silence. But let me address three arguments that I suspect Mr. Obama is hearing against moving on health care, and explain why they’re wrong.

First, some people are arguing that a major expansion of health care access would just be too expensive right now, given the vast sums we’re about to spend trying to rescue the economy.

But research sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund shows that achieving universal coverage with a plan similar to Mr. Obama’s campaign proposals would add “only” about $104 billion to federal spending in 2010 — not a small sum, of course, but not large compared with, say, the tax cuts in the Obama stimulus plan.

It’s true that the cost of universal health care will be a continuing expense, reaching far into the future. But that has always been true, and Mr. Obama has always claimed that his health care plan was affordable. The temporary expenses of his stimulus plan shouldn’t change that calculation.

Second, some people in Mr. Obama’s circle may be arguing that health care reform isn’t a priority right now, in the face of economic crisis.

But helping families purchase health insurance as part of a universal coverage plan would be at least as effective a way of boosting the economy as the tax breaks that make up roughly a third of the stimulus plan — and it would have the added benefit of directly helping families get through the crisis, ending one of the major sources of Americans’ current anxiety.

Finally — and this is, I suspect, the real reason for the administration’s health care silence — there’s the political argument that this is a bad time to be pushing fundamental health care reform, because the nation’s attention is focused on the economic crisis. But if history is any guide, this argument is precisely wrong.

[...] One more thing. There’s a populist rage building in this country, as Americans see bankers getting huge bailouts while ordinary citizens suffer.

I agree with administration officials who argue that these financial bailouts are necessary (though I have problems with the specifics). But I also agree with Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who argues that — as a matter of political necessity as well as social justice — aid to bankers has to be linked to a strengthening of the social safety net, so that Americans can see that the government is ready to help everyone, not just the rich and powerful.

The bottom line, then, is that this is no time to let campaign promises of guaranteed health care be quietly forgotten. It is, instead, a time to put the push for universal care front and center. Health care now!

Just my opinion

Promise me we won't go to a nightclub 

I really think that it's obscene  

What kind of people go to meet people  

In a place you can't be heard or seen  

- The Be Good Tanyas

Yes, the Damage can be undone . . .

. . . but, my oh my, how hard it's looking:

During his eight years in office – fat ones, for the most part, from a fiscal point of view – President George W. Bush moved the budget balance from surplus to structural deficit. Demographic and other pressures will worsen the position over the next decade or two. Now comes a fiscal expansion that will be only partly counter-cyclical: some of the new president’s spending will not reverse automatically as the economy recovers. A structural deficit of the sort taking shape is unsustainable and will be corrected one way or the other – if not by a timely change in policy, then by a new and potentially even worse financial calamity.

So, Happy Inauguration Day!  Eat, Drink and be Merry, for tomorrow we have a hell of a mess to clean up . . .

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5665f224-e568-11dd-afe4-0000779fd2ac.html

 

And, as twilight fades to black for the glory that has been the Cheney/Bush years . . .

. . . we need to send a big Shout! out to the man who made it all possible . . .

To honor this great jurist and his incredible contribution in giving us the Cheney/Bush legacy, here is a link to one of my fave speeches of all time, given in 2002 in Chicago:

http://pewforum.org/deathpenalty

You need to link through the Pew website to get to the speech and then scroll down a bit in the speech itself for the money quote (it's one among many, actually), but I re-print it here in case you'd rather not bother with all of that -- it really is priceless:

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".

Got that?  "People of faith" (who, presumably, count for more than people whose faith do not measure up to Justice Scalia's standards, as I assume he, or the Pope perhaps, might choose to define them) must "combat . . . as effectively as possible" democracy's "tendency to obscure the divine authority behind government".  Got it?

This, from a sitting United States Supreme Court Justice.  I had to read it a few times before I could believe what the good Justice was actually saying - not implying - but literally saying.  

I don't recollect many examples of guardians of the republic using the word "combating" and "democracy" in the same sentence, unless they were referring to combating somebody else in defense of democracy.  I don't know about you but I'm having a really hard time imagining any circumstances under which citizens would justifiably "combat" their own democratic form of government.  Remember: Justice Scalia is issuing a call to arms not to combat corruption in government, or a particular political party he doesn't like, or even the government itself: he is stating clearly and unequivocally that there is something inherent in our form of government - a democracy - which is inimical to something else that he believes is more important: the "divine authority behind government".  

This isn't just about semantics: don't all Americans have a pressing interest in understanding exactly how Justice Scalia proposes to combat an inherent "tendency" of democracy without combating democracy itself?  

There are other equally outrageous statements in this particular speech that betray a quite candidly unapologetic contempt for democracy -- mostly as a justification for the death penalty, of all things.  You gotta hand it to him: you could never accuse Justice Scalia of trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes.  The statements in his Chicago speech and myriad other statements (see posts further below) have been practically screaming at us for years just what he thinks of the sanctity (triviality) of the vote and the importance (irrelevance) of the Establishment clause, not to mention the Great Mistake that was the Enlightenment.   Bush vs Gore should not have come as a surprise. 

The Obama cavalry arrived in the nick of time -- with people so focused on the economy, the wars and the various other Cheney/Bush-set brush fires and lapses requiring immediate attention, I'm not too sure they are aware of what a bullet we've dodged in the Supreme Court.  Now Justice Stevens can retire with some semblance of peace of mind.

Uh . . . duh . . .

From Josh Marshall: 

"No U.S. president can justify a policy that fails to achieve its intended results by pointing to the purity and rectitude of his intentions," - Paul Wolfowitz, "Statesmanship in the New Century," in Kagan, R. and Kristol, W, eds.

I guess what's notable is seeing Paul Wolfowitz saying something sensible, in a book edited by Robert Kagan and William "the bloody" Kristol, no less . . .  doesn't quite make up for the mess they've made . . . but every little, I guess.

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.

"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.