Democracy by Combat

If it seems to you that American politics is sinking to a new low in conflict and nastiness, you would be right. Evidence abounds. This week the Republican majority of the House Ways and Means committee changed the substance of the pension “reform” legislation at the last minute and Democrats objected to yet another incident of majority arrogance by retiring from the committee room to determine their strategy. One member told another to “shut up” and was in turn called a “fruitcake” and challenged to duke it out. The chairman called the Capital police to drive the Democrats from their meeting room.

In California, Republicans are spending $25 to $50 million to recall the duly elected Governor of California only months after he won reelection by a convincing margin. In a number of States Republican-dominated legislatures, controlled by the White House, are redistricting Congressional districts established two years ago after the last national census, all in order to increase Republican majorities in Congress.

Even post-McCain-Feingold, campaign finance “reform” is a national joke. The President admits he will spend a quarter of a billion dollars to get reelected. When the bills are paid, after the election of course, expect the tab to be nearer half a billion. And a good 75% of that money will be spent caricaturing the Democratic party and its candidates. Every argument for making politics unappealing and every reason for not voting are promoted for the very simple reason that low voter turnouts favor Republicans. THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO VOTE!

Were all this to happen in Argentina or Nigeria or Indonesia we would say “they’re just not ready for democracy.” But all this is happening in the world’s greatest democracy. All this is happening, and increasing, in the United States of America.

Does this make you proud of your country? Does this cause you to encourage your children to pay attention to politics? Does this give you confidence to preach the American example when you travel abroad? Or does this make you–as it does me–furious?

The U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, which I co-chaired, found that the declining caliber and quality of public servants, including elected officials, threatened national security. Not good government. NATIONAL SECURITY! We cannot permit this new style of cut-throat, devil-take-the-hindmost, savage, power-mad, we-know-the-truth-and-to-hell-with-everyone else dominate the public arena in this nation. For if we do, if we don’t speak out and object on every occasion and offer a nobler ideal, we will get the kind of government we deserve.

But it will not be the kind of government I will recognize and it will not be democratic.

Contradicting accounts of lawmakers who have read the classified pages, Bush said [releasing the redacted 28 pages from the Congressional 9/11 report] "would help the enemy" and "would reveal sources and methods that will make it harder for us to win the war on terror." [ . . . ] Bush announced his decision in a Rose Garden appearance two hours before meeting with Saud. Bush said he had "no qualms at all" about rebuffing the request "because there's an ongoing investigation into the 9/11 attacks and we don't want to compromise that investigation."

- Washington Post, 7/30

Washington - The identity of an undercover CIA officer whose husband started the Iraq uranium intelligence controversy has been publicly revealed by a conservative Washington columnist citing "two senior administration officials." Intelligence officials confirmed to Newsday yesterday that Valerie Plame, wife of retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, works at the agency on weapons of mass destruction issues in an undercover capacity - at least she was undercover until last week when she was named by columnist Robert Novak.

- Newsday, 7/22

Larry Sabato, the most quotable of political scientists in the country, has put up hypothetical matchups between Bush and Edwards, Gephardt, Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman. Sabato has not included Dean, as he considers him to be too much of a longshot for the nomination.

The verdict? According to Sabato (who is CW incarnate), every one of those Dems except for Kerry would defeat Bush. (And given Sabato's thoughts on the electability of New England progressives, it's clear Sabato would also doom Dean to failure.)

Finally, Will betrays a more general skepticism about the European Union’s constitution, which seems to me to be the product of ignorance.

Europe’s nations speak of “pooling” their sovereignty, but the great question remains: How can those nations’ self-government — the setting of social policy by representative parliaments — be compatible with a European Union armed with this constitution? The answer is: It can’t be.

Wrong. The answer is: they’re already doing it. The proposed European Convention doesn’t do much more than fiddle with the existing system, adding a competence here, subtracting one there, and setting out the different responsibilities of the member states and European level authorities more clearly. It does push the integration process along a bit, but it’s not the kind of radical change that Will thinks it is. If it’s working now, there’s no reason to think that it will strangle national-level democracy in the future There are big questions about how the EU is likely to cope with Central and Eastern European countries when they finally join the club - but these are problems that the EU would face in any event. Simply put, the proposed constitution, important as it is in some respects, isn’t the threat to national sovereignty that Will thinks it is, and it can’t be. It’s simply not that big a deal.

I’ve no objection whatsoever to well-informed Euroskeptics; there’s a lot about the EU that I don’t particularly like myself. I don’t even mind too much that many right wing Americans dislike the EU on general principle. But for God’s sake, can’t they at least try to find out a little more about the EU and its member states before they trash them? It would add some credibility to their criticisms.

Paul Wolfowitz tries to mount a defense of the Bush administration's conduct:

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, defending the Bush administration's justification of the Iraq war, said today that intelligence on terrorism is by its nature "murky," and that the United States may have little choice in the future but to "act on the basis of murky intelligence" if terror attacks are to be prevented.

The thing is: He's totally right. Intelligence is always going to be somewhat murky, and the executive branch of government is going to need to do its best to take action based on whatever intelligence it can get. But that is precisely why it's so important not to have an executive branch that's taking perfectly good intelligence — "Mr. President, we checked out that Niger thing and it turned out not to be true" — and throwing it away. When it comes to these sorts of things, the people have no choice but to basically trust the judgment of their president, and that means we need a president whose judgment we can trust. People who, when faced with facts they don't like, will make up new, "technically accurate" facts are not the people we need in a time of murky intelligence.

WHO YOU CALLIN' ANTI-CATHOLIC? Some of you may have missed the recent, extraordinary spectacle of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a Methodist, explaining to the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, four of whom are Catholic, that they were anti-Catholic for opposing the nomination of William Pryor to a federal appeals court. Here are the highlights from Nina Totenberg's excellent report on NPR (you can listen to it here):

Pryor's nomination has been controversial from the get-go. He has called the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision an abomination resulting in the, quote, "slaughter of millions of innocent unborn children." He's supported laws making consenting homosexual conduct a crime, and he supported the erection of a giant monument to the Ten Commandments in the Alabama Supreme Court building. But today Pandora's box opened wide at the Senate Judiciary Committee, with all but one Republican member in attendance, in effect accusing Democrats of opposing the nominee because he's Catholic.

The seed of the controversy was planted in June at the confirmation hearing when committee chairman Orrin Hatch, over the Democrats' objections [emphasis added], asked the nominee his religion. 'Roman Catholic' was the answer. Then this week an ad ran in newspapers in Maine and Rhode Island picturing a giant courthouse door with a sign on it that reads: Catholics need not apply. Below the picture is text that reads: Some in the US Senate are attacking Bill Pryor for having deeply held Catholic beliefs to prevent him from becoming a federal judge. The ad was paid for by the Committee for Justice, an organization for which President Bush's father and nephew have raised money.

The charge in the ad sent a jolt of fury through the committee's Democrats, especially its four Catholics, starting with the ranking Democrat, Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

Senator PATRICK LEAHY (Democrat, Vermont): This smear is a lie. It depends upon the silence of others to survive.

TOTENBERG: But Pryor's mentor, Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, wasn't buying.

Senator JEFF SESSIONS (Republican, Alabama): The ranking member protests that he is not anti-Catholic and he's offended that anyone suggested that he is. Well, let me tell you, the doctrine that abortion is not justified for rape and incest is Catholic doctrine. It is a position of the pope and it's a position of the Catholic Church in unity. So are we saying that if you believe in that principle, you can't be a federal judge? Is that what we're saying? And are we not saying then good Catholics need not apply?

Senator RICHARD DURBIN (Democrat, Illinois): This is disgusting.

You can't con an honest man
Since it’s “contrarian” silly ideas week on CT this week, here’s another one for fans of Tyler Cowen’s telemarketing argument (see below). It’s something that’s bugged me for a while. Various versions of the libertarian creed seemed to be based on allowing people to do anything they like as long as it doesn’t involve “force or fraud”. My question is; why have they got such a downer on fraud?

The prohibition on force is easy to understand. Force is nasty; it harms people directly and interferes with their liberty. But defrauding someone is just offering them an opportunity to harm themselves. Rather like selling them heroin, or persuading them to opt out of a defined benefit pension scheme, two activities that most of us would support people’s right to do, even though we might disapprove of the consequences. If we’re going to establish a strong principle of caveat emptor, as most libertarians seem to think that we should, why should we have a prohibition on that form of free speech known as “lying”? If someone wants to be fooled by a smooth-talking charmer, or decides rationally that they can’t be bothered verifying the accuracy of claims made to them, why should the govenrment step in and paternalistically demand that they be insulated from the consequences of their actions?

I can’t think of any Nozickian or other libertarian grounds on which one should be able to object to someone earning their living as a confidence trickster; it’s a non-productive activity, certainly, and it degrades the general institution of trust, but these are social objections, not available to a consistent libertarian. None of us ever signed a contract saying we wouldn’t lie to each other, so we needn’t feel bound by any social objections. So I suggest that “or fraud” be dropped from the slogans of the Libertarian Party, and we leave it to the free market to weed out the dishonest timeshare promoters, merchants of patent medicines, Nigerian advance fee scam artists etc.

To play, you start with $1,797,000,000,000. That is OMB’s estimate of FY 2004 receipts of the Federal Government from individual income taxes ($786.6 billion), social insurance and retirement receipts ($748.6 billion), corporate income taxes ($144.1 billion), excise taxes ($70 billion), estate and gift taxes ($22 billion), custom duties ($22 billion) and miscellaneous receipts ($34.1 billion). Those figures have been reduced by $30 billion for something called “revenue uncertainty.”

Almost $1.8 trillion dollars sounds like a lot of money, and it is. It is in the neighborhood of 16% of GDP. Still, fair warning, the money will go fast.

Okay, now let’s spend some money.

The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region.

A FRESH START...

"I think the thing that discouraged me about Vice President [Gore] was uttering those famous words, 'no controlling legal authority.' I felt like that there needed to be a better sense of responsibility of what was going on in the White House. I believe that--I believe they've moved that sign, 'The buck stops here,' from the Oval Office desk to 'The buck stops here' on the Lincoln Bedroom, and that's not good for the country."

George W. Bush
October 3rd, 2000

"President Bush on Friday put responsibility squarely on the CIA for his erroneous claim that Iraq tried to acquire nuclear material from Africa, prompting the director of intelligence to publicly accept full blame for the miscue."

Associated Press
July 11th, 2003

The project chose the 10-dollar bill because of its common use in the currency, and the fact that Congress wouldn't have to bump off another president to put Reagan on.

"Granted Hamilton was a founding father and he helped to write the Constitution, certainly not insignificant, but we think the impact that Reagan had, particularly in the late part of the 20th Century, is great," says Cowan.

[I]t does seem like the White House knew it would be nice to have some other support for their claims about Iraqi uranium purchases and that there were some reasons for concern about their own 'evidence.' Their own actions seems to show they suspected something was wrong.

So I don't think dumping on [former ambassador] Wilson, which seems to be the White House's preferred strategy now, is going to cut it. But in each of these cases, let's find out. If Wilson and Thielmann are fibbing let's expose them. And if their superiors are playing fast and loose with the truth, let's find that out too. Let the chips fall where they may.

One big question . . . is that of rights (especially to property). Are these just the creatures of the state and positive law, or are their rights (including to property) which exist independently of the state and which the state ought to respect? Leftist arguments against such original property rights are often based on the fact that property is a complex matter and that without a full legal specification of the so-called ‘incidents’ of property, claims to ownership are going to be hopelessly indeterminate. Property rights are then said to depend, in some sense, on the state. But I’m unpersuaded by that line of attack. For we can surely point to many instances where people confer and recognise rights extra-legally, where it is clear that the state has moral (rather than simply pragmatic) reason to be constrained by those rights.

Of course, so far Bush's GOP cohorts and his apologists in the media have bent over backwards to find ways of saying that Bush didn't exactly lie -- he just exaggerated, or told a sort of white lie that had a beneficent purpose as well as a grand result. See, for instance, Fred Kaplan's Slate piece, Was Bush Lying About WMD?:

Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other Pentagon officials who made these claims so fiercely probably weren't lying. Clearly, they had formed their conclusions first, then went scrounging for the evidence. Clearly, they stretched the evidence they found right up to, and in some cases beyond, the logical limits. However, it's a fair bet that they genuinely believed that Saddam had these weapons.

This, of course, utterly ignores the possibility (not to mention the likelihood) that these officials, including Bush himself, were willing in fact to make knowingly false assertions (that is, to lie) in support of their predetermined conclusions. One of the foremost of these was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's assertion in September 2002 that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction:

"We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons," Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 18. "His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons -- including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas."

Later, on March 30, 2003, Rumsfeld told ABC's "This Week" program: "We know where they are."

Claiming to know something when, in fact, you do not know it (even if you believe it dearly) is a lie -- regardless of how you spin it afterward.

I collect Bush talk, as you know (along with Rumsfeld talk and some other choice verbal specimens). I'm sure I was not alone in enjoying what Bush said when asked about a terrorist "ceasefire" in the Middle East: "I'll believe it when I see it." Blunt, honest, easily comprehensible, Trumanesque: That's Bush talk. I love the eloquent speeches, written by those marvelous speechwriters. But I love just plain, unadorned, from-the-gut W. talk, too.