The Weekly Sift

Make haste slowly. -- Caesar Augustus

In this week’s Sift:

• The Unequal Duel. Dick Cheney was speaking at the same time on the same subject, but Obama’s was the only speech worth paying attention to. He’s moving very slowly to define the new relationship between liberty and security — and that’s driving everybody nuts.
• Why It’s Hard to Think Clearly about Social Security. We use several conflicting metaphors to describe Social Security, because of them is quite right. A time trip back to 1937 helps clarify matters.
• Short Notes. Endangered species have no solidarity. Mancow changes his mind. Porn star challenges john for the senate. A few good online interviews. And Colbert on Guantanamo and Yoo.

Thursday, very close to high noon, Dick Cheney [text, video] and President Obama [text, video] both gave speeches about national security. The media couldn’t resist the temptation to frame this as a debate or even a duel. They shouldn’t have. Obama’s speech was a policy address to the nation by the President of the United States, foreshadowing proposals whose details may not emerge for some time. Cheney’s was an encore performance of the golden oldies of right-wing propaganda. (He’s still playing word games that link the Iraq invasion to 9-11.) So I’ll focus on Obama and resist the temptation to give Cheney’s speech the line-by-line refutation it deserves.

This isn’t the best sound bite in Obama’s speech, but I think it’s the place to start:

After 9/11, we knew that we had entered a new era — that enemies who did not abide by any law of war would present new challenges to our application of the law; that our government would need new tools to protect the American people, and that these tools would have to allow us to prevent attacks instead of simply prosecuting those who try to carry them out. Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions. … We’re cleaning up something that is, quite simply, a mess

Since Inauguration Day, Obama has moved quickly on things like the economy. But when it comes to the security/liberty trade-off, he doesn’t want to be “hasty”.

On all sides, that’s driving people nuts. Everyone wants to project ahead and react with alarm to what they see in their crystal balls. Dick Cheney sees “people more concerned about reading the rights to an al-Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States”. Glenn Greenwald sees Obama “extending the ‘preventive detention’ power beyond a handful of Guantanamo detainees to anyone, anywhere in the world, alleged to be a ‘combatant’.” Former Bush OLC director Jack Goldsmith sees a terrorism policy not radically different from Bush’s. Digby sees that “the government can capture and imprison anyone they determine to be ‘the enemy’ forever. The only thing that will change is where the prisoners are held and few little procedural tweaks to make it less capricious.”

Depending on the exact wording of Obama’s proposals and how those proposals will be implemented, any of those futures is still possible. It’s also still possible that Obama will do something fairly reasonable. I’m inclined to trust him, so let me try to put the most reasonable construction on what he said Thursday.

You don’t have to buy into the 9-11-changed-everything rhetoric to admit that Al Qaeda is a different kind of security challenge. It’s stateless, borderless, loosely organized, and though it has few directly-commanded dedicated-for-life soldiers, it has millions of sympathizers and potential recruits. It can’t be conquered like Nazi Germany. Unlike a Mafia family, its violence doesn’t simply protect its profit-making activities; quite the opposite, it raises money for the purpose of doing violence.

Captured Al Qaeda agents, then, are sort of like criminals, sort of like prisoners of war, sort of like foreign spies, and sort of like political prisoners. Laws can be applied to them, but the laws weren’t designed with them in mind. What to do?

The Bush approach was to give up on the law. Instead, he created zones outside the law, where the president could order whatever he thought necessary. Guantanamo was a physical zone outside the law. “Enemy combatant” was a classification outside the law. (Once the president had declared you an enemy combatant, you had no rights of any kind; no one outside the executive branch had the right even to check that you were still alive.) Warrantless wiretapping was an intelligence-gathering system outside the law. The original Bush military tribunal system was a procedural show that could do nothing but rubber-stamp outside-the-law decisions already made. Signing statements and the unitary-executive theory allowed the president to put aside whatever laws he found inconvenient.

That’s the “mess”. The courts have rejected a lot of the Bush system, and will probably reject all of it eventually. And so we have hundreds of people in a legal situation that should never have been allowed to happen: They have been taken outside the domain of law and held there for years. Some of them are probably dangerous and some of them probably believe they are at war with us — so just saying we’re sorry and letting them go seems really stupid. Now we need to figure out some other way to re-admit them into the domain of law.

Obama’s speech does not define exactly what “the rule of law” means to him. But at a minimum, it seems to mean that your judges are independent from your accusers, and that both are part of some organized system recognized by Congress. So far, so good, but that’s pretty vague, and is still open to wild interpretations in many directions.

On the other hand, we’re still only four months into the Obama administration. He doesn’t want to be hasty. Which I guess is OK, if he eventually gets it right.

Every year the trustees put out a report on the current state of the Social Security Trust Fund. There’s always some projected year when the SSTF starts paying out more than it takes in (now 2016), and some later year in which the SSTF’s balance is zero (2037). Every year, this report is followed by headlines about how Social Security is “going broke”. As a result, lots of young people believe that they will never see a dime out of Social Security. I thought that myself when I was 30.

How seriously should we take these fears? Is 2016 or 2037 some kind of crisis point? Do we need to drastically cut benefits, raise the retirement age, or privatize the system in order to save it?

Salon’s Michael Lind does a pretty good job of debunking the worst of the fear-mongering, including pointing out the most common rhetorical trick: Combine Social Security (which is in reasonably good shape) and Medicare (which isn’t) into one big “entitlement crisis” — then ignore Medicare and claim that this crisis forces major changes in Social Security.

In this article I’d like to take one more step back and ask: Why is it so hard to wrap our minds around Social Security, and consequently so easy to fear-monger about it? Looking back, we’ve always discussed Social Security in terms of something we understand better: insurance or pensions or charity or a big collective IRA or even a Ponzi scheme. Al Gore used to talk about putting the SSTF in a “lock box” so that the government couldn’t raid it to pay for other programs.

And that’s the problem: None of these metaphors is exactly right, so if you follow any of them too far, you end up talking nonsense.

Start at the beginning. Social Security comes out of the Great Depression, when even people who had worked hard and been thrifty all their lives might be destitute in old age because a bank or a pension fund went broke. My father once rented a room from a widow who had lost her savings in a bank failure. She had never intended to run a boarding house, but it was her only remaining option. There were lots of people like that, and many didn’t have a house to fall back on.

We sometimes talk about old people being too proud to accept charity, but that was less than half the story. The very idea of it — that no matter what you do, you still might be a charity case when you get old — sent a ripple of fear through all age groups. The public wanted to know that working while they were able would guarantee some kind of security in old age. The Depression had proved that personal savings and private pension funds couldn’t make that guarantee (as many people are rediscovering after the Crash of 2008). Only the government was big enough.

So the charity metaphor was unacceptable from the beginning. And that shows why one proposed solution — means-testing — won’t work. If only losers collect, we’ve missed the point.

The pension-fund metaphor also won’t work, because from the beginning the problem was too immediate. A pension fund is essentially a group savings plan. A large number of people pay in for many years, a trustee invests the money, and the survivors get old-age payments for as long as they live. It takes time to get rolling. But in 1937, the country didn’t have time. So in 1940 the first monthly Social Security check went out to Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vermont. Ida makes a good example, because she had paid in $24.75 during the previous three years, and was already ahead by her second check. She ultimately lived to be 100 and got $22,888.92. A pension fund couldn’t do that. And when younger people retired much later, they didn’t get a “pension” either — because Ida had spent their money already.

That’s why some critics call Social Security a Ponzi scheme — an investment fund that gives high returns by paying current investors the money that comes in from new investors. A Ponzi scheme is a type of fraud — Bernie Madoff is our generation’s Charles Ponzi — which inevitably collapses. But that doesn’t capture Social Security either, because Ponzi schemes collapse by exponential growth. The number of investors necessary to keep the scam going eventually becomes larger than the population of the world, so something has to give. Social Security is more disciplined than that; it grows with the population, not faster. So there’s no mathematical reason why it can’t go on forever.

Insurance is a model that allows some people (like Ida) to take out much more than they put in — like if your house burns down the day after your fire insurance policy takes effect. The insurance metaphor is why you see the acronym FICA on your paychecks: the tax was set up by the Federal Insurance Contributions Act. But Social Security isn’t really insurance either, because Ida very predicably turned 65 on her 65th birthday; it wasn’t an accident.

The macro thing. And then we get to the most mind-straining aspect of Social Security, the macro-economics. This is where Social Security runs into something else that we only sort of understand: money. On a personal level, money seems totally real, and saving it for retirement makes perfect sense: You pile it up while you’re young, then you draw down the pile when you’re old. Simple.

But now imagine that everybody in the world is the same age and that we all save our money for retirement. On the appointed day, we all retire. We all take money out of our pile, go down to the marketplace and buy … nothing. Because nobody’s making anything to buy; we’re all retired.

On a macro level, the money we saved was an illusion. If we had saved clothing or non-perishable food, if we had invested our pre-retirement effort in building shelters that would last the rest of our lives — then we’d have something. But from saving money we have nothing.

Macro-economic issues came up right away. The “Roosevelt Recession” of 1937 — a second dip within the Depression — was blamed in part on Social Security, which had started collecting taxes that year but was paying only death benefits. Retirement checks weren’t supposed to start until 1942, after the SSTF had piled up some money. It sounds sensible, but macro-economic weirdness strikes whenever the government tries to pile up money: It’s an anti-stimulus. Demand drops and the economy shrinks.

So in 1939 Congress speeded up the plan, which is why Ida started getting checks in 1940. The whole point was to avoid having a big balance in the SSTF. Think about that for a second. We’re panicking about the SSTF shrinking; in 1939 they worried about it growing.

The Boomer problem. Congress has fiddled with Social Security’s taxes and benefits many times over the years. The most recent major revision (which happened only months before the trust fund would have gone to zero) came in 1983. The payroll tax was increased and the retirement age gradually raised. (It is 66 and a couple months for me; 67 for everyone born after 1960). The point of doing that was to build up a balance that could be drawn down to pay benefits for the Baby Boomers, whose numbers would have broken the system otherwise.

So why haven’t we been in a Roosevelt Recession ever since? Simple: the rest of the government used up the Social Security surplus by running big deficits. (Raiding Al Gore’s lock box, in other words.) So there is no big pile of money waiting for the Boomers to draw it down. Instead, the SSTF owns a bunch of government bonds.

And this is where it gets confusing. On a personal level, that plan would make perfect sense: You save money for retirement and invest it in T-bills. What could be more sound than that? But on a macro level, it seems like a shell game: The “surplus” that is supposed to fund the Boomers’ retirement consists of one part of the government holding IOUs from another part.

And here’s what nobody explains: Any financial thing we might have done to prepare for the Boomers’ retirement — like a big pile of money in the SSTF — would have been equally dubious. Because (like the everybody-retires fantasy) Boomer retirement is a problem in the real economy, not the money economy.

Forget money. Independent of the paper in anybody’s wallet or the electronic blips in the computers of the Federal Reserve, 20 or 30 years from now there are going to be an unprecedented number of old Americans. Most of them are going to consume more than they produce, because … well, that’s how aging works. A lot of us 80-somethings are going to need surgery, for example, and nobody trusts an 80-something surgeon. We’re also not going to be flying airliners, breaking down the doors of serial killers, pitching for the Yankees, or waiting tables at Hooters.

Younger people are going to have to do all that stuff, and a lot more. As a group, working-age people have always produced more than they consume. Over the next few decades, that phenomenon is going to be a little more extreme. Nothing we can do with money will change that fact.

No matter how much is in the SSTF, the rest of the government is going to have to start running a surplus in not too many years — reversing the tide that’s been running since 1983. That means higher taxes, less spending, and fewer wars. It’s not impossible — Clinton was running a surplus when he left office. And the Social Security outflow will be an economic stimulus on its own, so special stimulus programs should not be necessary.

But there will be pressure to examine our priorities — all of them, not just how committed we are to the idea that hard-working people shouldn’t be poor just because they get old. Lind brings that fact home with this thought experiment:

Suppose that in an alternate Rod Serling universe our other-dimensional twins paid for Pentagon spending on the basis of a dedicated national consumption tax, while they paid for Social Security and Medicare out of general taxation. In that case, opponents of Pentagon spending might have a field day denouncing the gap between the estimated federal consumption tax revenues in, oh, let’s say, 2050 and the military threats they estimate that the U.S. will face in half a century. But in this “Twilight Zone” America, neither Social Security nor Medicare, lacking dedicated taxes, would have “unfunded liabilities” any more than the Pentagon does in our world.

So the real question is: Going forward, what are our priorities as a country? It’s a general problem, not specifically a Social Security problem.

I think this started as a joke, but I’m not sure it still is: Porn star Stormy Daniels has formed an exploratory committee as a first step towards running against Republican Senator David Vitter (of D.C. Madam fame). She’s got a web site and everything. Josh Marshall’s response to the Stormy Daniels Exploratory Committee: “Is that a euphemism?”

In this week’s Sift:

• Which Way is the Economy Going? It depends on whether you focus on stocks or jobs. And the long-term irrationality of the world economy still hasn’t been addressed.
• Who Gets to Audition for the Supremes? The white males who dominate punditry are very upset that white males aren’t being considered for the Supreme Court vacancy.
• Onward Christian Soldiers. Al Qaeda tries to make American soldiers unpopular by calling them “crusaders”. So why are they acting like crusaders?
• The Do-As-I-Say Theory of Teen Sex. Like many mothers of infants, Bristol Palin has discovered abstinence.
• Short Notes. Should I have had children? The demography of religion and politics. Pork and swine flu. Arresting journalists is OK if you’re American. And the iPhone commercial you’ll never see on TV.

Every time I try to write an article about the economy, I run into the problem that I don’t really know what to tell you. Depending on what you look at, you can argue that the economy is headed either up or down. The Dow (see this one-year chart) has already made a considerable rebound: It hit a low of 6440 in early March and (despite a bad day today) is well over 8000 as I write this.

Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke expects the economy to start growing again by the end of this year, while the Fed unemployment projections have it topping out soon and starting to go down slowly in early 2010. The Obama administration is predicting a 3.5% growth rate by the end of 2009.

The problem I have putting it all together is that there are economic problems on many different time scales, a few getting better, some still getting worse.

Inventory. The shortest-term problem has been an inventory correction: When the economy crashed in September, businesses of all sorts realized they had more stuff on the shelves than they could sell, so they stopped ordering new stuff. This happens fairly often even in healthy economies and is nothing to worry about. As long as sales don’t fall to zero, eventually businesses work through their inventory and start ordering again. That’s starting to happen.

Jobs. In April, the economy was still losing a lot of jobs (539,000 of them), but not as fast as in the previous few months. Unemployment is up to 8.9% officially — a 25-year high. It’s even worse if you add in “marginally attached workers” (who would like a job and have looked for one in the recent past, but not recently enough to count in the official rate) and part-time workers who want full-time work but can’t find it. That bumps unemployment up to 15.8%, according to Americans for Democratic Action. A ZNet article on jobs notes the economy needs to generate 127,000 jobs a month just to keep up with our growing population. “In other words, the economy is currently 7.8 million jobs below where it would need to be simply to maintain pre-recession employment rates.”

Bonddad, one of my favorite economic bloggers, notes that average-weekly-hours-worked is still dropping. That’s a bad sign, because a company that is cutting hours is moving towards firing, not towards hiring. You’d expect to see employers increase hours before deciding that they need to hire more workers.

Real estate. Then there’s the housing bubble. Zillow.com reports that Americans lost $704 billion in real estate valuations during the first quarter, and that 21.9% of homeowners have negative equity. Their real-estate index is down 21.8% from its peak in 2006. The good news — and this is pretty thin for good news — is that the cities where the real estate crash started are now falling more slowly. “It’s quite a statement of current market conditions when the good news is that the bad news isn’t getting worse.”

Banks. The best news is that talk about the banking system collapsing has subsided. in the last few months, some of the best gainers in the stock market have been the big banks. A share of Citigroup was briefly below $1 in March, and is now up around $4. (Of course, it was over $50 in 2007.) You can say a lot of bad things about TARP, but in September there was a real look-out-below moment when Great Depression II seemed very likely. That seems to have passsed.

The dollar and the deficits. On a much longer time scale, though, the world economy has been doing something fundamentally unsound for a long time. The United States has a huge budget deficit and trade deficit. In the simplest possible terms, that means that the U.S. government prints dollars, which go overseas in exchange for things like sneakers and TVs. Ordinarily that would cause inflation as foreigners shipped those dollars back to America. But instead, they have been trading that paper for more paper: U.S. government bonds.

In other words, foreigners have been content to keep their savings in American paper, and haven’t demanded that we take that paper back in exchange for anything tangible. And as long as they are all content, they have every reason to be content. It’s a Yossarian Paradox. (In Catch 22, people keep asking Yossarian “What if everybody thought the way you do?” And he answers, “Then I’d be a damn fool to think any other way.”) But if significant numbers of them were ever to worry that something awful might happen to the dollar, then something awful would happen to the dollar. Maybe that will happen tomorrow, maybe 20 years from now.

The worrisome thing is that the different time scales conflict. Short term, the government needs to run a huge deficit to keep the economy going until the inventory correction is over and the housing bubble has stabilized. But it makes the long-term dollar problem worse.

As the Mainstream Media Village considers the prospect that somebody other than a white male might be appointed to the Supreme Court, wagons are beginning to circle. WaPo’s Richard Cohen protests that such affirmative action is a relic of a bygone era:

For most Americans, race has become supremely irrelevant. Everyone knows this. Every poll shows this.

Yeah. That’s why the Obama Waffles joke was so funny. And the Obama monkey. Atrios comments:

When the white guy is chosen, all of the people who bemoan the evils of affirmative action nod and clap at how “qualified” he is, despite the fact that generally white men are the greatest beneficiaries of various forms of affirmative action in this society, from inherited wealth and privilege, to the good old boys’ club, and to, of course, fluffing by our media.

As we all know, a white man has to be over-qualified and razor-sharp to make it in this politically correct world. If you don’t believe me, look at George W. Bush. Or ask Digby, who also has her sarcasm dial set to 11:

After all, the women and the minorities are just overflowing the Supreme Court with unqualified losers and the poor white guys can’t catch a break.

So far, 43 out of 44 presidents and 106 out of 110 Supreme Court justices have been white males. Draw your own conclusions.

Ezra Klein disputes the whole most-qualified-individual premise:

[The Court] is responsible for a country that’s 51 percent female and whose law graduates are 48 percent female. Its highest profile cases revolve exclusively around things that happen in a woman’s body. If we were aware of those facts and were stocking the Court from scratch, there is no doubt that we would strive for more gender balance. Viewed from that perspective, the situation clarifies considerably. The reason white men are disadvantaged in this nomination process is pretty simple: They are not, right now, what the Court needs. They are not the best candidates for the job.

Maybe a sports analogy will help guys grasp this point: If a basketball team played the best five individuals it could find, it might wind up with five centers or five point guards. The team would suck.

Let’s put Alan Page on the list, too. As a justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court and the leader of the Vikings’ famous Purple People Eater defense of the 1970s, Page could continue the Court’s Whizzer White tradition. He would also represent a different kind of affirmative action: I don’t think a defensive player or a lineman has ever been appointed to the Court.

Back in February, Bristol Palin’s interview on Fox News ventured beyond the prepared talking points, and she made an uncommon amount of sense: “Everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it’s not realistic at all.”

I guess the deprogrammers are finished with her now, because now she’s back on message:

I just want to go out there and just promote abstinence, and just say “This is the safest choice. This is the choice that’s going to prevent teen pregnancy and prevent a lot of heartache.”

Naturally, the best person to tell you you’re full of crap is your ex. Levi Johnston (who is getting bonus time on his 15 minutes of fame) says:

I don’t just think telling young kids: “You can’t have sex” — it’s not going to work. It’s not realistic.

The NYT’s Gail Collins shares my horror:

If you have ever watched Levi Johnston on TV for two minutes you will appreciate how terrifying it is when he has the most reasonable analysis of a social issue.

But then Collins goes too far. She has the bad taste to bring facts into the discussion:

while encouraging kids to wait is obviously fine, the evidence is pretty clear that abstinence education is worse than useless. Texas, where virtually all the schools teach abstinence and abstinence alone, is a teen pregnancy disaster zone.

The alternative is to teach kids about birth control, so that the ones who do have sex won’t necessarily make babies. But according to the Right, that is a “mixed message”. Apparently they think any message more complicated than “No” just won’t fit into a teen-ager’s tiny brain.

I guess Bristol’s message sounds clear to them. Here’s how Collins sums up the moral of the Bristol’s-baby saga, as presented at the Republican Convention:

If your handsome but somewhat thuglike boyfriend gets you with child, he will clean up nicely, propose marriage, and show up at an important family event wearing a suit and holding your hand. At which point you will get a standing ovation.

Even now that Levi is history, Bristol thinks her baby is “wonderful” and “a blessing”, even if he is “a lot of work”. She isn’t sorry she has him, she just wishes she’d “waited” — about ten years, according to her Fox News interview. (Waited ten years with Levi? Or if without him, how would that be the same baby?)

That’s the abstinence message in a nutshell: Babies and sex are like pieces of chocolate cake that you can’t eat until you finish your lima beans. At a time in your life when fifth period seems like it will never end, you should swear off that chocolate cake for a decade or so. Because babies are a lot of work and … I guess you’re too lazy and stupid to deal with them.

Was there ever a message better designed to provoke an “I’m going to prove them wrong” response? I wonder about the people who compose these “unmixed” messages and convince the Bristol Palins to repeat them. Were they ever teen-agers? Have they ever listened to a teen-ager?

The key, honestly, is communication between parents and children. … Unfortunately, Republicans typically don’t like to discuss or deal with things they think are wrong or immoral. And that’s a huge mistake. If we can’t discuss birth control in addition to abstinence, and in a nonjudgmental way, kids will continue to make bad choices for lack of having access to informed, safe options. … [T]he GOP continues to struggle with open communication about serious issues most people deal with rationally, and on a regular basis. Unless we learn how to integrate that kind of discussion, our party will continue its descent into irrelevance.

In addition to my current-events blogging, I also write a column for the UU World web site. My day-after-Mother’s-Day column is about not being a parent, and how that decision looks as my friends’ daughter gets ready to graduate from high school.

Using demographic data, Bowers then projects the future size of each of these groups, and comes to the conclusion that each will be about 1/4 of the electorate by 2032, with both non-Christians and non-white Christians passing the white evangelicals. In 2032, white traditionals are still the largest group, but down to 27%.

Combined, the two strongly Democratic groups, non-Christians and non-white Christians, should increase from 39% to about 52% of the electorate between now and 2032. A shift like that would add another 10% to the Democratic margin if partisan preferences within the groups remain the same.

This underlines a point I was making last week: Long-term, Republicans really need to start appealing to Hispanics. Blaming all our problems on Mexican immigrants is one of the dumbest things they could be doing.

Glenn Greenwald notes how different this result (and its surrounding publicity) is from the cases of journalists arrested by Americans. Sudanese cameraman Sami al-Haj was working for Al Jazeera when he was arrested in Pakistan and shipped to Guantanamo. He stayed there for six years with no trial of any kind. Bilal Hussein was a photographer for Associated Press until we arrested him in Iraq and held him for two years without charges. We still refuse to release Reuters photographer Ibrahim Jassam Mohammed even after an Iraqi court has ruled that there is no evidence against him.

“In the space of a week,” writes Scott Horton, “the torture debate in America has been suddenly transformed.”

The instrument of that transformation is the Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody report that the Senate Armed Services Committee released on Tuesday.

If you’ve been following this story on the Sift over the last year or so, and clicking the links out to reporting by people like Phillippe Sands and Jane Mayer, you may wonder what is so remarkable — because the story told by the Senate report is not new. But the significance of the Senate report is its authority and authenticity. Until now, if you didn’t want to believe that torture of detainees was a real problem, you could point to the anonymous sources in Sands’, Mayer’s, and Seymour Hersh’s reports and say they were making it all up; it was just a bunch of left-wing propaganda from the Bush-haters.

You can’t do that any more. The Armed Services Comrmittee included Republicans like John McCain, John Warner, Elizabeth Dole, and Lindsey Graham. (The report was finished by the previous Senate, in November.) It reviewed “more than 200,000 pages of classified and unclassified documents” and interviewed over 70 individuals, some under subpoena. This the most authoritative document on torture we currently have.

And — together with the testimony of newly emboldened officials who are saying in public what they previously said only off the record — it absolutely destroys the layers of disinformation that the Bush administration laid down to protect itself. Let’s take those layers one by one.

It’s not torture. President Bush said it outright in 2007: “This government does not torture people. We stick to U.S. law and our international obligations.” And Dick Cheney said in December: “We don’t do torture. We never have.” For the longest time, simply saying the word torture marked you as part of the liberal fringe. It was OK to talk about enhanced interrogation or to use euphemisms like “the gloves came off,” but not torture.

As long as the techniques were not described in detail, you could tell yourself it wasn’t really torture. Rush Limbaugh minimized it like this: “If a few terrorists get slapped around or sprinkled with water or lack air conditioning to protect us from further attacks, we can live with it.” Joe Lieberman said waterboarding was “not like putting burning coals on people’s bodies.” (Like that’s the standard.)

Well, the not-torture argument has fallen apart. In a report written in February 2007 but just leaked a few weeks ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross repeated what it had heard from 14 detainees — descriptions that now closely match the techniques OK’d in the Bybee memo — and said that this treatment “amounted to torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” The Senate report quotes a CIA lawyer as saying in 2002: “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

Now that the American people have heard about slamming people’s heads into walls, stuffing them into boxes, soaking them in cold water and leaving them to shiver in chilly cells, and waterboarding them as much as 183 times in a month — and from Bush administration memos, not liberal reporters — you can’t make those mental images go away with Orwellian Newspeak like enhanced interrogation.

Even House Republican leader John Boehner said the newly released memos outlined “torture techniques”. (His spokeman tried to back away from those words later.) George Will (full quote to come) somewhat apologetically referred to “torture, if you will”. Increasingly, refusing to call these techniques torture marks you as part of the conservative fringe.

Even if it is torture, it’s not policy. This is the “few bad apples” defense that the Bush administration used after the Abu Ghraib photos came out. The Senate report:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. … Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there.

Even if it is a policy of torture, it’s legal. This was the gist of the John Yoo memos: The president’s power as commander-in-chief trumps all treaties, laws, and even the Bill of Rights. So if the president wants to order torture, fine.

As long as Yoo’s memos were secret, people in the government could vaguely tell each other that the lawyers said the techniques were OK. You could almost imagine that some legal wizardry really did squeeze them into the letter of the law. But when the memos started coming out in 2004, the low quality of Yoo’s reasoning was obvious to everyone. Jack Balkin called them “arguments that make you ashamed to be a lawyer.” NYT reporter Anthony Lewis wrote:

The memos read like the advice of a mob lawyer to a mafia don on how to skirt the law and stay out of prison.

There was, in fact, no other reason to classify the Yoo torture memos. They didn’t mention any specific interrogation techniques or contain any other information that would help our enemies. The “secret” was the sheer brazenness with which Yoo declared the law to be whatever the President wanted it to be.

We’ve found out since that competent lawyers were working for the government as well, and that circumventing their accurate analysis required all of David Addington’s bureaucratic cleverness. The military judge advocate generals (JAGs) were uniformly opposed to torture. Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora tried to get the torture tactics rescinded, and thought for a while that he had succeeded. State Department lawyer (and 9-11 Commission executive director) Philip Zelikow wrote a memo dissenting from the Bush administration torture memos. He reports: “The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo.”

Why would they do that? The Anonymous Liberal explains:

The only reason to collect and destroy all copies of this memo would be in order to preserve, for as many Bush administration officials as possible, a potential defense against later prosecution. If the extent of these activities ever became public and investigations were commenced, the White House wanted to be able to argue that everyone involved relied in good faith on the advice of counsel. That defense would be severely undermined if it could be shown that these officials were warned, by a lawyer of Zelikow’s caliber and rank within the administration, that the legal arguments they were relying on were poorly reasoned and unlikely to be sustained by a court.

Attempting to destroy all copies of Zelikow’s memo, in other words, is evidence of bad faith. They knew they were wrong.

Even if it’s illegal, it’s necessary. This is the “ticking time bomb” argument. Michael Scheuer (the former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit) made that argument yesterday in the Washington Post. (I feel bad about Scheuer. I learned a lot from his 2004 book Imperial Hubris, but he’s been getting wiggier and wiggier ever since.)

Here’s the problem with that argument: There has never been any reason to believe that torture is an effective interrogation strategy. The Senate report makes it painstakingly clear that our torture program was never even designed to be an interrogation strategy. The torture techniques come from the SERE school, which mimicks a Chinese program designed to get false confessions. (That same Chinese program is the root of the classic Cold War novel The Manchurian Candidate. It’s about brainwashing, not getting information.) SERE trains our own soldiers to withstand a Chinese-style brainwash. But it was always a school for the potential victims of torture, not a school for interrogators. The SERE techniques were brought into interrogations largely over the objections of trained interrogators.

Unsurprisingly, then, the McClatchy newspapers report:

The CIA inspector general in 2004 found that there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any “specific imminent attacks,” according to recently declassified Justice Department memos.

Even more damning was an article by FBI interrogator Ali Soufan published in the New York Times on Thursday.

For seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding.

Using only standard FBI interrogation tactics, Soufan and another agent questioned Abu Zubaydah, the suspected terrorist whose interrogation became the subject of a Jay Bybee memo. Bybee wrote: “The interrogation team is certain that he has additional information that he refuses to divulge.” Quite the opposite, Soufan writes that Abu Zubaydah was cooperating.

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified.

Even if it’s illegal and unnecessary, it only hurts people who deserve it. Karl Rove was making this point in 2005 when he said: “Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to … offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.” No politician wants to go before the voters as a defender of terrorists’ rights.

But until detainees have been through some kind of legal process, they’re just suspects. And sometimes they turn out to be innocent, like Maher Arar, the Canadian we arrested while he was changing planes in New York and shipped off to Syria to be tortured. Our mistake cost him a little more than a year of his life. Or like Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen we abducted in Macedonia and held for four months in Afghanistan. (He had just argued with his wife, who — when he seemed to vanish into thin air — assumed he had left her and their four children.) In The Dark Side, Mayer reports: “Almost from the first moments that the CIA took custody of him, some Agency officials suspected that Masri was innocent. Yet for months they subjected him to unsparing abuse anyway.”

Finally, this story: A soldier in Iraq killed herself after refusing to participate in abusive interrogations. The Army covered it up.

Even if it’s illegal, unnecessary, and hurts innocent people, it doesn’t hurt ordinary Americans. Soufan points out one of the ways that torture makes us all less safe: It reconstructed the wall between the CIA and the FBI that the 9-11 Commission tried to tear down. Because the FBI’s purpose is to send criminals to prison under the law, an FBI investigation needs to be untainted by techniques that would get the whole case thrown out of court.

Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him. … Almost all the agency officials I worked with on these issues were good people who felt as I did about the use of enhanced techniques: it is un-American, ineffective and harmful to our national security.

The Senate report is very clear about how we’ve been hurt by our abusive interrogation tactics:

Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.

This judgment about our “moral authority” flies in the face of another standard argument, made often by Dick Cheney and as recently as last Sunday by George Will:

Rahm Emanuel said that the terrorists use our enhanced interrogation — torture, if you will — as a rallying cry. [But] before we had this enhanced interrogation, we had the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the attacks on the East African embassies. We had the bombing of the Cole. The terrorists weren’t waiting to be incited.

Where to start with this? First, note the hidden assumption that prior to torture America had done nothing to incite anyone. We were just minding our own imperial business, and then 9-11 happened out of the blue. But in The Accidental Guerrilla, counterterrorism expert David Kilcullen makes the opposite argument: Most of the enemies we face are “accidental” — they were the ones minding their own business when we blundered into their territory chasing terrorists.

Even if it’s illegal, unnecessary, hurts innocent people, and makes us all less safe, no one should be held accountable. This is the point that is still under argument. For example, Senators Graham, McCain, and Lieberman have issued a statement asking the administration not to prosecute the lawyers who wrote the torture memos:

Providing poor legal advice is always undesirable, and the Department of Justice is currently conducting an internal ethics review of the OLC memos, but that is a quite a different matter from making legal advice with which we may disagree into a crime.

This line of defense is no more credible than any of the others. In fact, no one is saying that bad-but-honest legal advice or bad-but-honest policy advice of any kind should be criminal. In order to prosecute someone like John Yoo or Jay Bybee, you’d need to show bad faith: that they knew they were giving bogus advice that facilitated the administration’s law-breaking. Bad faith is hard to prove, but the fact that the administration destroyed memos and lost emails is awfully suspicious. Who knows what we’d find if we did a serious investigation?

Jim White of Oxdown Gazette nailed this argument back in February:

there would be no need to “criminalize policy differences” with the Bush Administration if the policies themselves were not crimes. Torture is not a policy difference, it is a crime. Wiretapping without a warrant is not a policy difference, it is a crime. … To complete the inversion of logic here, now note that since there are indeed crimes that have been committed by the Bush Administration, when there is a call not to prosecute because Bush was the President and he and his minions were acting “for the good of the country”, this is actually a call to inject a political consideration [my emphasis] into the decision of whether to prosecute.

The way to keep politics out of the legal process is to do what Colin Powell’s former chief of staff wants: appoint a special prosecutor and let him or her follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Even over at Fox News, support for torture is starting to unravel: During the “Freedom Watch” segment Wednesday, Shepard Smith completely lost it on the air. After listening to a colleague make the point that torture helps keep us safe, Smith repeatedly slaps the desk for emphasis as he says:

We. Are. America. I don’t give a rat’s ass if it helps. We are America! We do not fucking torture! We don’t do it.

we were focused on trying to establish a link between AI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful … The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate resuIts.

This is the real nightmare scenario — torturing people until they say things to support the torturer’s delusions. It’s lose-lose in every direction.

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Short Notes

The new kids on my block. My apartment building is right next to Mine Falls Park (pictured), so one couple in my neighborhood is a mating pair of swans. They tell me that it’s nesting season, and that they expect to hear the splish-splash of little cygnets any day now.

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If you’ve never seen a straight steal of home, you weren’t watching the Red Sox and Yankees last night.

In this week’s Sift:

• Obama Disappoints on Secrecy. In two important cases, he has reaffirmed Bush’s precedents rather than rejecting them.
• The Gathering Storm of Conservative Victimhood. A new ad shows how the Religious Right plans to oppose gay rights going forward. But the “rights” they claim to be losing were already rejected in Greensboro in 1960.
• Untruth and Consequences. If you report the truth and it sets off some violent whacko, that’s not your fault. But if you set off the crazies by making stuff up, then maybe it is your fault.
• Short Notes. Why Palin will never be president. Ted’s still got it at Fenway. Will Franken ever get to occupy the senate seat he won? It’s official: protesters aren’t terrorists. My limited sympathy for Ted Stevens. Tracking the decline of newspapers. How other countries handle criminal leaders. And the ultimate small car from GM and Segway.

Obama Disappoints on Secrecy

The wars and the economy get all the headlines, but an equally important issue President Obama has inherited is executive power. The Bush administration put forward two principles (I’m stating them in my own words, but I believe I’m doing it fairly) that may sound reasonable individually, but taken together are very dangerous:

• By making the president commander-in-chief, the Constitution gives him the power to conduct a war without interference from the other branches of government.
• It is up to the president to decide (again without interference) what situations are part of an ongoing war.

Taken together, these principles imply that in wartime (and Congress has at least recognized and accepted that we are at war, even if war has never been formally declared), the president has unchecked power whenever he decides that he has unchecked power. It’s a roadmap for dictatorship, no matter whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat.

Many of us have hoped that President Obama would announce a new doctrine of executive power, one that would consign the Bush ideas to a “bad old days” that should never return. (Of course, the ultimate way to reject the Bush/Cheney power claim is to prosecute Bush and Cheney for war crimes. Future presidents would have to take account of that.) He hasn’t done so yet, and that has left us trying to read the tea leaves whenever he makes any decision related to executive power.

One recent leaf comes from the warrantless wiretapping issue. The Bush administration, with help from key Democrats in Congress, had managed to close off nearly every avenue for investigating this program, which on the face of it appears to be illegal. The one remaining chink in the program’s armor was a lawsuit that the Electronic Frontier Foundation had filed against the NSA. Raw Story reports:

In their filing Friday, the Justice Department argued that the case should be dismissed because information surrounding the program was a “state secret” and therefore couldn’t be litigated or discussed. It also proposed that the government was protected by “sovereign immunity” under federal wiretapping statutes and the Patriot Act, arguing that the United States could only face lawsuits if they willfully elected to disclose intelligence obtained by wiretapping.

So Obama is not only trying to close the final door on accountability for illegal wiretapping, he is doing so by invoking the state secrets privilege, something he criticized the Bush administration for abusing.

Another tea leaf is the administration’s effort to make the Baghram prison in Afghanistan the same kind of legal black hole as Guantanamo was under Bush — a place where suspects can be detained without any oversight or hearing.

During the Bush administration, some on the Right thought that executive power was purely a partisan issue, and that the Left would rally around a liberal president who made the same claims. It’s not happening. On both Baghram and state secrets, Glenn Greenwald having the kind of reaction that got him the nickname Glenzilla . Keith Olbermann is having a fit (video, transcript) as well. They’re not alone.

I’m sure Glenn and Keith and all the other liberal bloggers and pundits want to root for Obama, and everyone realizes that he is juggling a lot of important issues right now. But a Democratic Congress failed in its duty to impeach Bush when he broke the law. If a Democratic president now fails to reverse his policies, the effect will be a permanent change in the relationship between the branches of government. It’s not enough for Obama to try to use the Bush powers responsibly. If he leaves them intact, some future president will use them irresponsibly.

OK, here’s one good tea leaf to read: CIA Director Leon Panetta says the secret prisons have been shut down.

And not everybody reads the tea leaves the same way. See Obama supporters here and here.

The Gathering Storm of Conservative Victimhood

One of the few conservative successes in 2008 was Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage illegal again in California. They did it with a change of tactics, which they are now trying to take national. The first tactic against same-sex marriage was to laugh it off — the idea was absurd; people proposing it couldn’t be serious.

When it started becoming reality in places like Massachusetts (then Connecticut, Iowa, and now Vermont — by an act of the legislature, unprompted by the courts), the second tactic was apocalyptic: “The family as it has been known for more than five millennia will crumble,” prophesied James Dobson in 2004, “presaging the fall of Western civilization itself.”

But that message is less and less effective as it becomes clear that Massachusetts families are doing no worse than any others — better than Bible Belt families, by most statistics. Boston continues to be a center of civilization. Entire countries — Canada, for example — have married Adam to Steve with no sign of apocalypse.

Worse (from the Right’s point of view), the public is beginning to sympathize with same-sex couples, to see them as real people trying live their lives rather than as monsters intent on seeding moral chaos. The Courage Campaign’s “Don’t Divorce Us” video was a powerful weapon against Proposition 8.

And so we’re into the third round of tactics: claiming victimhood. This approach asserts that protecting gay rights means taking rights away from conservative Christians. Salon reports on a new ad called “The Gathering Storm” full of that-ain’t-right sound bites that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

For example, one of the characters in “The Gathering Storm” says: “I am a New Jersey church group punished by the government because we can’t support same-sex marriage.”

Not exactly. You should smell something fishy right away, because New Jersey doesn’t have same-sex marriage. The reference is to a the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, a Methodist group in New Jersey. The LA Times explains that the OGCMA

Most of the claims along these lines are similar. The “right” being violated is like the “right” of the Greensboro Woolworths not to serve blacks at its lunch counter. Like Woolworths in 1960, the Religious Right is arguing that it can define “the public” in such a way that some group is not part of it.

No.

Stanley Fish asks nails this one: “When a professional hangs out his shingle doesn’t he offer his services and skills to the public and not just to members of it who share his morality?”

And so I say an equal “no” to the professional photographer who won’t work at a same-sex reception, the marriage counselor who won’t help same-sex couples stay together, and the fertility doctor who won’t help lesbians get pregnant. You don’t get to define the public. That “right” can’t be taken away from you because it was never a right to begin with.

Untruth and Consequences

It’s tempting to point to all the recent shootings as evidence for my past claim that we’re going to see an upswing in right-wing violence. But it’s not quite that simple: Of the recent incidents, only Richard Poplawski’s shooting of three Pittsburgh police officers seems to be politically motivated. Poplawski was a heavily armed 22-year-old white supremacist who believed all sorts of conspiracy theories. Comments Gary Kamiya at Salon:

Poplawski’s black-helicopter and anti-Semitic ravings put him at the outer edge of the right. But his paranoid fear that Obama was going to take away his AK-47 is mainstream among conservatives. That fear, fomented by the NRA and echoed by right-wing commentators from Lou Dobbs to Limbaugh, is ubiquitous online.

A lot of conclusions might be drawn here, but this is the one that strikes me: There are consequences to making stuff up and promoting it to the public as if it were true.

In any well-informed free society, you have to live with the possibility that some nutcase might have an extreme reaction to the news. If a Poplawski sees a headline about our trillion-dollar deficit and decides he has to kill somebody, what can you do (other than try to give our officials good security)? We do have a trillion-dollar deficit, and people should know about it.

But a considerable effort goes into manufacturing hysteria on the right, by pushing stories that have no basis in fact. Such as, Obama is going to:

• replace the dollar with an international currency
• take away our guns
• shut down right-wing talk radio by reinstituting the Fairness Doctrine
• or shut it down through local content rules (“Christian radio stations will be saddled with local Muslim ‘advisory boards’ demanding equal time and getting it.”)
• gut the military (in fact Obama proposes an increase in the defense budget as Stephen Colbert explains)
• use your tax dollars to build a train from Disneyland to a brothel in Nevada
• send American young people to mandatory “re-education camps” to be “trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward”
• rig the census (in the words of RNC Chair Michael Steele) “to create permanent liberal control of the federal government”

And not that he could do it or might do it or we’re afraid he’ll do it — he’s doing it. If you’re going to stop him you have to act now.

In addition to the Obama myths are the nefarious activities attributed to liberal groups like ACORN, which was the object of vote fraud smears during the 2008 campaign, and is part of the “rig the census” charge. (ACORN is one of 250 groups helping the government recruit the 1.4 million temporary workers the census needs.) Did you know that ACORN is going to get $4 billion from the stimulus bill? (Nope.) Or that ACORN is sending in undercover agents to disrupt the conservative “tea party” protests? (Nuh-uh. If you don’t know what a tea party protest is, you’re in the same boat as ACORN’s leaders.)

These imaginary stories are then fanned with inflamed rhetoric about taking back America and revolution. Congresswoman Michelle Bachman: “There is no free country for us to repair to. That’s why it’s up to us now.” Glenn Beck: Obama is a “bloodsucker” and can only be stopped with “a stake through the heart”.

None of these Republican politicians and conservative media celebrities is saying “go shoot somebody”. Driving a stake through Obama’s heart is — you knew this, right? — a metaphor. And talk about poisoning Justice Stevens was “just a joke”. But they have to know that the right-wing fringe includes a lot of Richard Poplawskis and James Adkissons and Timothy McVeighs. (The Left has its own nutcases, but ours are more likely to hit you with a cruciatus curse than to blow you away with an AK-47.) It’s not hard to guess what such people will do when they swallow what they’re being fed.

I’ve long believed that conservatives look on the news cycle as a kind of game, where you win by getting people to believe and talk about stories that help you and hurt your opponents. But it’s not a game. Untruth has consequences.

BTW, if you want to know why liberals can’t discuss the teabag protests without cracking a smile, DailyKos TV explains — with help from Sex and the City. That’s why Rachel Maddow can barely keep from dissolving into laughter, while Jon Stewart just seems embarrassed by it all.

I have to give Glenn Beck this much credit: In this segment, he exercises a little quality control on the lunatic fringe. He debunks the YouTube videos claiming to show FEMA’s concentration camps.

TPM readers who worked on the 2000 census are worried what might happen to census workers if they’re perceived as part of some left-wing plot.

Short Notes

Ted Kennedy doesn’t walk smoothly any more, and his attempt to throw out the first pitch at Fenway Park Tuesday didn’t go very far. But he’s still got the Kennedy smile.

Now that we’ve had a count, a recount, a review by the Board of Elections, and now a ruling by a three-judge panel, is it finally time for Norm Coleman to admit that he lost the Minnesota senate race and let Al Franken take his seat? Even many conservatives are finally urging him to give up.

Matt Yglesias makes a persuasive case that car sales have to perk up soon: At the current sales rate, it would take more than 25 years to replace the cars on the road.

Peru just convicted its former president Alberto Fujimori of authorizing a death squad against the Shining Path insurgents. The court sentenced him to 25 years. Digby comments:

On the other hand, we’re doing better than Zimbabwe:

Now that his felony convictions have been thrown out due to misconduct by the Bush Justice Department, former Republican Senator Ted Stevens is receiving an outpowering of sympathy, including Gov. Palin’s call for a special election so that he can win his Senate seat back.

Everybody needs to take a breath. You know who else is free because of prosecutor misconduct? Bill Ayers. Getting off on a technicality doesn’t mean you’re innocent.

Speaking of Palin, lately we’ve been seeing the main reason why she will never be president: She doesn’t have the temperament for it. National politicians need to have thick skins, and to know when a fight is beneath their dignity. Palin doesn’t. That’s what the Troopergate story showed: Becoming governor was just a new way to pursue a family vendetta, not a mandate to rise above it.

The recent example of this character flaw is her reaction to the media tour by Levi Johnston and his family. A savvy politician would have either ignored it or released an above-it-all statement recognizing that the Johnstons were bound to tell the story in their own way. Salon’s Rebecca Traister comments:

She struck back again after Levi told CBS that the Palins were “snobby”. And now she’s in a public cat-fight with a family that feels it has to deny being “white trash”.

The RNC 8 are would-be protesters who face felony charges because of their “conspiracy” to “disrupt” last September’s Republican Convention in Minneapolis. The good news: terrorism charges against them have been dropped. You can watch their arrest in September.

You can track the ongoing demise of the newspaper industry through the blog Paper Cuts. Salon has an article about the effort to fund investigative journalism through non-profits. It also contains this interesting observation:

In this week’s Sift:

• Obama’s New Afghanistan Policy. I read The Accidental Guerrilla to get a handle on the ideas behind it.
• Looming Right-wing Violence II: Bachman Overdrive. Did you know that Obama is about to replace the dollar with a global one-world currency? That we need a revolution if we’re not going to lose our country? That the American people should be armed and dangerous? That we have to make a stand here, because there are no other free countries in the world? Me neither, but Congresswoman Michelle Bachman knows these things. And she’s taken seriously by the right-wing media.
• Short Notes. A not-so-happy anniversary for the labor movement. Trash-talk about Michelle Obama. Big Agriculture wants pesticides on the White House garden. Cool British names. An AIG executive’s appeal for sympathy. And more.

For years, the Afghan War has been like a godmotherless Cinderella. This is the deserving war, the one whose connection to 9/11 was more than just propaganda. And yet our effort in Afghanistan has had to scrimp along with whatever resources we had left after showering everything on its undeserving step-sister, Iraq.

Now the Obama administration is trying to change course in Afghanistan, using many of the same counter-insurgency ideas behind the Surge in Iraq. It’s way too early to tell how well this will turn out, but in an effort to understand at least what it’s trying to accomplish, I’ve been reading the new book The Accidental Guerrilla by counter-insurgency guru David Kilcullen.

Kilcullen, an Australian on loan to the U.S. military, doesn’t pigeonhole neatly as a liberal or conservative. For example, he writes things like this:

Iraq represents a cautionary example of exactly the type of conflict we need to avoid if we wish to successfully defeat the threat of takfiri* terrorism. … The Surge worked: but in the final analysis, it was an effort to save ourselves from the more desperate consequences of a situation we should never have gotten ourselves into.

*[takfiri is Kilcullen’s chosen label for al Qaeda’s beliefs. Literally, it refers to the willingness to change another person’s religion by force. He prefers this term to jihadi or mujahidin because those words have positive connotations in Muslim culture — just as crusader has a positive connotation in the West. But Takfirism is recognized as a heresy by most Muslims.]

The easiest way I can think to explain Kilcullen’s approach is to describe what he thinks we’ve been doing wrong in the Global War on Terror so far.

Killing Bad Guys Instead of Protecting the People. Kilcullen refers to our previous strategy as the “enemy-centered” approach. The problem: Smart enemies lead you on a merry chase through vulnerable areas, and you get blamed for the trail of destruction left behind. The people turn against you, and the enemy is able to recruit far more fighters than you’ve been able to kill. (Kilcullen’s “accidental guerrillas” are the people whose concerns are local or personal, but who get swept up into the global insurgency by the course of events.)

What’s more, insurgents only need occasional access to a village in order to intimidate its leaders into cooperation. Local leaders will side with the central government over the insurgents only if they are convinced that the government can protect them 24/7. So rather than sending troops out on search-and-destroy missions, Kilcullen wants them close to the villages where people can see them as protectors rather than raiders.

Helping the Enemy Unite. When we lump all the “bad guys” together, as the Bush administration did with its war-on-terror rhetoric, we give our enemies a unity that otherwise they would be hard pressed to achieve. Bin Laden is the one who wants to make One Big War out of the Chechan conflict, the Palestinian insurgency, the struggle for Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Danish Mohammed cartoons, the French headscarf controversy, and so forth. Al Qaeda wants to convince every Muslim with a grievance against his local government that he is a victim of American/Zionist/Western imperialism. We should be trying to dis-aggregate these conflicts, and separate the al Qaeda global insurgency from the local and personal issues (“they killed my cousin”) that cause the masses to take up arms.

Even worse than the Bush administration are the right-wingers who argue that Islam is the enemy. (More extreme version here.) Muslims haven’t been united since the era of the Arabian Nights, but we might be able to unify them if we declare Islam to be the enemy. Heck, why stop there? Why not declare Allah to be the enemy?

Using Firepower Instead of Troops. This is the classic imperial mistake. When you aren’t willing to commit enough troops to fight an insurgency, it’s very tempting to compensate by blowing more stuff up. When you outnumber the insurgents, you can take them out at relatively close quarters, and maybe only kill the people who are actually shooting at you. But if they outnumber you, you’re more likely to call in an air strike against a sniper and maybe kill a few dozen innocents — all of whom have relatives who may decide they now are now honor-bound to take revenge on you.

Believing the Lines on Our Maps. Here’s one thing Afghanistan and Iraq have in common: The British drew the border, and it signifies nothing. The dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan (around 40% of the population) is the Pashtuns, and the border with Pakistan (the Durand Line, named for the Brit who drew it) cuts right through their territory. So you’ve got 26 million Pashtuns in Pakistan and 13 million in Afghanistan, more or less.

Kilcullen argues that the Taliban is not so much an Afghan or Pakistani or Muslim insurgency as it is a Pashtun insurgency. We overthrew the Taliban in 2001 by backing the Northern Alliance, made up mostly of Tajiks and Uzbeks. (You can visualize the situation by looking at Wikipedia’s demographic map of Afghanistan: the Tajiks and Uzbeks are in the north, the Pashtuns in the south, next to Pakistan.) So the quest for an Afghan solution is hopeless without a Pashtun solution that includes the 26 million in Pakistan.

You can see all these ideas represented in one way or another in the Obama plan: more troops, a regional Afghan/Pakistani framing, more talk about protecting the population. I find myself convinced this far: If you’re going to fight the Afghan War at all, this is how you have to do it.

The problem is that it’s a long hard slog. The enemy-centered strategy projected the mirage that we might kill all our enemies quickly and be done. (Seven years after capturing Kabul, we’ve killed a lot of people, but we’re no closer to being done.) Kilcullen’s counter-insurgency provides no similar short-term hope. Ten years from now, maybe well-functioning Afghan and Pakistani governments have won their people’s trust and can survive on their own. But how much blood and gold should we be willing to spend on that outcome? What’s the alternative if we don’t?

The Surge of 2007 took advantage of a developing split between al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the Iraqi Sunni tribes. (In Kilcullen’s terms, it separated the global insurgents from the accidental guerrillas.) Before 2007 they had been on the same side, fighting an insurgency against the US invasion and the new Shia government in Baghdad. But there had always been a tension between them. The tribes want local autonomy and the ability to live by their own traditions. AQI wants a global caliphate enforcing sharia law. (By analogy, imagine scripture-based Christian fundamentalists in, say, Guatamala dealing with a culture where Catholicism has absorbed local pagan traditions.) When several issues boiled over into violence, the tribal leaders started believing that AQI was a bigger long-term threat to them than the Americans were.

Short-term, flipping the tribes from AQI’s side to ours gave us the local allies we had always needed in the Sunni areas, and went a long way towards racheting down the violence in Iraq. But the broader political settlement between Sunni and Shia has never happened. (That subtlety gets lost in those arguments about whether the Surge “worked”.) Our improved relationship with the Sunni tribes has not developed into an improved relationship between them and the Baghdad government, as it was supposed to.

If this goes back to civil war, as it might, we’re in the difficult position of arming both sides.

Two weeks ago I wrote about how the Right responds to despair with fantasies of violence while the Left responds with fantasies of escape. Case in point: Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachman (the one who in October called for an inquisition into whether other congresspeople were pro-American or anti-American). A week ago Saturday, she talked in a radio interview about wanting the American people to be “armed and dangerous” because

Thomas Jefferson told us, having a revolution every now and then is a good thing. And the people – we the people – are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country.

OK, a spokesman walked that back a little, saying she was talking metaphorically about being armed with information about outrages like Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal to combat global warming. (So, we’re going to “lose our country” if we have to reduce our carbon footprint?) Then Wednesday she’s talking to Sean Hannity and goes off again. More about “revolution” against Obama’s “economic Marxism.” Escape? No way:

Do we get into an inner tube and float 90 miles to some free country? There is no free country for us to repair to. That’s why it’s up to us now.

If you’re a right-wing loony, that’s the problem in a nutshell: Every other country that isn’t a hellhole is more liberal than we are. Bachman’s state borders Canada — she could get there without an inner tube. But if liberalism means slavery, then Canada, Denmark, New Zealand … they’re not free countries. There’s no place to run. America is the Alamo.

Bachman’s spinmeisters can reinterpret her however they want. But when it becomes clear that they’re not getting their way, people who really believe what she’s saying are going to get violent.

Let’s think this through: A teleprompter is a way for a speaker to deliver a prepared text; it replaces papers on a lecturn. Making an issue out of Obama’s teleprompter is supposed to frame him as a mere mouthpiece for whoever is writing the text.

But does Obama rely on prepared texts more than other recent presidents? In fact, the exact opposite is true. Unlike Bush, Obama exposes himself to uncontrolled interactions. Bush only appeared in front of friendly audiences, and only hand-picked people got to ask him questions in public. In press conferences, Bush would repeat the same talking points over and over, because that was all he knew. But President Obama can answer reporters’ questions with a detailed exposition of his point of view, and holds town-hall meetings that people get into on a first-come first-served basis. (The crowds are mostly pro-Obama because those are the kinds of people who will wait in line all night to see him, not because they’ve been hand-picked.) That means he sometimes has to answer hostile or wacky questions — something Bush would never do.

The next time somebody tells you that workers don’t need unions or governments to protect them, because industry can regulate itself — don’t argue with them, teach them some history. Wednesday was the 98th anniversary of one the pivotal events in the American labor movement: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City. 146 of the 500 employees died — mostly young women, mostly from Jewish or Italian immigrant families, some as young as 15. Many of the factory’s exit doors were routinely locked to keep workers from sneaking out early. They stayed locked during the fire. Cornell University’s online archives tell the story.

No one should kid themselves that this couldn’t happen again today if workers had only their bosses’ goodwill to protect them. The Kader Toy Factory Fire in Thailand in 1993 was even worse. There, rural Thai girls new to the big city made stuffed animals for delivery to American companies like Disney and Mattel. (You may own one.) Piles of stuffing were everywhere, and they went up fast. Again, exit doors were locked. Don McGlashan wrote a song about it.

Bruce went on to defend herself here, claiming that the “trash” comment was mild compared to what Democrats said about President Bush — like calling him a “war criminal”. Let me explain two differences. First, this is the president’s wife, not the president. If the Left ever abused Laura Bush like this, I missed it. Somebody’s going to have to play me a tape before I’ll believe we did.

Second, I’m one of the people who called President Bush a war criminal, which I admit is a seriously negative thing to say about a person. I said it — and continue to say it — because he has claimed responsibility for authorizing specific acts (waterboarding three Guantanamo detainees, for example) that are recognized internationally as war crimes. So, “Bush is a war criminal” is an assertion about facts, which opponents can dispute by citing other facts, if they have them. I’d love to see Bush dispute the claim in court.

Calling Michelle Obama “trash”, on the other hand, is just a gratuitous insult. It serves no purpose other than to raise hate. Is that clear enough?

I wonder: Will Dick Cheney’s book tour make any stops in London or Madrid?

Apparently the ACLU isn’t happy about this either.

DeSantis is bitter about being villainized for receiving a bonus. He wasn’t involved in the activities that destroyed the company. He has lost money in the collapse of AIG stock. He works very hard. He agreed to work for $1 a year in expectation of a bonus. And now he’s being pressured to return the $742K he got. He’s so bitter he’s going to quit and give the after-tax portion of his bonus to charity.

He was doing great until he mentioned the amount. Ordinary Americans understand that innocent people suffer when a company goes under. We feel bad for them. But we don’t feel $742K worth of bad for them. Lots of hard-working people don’t get that much in a decade. DeSantis and the folks who forwarded his article to all their friends don’t seem to understand that.