A Pox On All Their Houses

From The Economist, November 17-23rd Issue

This cartoon captures some of the absurdity of the current goings on between Israel and Hamas.  But what is utterly misstates is the disproportionality of the mess.  What Israel is doing is a little like dropping a 500 pound bomb on an obnoxious teenager because he shot you with a BB gun.  The pictures of the destruction wrought by Israel in Gaza are all over the place.  What is very, very hard to find is any comparable evidence -- indeed any evidence at all -- of destruction in Israel.  Given the Israeli PR adeptness, I suspect this is because there is very, very little of it.

I have no sympathy for Hamas.  What they hope to accomplish other than getting their own people killed by shooting rockets at Israel is beyond understanding.  Perhaps there is a better explanation, but the seemingly obvious answer is a culture of no-harm-goes-unavenged that would make the Hatfields and McCoys proud. 

But neither do I have any sympathy for Israel.  The idea that somehow Israel is the victim here is preposterous.  The Israeli Ambassador asked what would American do if some foreign group lobbed 8,000 rockets into America.  That begs the question, though, of what we would do if a foreign state had occupied most of the country for nearly 45 years and was relentlessly building settlements along the entire eastern seaboard.  Sporadic rocket fire from Hamas is the price Israel pays for the occupation.  And, since Israel has no intention of ever agreeing to a Palestinian state worthy of the name, they should accept that as a very small price indeed.

The Middle East has dominated American foreign policy for a quarter century now.  We need to follow through on the promise that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon.  But beyond that, it's time to give up.  We are no longer so dependent on the Middle East for our energy, and if we backed away from Israel, the terrorism threat would largely evaporate.  It's time to tell the entire Middle East: "You made this mess. Continuing it hurts no one but yourselves.  We've tried to help.  But we're done.  It's up to you to either clean it up or live with it."

Social Security and Me

I got my Social Security statement today. Through 2008, I paid in $218,028 in FICA taxes (and $124,451 in Medicare taxes btw) over the last 40 years or so. In return, I am estimated (not promised mind you, ESTIMATED) to get $28,440/year if I "retire" at 66 and $38,412 if I wait until I am 70. At some really simplistic level this doesn't seem so bad. If I start collecting at 66, I will recoup my "investment" by the time I am 73, and if I wait until I am 70, I will do so by the time I am 75. Of course, as with any lifetime annuity, it pays to live forever, so if I live to be 100, I will collect 4.6 times what I paid in if I start collecting at 66 and 5.5 times what I paid in if I wait until 70 to start. But these calcs ignore a few things. Like the fact that the government is not compensating me for the use of my money for 40 years or so. Nor does it account for the fact that the government will treat their repayment of my loan to them not as a return of capital but as income subject to at 15% to 28% tax (depending on how successful I am at generating income after I retire and assuming taxes on people like me don't go up -- a tenuous assumption at best). Bottom line? SS is a SHITTY investment. It is, in large part, a transfer payment pure and simple, and it should be accepted as such. I'm actually OK with that. I just wish someone somewhere would say "thank you," rather than TAX THE RICH!!!

Starve the Beast and Stuff the Goose

I had a bit of an epiphany tonight. Remember "starve the beast," the Reaganite theory that the way to control the size of government was to keep cutting taxes until, finally, slashing of spending/programs becomes unavoidable? Well, the Dems have a mirror image of that: Call it "stuff the goose": create more and more entitlements without regard to costs until, finally, tax increases become unavoidable. The problem for those of us just trying to do the right thing is that when "starve the beast" collides with "stuff the goose," the outcome is simply ENORMOUS debt. I'm glad the health care bill passed. I really am. It's a start, I hope, on what is clearly the single most important and difficult domestic issue facing America. But to provide, at taxpayer expense, health care coverage for an additional 35 million people, and to thereby remove any incentive for these additional people to use health care resources responsibly, without doing anything meaningful about the costs and profoundly perverse incentives in the American health care system borders on the criminally irresponsible.

How Important Is The Citizens United Case

I’ve been thinking about the S Ct decision in the Citizens United case. I am a big fan of the 1st Amendment and also bit of a Hugo Blackian (i.e. when the drafters said "Congress shall make no law" they meant “no law”), so I tend to be gratified on that score. But like everything else (including the 2d Amendment, btw) nothing in the Constitution is or can be absolute. So, is the harm that will flow from allowing corporations and unions to make campaign contributions serious enough to warrant the restriction?For these purposes, let’s ignore the threshold question of whether corporations or unions should have any 1st amendment rights at all. I assume they do and should but agree that this is a debatable issue. What interests me right now are two more practical questions. First, how much difference will direct corporate and associational contributions make in our electoral processes? Second, if there will be a difference will it be baleful or beneficent. My sense is that allowing corporate and union contributions will make very little difference in the end. Money in politics has already passed the point of diminishing returns. There is already so much relentless advertising from so many different outlets that by the time an election actually happens, the electorate is enervated. As I wrote elsewhere, supposing that more campaign money will make a difference to the electoral process is like supposing that another few inches of rain would have made a difference to Noah. For the same reason, I question whether the ruling will actually have much impact on the amount of money invested in politics. The people who would be making these contributions got to be where they are by being good at deciding how to invest money to produce a return. I see no reason to believe they would be more profligate in their political cost-benefit analyses than they are in their business analyses. They too are going to recognize that the incremental utility of additional campaign contributions or advertisements is already near zero. The one difference I do think the decision might make is to improve the transparency of the contributions. Money always finds a way, and if we think McCain-Feingold or other campaign finance laws have kept corporations and unions out of the election business, I think we are kidding ourselves. Allowing contributions to be made directly might reduce the allure of such subterfuges and PACs, “issue ads,” “soft money,” and outright graft, and that in my mind is all to the good. So on balance, my prediction is that this will prove to be a moderately important 1st Amendment case but a tempest in a teapot when it comes to money in politics.

Democrats And The War

Notwithstanding my concerns about billy bob and my continuing skepticism that we are doing any good in Iraq, I was pleased that the "Senate Reject[ed] Democrats’ Call to Pull Troops" yesterday.

For one thing, I am very cynical about the Democrats' motives in this. They have always known there was no chance such a resolution would ever actually go into effect, since it has always been clear that there is not enough support to overcome a filibuster much less a veto. Moreover, even if by some chance it did become effective, it would spark a Constitutional crisis of historic proportions, for there is no question Bush would ignore it. So what is the point?

Perhaps one could argue that even if the effort was obviously futile from the outset, it is important to make a statement as to one's beliefs. Well, maybe. But I am hard pressed to see why votes are required for this purpose. Coming on top of the non-binding resolution passed by House last month, one can't help but feel that the Democrats' real purpose has less to do with matters of conscience than it does with forcing the Republicans (as well as some Democrats) to again and again cast votes that the Democrats will be able to portray as "pro-war" two years from now.

These tactics no doubt serve to fire-up the bases on both sides. But elections are won and lost in the middle. And if I am any indication of how that middle feels about these antics, the Democrats are making a huge mistake playing politics with this war.

No one sensate is in favor of this war. The question is what to do about it. Like it or not, so long as Bush is President, the answer to that question is up to Bush. As an institution at least, Congress' choices come down to this: sit down shut up for the next two years and hope for the best or take responsibility and either cut off funding or impeach Bush.

Opposing The War But Supporting The Troops?

William Arkin, a national security/military affairs blogger for the Washington Post kicked of a regular firestorm with a January 31 column taking American soldiers to task for complaining about domestic opposition to the Iraq war. After quoting three soldiers who in various ways argued that you can not oppose the war and still claim to support the troops, Arkin unloaded:

These soldiers should be grateful that the American public, which by all polls overwhelmingly disapproves of the Iraq war and the President's handling of it, do still offer their support to them, and their respect.

Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform, accepting that the incidents were the product of bad apples or even of some administration or command order. . . .

So, we pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?

That wasn't the worst part. The line that gained the most attention was this one:

[This complaining by the troops] is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary - oops sorry, volunteer - force that thinks it is doing the dirty work.

The response to this was swift and ugly and personal and overwhelming. After two more columns one attacking his critics and another defending himself and half apologizing, Arkin finally threw in the towel with an embarrassingly maudlin effort, in his words, "to make sense of the worldview of those who have responded."

There were well over 3,000 "comments" posted on the first three of these columns; yet this was just the tip of the iceberg of e-mail and blog reactions that the columns generated. The Post had finally had enough, as Arkin acknowledged in his final post:

On the advice of my editors, this is the last column I will post for awhile on this subject. My impulse would be to continue to fight back and answer the critics, but I see the wisdom in their observation that nothing new is being said here and the Internet frenzy is adding nothing to the debate or our understanding of our world. I also see that I cannot continue to write about humanity and difficult questions if indeed what I wish is to vanquish those who attack me.

But that was not quite enough. Yesterday, in a self-confessed effort to insulate the Post itself from the "Blast Damage" caused by Arkin, the Post's ombudsman published what amounted to a public rejection of its own columnist:

The fact that The Post and washingtonpost.com are interlocking yet separate is lost on most readers, who do not care that the two are miles apart physically and under different management. A great example is the recent firestorm over a column that never appeared in The Post -- but for which The Post was blamed. . . . Did one online column irreparably damage Post national security journalism? No. But it does show that an online column rubs off on the newspaper. . . .

What's the difference between opinion writing for the newspaper and for washingtonpost.com? The writing can be similar, but the editing is more intense at the newspaper. More experienced eyes see a story or a column before it goes into the paper; The Post has several levels of rigorous editing. There is "less of an editing process" for blogs at the more immediacy-oriented Web site, Brady said. . . .

Arkin's column did not meet Post standards, but then, newspaper editing isn't perfect, either. But "mercenary" surely is live ammo; such an incendiary word should have popped out in flames to Post editors.

I am not about to defend Arkin's language or the entirely unwarranted anger it seems to betray. But I do think there are a couple of important issues buried in all of this.

Is it possible to support the troops but oppose the mission? At one level, the answer is an obvious "yes." I can certainly oppose the war and yet have and manifest pride in our troops, their efforts, and how they go about the job they have been assigned. In fact, in some ways, the more important it is to me to support the troops, then the more urgently I need to oppose the war since it is the war that is killing them.

But at another level, I guess I can see what the "support the troops, support the mission" crowd means. These guys and girls have left family and friends, homes and jobs, comfort and safety and are over in a hell hole the scope of which we cannot even imagine, and they are fighting and in some cases dying. How can I say I "support" them if I also say that their sacrifices are meaningless if not reprehensible. I know if I were doing something that entailed that amount of risk and suffering I would have mixed emotions about people who claimed to be proud of me but who thought what I was doing was a crime or worse. If you want the troops to believe that you are proud of them, you almost have to tell them that what they are risking their lives for is worth it. I think it is worth it, for now at least, but that is a story for another time.

The other question Arkin raises is even more difficult and certainly more important. How does a democratic society relate to an all-volunteer army? Do soldiers who volunteered give up the right to bitch about how they are used? Do they give up the right to complain about those who don't cheer for them? Do they have any right to anything more than what they were promised as an inducement to sign up?

And, what do we civilians owe to such an army? Aren't they just the "the hired help?" Do we owe them any more (or less) respect, any greater pay, benefits and support, than we do policemen, or firemen, or any of the other people we have hired to protect us from what we see as dangerous? Do we owe these men and women the same type of support we gave the GIs in WWII?

I think the answer is no. But I'm not sure. And, if the answer is "no," I'm even less sure what the right answer is.

Let The Culture Wars Begin (Again)

Oh dear. Mary Cheney is pregnant.

Who cares?

Well, appaently, lots of people. From the NYT article linked above:

Family Pride, a gay rights group, noted that Ms. Cheney’s home state of Virginia does not recognize same-sex marriages or civil unions to same-sex couples.

"The news of Mary Cheney’s pregnancy exemplifies, once again, how the best interests of children are denied when lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens are treated unfairly and accorded different and unequal rights and responsibilities than other parents," the group’s executive director, Jennifer Chrisler, said in a statement.

Focus on the Family, an influential Christian group that has provided crucial political support to President Bush, released a statement that criticized child rearing by same-sex couples.

"Mary Cheney’s pregnancy raises the question of what’s best for children," the group’s director of issues analysis, Carrie Gordon Earll, said in a statement. "Just because it’s possible to conceive a child outside of the relationship of a married mother and father doesn’t mean it’s the best for the child. Love can’t replace a mom or a dad."

As if the welfare of children had anything to do with this. On either side.

The End Of An Era

There is a club in downtown Toledo (aptly named The Toledo Club) that was founded well over a century ago by the glass barons and other industrialists and luminaries that served as Toledo's founding fathers: Edward Drummond Libbey and Michael J Ownes (Libbey Glass, Libbey Owens Ford and Owens Illinois), John North Willys (Willys Overland), Morrison R Waite (7th Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court), and David Ross Locke (newspaper publisher and abolitionist essayist). As with clubs like this in other cities, The Toledo Club was, for most of its existence, an exclusive bastion of old, rich, mostly white, men. Today, women are allowed to become members, and a few intrepid souls have done so, but for the most part the Club remains what it has always been: a place for men to get together in comfortable surroundings and do what men love to do -- talk, tell stories, share gossip, make contacts and deals, and indulge their taste for fine cigars and good liquor, all in an milieu free from the constraints (whether real or perceived) imposed on such activities by the "fairer sex."

Over the years, the Club has not escaped the campaign against second-hand smoke, and large portions of the Club are off-limits to smoking now. But there is one room -- The Oak Room -- where smoking continues to be allowed and where a simpatico bartender pours "three-fingers-in-a-rain-barrel" drinks of fine Scotch, Gin, Vodka, Bourbon or whatever else might suit the a man's fancy. Because of this, the Oak Room has become, for many, both the avatar and conservator of a great tradition.

The Toledo Club is not unique in all of this, of course, even in Toledo. The Country Clubs, originally founded by the same types of people who founded the Toledo Club for essentially the same kinds of purposes, have been through similar transitions. Yet there remains in each of these an "inner-sanctum" where the traditions are observed and defended from the seeming relentless forces of temperance.

All of the people who frequent such places have long shared one belief: that, having been driven so far underground, they were safe; that the smoking abolitionists would simply not be able to stamp out these last few islands of freedom. After all, we are talking about a single room in a private club! Surely they can't reach there without making smoking illegal per se!

Alas, how wrong they were.

Tomorrow, December 7, what is probably the most comprehensive smoking ban ever enacted goes into effect, state-wide, in Ohio. Passed by citizen initiative in the November elections, the ban technically extends only to places to which the public has access (bars and bowling alleys included). Private clubs are nominally exempted. However, there's a catch: to be a "private club,"you can have no employees.

There are creative lawyers (some in my own firm) working diligently on behalf of paying clients to find loopholes in this prohibition. They may do so, although I think it will be hard to find any that are likely to withstand scrutiny. But in reality the war is over. The abolitionists have breached the wall between the public and the private. Efforts to preserve that distinction will continue for some time, I think, but those will simply be the final skirmishes in a war that has already been lost. There is no place the smoking nazis cannot reach.

The tactical stroke of genius that made this possible was a shift of focus from patrons to employees. As long as the battle was being fought to protect "patrons" of establishments, there was considerable force to the argument that no person had an absolute right to enter privately owned places. If a person objected to or was concerned about the second-hand smoke, he or she could go to places that didn't allow it. In the end, the market would sort things out, with each business having to decide whether it would be better off with or without smoking. But, when the focus turned to employees, who have far less of an ability to choose where they work, that argument lost much, maybe all of its force. It is a common-place that business owners have a duty to protect their workers from work-place injury, and imposing an obligation to protect them from second hand smoke is a small step from the existing obligation to protect them from repetitive motion injury or other workplace ills.

Yes, I am a smoker, but that is not really the reason I find this sort of thing repugnant. I am always looking for a reason to quit, and now I have another one. My wife won't let me smoke in my house (indeed, even I don't like the smell) and my state will not let me smoke indoors anywhere else. So, maybe, finally, the lack of places to do it will make me quit. And, if it does, I will feel a twinge of gratitude.

But there is something inestimably sad about the outlawing of places like the Oak Room. (The same is no doubt true about the corner bar; I just don't go there too often). It is a reduction in the diversity of our society; another step in its homogenization. Hell, we do LOTS of things that are bad for our health. Driving being the poster child. But in our terror of "adverse health effects" and our insistence that the "majority rules" not just in most places but in all places, we are gradually eliminating the variation that makes life interesting.

Or so it seems to me.

Human Hubris: From the Simply Silly To The Manifestly Absurd

One of the more depressing upshots of the Democratic victory in the Congressional elections is that the new Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, is one of the most ardent opponents of disposing nuclear wastes at Yucca Mountain Nevada. Here's a quote from Mr. Reid's Web page:

The proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump is never going to open. Since I was elected to Congress in 1982, I have been fighting against Yucca Mountain because it threatens the health and safety of Nevadans and people across the United States. The science is incomplete, unsound, yet clearly demonstrates that Yucca Mountain is not a safe site for isolating nuclear waste. The tide is turning on Yucca Mountain, and it is time we look at viable alternatives and realistic approaches to long term nuclear waste storage. My highest priority is to ensure the health and safety of Nevadans and I will continue to fight against bringing spent nuclear fuel to Nevada.

I am far from conversant with the pros and cons of Yucca Mountain, but one aspect of the deabte recently caught my attention: whether, in designing the repository, DOE should be required to demonstrate that it will protect people for 10,000 years or for a million or more.

Some background (mostly taken from the opinion of the DC Circuit in the case linked below):

In 1992, following years of fierce debate (and litigation) over what to do with nuclear wastes, Congress stepped in and picked Yucca Mountain as the best (i.e. least worse) option. At the same time, Congress directed EPA to promulgate "public health and safety standards for protection of the public from releases of radioactive materials stored or disposed of in the repository at Yucca Mountain." These standards were to be "based upon and consistent with the findings and recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences."

Ten years later (approximately nine years late), EPA finally got around to adopting these standards. It promulgated three standards, but one of them is sufficient to illustrate the issue:

The DOE must demonstrate,using performance assessment,that there is a reasonable expectation that, for 10,000 years after disposal, [no individual is reasonably likely to receive a specified does of radiation per year].

The State of Nevada (and others) challenged the standards arguing that 10,000 years was too short. The Court of Appeals agreed, holding that EPA needed to establish standards that would require DOE to demonstrate that the "acceptable dose" would not be exceeded for a million years or more. (The decision is 100 pages long, but if you want to read the key part, see pages 20-32. The rest is stuff no one could love and only a lawyer could even tolerate).

This is a patently silly outcome, but before you go off on the evils of "activist" courts, the key to the decision was the statutory requirement that the standards be "based upon and consistent with the findings and recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences." The National Academy of Sciences determined (quite sensibly) that there was "no scientific basis for limiting the time period of the individual-risk standard to 10,000 years or any other value." According to the Academy, radiation exposures were likely to change only "on the time scale of the long term stability of the fundamental geologic regime -- a time scale that is on the order of [a million] years at Yucca Mountain." Thus, NAS concluded that human populations might not experience peak exposures "until tens to hundreds of thousands of years 'or even further into the future.' " As a result, NAS recommended that the exposure evaluation "be conducted for the time when the greatest risk occurs, within the limits imposed by the long-term stability of the geologic environment."

Personally, I find this recommendation to be impenetrable. Are they saying that the period EPA must consider is dictated by "the long-term stability of the geologic environment" and that because Yucca Mountain is so geologically stable, the projection has to go out a million or more years? If the geology were less stable, would the time for consideration be shorter? If that is the point, then we have a case of "no good deed goes unpunished:" the very aspect that makes Yucca Mountain appealing -- it's geologic stability -- would appear to make the period that must be covered in the risk assessment longer. What would seem sensible would to start by making the policy-based, risk management decision on a period of time over which unacceptable exposures must be prevented and then assessing whether the geologic stability of Yucca Mountain (together with other design aspect of the repository) were sufficient to prevent such an exposure from occurring within that time frame.

But the legal niceties of all of this are beside the more fundamental point: We can't reliably say anything about human society even 10,000 years from now, much less 1,000,000 years from now. Even attempting to do a "risk assessment" over thousands (to say nothing of millions) of years is just plain silly.

From Wikipedia, here are some of the major innovations to occur ten thousand years ago, i.e. in 8,000 BC:

Agriculture in Mesopotamia.

Domestication of the pig in China and Turkey.

Domestication of sheep and goats in the Middle East.

Domestication of dogs from wolves in China.

Ancient flint tools from north and central Arabia belong to hunter-gatherer societies.

Clay vessels and modeled human and animal terracotta figurines are produced at Ganj Dareh in western Iran.

Exchange of goods may represent the earliest pseudo-writing technology.

People of Jericho started to mold bricks out of clay, then hardened them in the sun.

Even if the rate of change were constant, which it is not, can you imagine a human society that is as different from today's as today's is from that which existed in 8,000 BC? Now, extrapolate that out 100 times.

Congress, NAS, EPA and the Court all share some of the blame for an outcome that results in EPA mandating an entirely pointless (and manifestly silly) "million year risk assessment". But, I think something important underlies this silliness: despite the evidence of history, human beings simply cannot internalize how little the current state of the world has to tell us about the state of the world even hundreds of years from now, much less tens of thousands or millions of years from now. The risks that concern us today are no more relevant to the risks we will confront even 500 years from now than the risks that concerned 16th Century Europe are relevant in today's world. And, that is only 500 years. It is pointless to even try to imagine what human society will look like in 1,000 years, much less 10,000 or 1,000,000 year from now. For all we know, radioactive waste generated in the 20th Century and stored at Yucca Mountain will be a critical source of energy for people (assuming any exist) even 500 years from now. 10,000 year from now, humans will have either disappeared entirely or colonized the universe. In either event, the fate of nuclear waste deposited at Yucca Mountain will not be relevant.

In terms of the age of the earth, to say nothing of the age of the universe, the whole of human history is not even a blink of an eye. We exist in an incredibly narrow environmental envelope that by itself is almost freakishly improbable. Given the forces at work in the universe, it is improbable to suppose that we will last even another 10,000 years, much less another million. But if we do, one thing can be said with certainty: whatever we are worried about today will seem as quint to our progeny as the worries of the Sumerians seems to us today.

Simple humility, if nothing else, requires us to recognize that fact. Yes, we need to be concerned with the future, but a hundred or so years is probably the limit of meaningful speculation. Anything beyond that is outside the range of our influence and, if we are to assume humanity is to survive at all, we have to trust that they will be able to deal with the issues we leave behind.

Idealism Is Dangerous

This article from the Washington Post is fascinating. It documents the collapse of "neo-conservatism," and in doing so provides yet another case study (as if we needed another) of how dangerous idealism is when untempered by realism.

As an aside (only), I have to note Richard Perle's ridiculously self-serving effort to avoid taking part of the blame, which WaPo does a decent enough job of skewering that I can simply quote it without comment:

In an interview last week, Perle said the administration's big mistake was occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. [Huh? How exactly would you have done that?!] "If I had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation, then I'd say, 'Let's not do it,' " and instead find another way to target Hussein, Perle said. "It was a foolish thing to do."

Perle, head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board at the time of the 2003 invasion, said he still believes the invasion was justified. But he resents being called "the architect of the Iraq war," because "my view was different from the administration's view from the very beginning" about how to conduct it. "I am not critical now of anything about which I was not critical before," he said. "I've said it more publicly."

That is simply laughable, Richard, you spineless weasel. I haven't heard so much exculpatory hair-splitting since Bill Clinton was talking about Monica Lewinski.

It is almost too easy to make fun of Perle. Or Wolfowitz. Or Rumsfeld. Or Feith. Or any of those other "neo-conservatives" who were so convinced that America was on a mission from God (metaphorically in some cases; literally in others). But the quote that really captured my attention is from Ken Adelman, another one of the self-confessed intellectual architects of this war:

"The whole philosophy of using American strength for good in the world, for a foreign policy that is really value-based instead of balanced-power-based, I don't think is disproven by Iraq. But it's certainly discredited."

"Disproven" vs. "discredited." Now THERE's a distinction even a lawyer couldn't love. One cannot "disprove" ideas; one can only "discredit" them. But that is not the real point. It should not be necessary to "disprove" or "discredit" the idea that foreign policy should be driven by "values" rather than self-interest. The idealism that underlies Adelman's neo-conservatism not much different from that which underlay the Utopians or even the hippies. It is, for all its seeming ferocity, almost childlike in its naivete.

International relations is about self-interest and nothing else. If our self-interest aligns with our ideals, so much the better. But if our ideals and our self-interest diverge, only a fool would pursue the ideals.

The Iraq war was sold on the basis of realism and self-interest. In 2003, there was no talk about spreading freedom and democracy. It was all about getting rid of a government that was portrayed (and perhaps even perceived) as posing a clear and present danger to our security. But, as Adelman effectively admits, that was not really the true rationale of the people who orchestrated the selling of the war. Their true motivation was, as Adelman confesses, a "philosophy of using American strength for good in the world, for a foreign policy that is really value-based instead of balanced-power-based." Adelman is right that the fiasco in Iraq thoroughly discredits such an idea, and one can only hope it will stay discredited for another hundred years. But what is amazing to me is that these guys believed it in the first place. How do such men get to positions in which they control the levers of US power?

The Dems Won. Why am I not Happy?

It was an intersting week: The Dems win both Houses. The first woman Speaker. Rummy fired. W admits he got "thumped" and hires another one of Daddy's friends. And the talk of bipartisanship is so thick you can cut it.

As to that last, I don't believe it for a moment. If Bush were interested in compromise he wouldn't be pushing Bolton and the domestic survellience bill. And the Dems are (as always) posturing. They can hardly wait to start the hearings. From today's NYT:

After meeting with Mr. Bush at the White House, Senator Harry Reid, the incoming Senate majority leader, said "the first order of business" when Democrats formally take over in January will be to reinvigorate Congressional scrutiny of the executive branch, with a focus on Iraq.

"Let’s find out what’s going on with the war in Iraq, the different large federal agencies that we have," said Mr. Reid, Democrat of Nevada. "There simply has been no oversight in recent years."

. . .

In Los Angeles, Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is to lead the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, said in a speech that war profiteering could also be a likely subject for his committee.

Mr. Reid is also interested in completing the long-delayed second phase of an Intelligence Committee review into prewar intelligence and the administration’s handling of it, Mr. Manley said.

I agree with Rob's comment on this post that such public witch hunts are entirely counterproductive. But these people are genetically incapable of resisting the temptaion to try to score political points. One of the worst consequences of this election is that we will see lots of Henry Waxman on our TV screens for the next two years. It is going (I fear) to be a reprise of the last two years of the Clinton administration.

Speaker Nancy? Who knows, I guess. Maybe she will grow into the job. But her public pronouncements since becoming minority leader have struck me as nothing short of inane, distinguished only by partisan venom and buzzwords cahined together to make invective. More generally, I have absolutely no confidence in the Democrats. What kind of a party is it whose last nominee is as inept as John Kerry, whose current front runner is Hilary Cinton, and whose most attractive candidate (by a long shot) has been a Senator for two years and has never had a job in which he had to make decisions. Moreover, on social issues at least, the effect of the election was to make both parties more intolerant, with Republicans like Lincoln Chafee losing and Democrats like Brad Ellsworth winning. On a lot of issues, many of the new Democrats willl be voting with the Republicans.

On the Iraq "issue": The Dems campaigned for "change," but have no more of an idea as to what to do than Bush does. Moreover, the very idea that an institution as fractious as Congress could come up with a coherent policy for Iraq is simply nonsense. When it comes right down to it, the Dems are no more inclined to simply leave than are the Republicans. They too realize that if they get blamed for the mess that will almost certainly follow from withdrawal, they will end up getting clobbered in 2008. So, the policy changes, if any, will all be at the margins. The essential fact will remain: we will stay until the spinmeisters believe they can "declare victory."

This mess is so much like Viet Nam. It's just the parties that are reversed. In Viet Nam, the Dems got us in it and it cost them the Presidency in 1968. Yet, it took Nixon 5 more years to get us out, and even then the leaving was an unmitigated embarassment. Now its the Republicans that got us in, and I suspect that it will cost them the Presidency in 2008. Yet, I also suspect that the next President (Hillary, Osama, who?)will still be trying (probably unsuccessfully) to bring the conflcit to an "honorable" end when he/she runs for re-election four years later.

In the end, we will leave as ignominiously as the Russians left Afghanistan -- and will similar results.

This election was a referendum on the war. The war lost, much as it did in 1968. But telling a current administrattion that they are fuck ups doesn't really solve anything. As somebody once said, wars are much easier to get into than get out of.

Sigh.

Election Night Musings

I just got on line and they (CNN) projected that Lincoln Chafee lost. Why does that not make me happy? Of all the Republican Senators with whom I felt simpatico, Lincoln Chafee was the first. And before that, Joe Liberman apparently won. The one Democrat I would most have loved to see lose.

Sigh. For those of us who see this election as a referendum on George Bush, it is going to be a "be careful what you wish for" year. I voted Democratic across the board this year, the only time I have ever done that, for either party, in my lifetime. I think I will get my wish -- non-Republican control of Congress. Yet, before the next two years are over, my guess is that I will be kicking myself.

What strikes me most about these elections is how socially conservative and fiscally progressive the Congress is becoming. That is not me. Indeed, I am the opposite. I am socially progressive and fiscally conservative. Where oh where is MY party?

Responses to a couple comments:

What do I think of Kerry's "joke"? I think it is a testamenet to how pathetic the Democrats have become. Taken by itself, it was just silly. But then you realize that this is the guy the Democrats nominated for President. And then you think that his main opponent was Howard Dean. And you wonder what ever happened to the party of FDR, LBJ and JFK? The Democrats are a joke. But for the Iraq debacle, they would be a splinter party. And the only ones who could win would be the anti-abortion,anti-gay rights, anti-free trade, pro-taxes luddites like Sherrod Brown.

What do I think of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker? First off, I'm not at all sure she will win given the nature of the "new Democrats." But assuming she does, I think it will be a debacle. Has the woman ever been anything other than shrill? If the D's win tonight we are in for a two-year period of "investigation paralysis" that will make the last two years of the Clinton administration seem idyllic.

I can't remember when I have been more depressed for the future of my country.

Update (12:30 am ET): Well, it looks like Nancy Pelosi will be Speaker (shudder) and Dick Cheney will be the deciding vots in a 50-50 Senate (doule shudder). I can't think of much worse other than where we are today. But, I am going to bed, and we will see how things work out.

Tuning Out

Every month about this time, the NY Times e-mails me (and its other online subscribers) a list of the 10 most e-mailed articles for the last 30 days or so. This list always intrigues me, less becuase of an interest in the articles themselves (although I do occasionslly find something intriguing that I missed) than becuase of what the list seems to say about the interests of the (amittedly unrepresentative) on-line readership of the New York Times.

This month's list was peculiarly suggestive. There was not one article on Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, the Palestinians, Somalia, Iran or Korea. Nor were there any articles on spying, or immigration, or detainees, or military tribunals, or flag burning or "defense of marrriage" amendments, or any of the other subjects that so consume those in Washington and the blogosphere. There was also not one editorial or op-ed piece. The readers, in short, found almost nothing in the entire news or editorial sections of the NY Times to be worth sharing with others.
The four most popular articles were, in order:

1.What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage,

2.At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust,

3.Star Jones Reynolds's Departure From 'The View', and

4.Rogue Giants at Sea (a story about freak ocean waves).

Of the other six "most popular" articles, two were about Ken Lay's death, one about the man who blew up his multi-million dollar NY townhouse rather than give it to his estranged wife, one about Google, and one about the bizarre end to the World Cup. Of the ten, the only one that might begin to qualify as "news" (at least as I define it) was this, coming in at number 7: Surprising Jump in Tax Revenues Is Curbing Deficit .

What do I make of this? Probably too much. But it does seem to suggest that people -- even the types that read the NY Times -- have simply tuned out. The purient and perverse (Ken Lay, the NY town house, Star Jones Reynolds, and the Zidane head-butt incident) will catch their interest, as will forces of nature (rogue waves and Google), the counter-intuitve (female dominance in college) and the simply bizarre (Shamu on marriage). But the only "news" readers see fit to share with others is the rare bit of good news (whoops! the deficit is coming down a bit). The rest is so unrelentingly bad that, even if it is read, forwarding it to people who may have had the good fortune to avoid it would be bad manners or worse: "Hey Joe. Just in case you didn't hear, there were 120 peoplke killed in Iraq yesterday. Have a nice day."

I find myself doing the same thing. I look at the headlines and flinch. I feel like it is "important," but I have to make myself read even a couple paragraphs. Mostly, I skip anything beyond the headline and go off ot look, usually fruitlessly, for something upbeat or new or surprising to actually read.

In part, at least, this is what lies behind my month-long hiatus in posting here. In particular, my enthusisam for "Billy Bob's Bulletins" had been considerably dampened. In posting the headlines about Iraq, or other events that might impact Billy Bob, I feel like a one-man morale buster. It is probably hard enough for someone in Billy Bob's position to stay positive without having someone like me making it even easier to see how f@%*ed up everything is right now.

There is lots going on, but it is all so damn depressing that the thought of "sharing" it with others makes my skin crawl.

That's Great Tom. Now Get Out Of Here

and never darken the door of our political life again.

DeLay Pulls No Punches In Final Speech to House

Former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said goodbye to Congress yesterday in typical fighting form, delivering a pugnacious defense of the iron-fisted partisanship that defined his decade in power.

"Given the chance to do it all again, there's only one thing I'd change," DeLay said in a defiant retirement speech on the House floor. "I'd fight even harder."

Go to jail. Do not pass Go. Go directly to jail. You arrogant p#%@k.

What They Might Be Planning

There was a paragarph in Bush's statement on the Zarqawi killing this morning that has recieved little attention but that has been banging about in my head ever since:

On Monday I will meet with my national security team and other key members of my Cabinet at Camp David to discuss the way forward in Iraq. Our top diplomats and military commanders in Iraq will give me an assessment of recent changes in the political and economic and security situation on the ground. On Tuesday, Iraq's new Ambassador to the United States will join us, and we will have a teleconference discussion with the Prime Minister and members of his cabinet. Together we will discuss how to best deploy America's resources in Iraq and achieve our shared goal of an Iraq that can govern itself, defend itself and sustain itself.

Emphasis mine.

On the surface, this is "non-news" about the Prsident's travel/meeting plans; the sort of stuff Tony Snow gives the press every day. But, the timing and the fact that Bush himself chose to talk about these meetings makes me wonder if there is not something more behind these meetings than meets the eye: Zarqawi dead, a fully manned Iraqi government finally in place, the upcoming US mid-term elections (with the popularity of both the war and Republicans at an all time low) on the horizon; a significant potential that the Dems could get that one thing that Bush fears most, the power of the subpoena?

In this context, it seems just possible that Bush and his boys have figured out that there is likely to be no better time to "declare victory" and begin the process of drawing down our troop strength in Iraq. Could it bee that the real purpose of the planning meeting on Monday is to figure out how to do this? Could it be that the purpose of the videoconference with Maliki on Tuesday is to tell him he better get his house in order becuase the Americans are on their way home?

Probably not. But, for one who has argued for some time that we will see a significant reduction on current troop strength in Iraq, it is an intriguing possibility.

Problem is, I don't really know whether to hope I am right or wrong.

Phony Wars

Having a bit of fun with the so-called "war on marriage" and comparing it to last year's equally bogus "war on Christmas," Emily Messner of the Washigton Post asked this question:

Why is it that politicians characterize a war as inexcusably destructive and call for its immediate end pretty much exclusively when no actual war of any sort is involved?

Good question.

As Well It Should

Senate Emphasis on Ideology Has Some in G.O.P. Anxious

Ooooh! That's Harsh!

But funny.

Ooops! Not There Either

F.B.I. Calls Off Its Latest Search for Hoffa

Ask yourself why these guys are spending time and money looking for Jimmy Hoffa, especially since anyone who had anything to do with his disappearnce is now probably as dead as he is. In the age of golbal terrorisim, doesn't the FBI have anything better to do?

Gee, Thanks For The Reminder.

From a WSJ Review of "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's global warming potboiler (some editorial license exercised):

Talk about an inconvenient truth: In a million years, the time it takes the earth to sneeze, the planet will likely be shorn of any conspicuous sign we were ever here, let alone careless with our CO2, dioxins, etc.

That's your happy-thought for today.