The Weekly Sift

When I was in high school, the Mobil corporation used to buy advertising space in major newspapers to publish its own editorials. Purists objected that democracy wasn’t supposed to work this way, with booming corporate mouthpieces making themselves heard above the voices of ordinary citizens and their representatives in politics and the media. But from today’s perspective Mobil’s editorials look like relics from an age of innocence. Sure, Mobil’s bottomless purse could insure that its agenda (mostly oil-company tax breaks and hobbled environmental regulations) stayed on center stage independent of its merits. But at least we knew we were listening to Mobil. We could consider the source and evaluate the ideas accordingly.

That was a simpler time, and the seeds of a more complicated time were only sprouting.

Someday, when corporations rule the world openly (like the machines in The Matrix), they will undoubtedly write their history as a story of liberation from human oppression, with the tobacco companies as their Paul Reveres and Martin Luther Kings. Because it was the tobacco companies who pioneered the techniques of corporate lib.

It started when Big Tobacco realized that it couldn’t put its case across openly. If the makers of Marlboro and Lucky Strike simply published their message in the New York Times, saying “Don’t believe all this nonsense about lung cancer” in Mobil-like signed advertisements, any wannabee Marlboro Man would consider the source and understand the truth: Tobacco companies wanted him to volunteer for a nasty death to keep their profits up.

That wouldn’t do at all.

So instead, the companies funded the Tobacco Institute — a “research” institution that funded “scientists” and published “papers” in “journals”. The Institute never tried to prove that cigarettes were good for you — that was a bridge too far — but instead kept raising the standards of proof to argue that the link between smoking and cancer was still “controversial”. That tactic changed the shape of the public conversation. Previously, whenever cigarette executives tried to defend their product in public, they would be grilled about why they were giving people cancer. But now, anti-cigarette activists could be countered by scientists with doctorates from impressive universities. The activists could be grilled about why they were misrepresenting the data and presenting their views as facts when the scientific community was still divided.

As long as the money flowed, new points of controversy could always be found. The televised discussion shifted away from easily understood topics like profits and cancer. Instead, rival eggheads argued about sample bias and standard deviations. Politicians (also funded by the corporations) could call for more research rather than action; they appeared to be doing something when actually they were just keeping the game going. Bored and confused, the public would tune out rather than use the machinery of democracy to defend itself from predators.

The predators liked that.

If this is reminding you of today’s debates about global warming or universal health insurance or even creationism, you’re starting to get the point. The tobacco companies were ground-breakers and trail-blazers. Like Moses, they may not reach the Promised Land themselves, but they have pointed the way. Other vested interests can follow their path and be liberated from the oppression of an informed public.

A second tobacco industry innovation was the astroturf (i.e. fake grass roots) campaign. Why stand up for corporate profits when you can defend smokers’ rights? The poor beleaguered smokers have had it up to here with being nagged and taxed and made to stand outside in the cold. They’re mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it any more! It’s bad enough that the non-smoking majority is fitter and healthier and likely to dance on smokers’ graves — do they have to lord it over them as well? The tobacco companies didn’t even have to invent the pissed-off smokers. They just had to fund the infrastructure to organize them and publicize their message.

Everybody does astroturf now. A city doesn’t have to be any bigger than my own Nashua, New Hampshire to have a local astroturf campaign. The City of Nashua is trying to take over the local water company (Pennichuck) because many of us are convinced they’re poor guardians of our watershed. The takeover proposal started when Pennichuck tried to sell itself to a multi-national water corporation, but has dragged on for years (after we voted overwhelmingly to exercise eminent domain) due to legal challenges. Whenever the takeover becomes an issue in a local election, we are inundated by commercials in which angry local citizens rage against bureaucrats who want to spend their money frivolously on a safe and secure water supply. The angry citizens repeat “facts” conveniently supplied by Pennichuck.

I have never seen a commercial on the anti-Pennichuck side, because where would the money come from? Preserving the watershed doesn’t create a pile of cash to pay for air time. It just … preserves the watershed. (If you’d like to add your voice to the support of our poor oppressed water company, you can easily do so from the corporate web site. No doubt some corporate-supported citizen action group will contact you to see if you would look good on TV.)

The most famous single example of astroturfing was the Brooks Brothers Riot during recount of the Bush/Gore race in Florida. What originally appeared to be a spontaneous demonstration by Floridians fearing vote fraud turned out to be an operation planned and carried out by Republican political operatives.

And that brings us to the demonstrators disrupting the town hall meetings in which Democratic congresspeople have been trying to discuss health care with their constituents. By most accounts, the protesters are not of the Brooks-Brothers variety. (Though a few of them are.) ABC News (among others) says there were “no lobbyist-funded buses” outside one such meeting. So the astroturfing here is more of the Pennichuck or smokers-rights variety: real people, really pissed off — but stoked and organized by corporate money. Typical organizing groups include Conservatives for Patients Rights (led by former hospital-corporation CEO Rick Scott, under whose leadership HCA did things that led to them paying a $1.7 billion settlement for fraud) and FreedomWorks (led by former Republican House leader Dick Armey, whose lobbying interests closely match FreedomWorks projects).

But as I watch the videos, I’m convinced that the people on the ground are genuine. They’re real people, really pissed. And why wouldn’t they be pissed? They’re being ruled by a secret Muslim who isn’t really president because he wasn’t born in this country. He’s going to take away their guns and leave them to die when they get old. He’s planning to surrender to the terrorists, raise taxes and undermine religion. He pretends to be a Christian, but he might even be the anti-Christ. Did I mention that he hates white people?

Sane folks have been scratching their heads for months, wondering what all this nuttiness could possible be about. Well, this is what it’s all about: The point is to create free-floating anger among working-class whites who feel dispossessed. Once the mob exists, corporate shills can turn it against anything that threatens their clients’ profits.

“When a politician can’t tell what’s grassroots and what’s Astro, that’s dangerous,” Mr. Zelizer said. “In the long term, that could undermine the potential of grassroots mobilizers to change things. At a certain point, it’s crying wolf. No one is going to believe it’s real.”

And maybe, in the long term, that’s the point. If the machinery of democracy gets wrecked or hopelessly corrupted, the predators never have to worry about it again.

But SourceWatch’s characterization of astroturf is a good place to start:

Unlike genuine grassroots activism which tends to be money-poor but people-rich, astroturf campaigns are typically people-poor but cash-rich. Funded heavily by corporate largesse, they use sophisticated computer databases, telephone banks and hired organizers to rope less-informed activists into sending letters to their elected officials or engaging in other actions that create the appearance of grassroots support for their client’s cause.

Newly unveiled court documents show that ghostwriters paid by a pharmaceutical company played a major role in producing 26 scientific papers backing the use of hormone replacement therapy in women, suggesting that the level of hidden industry influence on medical literature is broader than previously known.

Later research (sponsored by the federal government, not drug manufacturers) concluded that the therapy increased post-menopausal women’s “risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke.”

Now, there’s nothing wrong with a drug company doing research and telling doctors about it. The problem here is the misrepresentation. If your GP read those articles, she thought she was getting an impartial assessment — not a sales pitch from the manufacturer.

Double-X’s Sarah Wildman tells her health-insurance story: She and her husband looked for a family health insurance policy with maternity coverage and spent an extra $126 a month for it. The big print listed all the stuff it covered, but deep in the fine print of an addendum, the policy capped benefits at $3000 per pregnancy. After 36 hours of labor led to a caesarian, Wildman unexpectedly wound up on the hook for $22,000 — which the insurance company waived only after it found out she was a journalist writing an article about her experience.

Individual (not group or employer-based) health insurance is where the greatest abuse is. The insurance companies know they’re much bigger than you are, so they hide things in the small print, deny coverage at will, and more-or-less just dare you to sue them.

This is the part of the market that John McCain wanted to expand. I can’t find the text of McCain’s plan on the web any more, but the gist of it is:

American families know quality when they see it, so their dollars should be in their hands. When families are informed about medical choices, they are more capable of making their own decisions, less likely to choose the most expensive and often unnecessary options, and are more satisfied with their choices.

McCain was all about giving American families the power to choose which health insurance company would rip them off. Echoing this position, Charles Krauthammer thinks our healthcare system only needs two tweaks: (1) Curb malpractice payments and (2)

Tax employer-provided health-care benefits and return the money to the employee with a government check to buy his own medical insurance, just as he buys his own car or home insurance.

Lindsey Graham chimed in during a recent interview with Ezra Klein:

If I gave you and your family x amount of dollars to purchase health care, you’d be able to go shop around and make a choice and if the incentives were such that you could actually benefit from those choices, you’d make those choices.

When Graham (like Krauthammer) used a car-buying analogy, Klein came back with exactly the right response:

The car example is interesting. When I go to get a car I can walk out of the dealership if I don’t like the prices. But if I have a pulmonary embolism and am on a gurney, it’s hard to comparison shop, or to have anyone do it for me.

Graham rephrased the point and then dodged it completely, as Republicans always do.

McCain also wanted to create a “national market” for individual health policies, which would allow insurance companies in one state to write policies in another. Think about what that means: All the insurance companies could move their operations to whichever state would offer the least consumer protections. (Ever wonder why you mail your credit card payments to South Dakota? Same idea.) Republicans in Congress still like that proposal.

Healthcare itself is provided by doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, hospices, and device makers. Insurance companies do none of this. They don’t do research, they don’t perform surgeries, they don’t change bedpans, and they don’t make diagnoses. They’re just middlemen. All they do is pay the bills after marking them up 30%. They don’t do anything at all to make healthcare better or more efficient. But for some reason we’re supposed to care about whether they continue to exist or not. Why?

He quotes an LA Times column debunking those studies about how satisfied Americans are with their coverage:

Most people are satisfied with their current insurance because most people never have a complex encounter with the health insurance bureaucracy. … If your typical encounter is an annual checkup or treatment of the kids’ sniffles, or even a serious but routine condition such as a heart attack, your experience is probably satisfactory. But … [a]nyone whose condition is even slightly out of the ordinary knows the sinking feeling of entering health insurance hell — pre-authorizations, denials, appeals, and days, weeks, even months wasted waiting for resolution.

Repeating a point I made last week: Routine care is not why you need insurance. If you’re not poor, you could pay for our own check-ups and children’s sniffles — probably for less money than your health insurance costs. But you need insurance for scenarios that would bankrupt you. The current system doesn’t handle those situations well, and the free market can’t fix the problem for a very simple reason: You don’t know whether your coverage is good or not until you get sick, and after you get sick the insurance company no longer wants your business. So they have no motivation to provide good service to sick people.

they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

In response, Joan Walsh and Harold Pollack just kind of lost it. I can’t blame them.

Transformers and G.I. Joe made profitable action movies, but maybe Care Bears vs. My Little Pony is going too far.

But we appear to have averted the worst: utter catastrophe no longer seems likely. And Big Government, run by people who understand its virtues, is the reason why.

If government had done what the Republicans in Congress wanted and (in the words of John Boehner) “tightened their belt” rather than accept a deficit to stimulate the economy, Krugman thinks we might be in another Great Depression now.

When my wife and I took a 25th-anniversary trip to Iceland last week, I wasn’t planning to blog about it. But once I got there I found that this 300,000-person country embodied a lot of the issues of the larger world in miniature: alternative energy, the financial crisis, localism vs. globalism, and so on. (And yes, I know I’m exaggerating about the midnight sun. The Arctic Circle only touches Icelandic territory on Grimsey Island. So what I was seeing in Reykjavik was only midnight dusk.)

In this week’s Sift:

• The Global Energy Solution Might Be Local. Iceland has its post-fossil-fuels energy future well in hand. But what does that mean for those of us who don’t live on top of a volcano?
• An Economy in the Kreppa. Iceland had the mother of all banking collapses, and the government wasn’t big enough to bail it out. Like our banking collapse, a few people got very rich off of it. And Iceland’s government, like ours, isn’t eager to investigate its financial power elite. But maybe it’s going to happen anyway.
• How the Republicans Could Come Back. Didn’t they used to be the party of small businessmen?
• Late Summer Reading. David Liss’ novels are a way to get an education in spite of yourself. And Peter Abrahams’ Echo Falls mysteries fix something that’s been bugging me ever since the Hardy Boys.
• Short Notes. The free market can’t fix healthcare, and a big dose of insurance-company money could keep Congress from fixing it too. Pat Buchanan’s white male pride. Jon Stewart skewers Lou Dobbs. And more.

Iceland is a good example of a point I’ve made before: When people talk about the future of energy, they often frame the question in a way that assumes there’s going to be a single answer: Oil is going to be replaced by X, where X is wind or solar or nuclear or some new technology that will let us burn currently dirty or inefficient fossil fuels (like soft coal or tar sands) without wrecking the climate. But rather than one big answer, there might be a lot of little answers depending on local conditions: wind in the Dakotas, solar in Arizona, hydro in Quebec, and
so on.

Well, Iceland has almost no oil to speak of. In fact, the country has been energy-poor for centuries, because they have almost no coal and almost no wood. (Here’s a joke I heard: What should you do if you’re lost in an Icelandic forest? Stand up.) In a cloudy country that is dark for
weeks at a time, solar is going nowhere. The wind is pretty stiff, but I didn’t see a single windmill the entire week. But they do have plenty of underground heat. As Popular Science puts it: “The island is basically one big volcano.” And so today, Iceland is starting to think of itself as an energy-rich nation.

In Reykjavik, for example, nobody has a hot-water heater. Or rather, everybody shares one big hot-water heater under the nearby mountains; they pump fresh water down near the magma, let it heat up, and then send it throughout the city in insulated pipes. As a result, everybody’s shower smells a little like sulfur. But they don’t care, because the hot water is cheap and you never have to worry about your roommate using it all up. (Fortunately, the smell doesn’t stick to your skin.)

And you know how most fossil-fuel power plants make electricity? They burn fuel to produce steam, then use the steam to push a turbine. Well, in Iceland you don’t have to burn anything to get steam; you just stick a pipe into the ground. So they’re well on their way to being self-sufficient in electricity — at less than half the cost per kilowatt of the other Nordic countries. The only thing they’re lacking is transportation fuel, and there’s a proposed solution to that too: hydrogen.

The big difference between hydrogen and oil is that there are no hydrogen wells. Making hydrogen requires applying energy to some compound — like water — that contains hydrogen. Then you can transport the hydrogen somewhere, burn it, and get your energy back. So hydrogen is more like an energy transmission and storage system than an energy source. You can’t, for example, run a car on magma. But if you have magma and lots of water — which Iceland does — you can make hydrogen and run a car on that. So far they’re at the prototype stage: Some of Reykjavik’s buses run on hydrogen, and they’ve got a prototype fishing boat as well. They’re talking about having a “hydrogen economy” by 2050, but the recent economic troubles may have set back this goal.

All in all, Iceland is a happy example for the future of energy. But it’s not a one-big-solution: Geothermal energy is never going to light up Times Square. On the other hand, if you’re another fossil-fuel-poor island with volcanoes — Hawaii and New Zealand pop to mind — Iceland gives you a lot to think about. And even if you don’t have volcanoes, you need to look around and say, “What do we have here?”

No first-world country got hit by the economic crisis as suddenly and extremely as Iceland. The industrial revolution didn’t really make it to Iceland until the 1960s; museum pieces from the 1950s look a lot like American museum pieces from the 1800s. But they hit the ground running and before long established one of the most affluent societies in Europe. In 2007 they passed Norway to take the top spot on the UN’s “best country to live in” list.

Unfortunately, a lot of Iceland’s apparent wealth was based on easy credit and a massive deregulation of the banks in 2001. In October The Guardian quoted an Icelandic chef:

When everyone was extremely rich in Iceland – you know, last month, it was with money that they never have earned. Now those who were extremely rich are just normally rich, but they think they are poor. They were spoilt, spending billions.

An auto salesman explains how it worked.

Customers would come in and we would apply for credit online for them, a 100 per cent loan, and they can drive away in their new Range Rover. It took ten minutes, it was very easy. But 60 to 70 per cent of those loans were in foreign currency, Japanese yen or Swiss francs, and they have gone up 90 per cent as the krona burns. A car worth 5 million krona now has a 9 million loan on it; how are people going to make those payments?

You can make a public morality play out of this, just as people do here. But there’s also a private corruption angle — just as there is here. Kaupthing, their biggest bank, loaned its officers huge amounts of money to buy Kaupthing stock — and apparently forgave a bunch of those loans just before everything blew up. IceNews outlines a complicated arrangement that allowed a banker to build his dream house with other people’s money and keep it after everything went bust.

And there’s a bailout. The Icelandic government — supported by only 300,000 people, remember — has wound up holding a huge amount of debt. The natives are unhappy, to say the least. After an initial investigation that has been characterized as “a joke”, officials imported an experienced fraud investigator from France.

In the background of all this is the proposal for Iceland to join the EU and start using the euro instead of the krona. Iceland has submitted its application, and the EU is likely to jump it ahead of various eastern European candidates. But it will be interesting to see how the Icelanders vote. Iceland’s people would be less than a tenth of a percent of the population of the EU. And while Iceland’s society is very European in terms of laws, markets, education, social services, and so on, the island also has a strong local pride. They identify with their Viking heritage. They take great pride in their language, which is so close to Old Norse that their schoolchildren can still read the ancient sagas in the original. It would be easy to imagine all that getting swamped in the vast mass of the EU.

He told stories about corrupt politicians, the kind of stories that are amusing, but also make a person skeptical of government and government programs. He mentioned sensible things that Iceland does that it will have to stop doing if it joins the European Union — because the one-size-fits-all regulations that come out of Brussels don’t take Iceland’s specific situations into account. He joked about avoiding taxes — clearly he thought it was OK if you could get away with it, a sort of contest between the government and its citizens.

But he also expressed some satisfaction in paying taxes, because in a small country like Iceland you can see exactly where the money goes. He took pride in the services that Iceland provides for it’s citizens: its healthcare, its education, its world-leading geothermal energy policy, and so on. It was clearly important to him that Iceland isn’t some little backwater country where beggars collapse in the streets or desperate teens are forced into prostitution. I didn’t hear him express
any social hatred — no racism or sexism, no resentment of the unemployed or people of different religions or lifestyles. He seemed as skeptical of bigness in business as bigness in government. He thought that “about thirty people” profited hugely from the events that led to the kreppa, and they weren’t heroes to him.

Here’s what I found striking: In America, I used to hear this point of view all the time. The pre-Reagan Republican Party had a strand of enlightened conservatism — people who shared progressive values, but doubted that government was the right vehicle for achieving them. Like small businessmen, they were pragmatic and evidence-based. They believed in budgets, and were against spending money just to “do something” about a problem. But if a program worked — as, say, the FDIC or Social Security proved to do — then they were for it, even if it wasn’t something they would have designed. Socially, they saw the costs of change sooner than its benefits, and that made them generally support the status quo. But once change arrived, they were quick to accept it as the new status quo. They didn’t march in Selma for civil rights, but afterward, why would they want to go back to Jim Crow and give up their black customers? They hadn’t been feminists, but if a female-led business provided a good service at a good price, what was the big deal? And if that new immigrant with an unpronouncable name turned out to be a hard worker, hire his cousin too.

You can still meet people like that in the United States, but you never see them on political talk shows. The Republican Party does not represent them any more, so they are basically voiceless in American national politics. Today the Republican agenda is set by large corporations, militarists, the very rich, and evangelicals — not small businesspeople. Republican positions on the major issues are ideological, not pragmatic. (Imagine one of today’s Republican leaders saying, “I was against gay marriage at first, but they’ve been doing it in Massachusetts for a while now, and it seems to work OK.” Not gonna happen.) Some Republican positions are just corrupt, like taking Exxon’s view of global warming or Cigna’s stand on healthcare. And if the evangelicals are against teaching evolution, well, who cares where our next generation of biologists will come from?

Every few days I see another article or TV segment about how to rebuild the Republican Party. To me it seems simple: Become the party of small business again. And I don’t mean “Say nice things about small business” or “Have big corporate shills use small-business words to frame their global agenda.” I mean, give real power to the kinds of people who run small businesses. Be pragmatic and evidence-based. Stay close to your communities, and listen to what the customers and employees are saying. Keep a budget. Be honest about what things cost — even wars. Recognize that everything has to be paid for, but that some things are worth paying for.

I’ll give you an example. My favorite part of The Omnivore’s Dilemma is the chapter Michael Pollan spends with a Virginia farmer who has completely thought through the ecology of his particular 400 acres. The farmer slaughters chickens for his customers, but government health regulations make it completely impractical for him or any small consortium of his fellow farmers slaughter any larger animals. It’s a bad joke, because the small-farm meat is much healthier than what you can get from a big packing operation. But think it through politically: Democrats represent the regulator’s point of view; Republicans represent the big meat-packers who don’t want competition. Nobody represents the small farmers, or the customers who want to buy from them.

Speak for that guy, Republicans. That’s the way back.

The Coffee Trader is set in the world’s first modern commodity exchange: Amsterdam in the mid-1600s, the time when European society was just finding out about this strange new beverage from the Ottoman Empire. This was the first time in history when a class of people made their living by trading pieces of paper — promises to deliver commodities rather than the commodities themselves — and a lot of the market manipulations thatare still in use today were brand new.

The Whiskey Rebels is set in the new United States of 1791-92, a period of wrangling about what this new nation would be about. Was this really going to be a place where all people — or at least all white male people — were equal? Or was it going to be England all over again? The conflict was symbolized by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s favorite child: the Bank of the United States. Liss’ plot revolves around a conspiracy to bring down the bank and get revenge on Hamilton for his pro-big-money policies. All the arguments about the government bailing out undeserving speculators happen in their original and simplest form — at a time when you could go down to the Treasury Secretary’s office in Philadelphia and wait until he had time to see you.

Peter Abrahams is fixing a mistake that has dogged teen detective novels since the days of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew: the fictional teens are just way too focused. Abrahams’ 13-year-old detective Ingrid Levin-Hill is more like the teens I know: pulled in a hundred directions at once. She wants to get a part in the community theater play, her soccer team is starting the play-offs, there’s a boy who seems to like her, her older brother’s a jerk, her math teacher hates her, the richest family in town wants to push her grandfather off his farm — and oh by the way there’s a dead body that she knows something about and is afraid to tell the police. Maybe she’ll just have to solve the mystery herself, in between practices, rehearsals, and pop quizzes.

Abrahams has written three Ingrid novels so far (the Echo Falls mysteries), and they all get their titles and themes from the plays Ingrid is trying out for. Start with Down the Rabbit Hole, where she wants to be Alice.

Paul Krugman lends his Nobel-prize-winning economic authority to the same argument I was making a few weeks ago: The free market can’t solve healthcare.

It’s weird how different these same facts look if you change your perspective: Everybody but white males was locked out when the ground rules for our country were being written. I love the Constitution as much as anybody, but it’s not a source of white male pride to me that we didn’t let anybody else participate. And I have to wonder what else I’m supposed to be proud of. I mean, we really kicked those Native Americans’ butts. And did you see Hiroshima when we got through with it?

Trust Steven Colbert to give Buchanan’s outburst the respect it deserves.

And those blue-dog Democrats who are dragging their feet about passing a healthcare plan? They’re being well paid for their efforts.

What if you could ignore the political reality of vested interests and their lobbyists, and could just design a healthcare system that works?

In this week’s Sift:

• The Discussion We Ought To Be Having. Beyond all the divisive nonsense lies a question Right and Left ought to be collaborating on: What kinds of things should government be doing?
• The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore … look for Big Boy Rules: America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq by Steve Fainaru. He comes down hard on Blackwater, but finds a strange empathy for the guys carrying guns. Meanwhile, I suggest some beach reading.
• The Spectrum of Crazy. Mainstream Republicans would like to a claim that a firm boundary separates them from the right-wing terrorists. But where is it?
• Short Notes. Juan Cole on Iran’s election. Swine flu is a pandemic. The latest clever Republican wordsmithing. And more.

It’s easy to make fun of the state of political discourse in America today. In both the major media and in our own conversations over coffee, we spend valuable time and energy talking about David Letterman’s jokes, Obama’s birth certificate, and the latest ridiculous thing Rush Limbaugh said. I do it too; it’s hard not to. This stuff is the junk food of politics. It gives you lots of quick energy, but does nothing to nourish our democracy. Even if you try to give it up, other people push it at you. (“Have you tried these barbecue potato chips? They’re fabulous!”)

So what should we be talking about? Where could Right and Left alike devote their attention to a meaningful discussion, one that could go somewhere? Last week I interpreted Obama’s Cairo speech in terms of rebuilding a center and depolarizing the America/Islam split. What would do the same thing for Right and Left in America?

It seems to me that the answer is obvious: We ought to be talking about the proper role of the public sector in our economy. That same basic issue shows up again and again in various forms: What should the government role be in health care? In banking? In rebuilding the electrical grid? In the transition to renewable fuels? In mitigating the consequences of global warming? How long should the government continue to own General Motors, and how active a shareholder should the Obama administration be?

In spite of all the polarizing rhetoric on both sides, there actually is a center to build up. Americans share a broad consensus about some basic principles, and our differences can be framed as differences of degree (that can be compromised on) rather than differences of kind (that can’t).

For example: Other than a negligible number of radicals on each side, Americans largely agree that we need a mixed economy. Some things the government should do directly, some things the government should stay away from, and some things should be done by private industry with greater or lesser amounts of government regulation.

The book I review in the next section examines a situation where we let the private sector go too far — mercenaries in Iraq. Military action and profit incentives don’t mix well. We want soldiers to be motivated by patriotism, by a sense of honor and duty, and by loyalty to each other — not by a big paycheck. And when military power gets misused, we need the kind of transparency you just can’t get in the private sector.

But even very far-Left liberals learned from the failure of the Soviet Union. The government does a bad job of innovating, of coming up with new products, of responding quickly to consumer preferences, and of converting to whole new models of delivering services. In a classic Adam Smith situation, where you have a bunch of commodities with a bunch of uses (none of which are matters of life and death), you can’t beat markets for allocating those resources quickly and efficiently. A lot of seed money to develop internet technologies came from porn — no government would have thought of that. One reason research in carbon-fiber materials is paying off is that people happily pay big money for ultra-light bicycles and tennis rackets and golf clubs. No one has ever been quite that excited to pay their taxes.

Health care (which I promise to discuss in more detail when the Sift comes back in July) is a difficult issue precisely because it combines both aspects. Medical emergencies are like hostage situations: “Do what we say or someone you love will die.” The free market is absolutely the wrong model here. You’re in no position to negotiate. You need to trust your doctors and believe they have your best interests at heart — not make allowances for their salesmanship or take the buyer-beware attitude that a market requires.

But routine-care delivery resembles retail. Subtle changes in technology or social preferences or skilled-to-unskilled salary ratios might completely transform the best way to deliver particular kinds of care. If some guy thinks he has a better way to manage chronic pain or do basic prevention or follow-up care for wounds or whatever — why not let him try, and profit or fail depending on his success?

We need to have a national discussion about where the borderline should be: What needs to be public? What is better kept private? Both Right and Left have a case to make. We could be having that discussion across the board — it’s in the background of almost every domestic issue we’re facing.

Available studies suggest that health outcomes may be superior in patients cared for in Canada versus the United States, but differences are not consistent.

Or, as Matt Yglesias summarizes: “Canada’s is probably slightly better, almost certainly no worse, and definitely cheaper.”

… look for Big Boy Rules: America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq by Steve Fainaru. This is a current-history book that reads like an action novel because Fainaru

• got assigned by the Washington Post to investigate a fascinating topic: the “security contractors” carrying guns in Iraq
• got “lucky” (in the journalistic sense) when a horrifying event happened right under his nose
• had the insight to see the parallels between his own psychology and that of the mercenaries he was covering
• had the sense to make himself a character in the story he wrote.

When he gets to Iraq, Fainaru finds himself hanging around with Crescent Security Group, maybe the most slipshod group of mercenaries in the business. They live in Kuwait and “commute to the war” as Fainaru puts it. They guard convoys going into Iraq.

The group’s medic wears an EMT hat, but explains that he isn’t really certified: “They made me the medic because I’ve read a lot of books. I just haven’t gotten around to taking the tests.” The rules-of-engagement are … well, there aren’t any really. Just don’t lose the convoy, and shoot them before they shoot you. Those are the Big Boy Rules, not the wimpy rules that the Army and the Marines have to live by.

If you end up shooting somebody you shouldn’t have, well, that’s a shame. Fortunately there’s nobody in a position to punish you for it, because security contractors are exempt from Iraqi law and not covered by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. You should file a report about it. Or not. It doesn’t really matter.

Fainaru rides with the talkative and endlessly charming Jon Cote’. Cote’ served a tour in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne, then went home and tried to be an accounting major at the University of Florida. It didn’t work out. After the blood and explosions of war, the sights and sounds of student life barely registered. He thought it would be idyllic — Florida, the girls, the parties. But nothing was a matter of life-and-death there, so why do it? He found himself taking bigger and bigger risks until he got arrested for doing motorcycle tricks on a main drag while drunk. Coming back to Iraq as a mercenary — it got him out of a bad situation and would soon get him out of debt, plus it put him back in a world of life-and-death. So it was a win all around.

Fainaru is 21 years older — exactly, they have the same birthday — but he sees a lot of himself in Cote’. War correspondents also get addicted to blood and explosions. Fainaru had spent in a lot of time in Iraq before coming home to cover safer stories — and it didn’t work out for him either. He didn’t have to return to Iraq, but he wrangled a way. Like mercenaries and unlike soldiers, war correspondents aren’t there for their country or to save anybody’s life or freedom. They can tell an idealistic story about the people’s right to know, but really it’s about fame and fortune. And blood. And explosions. War is not pleasant, but it’s very real — and after a while, nothing else is.

Then a subplot cuts in: Fainaru abruptly goes home for one last trip with his brother and his Dad, who is dying of lung cancer. The brother has his own drama going: He’s been covering the Barry Bonds steroid scandal. He published some confidential grand jury testimony, and he’s about to go to jail if he doesn’t reveal his sources, which he’s not going to do.

The trip may have saved Fainaru’s life. While he was gone, a Crescent convoy got hijacked and several of the mercs were taken, including Cote’ and the medic. We know the story in detail because two mercs survived in the most random way possible: The insurgents threw their captives into an SUV when they heard the Army coming, and the SUV wasn’t big enough for all of them.

The convoy hijacking is a story of screw-ups. Half of a typical Crescent crew is Iraqi, and they pick them up at the border. Except the Iraqis didn’t show up that day — maybe they were tipped off. Crescent should have cancelled right there, but the convoy was half across the border by the time they figured out what had happened. Turning around would have been a mess, and the run to Basra was usually tame, so they went for it. A few hours later they were hijacked by a group of Iraqis that probably included some disgruntled former employees, who were way underpaid compared to the Americans.

Nobody claims responsibility or asks for ransom. The official investigation starts late because Crescent forgot to register the convoy with the authorities. And nobody seems to be working all that hard to find the missing mercs — not Crescent management and not the military. Soldiers (who are also way underpaid compared to the mercs) strangely are not that wild about risking their lives for guys who live by no rules and then yell for help whenever they get themselves in trouble. Who’d have thought?

Fainaru starts hanging out with the families — mercenaries have families, it turns out: parents, brothers and sisters, children, and a lot of ex-wives. For reasons of their own, they love these guys, and they’d like to know what happened to them. It takes a long time, but eventually they find out. It’s not a happy ending.

I started reading Big Boy Rules out of good intentions. I thought it was a subject I should know something about. But then I got pulled in by the story and characters, and I ended up learning about mercenaries almost by accident. But the book actually does contain a lot of information. For example, Fainaru provides the first coherent explanation I’ve ever heard about how Blackwater got so far out of control: It was a token in the turf battle between State and Defense. Early on, Don Rumsfeld outmaneuvered Colin Powell, and the State Department got shut out of any significant role in Iraq. But Blackwater fell under State’s jurisdiction, because their main contract was to guard diplomats. So when the generals had complaints about Blackwater, State wasn’t inclined to listen. And that meant that Blackwater was virtually unsupervised.

Fainaru does a good job of painting a complex reality. He has little doubt that the contractor system is inherently corrupt, and that the contracting companies are war profiteers. Killing people is just not a business that private industry ought to be in. But he is ambivalent about the mercenaries themselves. They are exploiting the situation for their own profit, but are simultaneously being exploited for someone else’s profit. Few of them manage to save much money, and most don’t even have a clear idea of what they’d be saving for. Many of them die — how many? no one counts because no one really wants to know — and some are just broken and tossed aside.

Fainaru never says this explicitly, but I think he believes that when Jon Cote’ got caught doing drunken wheelies in Florida, he should have been offered help — not a gun and a big salary. Maybe he would have found some other way to get himself killed. But maybe not.

Two weeks apart, we’ve had the murder of late-term abortionist Dr. George Tiller and an attack on the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Most of the Right would like to claim that these are unpredictable acts by lone-wolf crazies. And that’s even true up to a point: There’s no sign of any broader conspiracy to carry out those specific attacks.

In a broader sense, though, the spectrum of right-wing craziness stands on a slippery slope. At the far end you have the Scott Roeders and James von Brunns — people who appear to have carried out acts of right-wing terrorism. One step closer to the mainstream are the web sites and blog commenters who think that the Roeders and van Brunns are heroes.

One more step brings you to the people who wish for violence without threatening to do it themselves, like whoever took out the ad saying: “May Obama follow in the footsteps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy!” Here we find Southern Baptist pastor Wiley Drake, who was Alan Keyes’ vice president on the American Independent Party ticket last fall.

Drake thinks Tiller’s murder was the answer to his prayers. He wants to revive the practice he calls “imprecatory prayer” — praying for God to harm your enemies. “It is in the Bible,” he says, “and we are proud to say as Southern Baptists that we believe the Book.” (Hmmm. Didn’t some minor character in the Bible also say: “Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you.”? But that’s a plot twist from the second half of the Book, so maybe Drake hasn’t read that far yet.)

When radio host Alan Colmes asked Drake who else was on the wrong side of his prayer list, Drake replied: “The usurper that is in the White House is one, B. Hussein Obama.”

Colmes: Are you praying for his death?

Drake: Yes.

Colmes: So you’re praying for the death of the president of the United States?

Drake: Yes.

Another step gets you to the people who don’t advocate or even root for violence explicitly, but provide justification for it. When Bill O’Reilly repeated denounced Tiller as “the baby killer”, he didn’t ask anyone to stop Tiller by violence. But how big a leap was that? The folks (like Alan Keyes) who keep pushing the “birther” conspiracy theory (that Obama actually isn’t president because he wasn’t born in this country) — what solution are they advocating? When you combine Obama-usurper rhetoric with charges that he’s secretly a Muslim who hates whites, is ruining our American values, is about to take away our guns, and is conspiring with ACORN to rig the census and fix elections — well, what is a heroic young man who believes all that supposed to do, exactly?

One step further in brings you to mainstream Republicans who use Biblical/apocalyptic code words to pander to the crazies in a deniable way. At the recent Republican fund-raising dinner, master-of-cermonies Jon Voight advocated “staying the course to bring an end to this false prophet, Obama.” If some warrior-of-God decides to bring an end to Obama with a sniper’s rifle, I’m sure Voight will express a completely guiltless sense of shock, if he sees a need to comment at all.

Take one more step and you arrive at Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and countless other big-name mainstream Republicans who attended the dinner: They applauded Voight. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said he “really enjoyed” Voight’s remarks.

I’m with Paul Krugman on this:

Yes, the worst terrorist attack in our history was perpetrated by a foreign conspiracy. But the second worst, the Oklahoma City bombing, was perpetrated by an all-American lunatic. Politicians and media organizations wind up such people at their, and our, peril.

Like Frank Rich, I’m waiting for some Republican leader to stop pandering to the violent and take a stand for sanity. John McCain did so a couple of times late in the 2008 campaign. Fox News’ Shepard Smith is doing it now. But who else?

And that’s the real problem: Not the fringe nutjobs, but the mainstream voices who tolerate and exploit them. We don’t need to censor the Birthers any more than we needed to censor the people who thought that Bush conspired in 9-11. But mainstream Republicans who wink and nod at this craziness are playing with fire. How many people will have to die before they stop?

Not that Obama considers himself divine. (He sees himself as merely messianic, or, at worst, apostolic.) But he does position himself as hovering above mere mortals, mere country, to gaze benignly upon the darkling plain beneath him where ignorant armies clash by night, blind to the common humanity that only he can see.

Not that Charles would advocate striking down such a self-aggrandizing ruler. Of course not!

The source I’m following about the Iranian election is Juan Cole. Cole believes the election was stolen, and that (in spite of protests) the regime will get away with it — for now. “But the regime’s legitimacy will take a critical hit, and its ultimate demise may have been hastened, over the next decade or two.” Real change, he suspects, will have to wait for a generation of leaders who never knew the Shah.

The new name goes a long way towards denying what the photos are: pictures of things that actually happened. We’re not trying to prevent our enemies from telling lies about us; we’re trying to cover up what we did.

Meanwhile, GM’s former Saturn brand has been bought by Penske, which plans to subcontract the whole car-making part of the business. Seriously. And the Chinese own Hummer now.

By far the biggest story this week was President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. I doubt you missed that story, and on all the specific points raised against her, Sotomayor’s defenders — see Rachel Maddow here and here, for example, or TPM — are doing fine without me, so I think the Sift’s time would be better spent trying to make some kind of larger sense out of the discussion.

The pro-Sotomayor and anti-Sotomayor arguments are based on two very different pictures of how the law works and what the courts should be trying to do. That’s why each side is more likely to react to the other’s points with a you-don’t-get-it headshake than with reasoned discussion. I’m far from neutral myself, but let me at least try to lay out the differences.

Conservatives are arguing from what we might call a modernist perspective. Modernists believe that a text like the Constitution has a clear and unique meaning. What they want in a judge, then, is a legal calculating machine who can work that meaning out and apply it objectively to the case at hand, uninfluenced by emotions or personal experiences. Their ideal Supreme Court is the nine “best qualified individuals” — the country’s nine best legal calculators.

Liberals are arguing from a post-modern perspective. Post-modernists believe that interpreting the Constitution is a more of an art than a science. There isn’t a unique meaning in the text, waiting for you to pull it out, because the text is often being applied to situations the authors could not have imagined, and is being asked to resolve questions the authors never considered. So rather than deducing the text’s unique meaning, an interpreter has to make reasonable choices among many possible meanings. Over time, the meaning of the text evolves through the choices that interpreters make. That’s why liberals will sometimes talk about a “living Constitution” — one whose meaning evolves through a dialog between the text and its interpreters.

Evolving phrases. That all sounds very abstract until you look at examples. Think about the Second Amendment‘s “right of the people to keep and bear arms”. What are arms? Probably in their own day, the Founders would not all have answered that question the same way. But even if they had, what do you do with weapons they couldn’t have imagined, like Stinger shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles? Does the Second Amendment entitle me to keep and bear a Stinger near Logan Airport? There’s not one unique and obvious way to calculate an answer to that question directly from the text. But an answer (no) has evolved through a gradual process of interpretation.

Or when the authors of the 14th amendment said “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” did they intend person to include fetuses still in the womb? Many pro-lifers think so; pro-choicers disagree. Can we really compute a right answer? Or do we have to accept that the authors weren’t thinking about that question and just make a choice?

Experience and the post-modern Court. Taking things one step further, people with different experiences will have different opinions about what interpretation is most reasonable. In 1896, for example, the Supreme Court thought separate-but-equal facilities for whites and coloreds was a reasonable way to fulfill the 14th Amendment‘s promise of “equal protection of the laws”. But in 1954, the Court decided it wasn’t. What changed? Not the 14th Amendment. But the nine white men of the 1954 Court lived in a different world than the nine white men of the 1896 Court. They brought different experiences to bear, and it led them to a different answer.

In the Henry Brown quote at the top of the page, you can hear echoes across the vast gulf that separated him from “the colored race”. The whole Plessy v. Ferguson case was a conversation among white men. Even the plaintiff, Homer Plessy, was only 1/8th black.

But by 1954, in thousands of ways great and small, the distance between the races had lessened. Willie Mays was having an MVP season; all over the country white boys were running out from under their caps and making basket catches like Willie did. The races had fought together in Korea, because President Truman had integrated the military in 1948. Most important of all, the 1954 justices had to look into the eyes of Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP attorney who argued Brown v. Board of Education. Maybe the justices couldn’t forsee that in 1967 Marshall would join the Court himself, but none of them could deny that Marshall was a human being with thoughts, feelings, and desires not so different from their own.

The 14th Amendment hadn’t changed, but the 1954 justices were beginning to be able to imagine black experience. It made a difference. In the post-modern view, it should have made a difference.

So the ideal post-modern Court is not the nine best individual legal calculators. It’s a team of justices who (in addition to having fine legal minds and good training) collectively have a wide range of experiences and individually have empathy — the ability to imagine and take seriously the experiences of others. In easy cases, where law and precedent are clear, this Court makes the same decisions as the modernist Court. But when new interpretations are necessary, its intuitions about what is reasonable should more closely reflect the nation, rather than the parochial interests of a single race, class, religion, or ethnic group.

Sotomayor. With that background, we can make more sense out of the Sotomayor debate. Conservatives are jumping on Obama’s statement that he was looking for a nominee with empathy, as well as two of Sotomayor’s statements. In a 2001 speech she said:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

And in a 2005 panel discussion at Duke (in which judges answered law students’ questions about legal clerkships) [sound bite, larger context, full 51-minute session] she said:

Court of appeals is where policy is made.

From a conservative modernist point of view, this all wraps together into a horror story: Sotomayor isn’t even trying to calculate the outcome of the law impartially. Instead, she’s going to ignore the law and “make policy” to favor the groups she empathizes with (women and Hispanics) over white males. The Ricci case — which we’ll get to in a minute — is supposed to show her doing just that.

Charles Krauthammer made this argument on Fox News:

Her job on the court is to be an impartial adjudicator. And if she is not, if her empathy and her concern for certain ethnicities overrides the idea of justice and equal justice, I think that is a troubling concern.

In his WaPo column, Krauthammer called Sotomayor’s appointment an example of “the racial spoils system”. Her wise-Latina quote is “identity politics, which assigns free citizens to ethnic and racial groups possessing a hierarchy of wisdom and entitled to a hierarchy of claims upon society.” John Yoo (we’re supposed to listen to John Yoo? about law? really?) wrote: “Empathy has won out over excellence.”

But from a liberal post-modern point of view, the same Obama and Sotomayor quotes look not only harmless, but (if you read them in context) obvious. Courts “make policy” whenever they choose one possible intepretation over others. The experiences that the justices have or can imagine (through empathy) affect those choices, whether the justices want them to or not. (Another Anatole France quote: “He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and this pretension itself is a very great prejudice.”) The current Court is overweighted with white males and light on everything else. Consequently, Sotomayor’s Latina experience can only enrich the Court, and her mere presence is bound to change the discussion — particularly in cases involving discrimination (which was the subject of the section of the speech where her “wise Latina” quote appeared).

Without that broad base of experience, it is far too easy for the Court to accept a status quo that favors people like the justices themselves — to make, in other words, more decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson.

opposed John Roberts for using his skills “on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak.” He criticized Samuel Alito for siding with “the powerful against the powerless.” Obama made these distinguished judges sound monstrous because they stood for the impartial application of the law.

Gerson’s column doesn’t even address the possibility that “siding with the powerful against the powerless” might not be “impartial application of the law”. I’ll bet if he wouldn’t have oversights like that if he teamed with a Latina who grew up a housing project.

The district court found against Ricci, and Sotomayor was part of a panel that upheld the district court ruling. The case has since been heard by the Supreme Court, which should rule this month.

The best account I’ve found is by Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford. According to him, current affirmative action law says this: If an employment test produces an adverse effect on a discriminated-against group, the burden of proof is on the employer to show that the test faithfully reflects the requirements of the job. Ford gives a hypothetical example in which a weight-lifting test screens women out of a job where strength is not that important. Even if the test is applied fairly and the discriminatory effect is unintentional, the employer needs to do something else.

When the firefighters’ test results came back with an adverse effect on non-whites, New Haven figured it couldn’t meet that burden of proof, so it started over. That’s what current law says it should do. You’ve got to feel for Ricci — just like you’d feel for a guy in Ford’s hypothetical who worked out until he could bench-press 300 pounds — but it makes sense.

So basically, this is an example of Sotomayor doing what conservatives claim they want: applying the law in spite of the fact that the plaintiff has a sympathetic story. But it’s a white guy with a sympathetic story, so that changes everything.

Sane Republicans have got to be pulling their hair out whenever former Colorado congressman and presidential candidate Tom Tancredo goes on TV. Thursday he compared the Hispanic civil-rights group La Raza to the KKK, and interpreted La Raza as “the Race”. (It actually means “the People”; you get “the Race” out of it by assuming that Spanish is some kind of mispronounced English. And radio talk-show host Gordon Liddy can’t even say the word Spanish. He talks about what La Raza means “in illegal alien“.) When asked Friday whether he agreed with Rush Limbaugh that the Obama administration “hates white people”, Tancredo replied: “I don’t know.“

A lot of important issues don’t get the attention they deserve because they hardly ever make “news”. For example: the sad state of math and science education in the United States.

Day-to-day, nothing reportable happens. (Picture it: “This just in: Today 5,433 American fifth-graders gave up and decided that they will never understand fractions. Details at 11.”) Occasionally a blue-ribbon panel will issue a report or we’ll hear about SAT math scores going up or down, but even those events can’t compete with missing co-eds, celebrity drunk-driving arrests, or the latest offensive slip-of-the-tongue by some public figure.

Gadgets or pictures from outer space sometimes make news, but those things get covered as if they were magic. Rocket scientist has become slang for somebody who understands mysteries unapproachable by mere mortals, and it’s almost always used in the negative: “He’s no rocket scientist.” (In the movie Roxanne, it’s a little jarring when Steve Martin says, “Well, actually, she is a rocket scientist.“)

Recently in the Boston Globe, Boston College math professor Solomon Friedberg tried to call attention to this non-news-making subject. [Full disclosure: Sol and I were graduate students together at the University of Chicago. We once shared the bonding experience of driving from Chicago to San Diego in a $200 car.] Among other issues, he calls attention to the way that our educational culture replicates failure: If a kid is no good at math, what do you tell him or her to go into? Education.

It’s as if there were a disease that caused infected people to go into nursing. How many second- and third-grade teachers transmit the vibe that math is something hard and scary, and that you just need to get through it before you can move on to something fun like reading? I ran into a lot of their students years later when I was teaching calculus to freshmen. These were smart people — they got into the University of Chicago — but often my hardest task was to convince them that they could think about math, that they didn’t have to just memorize something and perform by rote. Where did they get that?

I don’t believe anybody wants a witch-hunt to purge all the math-phobes from the teaching profession. But the balance needs to change. One math-challenged teacher is probably not going to cripple a kid, especially if that teacher has compensating strengths elsewhere. I worry, though, about kids getting the idea that math anxiety is normal, that only a few geeks with a specialized math-module in their heads can understand this stuff. (What if kids got the same idea about reading?)

The solutions are — I guess I have to say it — not rocket science. Sol suggests targeting financial aid at math-capable students who go into education, giving more attention to math and science in teacher-training programs, continuing math-and-science opportunities for teachers already in the schools, and higher pay for math and science teachers (who are hard to retain because they could make more money elsewhere).

I’ve thought about the higher-pay idea before, and the main obstacle is the everybody-is-equal culture of teachers’ unions. Maybe we could work around that culture rather than fight it: Let math and science teachers apply for federal grants that have nothing to do with the pay they get from their school districts.

But how will we marshal the political will to make any of those changes happen? Sol finds himself rooting for another Sputnik; rather than this slow-but-steady falling behind, some sudden symbolic wound to our national pride.

Something, in other words, that would be news.

I was disappointed when the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8, the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in California. But having looked at the decision, I think the CSC got the law right.

The main issue in the case was whether Prop 8 was a simple amendment, which the voters could pass by majority vote, or a revision of the California Constitution, which would require a more arduous process. Prop 8 opponents argued that taking away one of your neighbors’ fundamental rights has to be a revision.

The CSC disagreed, but it did so by interpreting Prop 8 as narrowly as possible — as

eliminating equal access to the designation of marriage, and as not otherwise affecting the constitutional right of [same-sex] couples to establish an officially recognized family relationship.

The same-sex marriages already performed will stand, and civil unions in California will be marriages in all but name. Given the precedents defining the amendment/revision distinction, I don’t see how the CSC could have done more.

Now a suit has been filed in federal court to throw out Prop 8. Like John Dean, I’m skeptical. Same-sex marriage has momentum now among both voters and legislators. Why not see how far that goes before making a game-changing move?

Republicans claim that Democrats hated Bush just as rabidly as they hate Obama now. But I don’t remember liberals taking out newspaper ads calling for a presidential assassination.

The database I follow doesn’t break deaths in Afghanistan down by both country and month, so I’ll talk about coalition deaths rather than American deaths. Deaths have been up every year since 2003: 57 coalition troops died in 2003, 294 in 2008. So far 2009 is worse. At the end of May in 2008, there were 77 deaths; there are 115 so far in 2009. The big fighting season in Afghanistan, June-through-September, is just starting.

In this week’s Sift:

• No Ticking Bomb. What if torture wasn’t about protecting the American people?
• What’s Cheney Up To? On the surface, the former VP’s 24/7 media blitz looks like a political disaster. Is it some subtly brilliant trap for Democrats? Or is it just another episode in Dick’s long-running series of screw-ups?
• The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore … look for Reza Aslan’s How to Win a Cosmic War. Aslan has great insight into fundamentalism in general, jihadism in particular, and what we should do about it.
• Short Notes. A non sequitur from Pat Robertson. Jon Stewart finds a moral line we won’t cross to win the War on Terror. Congrats to Marcy Wheeler. And more.

The week’s most important story wasn’t new and is still speculative, but the pieces are starting to come together: Torture wasn’t just used to find ticking time bombs and save American lives. The Bush administration may also have tortured people for political gain.

The story has been percolating since a McClatchy Newspapers article April 21 (based on the Senate Armed Services Committee report), but the latest round started with Robert Windrem’s article in Wednesday’s online Daily Beast. Based on what has been written by Iraq Survey Group head Charles Duelfer (the guy whose report finally closed the book on Saddam’s mythical WMDs) and interviews with two anonymous intelligence officials, Windrem claims that someone in Dick Cheney’s office wanted a captured Iraqi waterboarded, even though those in the field (i.e. Duelfer) believed he was already cooperating. Why? Because he wasn’t providing the information the administration wanted: a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

Along with WMDs, the supposed Saddam-AQ link had been a big part of the administration’s case for invading Iraq. Post-invasion, evidence of this link had no ticking-bomb value, but would have bolstered the administration politically.

If true, this is huge. The Bush administration has always presented its “enhanced interrogation” policy as a sound (if distasteful) moral trade-off: weighing the lives of innocent Americans against the pain of suspected terrorists. But Windrem is telling a story of pure corruption, in which the administration broke laws and flouted morality for no purpose higher than re-election.

The difficult-moral-trade-off frame has always been a key part of the argument for not investigating torture: Americans are probably happier not knowing about the ugly things that were done to keep us safe. (As George Orwell may or may not have said: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”) But if our safety was not the point, if this is just about corruption, then how can we not investigate?

TPM provides a timeline of the torture-for-politics story, and Rachel Maddow clearly connects the dots while interviewing Duelfer and Windrem (part 1 summary, part 2 Duelfer, part 3 Windrem).

I’ll put it to you this way: you give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

My son did NOT volunteer to be tortured. He was NOT told what would be done to him at SERE. He was told he would be taught to survive. Instead he was tortured, humiliated, degraded, shamed, and told to keep quiet about it. … These people, Cheney and his talking heads, everyone of them chicken hawks who avoided serving, should NOT be allowed to use torturing our troops as rationalization for their crimes.

For weeks now, Dick Cheney has been on a media tour defending the Bush administration’s torture policy. At a time when the Republicans are in post-defeat chaos, this has made the unpopular and untelegenic Cheney the Republicans’ most visible spokesman, and has centered public attention on torture, which is not a good issue for the Republicans. It also has pushed attention backward onto the Bush administration and away from any new faces or new ideas the party might have.

President Obama had been eager to let the whole issue drop, but Cheney’s tour has waved a red flag at Democrats, and greatly increased the likelihood of either a truth commission or actual prosecutions, possibly even prosecution of Cheney himself. So what’s Cheney up to? Surely this is all part of some ingeniously complex scheme, a trap he is baiting that will snap shut as soon as Democrats commit themselves. Right?

Maybe not. The more I study the Bush administration, the less I believe in the myth of Dick Cheney as some kind of Doctor-Doom-style mastermind. On issue after issue, Cheney comes off as a profoundly ignorant man. Looking back, it’s clear that he knew

• nothing about Iraq. Assume for a second that he really believed we’d be “greeted as liberators“. How ignorant was that? And then there was his unshakable certainty that Saddam was an ally of bin Laden. As the administration’s WMD-hunter Charles Duelfer said: “That’s just born out of ignorance. I mean, to anyone who knew anything about the Iraqi regime … there was no logic for Saddam to have a connection at all with Al Qaeda.”
• nothing about Afghanistan. The Bush administration made the classic mistake of would-be conquerors of Afghanistan: to (in the words of counter-insurgency guru David Kilcullen) “confuse entry with victory”. At a time when the Afghan War was just getting started, Cheney thought we had won and could move on to Iraq.
• nothing about Islam. The tensions betwen Sunni and Shia, between secular leaders like Saddam and jihadists like bin Laden, between the traditionally recognized imams and the upstart theology of Al Qaeda, between local tribal traditions and by-the-book fundamentalism — it was all lost on Cheney. Instead of isolating Al Qaeda and finding allies all over the Muslim world, we launched a “crusade” that validated everything bin Laden was saying about us.
• nothing about terrorism or counter-insurgency. Cheney never got beyond a kill-the-bad-guys approach to fighting insurgents. He never understood that the War on Terror is a war of ideas, and the key battlefield is in the minds of 15-year-old Muslims all over the world. By giving up inspiring American ideals like decency and the rule of law, Cheney unilaterally disarmed the United States.
• nothing about the traditions of our military. In instituting the torture policy, one of the administration’s key problems was how to circumvent the military judge advocate generals. Ditto for instituting military tribunals, which came straight out of World War II as if the last half-century never happened. Cheney never understood the value that the JAGs — and our military in general — place on the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
• nothing about the law. I’m coming to the conclusion that Cheney actually believed the absurd legal arguments put forward by administration lawyers. Numerous behind-the-scenes accounts indicate that Cheney’s legal alter-ego David Addington was actually shocked by the defeats the administration suffered in the Supreme Court.
• nothing about interrogation. Cheney’s certainty that torture is the most effective interrogation technique does not come from our trained and experienced interrogators. Quite the opposite. Consider this advice from a memo by Major Sherwood Moran, the legendary interrogator of Japanese prisoners during World War II:

get the prisoner to a safe place, where even he knows there is no hope of escape, that it is all over. Then forget, as it were, the “enemy” stuff, and the “prisoner” stuff. I tell them to forget it, telling them I am talking as a human being to a human being, (ningen to shite). And they respond to this. … To emphasize that we are enemies, to emphasize that he is in the presence of his conqueror, etc., puts him psychologically in the position of being on the defensive, and that because he is talking to a most-patient enemy and conqueror he has no right and desire to tell anything.

The history of the Bush administration is a history of blunders — usually blunders that even a rudimentary knowledge of the field in question could have prevented. And if you trace those blunders back, you inevitably find Dick Cheney. He’s not Doctor Doom, he’s Wile E. Coyote.

So my advice to Democrats is: Take the bait. Walk into the trap. You’ll find that it’s as poorly constructed as everything else Dick Cheney had a hand in.

I just find the whole thing kind of mind-boggling. Rush’s defenders understand, I hope, that painting Rush as the all-powerful lord of conservatism before whom all else must submit was, in its origins, a political strategy devised by their enemies, right? So why are they jumping so quickly to prove that the argument is dead-on?

Memo to dittohead Republicans: 19% makes a great radio-show audience, but in any election it’s a landslide defeat. So Rush can win while you lose.

… look for How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror by Reza Aslan. This is a different kind of war-on-terror book. It doesn’t reveal new details about what happened on the battlefield or at Guantanamo or inside the Bush administration. It’s about backing up, getting context and perspective, and making sense of things.

Aslan is an Iranian-American who came here when he was seven. He’s also that rarest of birds: a liberal Muslim who can get attention from the media. His previous book No god but God (which I reviewed for UU World) retold the history of Islam as a liberal Muslim might understand it, and said that the current Muslim ferment was symptomatic of a reformation — similar to the (sometimes violent) convulsions Christianity went through in the 1500s and 1600s.

Cosmic War starts with perhaps the most mysterious aspect of the War on Terror: the number of people on both sides who view it as a cosmic event.

A cosmic war is a religious war. It is a conflict in which God is believed to be directly engaged on one side over the other. Unlike a holy war — an earthly battle between rival religious groups — a cosmic war is like a ritual drama in which participants act out on earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens.

And so the 9-11 hijackers prepared themselves as if for a religious ritual. On the American side, Lieutenant General William Boykin (speaking in uniform at a church) said “the enemy is a guy named Satan,” Donald Rumsfeld’s daily war briefings for President Bush led off with Bible quotes, and Bush himself announced that the goal of the war was to “rid the world of evil“. Such a goal, Aslan notes,

ensures that a cosmic war remains an absolute, eternal, unending, and ultimately unwinnable conflict.

Why would anyone sign up for such a thing? To say that they’re just crazy, or that religion makes people crazy, just excuses our lack of understanding; it explains nothing.

I have a rule of thumb for judging explanations of bizarre behavior. Bad explanations make the explainer feel safe. They explain why he will never do anything like that, not why the other person did. (So: the religion-makes-you-crazy argument comes from Richard Dawkins, an atheist.) Good explanations are a little threatening. They start with motives we all share, and make us realize that everyone is a lot closer to the Abyss than we like to think.

Identity and Globalization. Aslan starts with identity. We all need to have a story about who we are and why our living-and-dying is worthwhile. Identity-stories usually involve boundaries, either physical or metaphorical. (People like me are here; people not like me are over there.) But globalization is breaking boundaries, and so threatening traditional identities.

Take national identity, for example. What does it mean to be English? It used to mean a lot of things: not just that you lived on a particular island, but that you had certain racial and ethnic characteristics; you spoke and thought in English; you probably had an ancestor someplace like Waterloo or Agincourt; you were a Christian who either belonged to or was alienated from the Church of England; you shared cultural heroes like Shakespeare and Newton, and had a strong opinion about Oliver Cromwell. But today, citizenship in the UK (or the EU) implies none of that. Being English is not something you can hang your hat on anymore.

Lots of identities don’t work as well as they used to. You might live half a dozen places in your life and have two or three professions. Over time, you might have more than one spouse, more than one set of children, and a new best friend every five or ten years.

So who are you? What story explains why your living-and-dying is worthwhile? Who will carry on after you’re gone? And even if somebody wanted to, what would they carry on?

A century ago, intellectuals took for granted that religion was a relic. Surely it would fade away as science explained more and more of life’s mysteries, and as increasingly cosmopolitan people realized how parochial their local mythologies were. But the intellectuals failed to grasp something important: The modern world was killing off all the traditional identity stories, and people still needed to identify with something. So religion would thrive in the modern world; and the religions that created the most satisfying identities would thrive best.

Fundamentalism rocks as an identity. Whether you’re a Pentecostal speaking in tongues, an illegal Zionist settler reclaiming Palestine for God’s chosen people, or a jihadist training for martyrdom in the tribal areas of Pakistan — you know who you are. You know who your people are and exactly what they will carry on after you die.

Islamists vs. Jihadists. A second important point of the book is the distinction between Islamists and jihadists. The jihadist is a cosmic warrior. The problems of his fellow Muslims, either locally or far away in Palestine or Iraq, form his identity as a member of an aggrieved community — but his actions are not part of any worldly program to resolve those grievances. Rather, a jihadist acts to demonstrate the power of God, and it is ultimately God who must remake the world and solve its problems.

The Islamist, on the other hand, is motivated by his religion to solve worldly problems through worldly action. Aslan cites the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the ruling Justice and Development Party of Turkey as examples. He sees them evolving into the role that the various Christian Democrat parties play in Europe. Because their goals and methods are of this world, they can compromise and learn to work with non-Muslims.

The key question for the next generation of Muslims is whether they have sufficient hope to reform the world rather than blow it up so that God can start over. Can mere people organize to replace corrupt governments like Mubarak’s in Egypt? Or must they rely on God to topple the whole world order first, starting with the United States?

How to Win. The answer promised by the book’s title is simple: The only way to win a cosmic war is not to fight one. Otherwise, both victory and defeat are apocalyptic myths. And so we must simultaneously resist the efforts of our own fundamentalists to frame the current struggle in cosmic terms, and do whatever we can to break the jihadists’ cosmic-war frame.

Aslan gives a clear picture of how jihadists — like the 7/7 London bombers — are made: First, legitimate local grievances (like the alienation of young British Muslims) are interpreted in religious (not ethnic, racial, or class) terms. Then distant problems (like the oppression of the Palestinians, Chechans, and Kashmiris) are built into an identity as an aggrieved global people. Then the apparent Muslim leaders (clerics, politicians, or tribal sheiks) are portrayed as corrupt collaborators in the current order. And finally an apocalyptic global jihad is presented as the solution.

He recommends disrupting that process at every stage: doing a better job of integrating Muslims into Western society, seeking justice for oppressed peoples worldwide, and working with non-jihadist Muslim leaders rather than regarding all Muslims as potential jihadist sympathizers.

Media Matters collects what the Right is saying about same-sex marriage. Pat Robertson has the clincher:

And what about bestiality? And ultimately, what about child molestation and pedophilia? How can we criminalize these things and at the same time have constitutional amendments allowing same-sex marriage among homosexuals?

A real conundrum, that is. Unless you actually think about it or something.

So it was OK to waterboard a guy over 80 times, but God forbid the guy who could understand what that prick was saying has a boyfriend.