Saturday, May 5, 2007

"It's Complicated"


(Via E.K.)

Spiderman 3

Critics I normally trust aren’t impressed. But I take the Matthew Yglesias stand. Hell, man, I think it rocked.

Aye-yi-yi

I love America. I’m just frustrated by the knowledge curve of its people – namely, the apparently widespread inability to remember more than two decades of history at any given time.

A new Newsweek poll reports that President Bush’s approval ratings have slipped to 28 percent, which of course we might have expected the week that he vetoed a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. But the pollsters also asked another interesting question, and received some depressing answers:

When the NEWSWEEK Poll asked more than 1,000 adults on Wednesday and Thursday night (before and during the GOP debate) which president showed the greatest political courage—meaning being brave enough to make the right decisions for the country, even if it jeopardized his popularity —more respondents volunteered Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton (18 percent each) than any other president. Fourteen percent of adults named John F. Kennedy and 10 percent said Abraham Lincoln. Only four percent mentioned George W. Bush. (Then again, only five percent volunteered Franklin Roosevelt and only three percent said George Washington.)

[Sigh…] Alrighty then, the left and right are nostalgic for their recent heroes and seem to believe that eight years without any major calamities is synonymous with political courage. Well, such a presidency is usually a sign of being a gifted salesman, not principled inflexibility. Reagan based his presidency on cutting taxes and annoying the Soviets – not exactly politically toxic moves – and in any case did everything he could to hide the process by which he made tough decisions. Clinton was many things (notably intelligent, competent, and charming) but “political courage” was not part of his repertoire – i.e., his changing stances on health care and welfare reform, the indefensible carnage caused by Sudanese air strikes, and his own little perjury mishap.

Who we should have seen at the top of the list: Abraham Lincoln, John Adams, Grover Cleveland, Andrew Johnson.

'Democracy' According to Bush Republicans

The blogosphere was aghast this week at Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield’s egregious little rumination on the necessity of having a “strong executive” during “stormy times”. (No, I insist - read it for yourself.) After all, he says, don’t we need a war-chief who will brush aside weak, second-guessing legislators when the threats come to the fore? Wouldn’t you rather be ruled by the “best man” than the “best laws”? Haven’t we taken the whole civil liberties thing a bit too far, conflating them with inalienable inborn rights? Mansfield, in his own words:

The case for a strong executive begins from urgent necessity and extends to necessity in the sense of efficacy and even greatness. It is necessary not merely to respond to circumstances but also in a comprehensive way to seek to anticipate and form them. "Necessary to" the survival of a society expands to become "necessary for" the good life there, and indeed we look for signs in the way a government acts in emergencies for what it thinks to be good after the emergency has passed. A free government should show its respect for freedom even when it has to take it away. [emphasis added]

But don’t take it from a pro-rule of law, pro-civil liberties sissy liberal like me. He spells it out for us very clearly: “necessity” is an inherently elastic term, and can be used to justify almost any extralegal executive prerogative for any length of time.

I don’t particularly feel the need to scratch out a systematic theoretical rebuttal to this article (although I certainly will if some errant member of this blog’s tiny audience wants to defend it). The entire American project is a standing rebuttal to thinking of this kind. No privilege, no exceptions – no one is above the law.

But the most mind-boggling part of this piece is Mansfield’s bizarre repeated insistence that in dangerous situations, it’s better for a republican government to be led by the unchecked “wisdom” of a single individual rather than the mitigated, compromised wisdom of, say, Congress. It’s as if he’s missed the past six years’ incredible string of enormous screw-ups in the exercise of executive power. Personally, I don’t plan on even considering vesting more power in the imperial presidency until I’m convinced that the people in charge 1) can prevent a massive terrorist attack, 2) know the difference between good intelligence and bad intelligence, 3) prepare adequately for the wars they start, 4) believe in modern environmental and biological science, 5) are capable of responding to natural disasters, 6) do not staff high-level jobs with incompetent leader-worshippers, etc., etc., etc.

Mansfield’s affection for "Machiavellian" politics is frightening, especially if this is the Bush Administration's theory of executive power (as Glenn Greenwald suspects it is). But don’t take it from a habeas corpus-touting leftist whiner like me. Mansfield, in his own words:

Such [an executive] will have the greatest incentive to be watchful, and to be both cruel and merciful in correct contrast and proportion. We are talking about Machiavelli's prince, the man whom in apparently unguarded moments he called a tyrant.

“Apparently unguarded moments”? Is this Harvard faculty member really trying to remove from the excesses of executive power the unpleasant connotation of the word "tyrant"?

Seriously. This is all the more staggering because Machiavelli himself vastly preferred the limited republican model of government, seeing tyrannies as unstable and unsustainable. We can mark the imperial presidency of 2001-2009 as another point in his column.

Friday, May 4, 2007

'Democracy' According to the Azerbaijani Government

The Azerbaijani government jails two journalists for comparing Christian and Muslim values and denigrating the Prophet Muhammed. The BBC reports on the government's response to international criticism of a recent free speech clampdown:

Seven journalists are now in prison in the country, but authorities say there are no problems with free speech in Azerbaijan as long as journalists obey the law.

Cute.

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Not Exactly Hitch's Finest Hour

A little cranky at an L.A. book panel. Somebody get this man a drink:


The Madness of King Hugo

Petroleos de Venezuela, Chavez’s blistered, bloated, and increasingly bankrupt state oil company, took control of several extraction projects from American companies today. Oil analysts are not optimistic – Chavez’s management has coincided with a ten-year productivity decline of about 35 percent, plus a general strike of the company’s management protesting the president’s interference in day-to-day operations. I’ve already posted on why leaving the projects in control of U.S. oil companies might (might!) be better for Venezuela than entrenching the power of the red-clad demagogue’s lumpen cartel state.

Fog of War – Brought to You by Incompetents

For The Daily blogs, Shaun Moore’s clever turn on the current administration’s amateur Orwellianism:

Over the last four years, the Bush administration has done their part to bury the pain of war under jargon, such as warping “torture” in to “interrogation techniques”. They’ve also proven to be ahead of the curve when creating new euphemisms for euphemisms they previously created.

Read the rest. I respect a man who quotes George Carlin at length.

“You Know, I Like the Feel of a Board Moving Smoothly Against a Sharp Saw…”

AQI Leader Killed

The BBC reports that Abu Ayyub al-Masri, Zarqawi's successor to the mantle of leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, has been killed:

According to Iraqi officials, al-Masri was killed in an "internal battle" between militants.

The clash took place on Tuesday in northern Baghdad, an interior ministry official said on Iraqi television. The official said that he was "100% sure" that al-Masri had been killed.

Live by treachery, die by treachery - I think I read something like that in a long, gory holy book. Now we wait to see which head will take over this noxious serpent next.

Monday, April 30, 2007

AT&T, Microsoft, and Black Robes

Spencer asked me to comment on a story I would normally find prohibitively boring. He has bravely defied the corporate behemoth that employs him by questioning whether today’s Supreme Court decision, which favored Microsoft in its patent dispute with AT&T, is actually destructive of intellectual property rights.

It is, of course. The case was basically this: Microsoft (ahem) appropriated some AT&T technology that turns your voice into digital code and implanted it in Windows, a blatant violation of U.S. patent law for which Microsoft has already paid massive damages. At issue was whether patent protections could be extended to – and thus additional damages collected for – the Windows PCs manufactured overseas. The Court decided 7-1 that they could not, leaving AT&T extraordinarily and understandably pissed.

To my (admittedly untrained) eye, the decision was the legally obvious one. American patent law rules America, “but does not rule the world” - if Microsoft behaves badly outside U.S. jurisdiction, there's just not much the Feds can do about it. Spencer is quite right, though, that this decision poses a salient threat to intellectual property rights in the brave new global economy. Urged on by pharmaceutical companies, the U.S. government has been pressing the world for more comprehensive IP regulation, largely to no avail – indeed, it’s just one more of the many ways the world is slowly chipping away at American hegemony in guerrilla retaliation for our recent foreign policy.

I'll Trust His Judgment

My movie buff friend has ranked the top mainstream movie characters of all time. I hated Ian Malcolm, but otherwise it makes sense, in a Tyler sort of way.

Chad

My brother gave us this critique of religion via Facebook (which actually has some workable blogging tools, by the way). He’s getting good at that reductio ad absurdum, no? In its simplicity, this is the intellectual indictment of year, as far as I’m concerned:

Has there ever been an institution which has taken sadistic glee at the obstruction of human progress comparable to that of the Roman Catholic church? This is the same organization that has continued its hallowed tradition of supporting the Nazis by declaring a former Hitler Youth to be infallible. The Catholic League of America recently puffed out its offended-feathers at a sculpture in chocolate of a naked Jesus of Nazareth. Can you guess what its main objection was? Yes, the fact that the lord and savior's package was visible. They are, presumably, offended by the numerous depictions of the holy tallywhacker in great Renaissance art.

Keep churning these out, boy-oh. While you're there, you may as well check out his informed commentaries on contemporary music too.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

I’m a Seattle-ite, as Seattle-ites Go

Ezra Klein took a trip to Seattle this week and wanted to know all the great places to go in our green, lefty, über-cultured little metropolis. I checked out the suggestions and was proud to find that I’d been to most of them.

NOTE: Zack Hewell is possibly the best tour guide in the city.

Caption Contest (4/29/2007)

It's a tried and true blog meme.

West on Obama

Yet again, via Andrew Sullivan. Apparently, Cornel West was irked that the first viable black presidential candidate in the history of the United States decided that it was more important to announce his candidacy than to participate in this ego fest for minority media scoundrels and self-righteous faux intellectuals. Another chapter in the neverending narrative of West's ignorance, doublespeak, narcissism, and general phoniness:



Will we never be free of the mindless platitudes of this patronizing leech? Just wait till he gets to the part about the kinds of campaign donations - is it "black" money? "white" money? "Jewish" money? - that Obama has been receiving.