Monthly Archives: October 2006

Investigate

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[Update: Read complete Krugman column here.]

Paul Krugman has advice for Dems (behind the NYT subscription firewall) — he says, don’t listen to advice.

There are those who say that a confrontational stance will backfire politically on the Democrats. These are by and large the same people who told Democrats that attacking the Bush administration over Iraq would backfire in the midterm elections. Enough said. …

…What the make-nice crowd wants most of all is for the Democrats to forswear any investigations into the origins of the Iraq war and the cronyism and corruption that undermined it. But it’s very much in the national interest to find out what led to the greatest strategic blunder in American history, so that it won’t happen again.

What’s more, the public wants to know. A large majority of Americans believe both that invading Iraq was a mistake, and that the Bush administration deliberately misled us into war. And according to the Newsweek poll, 58 percent of Americans believe that investigating contracting in Iraq isn’t just a good idea, but a high priority; 52 percent believe the same about investigating the origins of the war.

Why, then, should the Democrats hold back? Because, we’re told, the country needs less divisiveness. And I, too, would like to see a return to kinder, gentler politics. But that’s not something Democrats can achieve with a group hug and a chorus of “Kumbaya.”

The reason we have so much bitter partisanship these days is that that’s the way the radicals who have taken over the Republican Party want it. People like Grover Norquist, who once declared that “bipartisanship is another name for date rape,” push for a hard-right economic agenda; people like Karl Rove make that agenda politically feasible, even though it’s against the interests of most voters, by fostering polarization, using religion and national security as wedge issues.

As long as polarization is integral to the G.O.P.’s strategy, Democrats can’t do much, if anything, to narrow the partisan divide.

Pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?

There are those who believe that the partisan gap can be bridged if the Democrats nominate an attractive presidential candidate who speaks in uplifting generalities. But they must have been living under a rock these past 15 or so years. Whoever the Democrats nominate will feel the full force of the Republican slime machine. And it doesn’t matter if conservatives have nice things to say about a Democrat now. Once the campaign gets serious, they’ll suddenly question his or her patriotism and discover previously unmentioned but grievous character flaws.

The truth is that we won’t get a return to bipartisanship until or unless the G.O.P. decides that polarization doesn’t work as a political strategy. The last great era of bipartisanship began after the 1948 election, when Republicans, shocked by Harry Truman’s victory, decided to stop trying to undo the New Deal. And that example suggests that the best thing the Democrats can do, not just for their party and their country, but for the cause of bipartisanship, is what Truman did: stand up strongly for their principles.


Glenn Greenwald also speaks out for investigation:

In my view, more than anything else, this will be the value of a Democratic takeover of at least one of the houses of Congress. As much wrongdoing as we have learned about on the part of Bush administration already, it is almost certainly the case that there is much, much more that we don’t know about, but ought to.

Beginning even before the 9/11 attacks and worsening substantially since, the administration has operated behind an almost impenetrable wall of unprecedented secrecy. More than preemptive wars, tax cuts, or presidential lawlessness, secrecy is its guiding principle, its core belief (hence the incomparable hatred that spews forth at those, such as reporters, whistleblowers, and former allies who reveal their secrets). Their allies who have controlled Congress for the last five years have not only failed to fulfill their oversight and investigative duties, but have actively helped shield the administration from any real scrutiny. …

… It is difficult to overstate how crucial that is for exposing what the Republican Party has become and undermining those who control it. The administration has been able to ward off even the most incriminating accusations and disclosures because they control the primary sources of information. They can deny anything, selectively release misleading exculpatory information, and operate in the darkest shadows and behind the highest walls of secrecy. As a result, disclosures about what they have done are always piecemeal and easily obscured. But full-fledged hearings will shine a bright light on what the administration has really been doing, and that will enable the public to get a full picture of the true state of affairs.

I have to keep reminding myself the Dems haven’t won the midterm elections yet. Recent history has shown us that elections have a way of not turning out as expected (cough). But for a moment, let’s pretend —

At this point, whether investigations lead to impeachment seems to me a secondary consideration. If the Bush Regime were removed from power but the Radical Right continued to wage destructive partisan warfare, we might find in a few years that nothing much has changed. Further, I suspect the Dems would prefer to have an unpopular Republican president in the oval office when they campaign in 2008. However, if Bush continues to overreach his constitutional authority, Congress may have to slap him down to save the Constitution. We’ll see. But remember — it’s Bush isn’t the real problem. He’s just a symptom.

What’s most important is, as Glenn says, giving the public “a full picture of the true state of affairs.” I think a large majority of Americans would be appalled if they knew the whole story. The pseudo-conservatives have got to be so humiliated and discredited they crawl back into whatever hole they crawled out of and stay there. For a generation or two, anyway.

This Blog Made Possible by Bupropion

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Via TPM Reader DK at Josh Marshall’s place — reporter Chris Rose of the New Orleans Times Picayne describes his descent into clinical depression and how he got his life back with medication.

He starts with an anecdote that perhaps only other depressives can relate to:

I pulled into the Shell station on Magazine Street, my car running on fumes. I turned off the motor. And then I just sat there.

There were other people pumping gas at the island I had pulled into and I didn’t want them to see me, didn’t want to see them, didn’t want to nod hello, didn’t want to interact in any fashion.

Outside the window, they looked like characters in a movie. But not my movie.

I tried to wait them out, but others would follow, get out of their cars and pump and pay and drive off, always followed by more cars, more people. How can they do this, like everything is normal, I wondered. Where do they go? What do they do?

It was early August and two minutes in my car with the windows up and the air conditioner off was insufferable. I was trapped, in my car and in my head.

So I drove off with an empty tank rather than face strangers at a gas station.

Many years ago I went to a DMV office for some reason; I think I had to change my address. After wandering around a bit in the office I found some forms I needed to fill while waiting in line. But there were no pens or pencils handy. I dug around in my purse for a while and found nothing to write with. So I took the form and went home, because I couldn’t bring myself to ask anyone for a pen.

And that’s when I was getting better. At least I got to the DMV office.

Here’s a passage I endorse enthusiastically.

In his book “Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness” — the best literary guide to the disease that I have found — the writer William Styron recounted his own descent into and recovery from depression, and one of the biggest obstacles, he said, was the term itself, what he calls “a true wimp of a word.”

He traces the medical use of the word “depression” to a Swiss psychiatrist named Adolf Meyer, who, Styron said, “had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the damage he had inflicted by offering ‘depression’ as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease.

“Nonetheless, for over 75 years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.”

He continued: “As one who has suffered from the malady in extremis yet returned to tell the tale, I would lobby for a truly arresting designation. ‘Brainstorm,’ for instance, has unfortunately been preempted to describe, somewhat jocularly, intellectual inspiration. But something along these lines is needed.

“Told that someone’s mood disorder has evolved into a storm — a veritable howling tempest in the brain, which is indeed what a clinical depression resembles like nothing else — even the uninformed layman might display sympathy rather than the standard reaction that ‘depression’ evokes, something akin to ‘So what?’ or ‘You’ll pull out of it’ or ‘We all have bad days.’ “

Some time before the DMV incident, when I was worse, I abandoned a cart full of food and ran in panic from a grocery store because someone told me to cheer up and smile. (Don’t ever do that to anyone you don’t know.)

Styron is a helluva writer. His words were my life. I was having one serious brainstorm. Hell, it was a brain hurricane, Category 5. But what happens when your own personal despair starts bleeding over into the lives of those around you?

What happens when you can’t get out of your car at the gas station even when you’re out of gas? Man, talk about the perfect metaphor.

Depression don’t get no respect because of the name. The common emotion depression and the disease depression are two entirely different things, but even some doctors and therapists can’t get that.

… here’s my doctor’s take: The amount of cortisol in my brain increased to dangerous levels. The overproduction, in turn, was blocking the transmission of serotonin and norepinephrine.

Some definitions: Cortisol is the hormone produced in response to chronic stress. Serotonin and norepinephrine are neurotransmitters — chemical messengers — that mediate messages between nerves in the brain, and this communication system is the basic source of all mood and behavior.

The chemistry department at the University of Bristol in England has a massive Web database for serotonin, titled, appropriately: “The Molecule of Happiness.”

And I wasn’t getting enough. My brain was literally shorting out. The cells were not properly communicating. Chemical imbalances, likely caused by increased stress hormones — cortisol, to be precise — were dogging the work of my neurotransmitters, my electrical wiring. A real and true physiological deterioration had begun.

I had a disease.

Rose was lucky. His employer realized he was sick and cut him slack, and his wife also recognized he needed help. He got almost immediately relief from a new medication, Cymbalta, instead of going through weeks or months of trial and error — waiting for a new drug to begin working, trying another dosage or another drug if it doesn’t. As Rose’s psychiatrist said, it’s a crapshoot. Many anti-depressants have to be taken for two to four weeks before any effects kick in, and sometimes the effects never kick in.

Do-gooders trying to get anti-depressive meds banned because of anecdotal evidence they cause suicides need to understand that untreated depressives kill themselves at much higher rates than not-depressed people. If someone who just started to take Paxil commits suicide, that doesn’t mean the Paxil made him do it. If the Paxil was a factor at all, more likely the patient became more despondent because it wasn’t working. Or, it’s possible a patient who is too enervated and mentally disorganized to do much but sit and stare into space might get just better enough to carry out a suicide plan.

And don’t forget — people get misdiagnosed. When someone taking an antidepressant becomes violent — Eric Harris of Columbine High School fame, for example — before blaming the drug, ask why he was taking it to begin with. He may not have been depressed; he may have been bipolar, which calls for different drugs, or he may have been psycopathic, a condition that doesn’t respond to medication. Also, the drugs may work differently on juvenile brains than on adult brains.

I hear people who have tried antidepressants say that the drugs suppressed their emotions and made them feel mentally foggy, which suggests to me they didn’t have the disease depression but just the common emotion of depression. If your brain chemistry and neurotransmitters are functioning normally, anti-depressants may make you feel worse. They aren’t “happy pills.” Taking anti-depressants if your brain is healthy is as stupid as taking insulin if you aren’t diabetic. However, if you are depressed, with the right meds your thinking becomes clearer and your emotions are normal. It’s important to understand this, because ignorance may be keeping some people from taking meds who could genuinely benefit from them.

Too many people still have medieval attitudes about psychiatric disorders. Many of them are caused by real physical and chemical changes in the brain, and these should be treated with the same respect as any other disease in any other organ.

Obama, Pro and Con

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Follow up to the last post — today Bob Herbert writes (behind the NYT subscription firewall),

It’s a measure of how starved the country is for a sensible, appealing, intelligent, trustworthy leader that a man who until just a couple of years ago was an obscure state senator in Illinois is now suddenly, in the view of an awful lot of voters, the person we should install in the White House.

At the Kennedy Library forum on Friday night, Mr. Obama declined to rule out a run for the White House in 2008. In an appearance on “Meet the Press” yesterday, he made it clear that he was considering such a run.

With all due respect to Senator Obama, this is disturbing. He may be capable of being a great president. Someday. But one quick look around at the state of the nation and the world tells us that we need to be more careful than we have been in selecting our leaders. There shouldn’t be anything precipitous about the way we pick our presidents.

That said, the Barack Obama boom may well have legs. During the forum, every reference to the possibility of him running drew a roar from the audience. He’s thoughtful, funny and charismatic. And there is not the slightest ripple of a doubt that he wants to run for president. …

…

The giddiness surrounding the Obama phenomenon seems to be an old-fashioned mixture of fun, excitement and a great deal of hope. His smile is electric, and when he laughs people tend to laugh with him. He’s the kind of politician who makes people feel good.

But the giddiness is crying out for a reality check. There’s a reason why so many Republicans are saying nice things about Mr. Obama, and urging him to run. They would like nothing more than for the Democrats to nominate a candidate in 2008 who has a very slender résumé, very little experience in national politics, hardly any in foreign policy — and who also happens to be black.

The Republicans may be in deep trouble, but they believe they could pretty easily put together a ticket that would chew up Barack Obama in 2008.

My feeling is that Senator Obama may well be the real deal. If I were advising him, I would tell him not to move too fast. With a few more years in the Senate, possibly with a powerful committee chairmanship if the Democrats take control, he could build a formidable record and develop the kind of toughness and savvy that are essential in the ugly and brutal combat of a presidential campaign.

At MyDD, Matt Stoller thinks Obama should run for the Dem nomination in 2008:

I think there are two keys to understanding Barack. The first is to look at his formative political experience, the seering loss to machine politician Bobby Rush in the Democratic primary in 2000. Before Brand Obama emerged, the Senator got destroyed by bucking the system. Losing to a machine, as Cory Booker also did, does strange things to idealistic-appearing hyperambitious politicians. It makes them a lot more wary of picking fights and making enemies, and it makes them a lot more inclined to cultivate chits and work within a system they know isn’t working.

And Obama knows America is broken. He knows it, he gets it, and that’s why he is so aggressively dismissive of progressives. He feels that he is one of us, and so we should understand why he has to have contempt for us. Here is, for instance, what he wrote on Daily Kos:

    Unless we are open to new ideas, and not just new packaging, we won’t change enough hearts and minds to initiate a serious energy or fiscal policy that calls for serious sacrifice.

Barack Obama knows we must change, but he also knows the penalty for fighting for change. This internal contradiction comes out in his sickening praise of Bush, whom he praised today on Meet the Press, or in his embrace of bipartisanship for him and his Senate buddies. It comes out in a strong disdain for progressives, be it random sneering insults towards liberals or pandering to an authoritarian pagan right-wing evangelical tribalism. He doesn’t like that we make him revisit his loss to Bobby Rush, because the last thing he wants to think of himself as is a loser, and because we make him make choices. You know, like the choice he made to not go to Connecticut to campaign for Ned Lamont, which we will remember as the unprincipled betrayal of the Democratic Party that it is. We want to hold him accountable for the dreams that are invested in his persona, and he doesn’t want to be responsible for the hope of millions, though he does want to sell a book called The Audacity of Hope.

Go to MyDD for the rest of the argument.

Don’t Look for a Magic Candidate

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Senator Barack Obama has been all over news media lately, and today he said he was considering a presidential run in 2008.

I’m lukewarm on Senator Obama, to tell the truth; he’s a great speaker, but I can’t tell from his Senate record if there is more to him than words.

Frank Rich seems more encouraged than I am:

What makes the liberal establishment’s crush on Mr. Obama disconcerting is that it too often sees him as a love child of a pollster’s focus group: a one-man Benetton ad who can be all things to all people. He’s black and he’s white. He’s both of immigrant stock (Kenya) and the American heartland (Kansas, yet). He speaks openly about his faith without disowning evolution. He has both gravitas and unpretentious humor. He was the editor of The Harvard Law Review and also won a Grammy (for the audiobook of his touching memoir, “Dreams From My Father”). He exudes perfection but has owned up to youthful indiscretions with drugs. He is post-boomer and post-civil-rights-movement. He is Bill Clinton without the baggage, a fail-safe 21st-century bridge from “A Place Called Hope” to “The Audacity of Hope.”

Mr. Obama has offended no one (a silly tiff with John McCain excepted). Search right-wing blogs and you’ll find none of the invective showered on other liberal Democrats in general and black liberal leaders in particular. What little criticism Mr. Obama has received is from those in his own camp who find him cautious to a fault, especially on issues that might cause controversy. The sum of all his terrific parts, this theory goes, may be less than the whole: another Democrat who won’t tell you what day it is before calling a consultant, another human weather vane who waits to see which way the wind is blowing before taking a stand.

That has been the Democrats’ fatal malady, but it’s way too early and there’s too little evidence to say Mr. Obama has been infected by it. If he is conciliatory by nature and eager to entertain adversaries’ views in good faith, that’s not necessarily a fault, particularly in these poisonous times. The question is whether Mr. Obama will stick up for core principles when tested and get others to follow him.

That’s why it’s important to remember that on one true test for his party, Iraq, he was consistent from the start. On the long trail to a hotly competitive senatorial primary in Illinois, he repeatedly questioned the rationale for the war before it began, finally to protest it at a large rally in Chicago on the eve of the invasion. He judged Saddam to pose no immediate threat to America and argued for containment over a war he would soon label “dumb” and “political-driven.” He hasn’t changed. In his new book, he gives a specific date (the end of this year) for beginning “a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops” and doesn’t seem to care who calls it “cut and run.”

Contrast this with Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, who last week said that failed American policy in Iraq should be revisited if there’s no improvement in “maybe 60 to 90 days.” This might qualify as leadership, even at this late date, if only John Warner, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, hadn’t proposed exactly the same time frame for a re-evaluation of the war almost a week before she did.

However,

The Democrats may well win on Election Day this year. But one of their best hopes for long-term viability in the post-Bush era is that Barack Obama steps up and changes the party before the party of terminal timidity and equivocation changes him.

I’m still more inclined to agree with Taylor Marsh —

Unfortunately, so far, I’ve seen nothing to imply that he is ready for the presidency.

Frankly, after George W. Bush’s reign, I want someone of deep experience in the presidency. A mature foreign policy thinker and gifted diplomatic leader. It’s a cynch that Obama outpaces Bush by a mile in intelligence, thought, curiosity and every other meter. However, he would still be a man learning on the job, having to rely enormously on his advisers. Regardless of whatever instincts Senator Obama may possess, though there’s no way to judge those talents as yet, he simply doesn’t have the depth of experience I believe is required in these complicated times. It’s simply not the time for a person that is an unknown, in my humble opinion.

On the other hand, I’d rather have Obama as the 2008 nominee than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. It may be that in 2008 people would rather have an “unknown” than someone they associate with either the Clinton or Bush administrations. We’ll see.

Being Good

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There’s tons to blog about and now I’m a day behind. Let’s start off with a Sunday morning religion post.

There’s an outstanding column in today’s Boston Globe by Sam Harris, titled “Bad reasons to be good.” Harris argues against the common idea that religion is the best arbiter of morality. Harris is an atheist who seems to have made a project out of exposing the shams and inconsistencies of religion. This should keep him busy.

Most Americans appear to believe that without faith in God, we would have no durable reasons to treat one another well. … The problem, however, is that much of what people believe in the name of religion is intrinsically divisive, unreasonable, and incompatible with genuine morality. The truth is that the only rational basis for morality is a concern for the happiness and suffering of other conscious beings. This emphasis on the happiness and suffering of others explains why we don’t have moral obligations toward rocks. It also explains why (generally speaking) people deserve greater moral concern than animals, and why certain animals concern us more than others. If we show more sensitivity to the experience of chimpanzees than to the experience of crickets, we do so because there is a relationship between the size and complexity of a creature’s brain and its experience of the world.

I’ve long believed that good socialization, not religious belief, is the real key to moral and ethical behavior. Emotionally healthy and well-socialized people, religious or not, nearly always treat other sentient beings decently. Sociopaths can quote the Bible all day long and still get their kicks out of bashing bunnies.

The bare-assed fact is that human history and everyday life are overflowing with empirical evidence that “religion” and “morality” don’t always hang out in the same ball park. Yet unthinking people (which is most of ’em, alas) continue to believe that religion is somehow a necessary prerequisite for morality.

Unfortunately, religion tends to separate questions of morality from the living reality of human and animal suffering. Consequently, religious people often devote immense energy to so-called “moral” questions — such as gay marriage — where no real suffering is at issue, and they will inflict terrible suffering in the service of their religious beliefs.

Under some circumstances our marriage laws may inflict real suffering on gay couples, but let’s put that aside for the moment. There is no better example of what Harris talks about that the embryonic stem cell controversy. To my mind, anyone who puts a higher moral value on saving frozen blastocysts than on alleviating suffering and disease is self-evidently screwy. Yet in our current sick culture the Screwjobs are respected for their “values,” and the rest of us are told we’d better straighten out or no one will like us.

I suspect a great many people have a gut-level queasiness with this view of morality, but they haven’t found a way to drag this queasiness into their heads to think about it and explain it. Language and logic seem to fail us. If killing is “bad,” then killing a blastocyst is “bad,” we are told. Is that not logical?

The “logic” of morality fails the “values” side, too, sometimes. The famous “rape and incest” exemption to abortion bans comes to mind. Logically, if abortion is murder, then it’s murder no matter how the conception took place. Yet many who oppose abortion can’t bring themselves to take that last, logical step and extend the ban to rape and incest victims. Some twinge of sympathy for the victimized women holds them back. To anti-abortion rights purists, on the other hand, that sympathy is moral weakness; the righteous must harden their hearts and stick to logic.

Perhaps you see the problem.

The purists painted themselves into a “logical” corner with Terri Schiavo, IMO, because too many of us these days have personal experience with making end-of-life decisions for loved ones. And most of us know in our hearts and guts that, sometimes, it’s selfish to cling, and loving to let go. The Schiavo episode revealed the “values” tribe to be a small, hysterical minority.

Harris continues,

But the worst problem with religious morality is that it often causes good people to act immorally, even while they attempt to alleviate the suffering of others. In Africa, for instance, certain Christians preach against condom use in villages where AIDS is epidemic, and where the only information about condoms comes from the ministry. They also preach the necessity of believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ in places where religious conflict between Christians and Muslims has led to the deaths of millions. Secular volunteers don’t spread ignorance and death in this way. A person need not be evil to preach against condom use in a village decimated by AIDS; he or she need only believe a specific faith-based moral dogma. In such cases we can see that religion can cause good people to do fewer good deeds than they might otherwise.

Last year a “creationist” testifying in the Dover evolution trial perjured himself by lying about using church money to buy “creationist” books for the public schools. A “Christian” organization called the Alliance Defense Fund routinely fabricates lies — such as the claim a California school banned the Declaration of Independence because it mentions a “Creator” — as part of its crusade to break down the separation of church and state. ADF and the perjured creationist have, apparently, decided that lies are OK if they help spread the Gospel (and they call us “moral relativists”).

Last July I wrote a three-part series explaining why the purists are wrong on the embryonic stem cell question; here is Part I, Part II, and Part III. Parts II and III in particular focus on the disinformation about stem cell research being spread by the purists to defend their “logical” opinion. I wrote,

The fact is, opponents of stem cell research routinely lie — to themselves, to each other, to anyone who will listen — in order to defend their belief that embryonic stem cell research is immoral. This suggests to me that the real reasons people object to stem cell research have less to do with moral principle than with some deeply submerged but potent fear. And this takes us back to elective ignorance. Something about flushing all those blastocysts makes the Fetus People uncomfortable in a way that condemning Henry Strongin to death does not. The arguments they make against stem cell research, which are mostly a pile of lies and distortions, are not the reasons they are opposed to stem cell research. They are the rationalizations created to justify their opposition.

I’m hypothesizing here, but everything about the “logical” morality of the purists seems ass-backward to me. Very often their “logical” arguments seem post hoc, and assembled to provide a pretty cover for opinions that actually were dredged out of the murky depths of their ids. The fact that most of their “moral” causes involve sex and death seems to be a clue.

And the problem with their “logic” is that it is based on assumptions about matters like life, death, beingness, selfness, etc. that are rigid and narrow and make no sense to me. As I argued here, if you change the assumptions the “logic” falls apart.

Sam Harris is arguing for a secular morality — fine with me — but throughout the ages many religious people also have expressed the view that true morality — “goodness,” if you will — is based on compassion. This is central to Buddhism, which teaches that the two eyes of enlightenment are wisdom and compassion. And, ultimately, wisdom and compassion depend on each other, because true compassion (metta) arises from the wisdom that all beings are One, and true wisdom arises from the desire to realize enlightenment (bodhi) to benefit others (bodhicitta). The actions of a genuinely wise and compassionate person will always be moral.

Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 comes to mind also —

If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.

The word for love used in the original Greek text is agape, which I’ve been told meant something like “affection” or “concern for others” before Christian scholars got hold of it.

And, of course, several of the Heavy Hitters of Religion — Rabbi Hillel the Elder and Confucius, for example — independently came up with the Golden Rule. Although seems to me a truly compassionate person follows the Golden Rule without having to think about it as a rule.

As it says in the Tao Teh Ching —

      1. Thus, when the Way is lost there is virtue
      2. When virtue is lost there is humaneness
      3. When humaneness is lost there is rightness
      And when rightness is lost there is propriety.

    (Verse 38, Charles Miller translation)

    I guess if you’ve lost propriety, the final fallback position is “logic.”

    Update: Dinesh D’Souza is “logical.”

Why I’m Not Famous

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I’m no good at self-promotion. Truly, I am. I always feel as if I’m missing out on opportunities somewhere just because I have no clue how the self-promotion thing is done.

Anyway, the article linked shows us why politics talk shows are so stupid. You don’t have to know squat to be a pundit; you just have to be a camera hog willing to say anything to cause a stir.

Update: Speaking of punditry — this is the funniest damn thing I’ve seen in, like, forever. Hat tip to Crooks & Liars.

Bush Hides Behind China’s Skirts

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Apparently China laid down the law to Kim Jong Il:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il expressed regret about his country’s nuclear test to a Chinese delegation and said Pyongyang would return to international nuclear talks if Washington backs off a campaign to financially isolate the country, a South Korean newspaper reported Friday.

“If the U.S. makes a concession to some degree, we will also make a concession to some degree, whether it be bilateral talks or six-party talks,” Kim was quoted as telling a Chinese envoy, the mass- circulation Chosun Ilbo reported, citing a diplomatic source in China.

Kim told the Chinese delegation that “he is sorry about the nuclear test,” the newspaper reported.

The delegation led by State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan met Kim on Thursday and returned to Beijing later that day _ ahead of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s arrival in the Chinese capital Friday.

We should send China a thank-you card for pulling our ass out of the fire, I suppose. Now if Condi doesn’t blow it too badly, maybe North Korea’s Dear Leader will settle down for a spell.

Naturally, rightie bloggers are crediting our Dear Leader for the apology. This poor schmuck actually titles his blog post ” Cowboy Bush Forced Apology Out Of Kim Jong-Il, WITHOUT Bilateral Talks?”

No, dear, China forced an apology out of Kim Jong Il with bilateral talks. Bilateral talks between China and North Korea.

Please understand that it’s a relief to me that Bush is being a weenie and allowing China to take the lead in handling Kim Jung Il. I trust China more than I trust Bush not to do anything really stupid. But ultimately it’s not in China’s interest to depose Kim Jung Il or allow Korean reunification. So if we want the interests of the United States to be addressed, the United States has to be the one to bring them to the table.

But once again we see that Bush doesn’t sound so tough when the enemy might hit back. As Dan Froomkin noted yesterday, the cowboy is, um, gone.

Kim Jong Il is the only leader of a nuclear weapons state who might conceivably consider it in his interests to sell a nuclear bomb to Osama bin Laden.

So forget for a moment how we got here. Put aside partisan politics. Wouldn’t this be a good moment for the American president to draw a very distinct line in the sand?

Wouldn’t it be appropriate for him to make clear to the North Koreans that if they do any such thing, they will suffer cataclysmic consequences? Wouldn’t this be a good time for some of that famous cowboy talk?

Not this time.

Last night, ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos aggressively questioned Bush on that issue. Here are some video excerpts.

Bush seemed appropriately stern, promising that North Korea would be “held to account” for any transfer of nuclear weapons, and would suffer “grave consequence[s].”

But then he seriously undermined his own rhetoric by likening those consequences to the sanctions recently imposed against North Korea — sanctions whose implementation, not to mention effectiveness, are very much in question.

Said Bush: “I want the leader to understand, the leader of North Korea to understand that he’ll be held to account. Just like he’s being held to account now for having run a test.” …

… [C]ould it be that Bush knows he’s not prepared to do what needs to be done?

Here’s part of the transcript Froomkin provided:

Stephanopoulos: “Last week, after their first test, you went into the White House and you said that any transfer of nuclear material by North Korea would be considered a grave threat to the security of the United States. I went back and checked, you’ve used that phrase once before in your presidency about Iraq. So, are you saying then if North Korea sold nukes to Iran or al Qaeda. . . . ”

Bush: “They’d be held to account.”

Stephanopoulos: “What does that mean?”

Bush: “Well, at the time they find out, George, one of the things that’s important for these world leaders is to hear is, you know, we use means necessary to hold them to account.”

Stephanopoulos: “So if you got intelligence that they were about to have that kind of a transfer. . . . ”

Bush: “Well, if they get – if we get intelligence that they’re about to transfer a nuclear weapon, we would stop the transfer and we would deal with the ships that were taking the – or the airplane that was dealing with or taking the material to somebody.”

Stephanopoulos: “And if it happened, you’d retaliate.”

Bush: “You know, I’d just say it’s a grave consequence.”

Stephanopoulos: “And that’s about as serious as it can get.”

Bush: “Well, my point is, is that I want the leader to understand, the leader of North Korea to understand that he’ll be held to account. Just like he’s being held to account now for having run a test.”

Jeebus, what a weenie.

Just as a reminder of what a real leader sounds like, here is JFK’s address to the American people regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis. Snips:

Our policy has been one of patience and restraint, as befits a peaceful and powerful nation which leads a worldwide alliance. We have been determined not to be diverted from our central concerns by mere irritants and fanatics. But now further action is required, and it is under way; and these actions may only be the beginning. We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth; but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced. …

… It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

Bush has been downright wobbly in dealing with nasty foreign people lately. You might remember the G8 Summit dinner last July in which the President was caught by an open microphone —

“See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this (expletive) and it’s over,” Bush told Blair as he chewed on a buttered roll.

He told Blair he felt like telling U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who visited the gathered leaders, to get on the phone with Syrian President Bashar Assad to “make something happen.” He suggested Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice might visit the region soon.

So his “solution” is for somebody else to talk to Syria. He goes running to others to fix his problems. Laura Rozen reported at the time:

… [R]ather than hold direct talks between Washington and Damascus, the Bush administration was leaning on Saudi Arabia to negotiate with Syria, with the aim of trying to drive a wedge between Damascus and Tehran, both supporters of Hezbollah. Rice also met with Lebanese Parliament speaker Nabih Berri, widely understood to be an unofficial liaison with Hezbollah. In both cases, the Bush team preferred proxies to direct conversation.

But Saudi Arabia and China have their own agendas. Why are we relying on Saudi Arabia and China to handle American foreign policy matters?

This is just weird.

See also: North Korea links.

Update: Is Bush having his Fisher King moment?

“We Answer to the Name of Liberals”

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This “manifesto for liberals in the waning Bush era” by Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin deserves reading and discussion. I regret I am still under the weather and not up to thoughtful commentary, but Stirling Newberry wrote some lovely thoughtful commentary, so if you want thoughtful commentary go read Stirling. And there’s more thoughtful commentary by Chicago Dyke at Corrente.

I gave the Ackerman-Gitlin piece a careful reading to see how it defined liberalism. I endorse it in its entirety, but I realize some might object to paragraph 5, which begins “Make no mistake: We believe that the use of force can, at times, be justified. We supported the use of American force, together with our allies, in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.” I supported those also, although not without reservation. Reasonable people, including reasonable liberals, opposed those actions.

Then I read the discussion of the manifesto at Crooked Timber. Most of the commenters got hung up on paragraph #4, which begins “We believe that the state of Israel has the fundamental right to exist.” The “discussion” devolved into the kind of impossibly precious wankfest Monty Python skewered so beautifully in “Life of Brian.”

But, OTHER THAN paragraphs 4 and 5, what do you think? (If you want to argue about paragraph 4, go to Crooked Timber.)

Update: For another POV, see Digby.