07.08.10
Posted in ALL, Climate Change, Environment, Government, Media
at 5:22 pm
I came across this Jim Morin cartoon first over at Political Irony. On the face of it, the cartoon calls the Republicans out for hypocrisy. And they deserve it. But ironically, it could just as easily have been drawn by a savvy G.O.P. consultant.
Why? It does show Republican hypocrisy, but to get there it also inadvertently puts the two sides’ accusations in the same light, the same frame, with none of the damning evidence that would show one to be more justified than the other. It omits the relative merits of each argument (Clinton balanced the budget and left a strong economy, while Bush left a weak economy and two ongoing wars), which will leave many readers with a feeling that the score is even, that both sides are playing the blame game and neither side has the high ground.
“… it keeps [the Democrats] on defense. The result is political stalemate — death for progressives, but a well-paid day’s work for the G.O.P.”
No doubt, different people will see different things in it. Democrats will see what the cartoonist drew — another instance of G.O.P. hypocrisy — and some independents will see the same thing. But many others, especially those who are more cynical about politics or just don’t have much time for it, will see both parties pointing fingers. Without the context of Clinton’s and Bush’s very different legacies, the elephant gains ground over the donkey in their minds.
This mirrors a strategy often used by the G.O.P. when the facts on the ground favor the Democratic policy. Evidence for global warming is overwhelming? Public patience for corporate malfeasance at an end? No matter. They can stymie reform just by pointing a finger back, by making an audacious charge, however groundless or outrageous: global warming is a “hoax,” or the government is doing a “shakedown” of BP.
The media will parrot it, if only to avoid charges of left-wing bias. And — bonus! — they’ll also refrain from suggesting either argument is more valid (too many editors fear such journalism will be construed as “opinionating”). The result — it may not win the argument overnight, but it narrows the margin a bit.
And bit by bit, it moves public opinion on a larger scale.
So, for example, while few people besides one Republican Senator (James Inhofe) think global warming is truly a hoax, years of the G.O.P. mocking Al Gore and denigrating scientists have brought us to a point where enough people are confused enough and mistrustful enough that support for a climate bill has softened. An effective energy bill is effectively off the table and the Republicans’ paymasters have won that war, for the time being.
Political stunts about scientific hoaxes or anti-BP mobsters are designed to take the people’s eyes off of melting glaciers and oil-coated pelicans. It ties the left up answering the ridiculous charges (through editorials or cartoons like the one above) and keeps them on defense. The result is political stalemate — death for progressives, but a well-paid day’s work for the G.O.P.
The question is, can the Democrats ignore the rhetorical decoys, get back on offense, and do what the country sent them to DC to do?
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06.25.10
Posted in ALL, Economy, Government
at 11:57 am
The United States may be juggling two separate wars and fighting 10% unemployment at home, but for some reason we’re hearing that the budget deficit is the most imminent national threat. Your children could be serving in Afghanistan, your brother might need a financial hand, and your roof might be leaking rainwater onto your head, but conservatives want you to know that your credit card balance should be your first concern.
Of course, the budget deficit is no funnier than a leaky roof during an Indian monsoon — it’s a real problem. But what is amusing are the growing cries over the last few months from the right that now, nOW, NOW is the absolute, critical, time-bomb ticking time to tackle it.
Now, if conservatives were truly serious about the deficit, they’d suggest doing something meaningful to reduce it. But since either cutting the largest discretionary budget item — excessive military spending — or letting debt-swelling tax cuts expire would usher in a fiery, bloody apocalypse, shaking fists at the deficit remains their preferred way to fight it.
“… Today’s “Tea Party” — and the Republicans who want to be invited to their tea parties — want to cut taxes when it’s least affordable and cut spending when it’s most needed.”
You’ve got to smile at the timing of this sudden interest in the national debt. In modern history, most of the increases in debt have occurred under Republican presidents. Every time, the party of “fiscal conservatism” ignored the ballooning public debt in favor of ever-lower taxes or ever-higher military spending. Presidents Reagan and H.W. Bush left it to the “tax-and-spend” Democrats to balance the budget, which they did under Clinton, only to see another Bush raid the Treasury again in the new century, putting the debt back on an upward course and leaving the steaming pile of debt to the next (Democratic) president to tackle.
Just as in business, there are times to spend more and times to spend less. Few economists think it’s normally good for the government to spend more than it brings in, but they’re nearly united in their belief that the right time to do so is during high unemployment. The private sector isn’t humming right now, despite low taxes and nearly interest-free money. Stimulus spending — yes, by the government — is what’s needed to get the engine to turn over, to lower unemployment, to get people spending and creating jobs, which attracts more investment, and so on.
It’s when times are good that government can and should cut spending. That’s when the private sector needs no help. That’s when it’s affordable to lower taxes. But when the engine is cold, you want to add a richer mix of gas to it to get it moving; only then do you ease up. Sure, you can save gas by never leaving the garage, but then, you’re stuck in the garage.
Today’s “Tea Party” — and the Republicans who want to be invited to their tea parties — want to cut taxes when it’s least affordable and cut spending when it’s most needed.
The timing may be crazy but it’s not accidental. If the Republican brand has one thing going for it it’s the assumption that they want you to keep your money while Democrats want to take it away. While in power they may misuse the military, under-regulate banks and oil companies, and run up the national debt, but their anti-tax-and-spend superhero cape allows them to win elections anyway.
They won’t keep that aura if the Democrats claw their way out of 10% unemployment. They won’t be able to keep painting the government as a bloated and ineffective cancer on the country if stimulus spending gets the economy moving again, if it brings to a close the economic crisis that began when Republican theories of economics ruled in Washington.
If government policy manages to lead the country out of that era of financial recklessness and free-market failure, then the G.O.P.’s halo of fiscal conservatism may finally evaporate like a Bush-era mortgage-backed derivative.
It may be hard to believe that any party would work so tirelessly against the national interest, but remember that much of the G.O.P.’s identity relies on demonizing public spending and government action. Their mid-term election strategy is to hype hysteria about the deficit while blocking the door to lower unemployment.
They may be risking the jobs and prosperity of ordinary Americans, but understand, their own jobs are at stake.
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06.08.10
Posted in ALL, Barack Obama, Government, Health, Hillary Clinton, Media
at 2:01 pm
Winning. Cheating. Scandal. Performance enhancing drugs.
These juicy phrases flooded back into the news recently with the Tour of California cycling race and Floyd Landis’s admissions and accusations of drug use.
Which got me thinking. Doping in athletic competitions are no secret, but we’ve never heard of such scandals in political races — yet.
Think about it — many of the same drugs used by athletes could give politicians a real edge over their competition. Quicker reaction times could boost their debating skills, higher endurance could help them on the campaign trail, extra muscle mass could make them look more athletic, and hence more telegenic.
That plus the fact that, in politics, the prize is real power, and I wonder if performance enhancing drugs (PED’s) aren’t already widespread inside the beltway and out on the stump.
“… And then, after getting caught with a fridge-full of red blood cells, they’ll apologize to the nation on Oprah, and publish books like, The Straight Dope: An American Story of Ambition, Regret, and Redemption.”
Politicians used to get by on good old-fashioned graft and determination. But now there’s many more options open to the politician seeking an unfair edge.
Anabolic steroids, amphetamines, human growth hormone …
The first use of PEDs in politics may have occurred right here in California. Remember the 2003 race for governor? By election day, Republican candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger had more muscle mass than the next three candidates combined. He won by 1.3 million votes.
Arnold had even admitted to steroid use in the 70’s, but the media failed to investigate whether he had been juicing for the gubernatorial race.
This probably sent a message to other politicians considering doping up for an election – “you can get away with it – the media will look the other way.”
And what about today? Consider President Obama. As a freshman Senator he challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, the person whom everyone thought had the nomination locked up. To take down the Hillary heavyweight, he would need almost superhuman skills. What came next was a series of speeches so well crafted, so expertly delivered, that he was compared to Cicero.
(If you look hard enough, you’ll see evidence everywhere.)
Consider Sarah Palin. She was an unknown governor from Alaska with no nation-wide ambitions, but overnight, she morphed into a wildly popular Republican superstar, rumored to take down caribou with her bare hands.
I’ve managed to collect a bit of beltway doping slang here, to help increase people’s awareness around politicians who may be juicing.
Stumping: Injecting PEDs on the campaign trail
Split-ticket doping: Taking drugs with someone from a different party
Supplemental appropriation: An extra dose of a drug to make it through a budget hearing
“Ralphies”: Pills named for Ralph Nader, which lower inhibitions about sticking with a doomed campaign
“Byrdies”: Street name for drugs that boost political longevity, named for 92-year old Senator Robert Byrd
Filibooster: An amphetamine taken to increase alertness or aggressiveness
So how do otherwise honest politicians get caught up in this seedy world of PEDs? It probably starts innocently enough. Some staffer offers them a cup of coffee, a harmless bit of caffeine to help them make it through a day of interviews.
Pretty soon, though, coffee’s not enough anymore, and candidates graduate to the harder stuff. Amphetamines . . . HGH . . . or storing two pints of their own blood in a fridge and re-injecting it the night before an election.
I know, you’re thinking, if politicians are doping, how come no one’s been caught yet? Well, I’m sure they’re smart enough not to be seen buying human growth hormone at a town hall meeting. Most likely it’s their campaign manager or maybe a Canadian physician who scores the dope for them.
If a drug scandal finally breaks, it’ll follow a predictable course. First, the politicians will deny it. They’ll write entire books to try to clear their names, books with titles like, Fair and Square: Running Clean in the Race of a Lifetime. And then, after getting caught with a fridge-full of red blood cells, they’ll apologize to the nation on Oprah, and publish books like, The Straight Dope: An American Story of Ambition, Regret, and Redemption.
Let’s hope it doesn’t get that far. We can’t let scandal taint the otherwise virtuous world of politics. Too many kids look up to these politicians, putting their lawn signs up on their bedroom walls, memorizing their voting records, dreaming of someday becoming the next John Edwards, the next Mike Huckabee, the next H. Ross Perot.
So what should we do? Should politicians get pulled out of committee hearings to undergo doping awareness and resistance training? Should they have to scrub the oil off of Gulf-coast beaches as pre-emptive punishment for doping? Should we make them pee in a cup before each major speech?
I don’t have all the answers. But the answers to those questions are yes, yes, and yes!
So far, the only people who know about politicians and performance enhancing drugs are readers of this blog. Until the rest of the country sits up and pays attention, listen out for the slang I taught you, and remember this helpful acronym: Doping is Over-Ignored in Politics Everyday (D.O.P.E.).
Of course, this is all tongue-in-cheek. But if I’ve learned anything from the first years of 21st-century American politics, with the incredible instances of governmental ineptitude and financial and sexual scandal, it’s to never underestimate politicians’ ability to be their own worst enemies.
So if a scandal ever does break around politicians using performance enhancing drugs, you heard it here first.
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05.12.10
Posted in ALL, Foreign Policy
at 10:03 am
In my last post I questioned the CIA’s use of aerial drones to attack suspected militants (and civilians) in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan, arguing that they don’t incapacitate the groups they’re supposed to be attacking, even as they inspire more people to attack the country that’s attacking them. Since then, a car bomb was left in Times Square (and, thankfully, failed to blow up). The man who has confessed to it was reportedly tied to the Pakistani Taliban and was upset over CIA drone attacks in Pakistan (among other things).
I’m not claiming I was prescient (and I won’t predict the World Cup for cash). It only underscores that retaliation for violence is inevitable.
It’s not “blaming America,” as some on the right would say, or giving terrorists what they want. It’s a reason to ask whether policies like pseudo-discriminate aerial bombings that kill civilians and fail to stop terrorism is productive or counter-productive — whether it’s in our best interests or not. (I’m also considering the innocent people who are being killed from above as they walk to school or work, but such people don’t seem to count for much to U.S. foreign policy hawks.)
As Robert Wright writes (heh) in an insightful piece, many commentators think jihadism is some sort of “prime mover” that explains terrorism but needs no explanation of its own. This view makes it easy to think that the way to stop terrorism is to simply to kill the terrorists (as if killing one can’t radicalize two). But if the strategists at the Pentagon and CIA were willing to measure the downsides of their actions, not just the upsides, they might find a better way forward than the one before us now.
This current path is bombing, revenge, retaliation, escalation — repeated, ad absurdium — on an ever widening scale, with evermore casualties, and no victory available to either side.
I can’t think of a surer way to lose.
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04.15.10
Posted in ALL, Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Government, Iraq
at 12:09 pm
5/12/10: See the update to this post in light of the attempted bombing in Times Square.
In Pulp Fiction, gangster Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) recites a pseudo-biblical verse about righteousness to people who have wronged his boss, just before he delivers a bullet to their heads. “… I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you…” They’re bloody deeds (hey, it’s Tarantino), but the little speech about justice he always recites beforehand emboldens him to go on killing.
That was in a movie studio. In the White House briefing studio, the President’s press secretary acknowledges the killing of evildoers with U.S. Predator drones, but usually puts it in less assassination-ey, more humanitarian terms, like “We provide assistance to the Pakistanis as they increase their efforts …” blah blah blah. (I think he actually said “blah blah blah” but it was edited for the transcript.)
“… And if you trust the current president not to abuse this power, can you trust the next one? (Think, ‘Aww shucks,’ with an Alaskan accent.)”
Now, the killing of evil people on the ground from a silent, invisible force in the sky used to only be the work of an omnipotent “man in the sky” (if you believe in that sort of thing). But in 2010, mortal Americans do these dirty, deistic deeds quite regularly, reducing other humans to piles of flesh and bones (usually burned and charred) with the touch of a button.
It goes something like this: A man in a clean-pressed uniform walks into an oval office in the eastern United States, has a few words with another man in a clean-pressed suit, and makes a phone call to an office building where someone who rocks at video games tells a remote-control drone circling a dry region on the other side of the planet to drop two Hellfire missiles onto someone else’s head.
President Obama approved more of these drone strikes in his first year as president than George W. did in his entire eight. (Not that Bush deserved the Peace Prize or anything, the technology just wasn’t as widespread yet.) If that puts fewer American troops at risk, you might say that’s a good thing, but there’s strong evidence such targeted killings don’t injure the terrorist groups they’re supposed to, while the collateral damage increasingly radicalizes regular people (ergo, more troops at risk). A popular Pakistani song says that Americans “kill people like insects.”
Imagine what American Tea Party activists — or even leftist pacifists! — would want to do to Pakistanis if they continually incinerated selected Americans driving around Washington, D.C. or Texas by high-tech gadgets controlled from Islamabad, while regular Pakistanis wolfed down McDonalds and flocked to the latest James Cameron movie barely aware America even exists. At the least there’d be calls to “deliver” some of our nuclear weapons to Pakistan.
Well, at least Pakistan has no nukes that could ever be used here, right? Ummm…
What’s more, the Obama administration has now approved the killing of an American citizen accused of plotting terrorism. They’re apparently consoled by the fact that this American is in Yemen rather than Yorktown and that his name is not Al, but Al-Awlaki. Neither of these distinctions matter to the Constitution, but if enough Americans shrug and assume the man is better off dead, well then at least it’s not a political problem for the president.
Decisions about which American citizens to vaporize from the sky and which to allow home for dinner would be easier if we knew which ones were plotting chaos. I mean, if hearing the word “terrorist” or seeing photos of the World Trade Center is enough to make you agree to tear up the Constitution, then knowing that Al-Awlaki is “evil men,” in Jules’ words, might be enough for you to say, “waste him,” and then go home for meatloaf.
But outside the movies and outside the briefing room, things are never so clear. On Mondays and Wednesdays we hold hearings into how intelligence agencies got X, Y, or Z wrong, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays we accept their guesses at face value. We just got a rare look at how one targeted killing went down in Iraq, when WikiLeaks released a video showing the aerial slaughter of more than a dozen people in Iraq from an Apache helicopter. At least one of the killed was thought to be an insurgent. Apparently his camera (he was a Reuters journalist) appeared to be a gun, from the point of view of the Apache’s gunsights.
But even if there were no fog of war — if we had perfect intelligence, and knew who has an RPG and who has a Nikon, and whether assassinating person X would increase the violence in region Y — there’s still a big reason to stop these sky-killings cold. If there’s any hard and fast law in Political Science, it’s that whatever power is used will eventually be abused. It’s simply too easy, and maybe too tempting, for a president without a strong moral compass to use such attacks to project toughness and success for political gain, if other aspects of war aren’t going so well. As to whether the victims were guilty or not, we would never know. (Pop challenge to Tea Party members: If you distrust government so much, how come you’re willing to take its word on everything it does outside the United States?)
And to see the wide potential for abuse of a power like the discretionary killing of an American citizen, you only need to think back to the extraordinary lengths the Nixon administration went to in going after political enemies like Martin Luther King, Jr. If you’re a thorn in the side of the president, you might think twice about traveling in countries Americans don’t care about. And if you trust the current president not to abuse this power, can you trust the next one? (Think, “Aww shucks,” with an Alaskan accent.)
Without due process, accusations of terrorism, conspiracy, or other evil never need defending. Any president who wanted to use the power of the Predator could abuse it. The missiles reside in the sky, and the responsibility nowhere.
Later in the movie, Jules renounces killing and repudiates his own past righteousness: “That sh*t ain’t the truth. The truth is you’re the weak. And I’m the tyranny of evil men.”
When you’re quoting Tarantino to make a moral point, you know the world is upside down.
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