Month: January 2004

For those of you who are buying the Bush administration spin that this journey to the moon and Mars won’t cost more than an extra billion a year or so, check out Gregg Easterbrook’s analysis. The numbers unveiled are a fraction of the real cost. I’d like to trust the administration on budget matters; but they have violated any trust anyone ever gave them. Money quote:

So far all money numbers announced for the Bush plan seem complete nonsense, if not outright dishonesty. We shouldn’t expect George W. Bush himself to know that $12 billion is not enough to develop a spaceship. We should expect the people around Bush, and at the top of NASA, to know this. And apparently they are either astonishingly ill-informed and naxefve, or are handing out phony numbers for political purposes, to get the foot in the door for far larger sums later.

I’m afraid that the answer is that this administration simply doesn’t care what it’s spending or will spend. Deficits don’t matter, remember? These people are beginning to make Lyndon Johnson look like Herbert Hoover.

AND WHEN IN- DOUBT, LIE: Leave it to Rick Santorum to say the following: “I would just suggest we stayed within the budget targets the President has set forth. They are substantially less than what the increases were under the Clinton administration. They are, I would argue, fiscally responsible.” Here’s the truth: If you take defense and entitlement spending out of the picture altogether (and they have, of course, gone through the roof), Bush and the Republican Congress have upped domestic spending by a whopping 21 percent in three years. That compares with an actual decrease in such spending of 0.7 percent in the first three years of Bill Clinton. Spending on education is up 61 percent; on energy 22 percent; on health and human services 22 percent; on the Labor Department a massive 56 percent. There really is no spinning of this. Bill Clinton was a fiscal conservative. George W. Bush is a fiscal liberal of a kind we haven’t seen since LBJ. Maybe the Democrats would be worse. But naitonally, the GOP is outspending Democrats wherever they get the chance.- A USA Today study found that GOP-controlled state legislatures increased spending an average of 6.54 percent a year from 1997 to 2002, compared with 6.17 percent for legislatures run by Democrats. Fiscal conservatives really have no place to go any more. But if you had to pick, you’d have to support the Democrats.

LET THE KIDS PAY: I have to say I agree with the winner of the MoveOn.org ad competition. It’s not a hate message; it ignores Hitler; it doesn’t mention the war. Yes, it’s a little extreme. But it’s a vivid way of pointing out what this president is doing to future generations by his fiscal recklessness. He truly must be held to account.

I’m talking about this $170 billion foray into space. After all, the next generation will be paying for a collapsed social security system, a bankrupted Medicare program, soaring interest on the public debt, as well as coughing up far higher taxes to keep some semblance of a government in operation. But, hey, the president needed another major distraction the week before the Iowa caucuses, and since he won’t be around to pick up the bill, why the hell not? Deficits don’t matter, after all. And what’s a few hundred billion dollars over the next few decades anyway? Chickenfeed for the big and bigger government now championed by the Republicans. This space initiative is, for me, the last fiscal straw. There comes a point at which the excuses for fiscal recklessness run out. The president campaigned in favor of the responsibility ethic. He has governed – in terms of guarding the nation’s finances – according to the motto: “If it feels good, do it.” I give up. Can’t they even pretend to give a damn?

WATCH JOSH SPIN: I can’t do any better than the original, so just take a look at Josh Marshall’s attempt to distinguish between good “unilateralism” under Clinton and bad “unilateralism” under Bush. Sometimes, Marshall’s rabid partisanship gets the better of his intellectual honesty. It’s just that he’s usually better at disguising it.

SLIMING DEAN: What a vile little smear story from ABC News. I knew this campaign was getting tough, but this kind of irrelevant piece of guilt by association is truly beneath contempt.

REAL PRICE GOUGING: I’m a big defender of the pharmaceutical companies and the incredible difference they have made for people with serious disease. But sometimes, they are indefensible. Check out this account of what Abbott Pharmaceuticals has been doing with the pricing of their anti-HIV protease inhibitor. After seven years on the market, they have suddenly increased its price by 400 percent. Why? Because it’s too toxic in the levels used when it came on the market (trust me; I took it when it first came out; it was crippling – liver stress, constant nausea, numbness of the face, neuropathy in my hands and feet, a mandatory two hour nap in the middle of the day, etc, etc.). So the amount now used is less than a tenth of the original dose – and often in combination with other drugs (which it helps metabolize). Abbott’s response? Quadruple the price overnight. If the drug industry wants to avoid being clobbered in this climate, they’d be smart not to engage in what amounts to sheer gouging.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “It is the same as saying the federal government doesn’t want to weigh in on slavery, but if the states want to call it chattel that is O.K.,” – Sandy Rios, Concerned Women of America, comparing allowing gay couples to get married to the evil of slavery. If the NYT piece is accurate, it’s revealing, I think, that the far right cares much less about supporting heterosexual marriage than in preventing gay unions. Revealing, but to anyone who follows them closely, utterly unsurprising.

He’s been back in Iraq and writing about what he saw. The piece is complex and nuanced and you should read it all. But I was srtuck by this concession from someone previously implacably opposed to intervention:

For Iraqis, there was no pro-war or anti-war movement last spring when the United States invaded their country. That, in their view, was a predominantly Western debate. They’re used to war; they’re used to gunshots. What is new is this tiny seed and taste of freedom. It is a compelling experience to have been in Baghdad just one year ago, where not a single Iraqi expressed to me opinions outside Baathist party lines, and just one year later, when so many express their opinions and so many opinions compete for attention. Where the debate is similar to that in the United States is over the way in which the business of war will administer the opportunity for peace and freedom, and the reasonable expectation of Iraqi self-rule.

There is still, of course, immense danger and instability. But it is good to see the left regain some of its moral bearings and also see the good that we have done.

Interesting defense of unilateralism as a last resort by Howard Dean in USA Today today. My support for his fiestiness, and left-liberal clarity is beginning to wilt a little under the weight of some of what he has been saying. There’s a difference between a conviction politician and someone who’s just wacko. Bush planned an invasion of Iraq because of psychological problems? There was no middle-class tax cut, but I’ll try and retain part of it in my upcoming tax plan? I’m committed to staying the course in Iraq but also running ads decrying candidates who had the temerity to vote for the actual funding for it? Oy.

THE HIV BAN: I recently wrote briefly about the injustice and cruelty of the ban on any HIV-positive visitors, tourists, or full-fledged immigrants. Jonathan Rauch has just written a much more detailed and sane piece, exploring this piece of discrimination. It’s a must-read. If the administration really supports compassionate conservatism in immigration, this is a real test of their seriousness. If legal immigrants can show they will not be a public charge because of their medical condition, they should not be discriminated against just because they have HIV. And even those conservatives who first endorsed the ban have now begun to come around.

THE GERMANS AND IRAQ: Even the Saddam-backers have begun to notice improvements:

Business is booming especially with no taxes to pay. Office furniture is currently in high demand as new companies are being established all over. … There are modest loans from the occupational authority for those seeking to start a small business. … In Baghdad the internet cafes are shooting out of the ground like mushrooms. Even in distant small towns you find some.

That’s from the Berlin Morning Post.

Some of you have queried me for making criticisms of the president with regard to Iraq. I think I’ve earned a certain amount of credibility on this one. I’m a big admirer of the both the aims and methods of this administration in the war on terror. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t made some real mistakes. They got the WMD question wrong. The intelligence was faulty and they failed to be sufficiently skeptical about it. They did have elaborate plans for post-war Iraq, as Jim Fallows details in the current Atlantic, but largely ignored them, perhaps dismissing such details as cover for an anti-war agenda. This insouciance led to debacles like the disbanding of the Iraqi army in the middle of last year. I don’t think it would kill the administration to fess up to this. They were human errors, compounded by a certain ideological fervor. I think, given the overall achievement, that they were entirely forgivable. And I guess the White House has learned to concede nothing, because when they do, it backfires (remember uranium from Niger?). But people did screw up. One consequence of that screw-up is that almost any future argument for pre-emption based on intelligence will be extremely hard to win. Ditto, the view that deficits don’t matter could well lead to an inability to take military action in the future, since the country will be unable to afford it. In that sense, the Bush administration’s errors have undermined the crux of their own foreign policy. That’s a loss. And, with a little more modesty and skepticism, it was preventable.

BUSH AND MARRIAGE: I have no objection to and much support for the president’s proposal to encourage marriage, especially for low income people. As long as the government isn’t indoctrinating or imposing itself, helping marriages prosper and last helps all of us: the couples, the potential or actual kids, and society itself, because such families are more able to take care of themselves. Marriage matters. And government has some responsibility to help foster it. But, of course, it begs the question. If marriage is so good for straights, why is the government so intent on preventing it for gays? Don’t gay men, in particular, face all sorts of problems and issues that the responsibility of marriage helps ameliorate? And then you realize: for this administration, gay and lesbian citizens are regarded as beneath responsibility. There is no need for a social policy toward them, since they have no human needs or aspirations. If gays try to build responsible lives, and families, the important thing is not to help or encourage or reach out to them, but to prevent their relationships at all costs and in any way possible – even if we have to amend the constitution to keep them excluded from families and society. Above all: don’t ever mention them in public. It might lead to some sort of social policy that could help them. They can pay taxes, but the government has no interest in helping them construct relationships that last. That’s roughly it, isn’t it?

No one even pretends to be for free trade any more. Ryan Lizza’s new blog explains.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Sixty-seven Japanese cities were firebombed by the B-29s in the spring of 1945 and three hundred and fifty thousand civilians burnt to death – and the war in effect won – well before Hiroshima… Now, thanks to our sleek modern weaponry, Americans no longer have to kill civilians in indiscriminate numbers in wartime, and can despise and fear enemies who hold to the idea that anyone can be targeted for death in the name of a fervent cause.” – Roger Angell comparing the United States fighting the Japanese in World War Two to Al Qaeda bombing the World Trade Center in the New Yorker, January 19, 2004.

BUSH IS HITLER WATCH: Here’s a classic from Canada. Of course, he takes pains to say that there are differences between Bush and the Nazi dictator, but then goes on to milk the parallels:

Like central European nations of the 1930s, Canada finds itself next door to a powerful nation led by an unusually aggressive and perhaps slightly unhinged man. What to do? It’s generally forgotten now, but in the mid-’30s Hitler was not universally condemned as evil personified. Indeed, he had many admirers in Europe and North America – people who lauded his “leadership,” who lionized his moral certainty (no namby-pamby moral relativism there) and who either forgave, or actively applauded, what was then called anti-Semitism and today would be labelled racial profiling. World leaders were wary and respectful. Canada’s then-prime minister, Mackenzie King, confided in his diary after meeting Hitler in 1937 that the dictator was “one who truly loves his fellow men and his country and would make any sacrifice for their good … a man of deep sincerity and a genuine patriot … a teetotaller.”

When Democrats accuse Bush of creating hostility across the globe, they fail to see that some hostility is simply a function of ignorance, ideology and insufferable smugness.

That’s according to Drudge. It’s all you need to know really, isn’t it?

The liberal interventionist, Paul Berman, expresses my view entirely about the rationale for the war against Saddam, even accounting for the WMD embarrassment:

What was the reason for the war in Iraq? Sept. 11 was the reason. At least to my mind it was. Sept. 11 showed that totalitarianism in its modern Muslim version was not going to stop at slaughtering millions of Muslims, and hundreds of Israelis, and attacking the Indian government, and blowing up American embassies. The totalitarian manias were rising, and the United States itself was now in danger. A lot of people wanted to respond, as any mayor would do, by rounding up a single Bad Guy, Osama.
But Sept. 11 did not come from a single Bad Guy – it was a product of the larger totalitarian wave, and the only proper response was to comprehend the size and depth of that larger wave, and find ways to begin rolling it back, militarily and otherwise – mostly otherwise. To roll it back for our own sake, and everyone else’s sake, Muslims’ especially. Iraq, with its somewhat antique variation of the Muslim totalitarian idea, was merely a place to begin, after Afghanistan, with its more modern variation.

For me, September 11 told us we faced a huge problem – one that would annihilate our civilization if we did not confront it. Confronting it meant engaging the Arab Musim world and finding a way to bring it into modernity. Only dangerous, time-consuming, casualty-incurring involvement would achieve this. Iraq is the very beginning, not the end game. My fundamental concern with the Dean candidacy is that he doesn’t recognize this. He doesn’t see the bigger picture: that the terror we face is not a function of mere criminality but of ideology. But unless we have leaders who understand the depth of the problem and the threat, we are doomed not just to defeat but to catastrophe.

What to make of the former Treasury secretary’s complaints? The paranoia about planning for war against Saddam early on is silly: of course, there were plans. Regime change had been national policy under late Clinton. Less easy to dismiss are O’Neill’s complaints that fit with John DiIulio’s, when he quit. To wit: This White House is all about politics. Yes, and banks are full of money. But with this White House, there is a level of politicization that’s striking. When challenged on the important question of whether stockpiles of Saddam’s WMDs have been found in contrast to mere infrastructure, plans, and scientists, the president told Diane Sawyer, “What’s the difference?” The glibness of that response still rankles. There was no difference to the president as long as the politics worked out okay, and, in general, he made the right decision. But someone who cannot anguish over his own mistakes may be doomed to repeat them. Integrity means the ability to question yourself. It does not mean the peremptory dismissal of all criticism.

POLITICAL BUSH: The supremacy of politics over everything accounts, of course, for some spectacular coups – like the immigration proposal – and some hideous errors – like the steel tariffs. But it remains one of the most illuminating prisms through which to understand this administration. The second criticism is one I’ve also seen close-up: an absolute refusal even to contemplate that they have a spending or deficit problem. Josh Bolten’s response is to ignore actual spending totals and focus on what the administration intended to disburse. Mankiw cannot defend the deficits and when he does, it’s painful. Rove abruptly dismisses any discussion of deficits – on the grounds (surprise!) that they don’t swing votes in a growing economy. So what? They destroy economies in the long run. Money O’Neill quote from Time:

In an economic meeting in the Vice President’s office, O’Neill started pitching, describing how the numbers showed that growing budget deficits threatened the economy. Cheney cut him off. “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said. O’Neill was too dumbfounded to respond. Cheney continued: “We won the midterms. This is our due.”

That rings true to me. There is, within this administration, a deep antipathy to questioning certain shibboleths. I wonder who has dared to tell the president that his space program ideas cannot be funded responsibly and so should not be funded. I bet no one. The same kind of blank refusal to consider alternative views can be seen in the fact that, despite enormous (and good) research from within the administration on how to prepare very carefully for the post-war in Iraq, much of it was ignored. Some of this blindness can help a president be decisive and drive events. Some leads into disaster. Much of the O’Neill stuff can be dismissed as sour grapes. But there are some worrying themes about the way this administration runs itself that rightly endure. The only sure bet is that the administration will ignore them.

Is Howard Dean the only one popping off bizarre accusations against the Bush administration? I’ve written before that Wesley Clark is arguably far more loopy than Dean, more prone to paranoia, weird conspiracy theories, and reversals of opinion that are dizzying in scope. Chris Suellentrop has been on the trail and discovering more. My favorites: “[the president] is continuing to associate Saddam, Iraq, and the problem of terrorism. Yet the only terrorists that are in Iraq are the people that have come there to attack us.” Yeah, right. Abu Nidal was on a vacation in Baghdad. “Newsweek magazine says [Osama bin Laden] is in the mountains of western Pakistan. And I guess if Newsweek could find him there, we could, too, if we wanted to.” Sure, the president wouldn’t want to find bin Laden in an election year. Why would he want to do that?

THE SELF-ESTEEM OF BULLIES: They have plenty of it. But we knew that, didn’t we? “They don’t show any signs whatsoever of depression, loneliness or anxiety,” Dr Juvonen said. “They look even healthier than the socially adjusted kids who are not involved in the bullying.” Duh. They’re mainly boys; they have testosterone; their social cachet comes from becoming Alpha Male. The last thing you need to do is psychoanalyze them: they have to be disciplined. Like dictators.