Monthly Archives: June 2014

Diabolical Persistence

June 30, 2014 – 10:09 am

Errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum. (To err is human; to persist is diabolical.)

— Seneca (quoted Friday by Paul Krugman)

This week everybody was talking about the Supreme Court

Like freshmen research papers, the Court’s biggest decisions always get finished on the last day of the term … which is today. So this is when the Hobby Lobby case will be decided, and we’ll find out whether a bizarre reading of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause will allow employers to control their employees’ health care options. There’s no time for me to process the decision, so I’ll put off that commentary until next week.

But other important decisions have been trickling out during finals week.

Police need a warrant to search your cell phone. The Court was unanimous in this ruling, which kind of obvious when you think about it. Police need a warrant to search the photo albums on your shelf, so why not the photo collection on your iPhone? My only regret is that Justice Scalia didn’t write a separate opinion. I would have loved to hear him explain the Founders’ “original intent” regarding cell phones.

The Court severely cut back the President’s power to make recess appointments. Before the Senate changed its filibuster rules, Republicans in the Senate had been using the Senate’s constitutional power to “advise and consent” on presidential appointments to nullify certain laws, by refusing to approve the appointment of anyone to enforce them. In particular, the refusal to approve any appointments to the National Labor Relations Board would have left that Board without a quorum, essentially invalidating all the nation’s labor laws. Continuing a struggle that the Bush administration had with a Democratic Senate in its final two years, President Obama filled the vacancies by making “recess appointments”, using his constitutional power to fill jobs when the Senate is out of session. The Senate then had “pro forma” sessions with virtually no one there to prevent a recess from taking place, which the President refused to recognize.

The Court ruled 9-0 that the Senate is in session whenever it says it is, as long as those present are able to exercise the powers of the Senate. (In theory they could pass something by unanimous consent during a pro forma session, though this almost never happens.) The point matters far less, now that filibusters on presidential appointments are no longer allowed. But it underlines the importance of Democrats retaining control of the Senate in the fall, which is currently rated a toss-up.

They invalidated a Massachusetts law creating a protester-free buffer zone around abortion clinics. Again 9-0, they ruled that the ability to buttonhole strangers on the street and try to change their minds about something is a freedom-of-speech issue. Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick disagrees:

more than anything it seems to reflect a continued pattern of “free speech for me but not for thee” or, at least, “free speech for people who think like me,” that pervades recent First Amendment decisions at the court. More importantly, I don’t know where to locate this ruling in the burgeoning doctrine of “the right to be let alone” that Justices Alito and Thomas and Breyer have espoused, nor do I know how to reconcile it with the court’s persistent second-rate treatment of any speech that threatens to harass the justices themselves. … In a gorgeously un-self-aware way, the same Supreme Court that severely limits speech and protest in a buffer zone all around its own building, extolls the unique and wonderful properties of the American boulevard

But Lawrence Tribe thinks the Court got it right:

Thursday’s opinion in no way restricts the right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, in 1973, and reaffirmed, in 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Nor does recognizing a duty to protect freedom of speech in this setting ask us to deny the genuine anguish suffered even by women who are confronted by quiet protesters rather than noisy agitators on their way to use reproductive health services. But neither empathy for their anguish, nor the need to protect the safety of women seeking such services, nor the clear need to guard against the rising tide of state laws designed to restrict access to abortions, can justify far-reaching measures that restrict peaceful conversation in public spaces.

and the World Cup

Like many Americans, I’m watching the World Cup seriously for the first time — even a few games between non-American teams. I wasn’t aware this was a political issue until Ann Coulter and a handful of other conservatives started getting upset about it. But it is political, sort of. The Atlantic‘s Peter Beinart explains:

The willingness of growing numbers of Americans to embrace soccer bespeaks their willingness to imagine a different relationship with the world. Historically, conservative foreign policy has oscillated between isolationism and imperialism. America must either retreat from the world or master it. It cannot be one among equals, bound by the same rules as everyone else. Exceptionalists view sports the same way. Coulter likes football, baseball, and basketball because America either plays them by itself, or—when other countries play against us—we dominate them.

and the Mississippi Senate primary runoff

Republican Senator Thad Cochran barely hung on against Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel, who had run ahead Cochran in the original primary (but failed to get a majority) and had been leading in polls just a few days before. And he did it in an unusual way: Under Mississippi law, anybody who didn’t already vote in the Democratic primary is eligible to vote in the Republican runoff. So Cochran appealed to Democrats, especially African-American Democrats, to help him beat back the McDaniel challenge.

It’s worth pointing out that Democrats were not monkey-wrenching (voting in the other party’s primary for the candidate who will be easy to beat; probably Cochran is harder to beat in the general election, though few really imagine Mississippi electing a Democratic senator under any circumstances). McDaniel has done just about everything he can to alienate blacks, probably figuring they don’t vote in his primary and aren’t a big enough bloc to defeat him in November. He’s spoken at a Neo-Confederate event, retweeted a white supremacist, and started talking about fraud as soon as Cochran began reaching out to the black community, as if black votes were somehow inherently fraudulent. McDaniel invited True the Vote — a notorious voter suppression group — to send poll watchers. Slate‘s Jamelle Bouie summed up:

If McDaniel resembles anything, it’s not a libertarian—although he swims in the current of right-wing libertarianism—as much as it’s a Southern reactionary whose appeal is built on resentment of assorted others, which in Mississippi, inevitably includes black Americans.

So Mississippi blacks saw a run-of-the-mill conservative — Cochran has an 88% rating from the American Conservative Union and National Journal ranks him as the 41st most conservative senator, just ahead of Lindsey Graham — running against someone who may or may not be racist himself, but certainly courts racists and repeats racist tropes. So some black Democrats, probably enough to sway the outcome, decided to vote for the lesser evil in the Republican runoff.

If you expected McDaniel or his supporters to take their defeat gracefully — to say, “Well played, Republican establishment. You out-maneuvered us fair and square.” — you haven’t been paying attention. Tea Partiers, particularly in the South, have a massive sense of entitlement. They aren’t just entitled to play, they’re entitled to win; if they don’t win, somebody must have cheated. They are the only real Americans, so if they lose, this isn’t America any more. They need to “take it back”, by force of arms if necessary.

So the McDaniel loss has lots of Tea Party voices talking about a third party. Right now it’s just talk meant to whip the Republican establishment into line. (The Tea Party has far more power as a faction within the Republican Party than it would as a third party, something I wish was better understood on the Left.) And it seems to be working. Witness the next note.

and John Boehner’s lawsuit

One popular talking point on the Right is that President Obama is ruling tyrannically, ignoring Congress and issuing his own decrees that circumvent the laws. There’s really no way to make that case consistently without indicting all recent presidents, maybe as far back as FDR, but right-wing talking points are not known for their consistency. (It’s like “czars“, a practice started by FDR, continued by Reagan, and expanded by George W. Bush that suddenly became tyranny when Obama did it. It’s almost like Obama is different from all other presidents in some way. I wonder what that difference could be?)

I haven’t discussed this in the Sift, but in online comments I leave on news sites my position has consistently been: If you think he’s doing something illegal, don’t just talk about it, take him to court. I think it would be amusing to watch Republicans state and defend an actual case, rather than just make vague accusations.

Well, apparently that’s going to happen. Maybe. Speaker Boehner says he is preparing a lawsuit accusing President Obama of failing to “faithfully execute the laws” as the Constitution demands. However, Boehner’s memo does not specify exactly which executive actions he’s talking about, and when asked he said “When I make that decision, I’ll let you know.”

Pundits are split over whether the lawsuit is a prelude to impeachment or a way to placate extremists who want impeachment. In any case, specifying the details of the lawsuit will be politically dangerous, because in almost every case — not deporting DREAMers, say, or increasing the minimum wage, or regulating the carbon output of power plants — it’s been Obama representing the popular majority and Boehner’s caucus standing in the way. A list of Obama’s “power grabs” would also be a list of issues where Congress has been dysfunctional.

By all means, Speaker Boehner, raise those issues. Focus everybody’s attention on them as we go into the fall elections. Better yet, shut down the government to defend polluters. That’s a sure winner.

but the continuing good news about ObamaCare still isn’t getting attention

If only there were a liberal media that could call as much attention to ObamaCare’s successes as our actual media focused on the (now clearly false) predictions of its impending doom.

Friday, Paul Krugman listed six doom-saying forecasts that have proved to be totally wrong — all without apparent damage to the reputations of the doom-sayers.

  • Not enough people will sign up. Actually, the program’s sign-up estimates were too low.
  • The apparent sign-ups will turn out to be an illusion when people don’t pay their first premium. Since the actual policies are written by private companies rather than the government (i.e., ObamaCare was never a “government takeover”), the exact numbers are scattered in privately-held databases. But the available numbers suggest the sign-up-but-don’t-pay percentage is about the usual insurance-industry rate.
  • The number of uninsured will go up, because more policies will be cancelled (because they don’t meet ObamaCare’s minimum standards) than new policies written. Gallup tracks the number of uninsured people; it’s going down sharply. And that doesn’t count the number of people who replaced bogus insurance with real insurance. The two big tests will be whether the number of bankruptcies caused by medical bills goes down, as I predict it will; and whether the death rate among the newly insured goes down, as it has in Massachusetts, where RomneyCare might be regarded as an ObamaCare pilot program.
  • ObamaCare’s premiums will be unaffordable. Nope. Not everyone paid less, but the great majority did.
  • Young people won’t sign up. Since young people cost less to insure, not getting enough of them could doom the whole program. But they have been signing up.
  • Health care spending will soar. A short-term increase was planned for, as people who have been doing without insurance start going to the doctor. (In some cases, this saved their lives.) Long-term, the program was supposed to create efficiencies that would cut costs. The recent numbers indicate the the initial surge is ending and costs are rising more slowly, as predicted.

You have to wonder how successful ObamaCare would be if Congress and Republican governors hadn’t tried to sabotage it at every turn.

Krugman added a blog post with supporting links, but he left out a seventh failed prediction of doom: That in the second year insurers would flee the ObamaCare exchanges. In fact, the exact opposite is happening.

Let me head off a comment: Naturally, ObamaCare critics will never admit they were wrong — that’s Seneca’s diabolical persistence — so the American Enterprise Institute’s Chris Conover has a column rebutting Krugman. (A certain amount is just nit-picking, like pointing out that sign-ups just barely beat predictions until the sign-up deadline was extended two weeks, as if the original doom-saying hinged on those two weeks. I don’t recall any ObamaCare critic saying, “Nobody will sign up, unless the deadline is extended two weeks.”) Charles Gaba counters Conover here and here. He also links to Jonathan Cohn’s larger collection of bad ObamaCare predictions.

and you also might be interested in …

Apropos of nothing: Segway Maximus

Thursday, “#YesAllWomen and the Continuum of Aggression“became the 9th Weekly Sift post to go over 5,000 hits.

Rick Perlstein believes the Cliven Bundy showdown marked an ominous “watershed moment”:

When legitimately constituted state authority stands down in the face of armed threats, the very foundation of the republic is in danger.

And while we’re talking guns, Robert Evans at Cracked has an amusing-but-serious “5 Things to Know About the Armed Men in Your Local Chipotle“.

New word: When white people suddenly “discover” something that non-whites have known about for a long time, it’s columbusing. As in: “Columbus columbused America” or “Miley Cyrus columbused twerking.” College Humor illustrates in a hilarious video sketch.

A Republican finally proved voter fraud exists: Scott Walker donor Robert Monroe just got arrested for voting five times in Walker’s recall election. I think I understand what happened.

Hardly anyone gets prosecuted for voter fraud, probably because hardly anyone commits voter fraud. (Election fraud exists, but it’s party bosses and corrupt election officials who cheat, not voters.) Voting expert Richard Hasen explains that stealing votes one-by-one is a lot of work for not much benefit:

It’s no surprise that the numbers are so low, because voter impersonation fraud is an exceedingly dumb way to try to steal an election.

Federal Judge Lynn Adelman has spelled it out:

The potential costs of perpetrating the fraud, which include a $10,000 fine and three years of imprisonment, are extremely high in comparison to the potential benefits, which would be nothing more than one additional vote for a preferred candidate (or one fewer vote for an opposing candidate), a vote which is unlikely to change the election’s outcome.

Still, Republicans often claim voter fraud is rampant, to the point that some even think Obama’s two massive victories are suspect. If you believe that, then you must conclude that not only do lots of people vote multiple times, but that they almost all get away with it. After a while, a true believer might start to feel stupid for just voting once when everyone else must be cheating.

Monroe made the classic mistake of believing his own side’s propaganda. No, Bob, that voter-fraud stuff is for conning other people and justifying crap your side wants to do for other reasons, not for applying in your own life. Like they say on Mythbusters: “Do not try this at home.”

If you’ve been reading about massive voter fraud in North Carolina, it’s a story of the same type I described last year in South Carolina: a computer check yields a large number of “possibly” fraudulent votes — more than 35K in NC — but after an enormous waste of election-official time, all but a handful of cases — 3 in SC — have reasonable explanations and none lead to prosecutions. That’s how the story has played out all over the country, and that’s what will happen here.

The Washington football team continues to take heat for calling itself the Redskins. The federal Patent and Trademark office revoked the Redskin trademark, which will have major financial implications if it takes effect. But the team’s appeal to federal court will at least delay things for years.

The main immediate impact is that it keeps the issue in the headlines, which is the kind of publicity no business wants. For now, polls show that most people either support the team or don’t care about the issue. But I think that changes if the discussion goes on long enough. I think most of us would like to dismiss the whole issue as ridiculous, but if we can’t do that, we’ll eventually have to admit that there’s no justification for keeping the name. That’s the conclusion John Oliver came to.

TPM’s Josh Marshall wrote an insightful article.

I imagine I’m like many my age who at one level just intuitively think about the Redskins and the Cleveland Indians and the Atlanta Braves as just part of the natural landscape of American culture. Even now, when I think about the Redskins, part of me is like, ‘We’ve been saying this forever.’

For a football fan, the Redskin name evokes history: Sammy Baugh, Billy Kilmer, Joe Theisman, the Hogs and Smurfs. But Marshall explores a different history, the history of “mascotization”, which didn’t begin until whites stopped seeing Indians as a real threat. (It started in New England, where the threat disappeared first.) He concludes:

The simple fact is we shouldn’t be using whole peoples as mascots for sports teams. Whether or not Indians in America today find it offensive is almost beside the point. The fact that most do is just an extra reason to do away with the practice.

With all I’ve said, there’s a part of me who feels like, ‘We really can’t have the Cleveland Indians anymore?’ It feels like a loss – part of the landscape of American sports I’m attached to. But it’s time.

The New Yorker‘s profile of Ted Cruz (who I think will be the 2016 Republican nominee) contains this quote from former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger:

Ted is able to use erudite constitutional analysis with politically appealing slogans—that’s a rare talent. The only problem is that Ted’s view of the Constitution—based on states’ rights and a narrow scope of federal power—was rejected at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and then was resurrected by John C. Calhoun, and the Confederates during the Civil War, when it failed again. It’s still around now. I think it’s wrong, but Ted does a very sophisticated version of that view.

I’ve been in a year-long reading project about the Confederacy and Reconstruction, and that’s the same conclusion I had come to: When Tea Partiers talk about “the Founders”, they’re really talking about Calhoun’s misrepresentation of the Founders. The key document in this tradition is not the Constitution or The Federalist, but Calhoun’s A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States published posthumously in 1851.

Daily Kos’ Dante Atkins has been forced to give up on the theory of Peak Wingnut — that there is some limit to how crazy the Right can get.

and let’s end with something amazing

OK Go’s new video “The Writing’s on the Wall” presents a series of illusions, not with CGI, but with old-fashioned perspective. And all in one continuous take. (Watch them make it.)

 

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

The Monday Morning Teaser

June 30, 2014 – 9:10 am

So much has happened these last two weeks that this week’s Sift is entirely devoted to catching up. I’m spending my full (self-imposed) word limit on the weekly summary and don’t have any separate featured articles.

What’s been happening? Well, it’s the end of the Supreme Court’s year, so decisions have been spilling out like the term papers of procrastinating freshmen. Unfortunately, though, their last day is today, so I won’t have time to digest the most important decision: Hobby Lobby, where a trumped-up notion of Christian entitlement masquerades as religious liberty and threatens to give employers control of their employee’s health care. But the Court did rule on the privacy of cell phones (which the Founders apparently foresaw), the President’s power to make recess appointments, and buffer zones around abortion clinics.

Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran’s primary run-off victory over Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel has been good theater. Cochran won by taking advantage of Mississippi’s open-primary rules to get votes from blacks who usually vote for Democrats. McDaniel apparently thought he was in an old-fashioned white primary (which used to be a thing in the Jim Crow South), called a foul, and has refused to concede. It’s like grade school recess: If the Tea Party loses, somebody must have cheated. They’re working to identify who it was.

John Boehner announced that he’s suing President Obama for … something. He didn’t specify exactly.

The news about ObamaCare continues to be good and mostly unreported. Paul Krugman — I guess all by himself he’s the “liberal media” we hear so much about — collected some of it.

And a bunch more stuff, ending with an amazing use of perspective illusions in the new video by OK Go.

Since I’ve decided not to wait for the Court, the weekly summary should be out by 10 o’clock Eastern, or close to it. But if I get delayed and then the ruling comes out, who knows?

 

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)

Ignorance and Nostalgia

June 16, 2014 – 12:55 pm

Anyone who was there [in Iraq] can tell you we had the conflict won. — John McCain on Friday

You know nothing, John McCain. — paraphrase of Ygritte, from Game of Thrones

There will be no Sift next week. The next articles will appear on June 30. This week’s featured articles are “Iraq is Still Broken, We Still Can’t Fix It” and “Actually, David IS Goliath“.

This week everybody was talking about Iraq

I covered this in “Iraq is Still Broken, We Still Can’t Fix It“.

and Eric Cantor’s primary defeat

The media is portraying Dave Brat’s victory as a David vs. Goliath story, but that ignores all the powerful forces on Brat’s side. I try to right the balance in “Actually, David IS Goliath“.

Politico points out an interesting angle on the Cantor loss: Cantor is currently the only Jew in the House Republican Caucus.

It’s easy to overstate the significance of Cantor’s ethnicity/religion to his loss: Dave Brat’s stump speech contains no overt anti-semitism or even a clear dog-whistle. And while Brat does call attention to his divinity degree (prior to his Ph.D. in economics), he doesn’t style himself as the Christian candidate. But Cantor’s Jewishness shadows him the same way Obama’s blackness does: Stereotypes lurk in the background and make the overt case against him more effective.

Beyond the immigration issue, Brat’s case against Cantor was that he’s out of touch, he doesn’t really represent the American people, he’s in bed with the Wall Street bankers, and that he’s a backroom deal-maker who sells out his principles. All that is much easier to believe if the back of your mind contains some timeworn stereotypes: the Jew as an outsider in America, a corrupt money-changer, and a duplicitous conspirator.

and polarization

Pew Research released the first of a series of reports on political polarization in the United States. The top-level takeaway is one of those “Scientists Prove Sex Causes Babies” results: Americans are far more polarized today than in 1994. Anybody who had been paying attention already knew that, but it’s nice to have the phenomenon quantified in graphics like this:

Deeper in the report, though, is some genuinely interesting stuff: Right and Left are not just mirror-image tribes. Increasingly, liberals and conservatives live different lives and want different things. For example, they value different kinds of communities. So, given their druthers, they won’t live near each other.

A more ominous difference is in polarized attitudes towards compromise. As Jonathan Chait put it: “Conservatives don’t hate the immigration deal. They hate all deals.”

That’s why Republicans keep driving us into government shutdowns or to the brink of a debt crisis: Their constituency sees compromise as corruption, so a Republican legislator who compromises needs to be able to claim it was a last resort before disaster. As Jonathan Haidt spelled out in The Righteous Mind, conservatives place a much higher value on purity than liberals do.

The disturbing thing about the compromise-is-corruption notion is that it’s fundamentally un-American. James Madison’s whole notion of separated powers with checks and balances depends on the willingness of the separate people who wield the separated powers to work something out. If they refuse to, then the whole constitutional system goes belly-up and the mob demands a man-on-horseback who can get things done. (I described this process in more detail — and how far along we are — in last fall’s “Countdown to Augustus“.)

It’s worth remembering that in our history, that system of compromise has only failed once: the Civil War. It failed then because a powerful group of Americans — the Southern slaveholders — decided they were done with the long series of compromises that had held the Union together since its creation. So they rejected the North/South Democratic coalition that had held the White House for Pierce in 1852 and Buchanan in 1856, and walked out on a Democratic convention that was ready to nominate another likely winner, Stephen Douglas. (Lincoln’s plan to keep slavery out of the territories but leave it alone in the slave states was similarly unsatisfying to abolitionists, but they mostly voted for him anyway.) And when slaveholders’ unwillingness to unite behind Douglas let Lincoln win with under 40% of the vote, they seceded from the Union rather than wait to see what they could work out with the new president after he took office. When it became obvious they were losing the war at horrible cost, they kept fighting anyway. Even after Lee surrendered, Jefferson Davis was captured trying to get to Texas, where he thought he might keep the war going. All because the Confederate aristocracy rejected the very idea of compromise. (A readable account of the political lead-up to the war is in Douglas Egerton’s Year of Meteors.)

and school shootings (again)

This one was Tuesday in Troutdale, Oregon. Everytown.org has listed 74 school-shooting incidents since Sandy Hook.

In the 50s, the threat was nuclear war, so we convinced ourselves we could protect children with duck-and-cover drills.

Now it’s lockdown drills against gunmen. Soon maybe we’ll have kids practice hiding under bulletproof blankets.

The Bodyguard Blanket is the kind of solution a hyper-individualistic free-market society comes up with. It’s like responding to air pollution not by regulating polluters, but by encouraging breathers to buy gas masks.

An insightful article by a lifelong gun owner is Gawker’s “It’s Really Hard to Be a Good Guy With a Gun“.

The universe of scenarios in which carrying a gun seems prudent or useful just keeps shrinking and shrinking, even as the legal freedom to wield personal firepower keeps expanding. The NRA has recalibrated its message for the 21st century: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” But in many ways, the 21st century has already overtaken us good guys.

and tenure for teachers

A California judge ruled that the state’s teacher-tenure system is unconstitutional, because it violates minority students’ right to a quality education. I expect a higher court to overrule, because the decision just screams judicial activism; California’s public education policy would be better decided by the voters’ elected representatives. And while a judge might well decide that the education provided in some schools does not fulfill the state’s constitutional commitment, it seems well beyond a judge’s competence to decide that the flaw is the tenure system.

Behind the popular fire-bad-teachers meme lurks a notion I find very doubtful: that there are legions of effective, well-qualified teachers eager to work their magic in under-performing schools, if only we could get rid of the teachers who occupy those jobs now.

and you also might be interested in …

George Will stepped on a hornet nest on June 6, when he wrote that colleges and universities are learning that

when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.

The proliferating victims he’s talking about are female students who claim to have suffered a sexual assault on campus. Will’s statement got roundly condemned all over the internet, and launched a petition for the Washington Post to end Will’s twice-a-week column.

Most of the time, I’m against these fire-somebody-who-wrote-a-bad-thing campaigns, because it’s genuinely hard to engage the culture without occasionally mis-stepping and enraging people you didn’t mean to provoke. But I’ve got a second reason for the Post to fire Will: In his old age he’s become a bad writer. Will’s column wastes the big stage of the WaPo’s opinion pages.

Take the column in question. It’s not even about campus sexual assault. He only mentions that inflamatory topic on his way to a far more vague and boring point: Because they have embraced a never-defined “progressivism”, universities have no basis to protest the government’s plan to rate them. Why they should protest — and why the government wants to rate them — is also unspecified. So of course Will never lists the “privileges” that make sexual-assault-victim such a “coveted” status, or identifies anybody in particular who covets it. Why should he nail down a throw-away line when he doesn’t nail down anything?

Will’s muddled essays have come to resemble shaggy-dog jokes. Only after you decrypt his pseudo-intellectual prose and follow the labyrinthine thread of his logic can you realize that his point is insubstantial. What a waste of one of the highest-profile spaces in American media.

The note above brings up something I’ve wondered about before: Doesn’t the WaPo have any editors? I write for much lower-budget publications, but even so, editors occasionally save me from making a fool of myself. Editors are a benefit of organized journalism. The Post isn’t doing Will any favors by leaving him unsupervised.

NBC giving big bucks to Chelsea Clinton is more than a little creepy, even if they do plan to terminate her contract if/when her mom officially starts running for president. The fact that they also employ Republican daughters like Jenna Bush Hager and Meghan McCain (for salaries the article doesn’t specify) doesn’t make me feel any better. It all points to the corruption of the meritocracy Chris Hayes described in Twilight of the Elites. For all I know, Chelsea and Jenna and Meghan might be brilliant; but they wouldn’t be where they are if they hadn’t been born with a head start.

and let’s end with something fun

As the Joker asked about Batman: “Where does he get those wonderful toys?” Photographer Chis McLennan goes to Botswana, attaches a camera to a little radio-controlled dune buggy, then drives it into a pride of lions. Because we’d all do that if we had Batman-scale toy budgets.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

Actually, David IS Goliath

June 16, 2014 – 11:11 am

Powerful forces aligned behind Dave Brat and against Eric Cantor

When previously unknown Dave Brat beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary Tuesday, pundits struggled in vain to find appropriate historical parallels. In America, majority leaders just do not lose primaries … until now.

Since then, the conventional-wisdom storyline has been David vs. Goliath: A grass-roots candidate with virtually no resources overthrew one of the most powerful insiders in the country. But that’s not exactly true; the more accurate story is that one branch of the Billionaire Party had an unexpected victory over the other branch.

Let’s start with the David. The quick description says Brat is an economics professor from Randolph Macon College in Ashland, VA. That’s true, but there’s more to that story. Brat is director of the BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism Program at RMC, one of those ethically suspect programs where billionaires pay a university to teach a particular point of view; in this case, that free-market capitalism is morally superior to all other systems.

Probably, Brat genuinely believes this Randish philosophy. And propagandizing students with his personal opinions makes Brat no worse than professors of many other viewpoints. But unlike those other professors, Brat is paid not to change his mind. He may be a genuine proselyte, but he’s also a hired shill.

Other shills hired by the same people are the stars of right-wing talk radio. As Politico has reported, talk radio runs on a political version of payola:

A POLITICO review of filings with the Internal Revenue Service and Federal Election Commission, as well as interviews and reviews of radio shows, found that conservative groups spent nearly $22 million to broker and pay for involved advertising relationships known as sponsorships with a handful of influential talkers including [Glenn] Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh between the first talk radio deals in 2008 and the end of 2012. Since then, the sponsorship deals have grown more lucrative and tea party-oriented, with legacy groups like The Heritage Foundation ending their sponsorships and groups like the Tea Party Patriots placing big ad buys.

Dick Armey has described the system — known as “embedded media”– more bluntly:

The arrangement was simply FreedomWorks paid Glenn Beck money and Glenn Beck said nice things about FreedomWorks on the air.

Brat spent only $200K or so on his campaign (compared with $5 million by Cantor). But (in what the NYT calls “a unique and potent alignment of influential voices in conservative media”) he got the kind of support money supposedly can’t buy from talk-radio personalities like Ingraham and Levin. Not only did they talk him up regularly on their shows (and dis Cantor), but Ingraham lent her star-power to a Brat rally. Thom Hartmann refers to this arrangement as a “dark money machine” and says:

Once you’ve realized that David Brat wasn’t just some random college professor but was actually the hand-picked candidate of the libertarian billionaire class and its army of talk radio hosts, it’s easy to see another one of the major reasons Eric Cantor lost. We’re living in a brave new world of dark money politics, and in this day and age, doing what Eric Cantor did – hanging out with the Chamber of Commerce, K Street, and Wall Street – only gets you so far. If you want to win these days, you need to win the support of the Kochs, their libertarian billionaire friends, and their allies in the talk radio world.

So while Cantor spent more-or-less transparently — receiving contributions and then buying ads — money got spent invisibly around Brat: The Koch-supported candidate got pushed by talk radio personalities who have sweetheart deals with Koch-funded groups.

That’s not exactly grass roots.

The other misperception about the Brat/Cantor race is that it was all about immigration, where (despite blocking House consideration of the bipartisan Senate immigration bill) Cantor was painted as pro-amnesty. That dynamic was certainly part of the campaign, but if you have a half-hour to burn, it’s worth listening to Brat’s stump speech.

Immigration certainly comes up, along with the I-can’t-believe-he’s-an-economist explanation that cheap labor from immigrants is to blame for the slow growth in jobs. (Cheap unskilled immigrant labor might lower the wages of unskilled jobs, but basic supply-and-demand says that lowering wages would increase the number of such jobs. Since the number of people employed only recently got back to pre-recession levels, immigrant competition can’t be the main reason the job market is so tough.) But Brat’s indictment of Cantor runs much deeper: He’s the Chamber-of-Commerce candidate, while Brat is running against TARP and bailouts and all the other ways that government fixes the game in favor of big business.

If he’s elected, we’ll see if anything comes from that populist rhetoric, or if Brat only implements the cut-spending-on-the-poor and let-corporations-pollute aspects of Randism.

Thomas Frank, whose What’s the Matter With Kansas? detailed the conservative bait-and-switch between populist social-issue rhetoric and cut-taxes-on-the-rich votes in Congress, is skeptical. Yesterday in Salon, he wrote:

The clash of idealism and sellout are how conservatives always perceive their movement, and what happened to Eric Cantor is a slightly more spectacular version of what often happens to GOP brass. That right-wing leaders are seduced by Washington D.C., and that they will inevitably betray the market-minded rank-and-file, are fixed ideas in the Republican mind, certainties as definite as are its convictions that tax cuts will cure any economic problem and that liberals are soft on whoever the national enemy happens to be.

Which is not to say that such betrayals don’t really happen. But Frank finds their inevitability not in universal human corruptibility, but in the fundamental tenets of conservatism itself: Anyone who believes the free market should control all aspects of life will eventually sell his vote to the highest bidder.

So the cycle goes on, uprising after uprising, an eternal populist revolt against leaders who never produce and problems that never get solved. Somehow, the free-market utopia that all the primary voters believe in never arrives, no matter how many privatizations and tax cuts the Republicans try. And so they seek out someone even purer, someone even more fanatical. They drag the country into another debt-ceiling fight, and this time, they say, they really mean it! But what never occurs to them is that maybe it’s their ideals themselves that are the problem.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , | Comments (5)

Iraq is Still Broken, We Still Can’t Fix It

June 16, 2014 – 9:35 am

Was our mistake pulling out, or invading in the first place?

The fall of Mosul to Sunni extremists has put Iraq back in the headlines, pulling it out of the memory hole where it had been since American troops left in 2011.

Pundits and politicians have responded in two ways. If you were for the war, Mosul’s fall shows that President Obama was wrong to pull our troops out before the Iraqi government was established well enough to stand on its own; we should at least send in air strikes or possibly even return with soldiers.

If you were against the war, the fact the nearly nine years of American occupation could come unraveled so quickly — that the Iraqi army we spent so much time and money on “standing up” so that ours could “stand down” abandoned its weapons and ran in the face of a smaller, less well equipped enemy — underlines what a huge blunder it was to invade the country in the first place; re-entering the war would just repeat that mistake.

I stand by the position I took in August, 2005 in a Daily Kos piece called “Cut and Run“. (Two months later I would start the blog that eventually morphed into The Weekly Sift.)

We all know the rhetoric against an immediate pull-out: We can’t cut and run. We have to stay until the job is finished. Otherwise our 1800-and-counting dead soldiers will have died in vain. We have to stay until we fix all the things we’ve broken.

Eventually, though, those who understand that the invasion was a mistake will have to face a second hard truth: We’re not fixing anything by staying. Whether we leave in a week or a year or in twenty years, Iraq will be a broken country. The only difference is this: Will 1,800 soldiers have died in vain, or thousands more? … We can leave Iraq now, or we can leave after our losses have grown. That is the only choice we have.

If we had cut and run in 2005, Iraq would probably have devolved into sectarian civil war. So instead, we stayed another 6+ years, spent additional hundreds of billions, killed a lot Iraqis, and got another two-and-a-half thousand of our own troops killed … and Iraq has devolved into a sectarian civil war.

But putting hindsight and I-told-you-sos aside, what is happening now and what is likely to happen in the future? All through the Iraq War, Juan Cole (a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan) has provided clear insight. Now he sees Iraq in sectarian (rather than national) terms. The national army commanded by the Shiite-dominated government has proven itself useless at defending its Sunni-dominated territory against a Sunni insurgency. The only effective fighting forces are the sectarian militias: The Kurdish Pesh Merga is defending Kirkuk, and the Shiite militias are rising to defend Baghdad (which is largely Shiite after the 2006-2008 civil war pushed out many of its Sunnis). If the national army holds together at all, it will probably do so as a Shiite force. Prime Minister Maliki’s

inability to reach out to Sunni Arabs made plausible what the entire Iraqi parliament rejected when it came out, the Biden plan for the partition of the country.

This time, though, eastern Syria is part of the Sunni partition, leaving an Alawite state in the west.

Neocons argue that we can’t allow such a Sunni state, particularly one controlled by ISIS, because it will lead to another 9/11 — as if there have been no terrorist training camps in the world since we invaded Afghanistan, and as if Afghanistan was the only place 9/11 could have been prevented.

More realistically, we can’t prevent terrorists from training. We can’t even prevent them from training in America, as our home-grown right-wing militias do. And yet, we have managed to prevent any 9/11-scale attacks on U.S. soil for the last dozen years. The existence of terrorist safe havens is bad, but not nearly so bad that we need to control the world to keep ourselves safe. Attacking any region that threatens to become a terrorist haven is a recipe for constant warfare, which in the long run may create more America-hating terrorists than it kills.

The Sunni lines also fail to include either of Iraq’s large oil fields: the southern one around Basra and the northern one around Kirkuk. That’s one reason the partition plan never took off: Sunnis knew they were drawing the short straw.

Here’s the most annoying aspect of the current discussion of Iraq: The media treats as experts the same people who were so horribly wrong about Iraq before we invaded. Surely they proved in 2002 that they are not Iraq experts.

Arguing against the points they make only legitimizes their “expertise”. The only proper response to them is Ygritte’s line from Game of Thrones: “You know nothing, Jon Snow.” If neocons want to convince me that re-engaging in Iraq is a good idea, let them send out a spokesman who at least understands what a bad idea the invasion was to begin with.

On Thursday, during a segment in which she pointed out the similarities to the way the large American-equipped South Vietnamese army dissolved in 1975, Rachel Maddow targeted one of the most discredited of the “Iraq experts”: Kenneth Pollack, who Maddow describes as “the captain of Team Wrong in 2002”. Pollack’s book The Threatening Storm: the case for invading Iraq, which came out a month before the invasion and re-packaged many of the points he had been making in op-eds all through 2002, gave spectacularly bad advice about more-or-less everything. This, for example:

Those who would argue that the United States would inevitably become the target of unhappy Iraqis generally also assume that the Iraqi population would be hostile to U.S. forces from the outset. However, the best evidence we have suggests that the Iraqi people would be pleased to be liberated.

So don’t worry about those unhappy Iraqis, they’ll welcome us like the Munchkins welcomed Dorothy.

But that didn’t stop the NYT from quoting Pollack Wednesday without mention of his abysmal record. This is yet an aspect of the problem Chris Hayes pointed out in Twilight of the Elites: There is no accountability in the expert class. No matter how many times you are wrong, you are still an expert. That’s why I support James Poniewozik’s proposal:

Rule: where available, all 2014 Iraq punditry must be accompanied by link(s) to the author’s 2002/3 Iraq punditry.

Here is one of Juan Cole’s last pre-invasion posts: “It Appears To Be Case That Iraq Simply has no nuclear weapons program“. From there you can easily get to the rest of his 2003 archives.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (1)

The Monday Morning Teaser

June 16, 2014 – 8:15 am

Two stories grabbed everyone’s attention this week: Sunni extremists seizing a big chunk of Iraq, and Eric Cantor losing his primary to Dave Brat, a guy most of us had never heard of.

On the Right, the Iraq story was all about how Obama should never have pulled out all our troops. Chatter on the Left, conversely, focused on how Bush never should have destabilized the country in the first place. Perversely, the media kept consulting “Iraq experts” whose advice was spectacularly wrong in 2002. In “Iraq is Still Broken”, I’ll go back to an expert whose accounts hold up pretty well to hindsight: University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole.

The Cantor debacle was covered widely, but not very deeply: It has been presented as a David-defeats-Goliath story in which the conservative grass roots take down a powerful insider. Yes, Cantor is a powerful insider, but in “Actually, David IS Goliath” I’ll take a closer look at the powerful forces behind Brat.

Not quite as newsy, but fascinating all the same, was a Pew report on political polarization. Not only did it quantify what everybody already knows — Americans are diverging into liberal and conservative camps — but it pointed out some interesting ways that the two sides are not just mirror images of each other. When James Madison was designing the Constitution’s system of separated powers, I don’t think he imagined so many of those powers winding up in the hands of people who think compromise is evil. I’ll discuss that in the weekly summary.

Also in the summary: Capitalism’s answer to school shootings. It’s really hard to be a good guy with a gun. Yes, George Will wrote a bad thing, but the reason WaPo should fire him is that his column is such a waste of valuable opinion-making real estate. And a photographer in Botswana does what we’d all do if we had a Batman-level toy budget: attach a camera to a radio-controlled dune buggy and drive it into a pride of lions.

 

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)

Making Peace

June 9, 2014 – 11:43 am

NED STARK: Make peace with the Lannisters, you say? With the people who tried to murder my boy?
PETYR BAELISH: We only make peace with our enemies, my lord. That’s why it’s called “making peace”.

— Game of Thrones

This week’s featured article is “This Is How It Ends“. If you missed it, last week’s “#YesAllWomen and the Continuum of Aggression” was very popular, with nearly 5,000 hits.

This week everybody was talking about Sgt. Bergdahl

Two weeks ago, could you have imagined that the last American POW could be freed and it would make people furious? Or that Fox News and the rest of the conservative media machine would start villifying the POW? And his family? I certainly didn’t see that coming.

I don’t think there’s a political explanation for this. Sure, Republicans are looking for something new to get excited about as the ObamaCare issue continues to fizzle on them, but why this? Especially when so many of them have to do a complete about-face and pretend they never said a bunch of things they were saying just a few weeks ago.

I think this response requires a psychological explanation: Trading POWs makes it a little too real that the War on Terror fantasy is ending. All those heroic dreams about “ridding the world of evil-doers” have come down to this. It’s a sad, hung-over morning in America, and a lot of people are pissed they have to wake up. “This Is How It Ends” fills that frame in.

and the impact of Obama’s new carbon rules

Grist summarizes nine things you should know about them. That article has the most succinct response I’ve heard to the perennial “Environmental regulations kill the economy” objection:

Job losses in the coal industry will be offset by hiring in the construction and clean energy sectors. Lower rates of respiratory illness will save money on health care and improve productivity. EPA estimates that lower particle pollution from coal burning will reduce annual heart attacks, asthma attacks, premature deaths, hospital admissions, and lost days of work and school by the thousands. The economic value of these savings could outweigh increased costs by up to a factor of 10.

Well-designed regulations don’t cost money, they save money.

and yet another school shooting

This one at Seattle Pacific University. The gunman was pepper-sprayed and tackled by a student while he was reloading. Two takeaways:

  • Once again, a bad guy with a gun was stopped by a good guy (or a good woman) without one.
  • Limiting how many shots a gun can fire without reloading is a good idea. It gives by-standers a chance to tackle a shooter before the death toll gets too high.

In other gun news, the NRA briefly showed some sanity, but then changed its mind. The NRA’s Institute for Legal Action posted a statement on its website asking open carry demonstrators in Texas — the ones taking AK-15s into Chili’s and Target — to cool it, referring to such behavior as “downright weird”. But when Open Carry Texas asked for a retraction of those “disgusting and disrespectful comments”, the NRA backed down. It removed the post from its web site and instead claimed the NRA is “the leader of open carry efforts across the country.”

The NYT’s Juliet Lapidos wondered whether this was the NRA’s “Tea Party moment”: Has the NRA pandering to the lunatic fringe “spawned a movement it can’t control”?

The Daily Show had a fabulous piece about the racial angle on guns: black and white “experts” give open-carry do’s and don’ts.

White expert: When you bring your gun to a restaurant, DO calmly inform the other patrons that you are there just to eat and not to shoot anyone.

Black expert: And when you bring your gun to a restaurant, DON’T be black. Because even if you tell them you’re not going to shoot, they’re probably not going to believe you.

but gay marriage rulings don’t even make headlines any more

Add Wisconsin to the list of places where federal judges have found that a state ban on same-sex marriage can’t be sustained after the Supreme Court’s Windsor ruling last June. WaPo counts 13 post-Windsor rulings for same-sex marriage and none against. I’m not even reading them any more because they’re all the same: States have no reason to ban same-sex couples from marrying, beyond the simple desire to make life harder for gays and lesbians. This was a radical argument when Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret Marshall made it in 2003, but it has become the conventional wisdom.

It’s fascinating to look back at my account of the 2003 Goodridge decision and see that — in spite of a dozen years of losses in court — the arguments against marriage equality have not changed. The anti-homosexual side keeps saying the same thing and hoping that this time it will convince somebody.

and you also might be interested in …

“I don’t plan on getting raped,” says a daughter on her way to college. And Mom answers: “Neither did I.”

The platform of the Texas GOP is always a good read. This year’s proposed version endorses quack “reparative therapy” to cure gays, plus (according to Steve Benen)

complete elimination of the Voting Rights Act; policymakers at all levels should deliberately “ignore” climate change; public schools should end sex-ed and start promoting Christianity; abortion should be banned; English should be the official language of Texas and of the United States; open-carry laws should apply to gun owners statewide

The San Antonio Current has the raw quotes, but they left out some of the best stuff:

All federal enforcement activities in Texas must be conducted under the auspices of the County Sheriff with jurisdiction in that county. … We believe the Environmental Protection Agency should be abolished. … we urge Congress to withhold Supreme Court jurisdiction in cases involving abortion, religious freedom, and the Bill of Rights … We strongly support the Electoral College. … We support the adoption of human embryos … We unequivocally oppose the United States Senate’s ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. … We oppose any laws regarding the production, distribution, or consumption of food. … We pledge our influence toward a return to the original intent of the First Amendment and toward dispelling the myth of separation of church and state. … we support reducing taxpayer funding to all levels of education institutions. … We believe the Minimum Wage Law should be repealed. … We support the return to the time-tested precious metal standard for the U.S. dollar. … We support the withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations and the removal of U.N. headquarters from United States soil.

If you live somewhere else, you might just shake your head and say “Texas”. But as voters have discovered in North Carolina and a few other states, Texas is just where right-wingers feel free to let their freak flag fly. Give Republicans a big enough majority in your state legislature, and crazy stuff will start showing up there too.

Religious freedom for me, but not for thee. In Cincinnati, no Catholic school teacher can support same-sex marriage in public on his/her own time. This new clause in the teaching contract is causing veteran teachers to resign.

You can expect a new push to teach Christianity in the public schools under the guise of Biblical literacy. In addition to trying to expand the definition of religious liberty to diminish the health insurance of his female employees, Hobby Lobby President Steve Green has been funding the Museum of the Bible‘s development of a curriculum aimed at high schools: The Book: The Bible’s History, Narrative and Impact.

SMU religious studies professor Mark Chauncey reviewed the curriculum, finding:

This is a classic example of preaching religious beliefs in the guise of promoting religious literacy. It’s hard to imagine this curriculum, with its sectarian elements, errors and oddities, was put together by dozens of scholars as claimed.

Those who want to tear down the wall between church and state often try to make the law sound complicated, but it’s actually quite simple. If a public school teacher says, “In the New Testament, Jesus rises from the dead, and many present-day Christians regard this as a historical event rather than a myth.” that’s teaching about Christianity, which is completely legal. But if s/he says, “Jesus rose from the dead.” that’s teaching Christianity, which is illegal. If someone convinces you that this principle is tricky, the person being tricked is you.

So far, Senator Mark Pryor in Arkansas has been doing the best job of any Democrat in making his opponent pay for his far-right voting record. Here’s a recent Pryor ad:

 and let’s close with something vast

If you’re not paying attention to the Astronomy Picture of the Day at NASA, you’re missing out. This was Sunday’s picture, of the open cluster NGC 290.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (8)

This Is How It Ends

June 9, 2014 – 9:40 am

The anger directed at Bowe Bergdahl only makes sense if you remember what the War on Terror was supposed to be.

From this distance, it is hard to recall the heady days at the beginning of the Afghan War. Americans had been stunned on 9/11, and for some time afterwards we felt uncertain and sad. “Why do they hate us?” we asked. But then the rage came and blew our depression away. President Bush didn’t start that process, but he channeled it like this:

Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.

We were furious, certain of the righteousness of our anger, and confident in our power to exact revenge. No other cocktail of emotions is quite so invigorating.

And we were not just powerful, we were great and beneficent. In our majesty, we would grant freedom and democracy to lesser peoples who might never achieve such good fortune on their own. Not just in Afghanistan, where the attack against us had been planned, but in Iraq, and perhaps later in Iran and Syria and even eventually in Saudi Arabia and the oil emirates. We were the avatars of the great goddess Liberty and no one could stand in our way.

Remember?

“Tell me how this ends,” said General David Petraeus, then a mere division commander, as his unit crossed into Iraq. He was wise and experienced enough to know that no amount of shock and awe was going make Jeffersonianism break out across the Middle East, so something else had to happen. But what?

Now we know. We spent trillions of dollars, lost thousands of American lives, and killed tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of Afghanis and Iraqis. And in the end we are leaving — without a parade, without a “thank you”, leaving a legacy of weak governments still beset by insurgents. Most likely, those governments will either get stronger until they rival the tyrannical ones we overthrew, or they will perish and be replaced by something tougher.

Not what we pictured, is it? Our recessional might be Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?”

Anyway, this is how it ends: We leave. We leave on a date circled on someone’s calendar, a day that no doubt will look just like the day before or the day after. We leave, not because we have finished something or accomplished something, but just because it’s time. We left Iraq that way on December 18, 2011. Our combat mission ends in Afghanistan at the end of this year, and all our troops are supposed to be out by the end of 2016. President Obama said:

Americans have learned that it’s harder to end wars than it is to begin them. Yet this is how wars end in the 21st century.

Could we stay longer? Maybe. Probably, if we wanted to badly enough. But how long? Until we accomplish … what? If there’s no what, then that future date is just another circle on a calendar. If then, why not now? Why not a long time ago?

So this is how it ends. We give back their people, they give back the one guy of ours they still have, because … what else are you going to do? Keep them forever? Why?

It feels crappy, doesn’t it? If you think dispassionately enough about it, you’ll realize that it was always going to feel crappy eventually, because … how else could it come out? Our Liberty-avatar high was bound to crash. What were we going to do? Slay the dragon? Marry the princess? What? But as long as we stayed, as long as we kept it all going, we didn’t have to think about that. We could keep pretending we were on our way to somewhere, keep imagining that someday soon we would feel again the way we felt back in those let’s-roll rid-the-world-of-evil days at the end of 2001.

My best advice for how to deal with that crappy feeling is just to let it run its course. Embrace the suck, as the soldiers used to say. Emotions are like water; if you just let them wash over you, before long they drip off and head for the nearest drain (rather than mounting up behind a dam and sooner or later devastating everything in their path). Let this one wash over, and eventually, we’ll feel something else. Maybe the next wave will motivate us to do something constructive and realistic that we can all be proud of some day.

It could happen. Really.

Or we could try some hair of the dog. Get angry again. Get angry at the president who set the clock that is running out, because he wouldn’t let us push this crappy feeling any further off into the future. Get angry at the deal to return that last prisoner. Get angry at the prisoner himself, because this is all his fault really.

Isn’t it? It feels like it must be. If not for him … something, I don’t know. Fill in the blank. It’s got to be his fault because I know it isn’t mine. I didn’t do anything. I was a perfectly marvelous avatar of Liberty and it felt great. Why did it have to end?

I don’t how else to make sense of the fury that has been directed at Bowe Bergdahl and his family this past week. You can say “It’s politics”, but that just shifts the question rather than answering it. Why does the politics work this way? Sure, Republicans are always looking for something they can pin on Obama (and if you can work the word impeachment into the conversation, so much the better), but how did they know this would do such a good job of firing up their base?

Just a few months ago, the conservative base was demanding that President Obama get Bergdahl back. Vox noticed this pattern:

[J]ust before Bergdahl was released, conservatives on Twitter loved to blast Obama for not freeing Bergdahl. There was even a whole meme on conservative Twitter saying Bergdahl was “abandoned by this administration.” But all of a sudden after Bergdahl was released, these people changed their tune.

Numerous congresspeople have had to scrub their Twitter-feeds to remove the evidence that they briefly thought getting an American POW back was a good thing. Most obviously, John McCain has turned on a dime from saying that he could approve the deal that had been on the table for months — Bergdahl for precisely these five named guys — to denouncing the deal after President Obama made it. He’s not alone. The most you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up reversal came from Oliver North of Iran/Contra fame; nobody’s allowed to negotiate with the bad guys but Ollie and his boss Ronny, I guess.


Steve Benen, Jean MacKenzie, and Hesiod have done a good job of taking down most outrageous talking points about Bergdahl.

  • Bergdahl is not a deserter. He seems to have been AWOL when captured, but he had wandered away from his base before and come back. Five years imprisonment with the Taliban is far greater punishment than a soldier typically gets for temporarily going AWOL.
  • He isn’t anti-American. Before coming to Afghanistan, he had been idealistic about how our military was “helping” the Afghan people. The realities of the war, the dysfunctionality of his unit, and the attitudes of his fellow soldiers towards the Afghanis disillusioned and disgusted him (and may explain why some of those soldiers are trashing him now). That’s where those out-of-context quotes about being “ashamed to be an American” come from. A longer quote: “These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live.” If that’s disloyalty, then a sizable chunk of the American public is disloyal, including me and probably most of my readers.
  • He didn’t get other soldiers killed. Men did die while on patrol, and Bergdahl was one of the things they were supposed to be looking for. But the NYT quotes an informed officer: “Look, it’s not like these soldiers would have been sitting around their base.”
  • He wasn’t turned. He even escaped once for a while.

Many of the talking points about the five men Bergdahl was exchanged for are equally ridiculous. Vox and CNN have more details, but here’s the gist.

  • They’re not terrorists. One downside of framing post-9/11 military operations as a “War on Terror” is that we started reflexively labeling all our enemies “terrorists” and equating them with the 9/11 hijackers. But at the time we invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban was a government fighting an insurgency. These men were involved in that government or that war. Granted, the Taliban was a horrible government and the tactics (on both sides) in that pre-9/11 civil war were reprehensible. So no one denies that some of the five are bad men — or at least they were 12 years ago. But to the extent that the word terrorist still means anything other than “enemy of America”, they were not terrorists. They weren’t even enemies of America until we invaded their country.
  • They’re not supermen. TV series like 24 and Homeland have created the myth of the Terrorist Superman: an unkillable mastermind who sees everything, has agents everywhere, and is always plotting ten moves ahead. But even in their prime, none of these guys were superhuman. And whatever they once were, they have been completely out of the loop for 12 years. A lot of the people they worked with and trusted are probably dead. No doubt they have symbolic value for the Taliban, but their military significance is questionable. Think about Mafiosi who get out after long prison terms, a situation that occurred more than once on The Sopranos. The gang celebrates their return, but doesn’t necessarily have a place for them now. And an imprisoned Mafioso isn’t nearly as cut off as these guys have been.

Finally, there’s the question of whether or not releasing the five detainees from Guantanamo broke the law — a decision Bergdahl himself had no part in. And the answer is: It’s a complex legal issue in which both parties justify themselves by switching the positions they held during the Bush administration. Adam Serwer describes the situation in detail.

To make a long story short: Ever since the Constitution divided responsibility for war and foreign policy between them, the President and Congress have been tussling over the boundary. Congress occasionally passes laws that limit the President’s power to do something-or-other, and presidents routinely claim these laws are unconstitutional. The War Powers Act is the prime example. Since 1973, when it passed over President Nixon’s veto, both branches have avoided a test case that the Supreme Court would have to rule on. Presidents have mostly complied with the Act, but always with the proviso that they were doing so as a courtesy; no president of either party has acknowledged the Act’s constitutionality. For its part, Congress has never tried to force a president to pull out troops he had committed.

So Section 1035 of the 493-page National Defense Authorization Act of 2014 regulates transfers from Guantanamo, and says:

The Secretary of Defense shall notify the appropriate committees of Congress of a determination of the Secretary under subsection (a) or (b) not later than 30 days before the transfer or release of the individual under such subsection.

President Obama signed the NDAA — the Pentagon would have gone unfunded if he had vetoed it — but attached a Bush-like signing statement.

Section 1035 of this Act gives the Administration additional flexibility to transfer detainees abroad by easing rigid restrictions that have hindered negotiations with foreign countries and interfered with executive branch determinations about how and where to transfer detainees. Section 1035 does not, however, eliminate all of the unwarranted limitations on foreign transfers and, in certain circumstances, would violate constitutional separation of powers principles. The executive branch must have the flexibility, among other things, to act swiftly in conducting negotiations with foreign countries regarding the circumstances of detainee transfers.

Citing a need to “act swiftly” to get this exchange done without endangering Sgt. Bergdahl, the Obama administration gave Congress only one day of notice rather than 30, having previously given Congress an “anticipatory briefing” laying out “the prospect of such an exchange”. In doing so, the administration claims to have respected the “spirit” of the law.

Jack Goldsmith, the head of the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, describes this as “quite a hard legal issue, with few real precedents.”

So Obama is definitely violating the anti-signing-statement rhetoric of his 2008 campaign. He’s being hypocritical in exactly the same way as his Republican critics who accepted Bush’s signing statements without objection and waved their hands about the President’s “Article II power” — as long as the president was somebody they liked.

Is that legalism and mutual hypocrisy what the conservative base’s man-on-the-street is fired up about? I kind of doubt it. I think they’re remembering that intoxicating post-9/11 fantasy about setting the whole world right, and wondering what became of it.

Is that all there is?

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , | Comments (2)

The Monday Morning Teaser

June 9, 2014 – 6:59 am

I spent much of this week meditating on the mysterious rage against Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, the last American POW from the Afghan War. None of the supposed justifications of that anger hold water when you look at them closely, and most of the people leading the charge against Bergdahl’s release are the same people who (just a few months ago) were vehemently demanding Obama do something to get him back. The deal that got made was the same one that had been on the table for months, maybe years: trade him for those same five guys, who may have been bad dudes in the Afghan government 12 years ago, but were never terrorists, never attacked the U.S., and have been completely out of the loop for more than a decade.

I couldn’t figure it out. I could fact-check the bullshit, but that seemed to miss the point. Where was this coming from?

And then it hit me: It’s over. That amazing righteous-fury power high we got on after 9/11 — it’s over. The Bergdahl deal was Obama announcing last call at the War on Terror Bar and starting to put the chairs on top of the tables. Remember how pumped up we were during happy hour, when W was saying “Let’s roll” and promising to rid the world of evil-doers? It wasn’t supposed to be like this, was it? Way back when we were starting to invade Iraq, General Petraeus said, “Tell me how this ends.” Well, this is how it ends.

Sucks, doesn’t it?

That’s going to be this week’s featured article: “This Is How It Ends”. I’m not sure how long it will take to put the finishing touches on it. It’ll be out this morning sometime.

As for the rest of the week, we had another school shooting. The NRA tried to back away from the lunatics who think it’s a good idea to take assault rifles into fast-food restaurants, but then they realized that lunatics are their base and if they start trying to get distance from the crazy people there will be no good place to stop. People who know something are starting to tell us what the EPA’s new carbon-emission rules will mean. You can add Wisconsin to marriage equality’s 13-state winning streak. And the proposal that came out of the platform committee for the Texas GOP is so batshit crazy … I know they’re serious and that ought to be depressing, but The Onion couldn’t have made this up. You have to laugh.

And while I’m reflecting, last week was a pretty good week on the Sift. “#YesAllWomen and the Continuum of Aggression” is closing in on 5,000 page views. It’s #9 on the Sift’s all-time-hit list.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)

Other People’s Bodies, Other People’s Love

June 2, 2014 – 12:45 pm

Other people’s bodies and other people’s love are not something that can be taken nor even something that can be earned — they can be given freely, by choice, or not. We need to get that. Really, really grok that, if our half of the species ever going to be worth a damn. Not getting that means that there will always be some percent of us who will be rapists, and abusers, and killers.

— Arthur Chu, “Your Princess is in Another Castle“

This week’s features posts are “#YesAllWomen and the Continuum of Aggression” and “How the Fall Elections are Shaping Up for Democrats“.

This week everybody was talking about #YesAllWomen

I agree with Rebecca Solnit that this is a moment when the national conversation could change. I try to do my part in “#YesAllWomen and the Continuum of Aggression“.

and Maya Angelou

who died Wednesday at age 86. I’m marking the occasion by reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, her memoir of growing up in the Jim Crow era. At a time when some southern whites are trying to whitewash Jim Crow, it’s important to stay in touch with the authentic voices of black experience.

Things I never knew: She had a singing career.

and climate change

If you missed last night’s Cosmos, go find it. Neil deGrasse Tyson does a watchable understandable explanation of why the case for human-caused global warming is so compelling.

Also, the EPA is finally planning to set limits on carbon emissions from power plants. But Ohio is rolling back it’s green energy standards, a cause that ALEC and the Koch brothers are pushing all over the country.

And Tom the Dancing Bug thinks people who haven’t learned yet probably never will.

and you also might be interested in …

There’s a reason why two weeks ago I described roads paved with solar panels as a “big dream”. This week an engineer shot it down.

Solar Roadways seem to take the problem of generating solar power, and put it into conditions that maximize cost.

He concludes:

Those solar-panel-covered shade structures that are popping up in church parking lots all over Tucson are looking smarter by the minute. The solar panels are mass-produced in China for a couple dollars a watt, and the structures are simple cantilevered steel I-beam ramadas. No fancy computers are needed, no worries about damage from tires, no hacking-into can happen, and they are not blocked by pedestrians, cars, trees or buses.

TPM’s Josh Marshall has coined a term that deserves to catch on: hate martyr, defined as:

someone who is either anonymous or had little profile in the political world but suddenly becomes a cause celebre and hero on the right by trashing some racial or ethnic group or gay people and then getting criticized for it. Whether it’s dressed up as religious liberty or free speech or whatever else, the essential element is right-winger persecuted (i.e., criticized by people on TV) for expressing bigoted or racist or just retrograde views about some historically (or presently) oppressed, denigrated or discriminated against group.

The archetypal hate martyr, according to Marshall, is Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson (whose quote I just linked to in the Maya Angelou note). Robertson was an invited speaker at Thursday’s Republican Leadership Conference. Phil’s son and co-star Willie was a guest of a Republican congressman at the State of the Union.

Steve Benen looks at the full list of RLC speakers — Robertson, Donald Trump, Rep. Steve King, Dinesh D’Souza, Sarah Palin — and thinks maybe this isn’t the best approach to the “minority outreach” Republicans claim to want.

And Ted Cruz won the RLC’s presidential straw poll. He gave a speech defending the government shut-down.

A Humanist in the armed forces may not believe in God, but faces many of the same spiritual challenges any other soldier does: the possibility of dying or killing, balancing duty and personal fulfillment, not to mention just being far from home. So why are there no Humanist chaplains? Universities have them.

Ron Crews of the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty engages in the usual sophistry:

The motto [of the Army chaplaincy] is ‘for God and country’—how could an atheist fulfill that motto if by definition he does not believe in God?

Yes, definitely, maintaining the motto of the chaplaincy should trump the needs of our soldiers.

Years ago when I read James Ault’s Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church, I learned something important from a footnote: Fundamentalists churches tend to follow the pattern of oral cultures: reinterpreting their histories freely as living memory fades.

It has happened before our eyes with respect to abortion. They tell the story this way: Their theology told them that fetuses had souls, so they were forced into politics to defend those souls. The more historians look at the record, though, the more they see this isn’t true: The theology came along to justify the political positions already taken for other reasons.

This week historian Randall Balmer exposed another chunk of the story: The original motivation behind the Moral Majority was to defend segregated schools.

and let’s close with something awesome

National Geographic follows an “epic gathering” of mobular rays.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (0)