Month: June 2004

AEI – hardly a liberal institution – knocks down any notion that George W. Bush is comparable to Ronald Reagan on fiscal matters:

Ronald Reagan sought – and won – more spending cuts than any other modern president. He is the only president in the last forty years to cut inflation-adjusted nondefense outlays, which fell by 9.7 percent during his first term. George W. Bush, in contrast, increased real nondefense spending by at least 25.3 percent during his first term.
Moreover, President Reagan believed that the federal government had usurped private, state, and local responsibilities and consequently thought the budgets of most departments and agencies should be cut. Following are comparisons of budget cuts during each presidential term going back to the Johnson administration:
*tPresident Reagan cut the budget of 8 agencies out of 15 during his first term and the budget of 10 out of 15 during his second term.
*tPresident Clinton cut the budget of 9 out of 15 agencies during his first term but cut none during his second term.
*tPresident George W. Bush has cut none of the agencies’ budgets during his first term.

No president since Johnson has been so supportive of big government as George W. Bush. Why are fiscal conservatives still supporting him?

He’s a top 500 reviewer. What a nerd.

“The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment.'” – president George W. Bush, June 27, 2003.

“If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job. I don’t think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this,” – an “official who supervised the capture of accused terrorists”, from the same story. The worst examples of mistreatment cited at the time were the use of truth-serum, threats to deport prisoners to other countries where torture is common, and sleep-deprivation.

This is from the Washington Post this morning:

In December 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld approved a series of harsh questioning methods for use at the Guantanamo Bay base. According to the Wall Street Journal, these included the removal of clothing, the use of “stress positions,” hooding, “fear of dogs,” and “mild non-injurious physical contact.” Even before that, the Journal reported, interrogators at Guantanamo forced prisoners to wear women’s underwear on their heads. A year later, when some of the same treatment was publicized through the Abu Ghraib photographs, Mr. Rumsfeld described it as “grievous and brutal abuse and cruelty.”

So what is it? Defensible interrogation techniques or something for which the Defense secretary has to apologize? Maybe it took seeing the actual abuse for Rumsfeld to realize how vile it is. But he approved many of the methods nonetheless. If people see nothing wrong with doing what was done at Abu Ghraib, then we need to have that debate. And that debate should be public, in front of the world. If the Bush administration wants to defend torture in an election campaign, it can go right ahead. But it has no right to change the rules of U.S. military conduct in secret, through a series of memos and improvisation, and then, when the evidence emerges, pretend it was all concocted by a handful of thugs. I keep remembering, as Anne Applebaum notes this morning, the look on the faces of those creeps humiliating inmates, and the grin on the face of Graner as he posed next to a murdered inmate. They are the faces of people who know they are doing what they are supposed to do. They fear no retribution. 37 inmates have died – died – in U.S. custody. Do we think they all caught pneumonia? Mercifully, some in the military upheld their own honor and disseminated the pictures. But what would have happened if we had not seen those pictures? Would torture still be going on? How would we have found out? This comes down to a fundamental compact between a government and the people. From all the evidence we see so far, the Bush administration has violated that compact, allowed America’s hard-won reputation for decency and fairness to be tarnished, and compromised the moral integrity of the war on terror. What is their explanation?

The latest poll of Iraqis – skewed because it doesn’t include the Kurds – is nonetheless bleak news. Paul Bremer will have spent over a year losing legitimacy completely. The Iraqis still have trust in the Iraqi security forces, while they have little or no trust in the CPA (it has an approval rating of 11 percent). (On the other hand, they also distrust the U.N., giving it only slightly higher grades than the loathed Americans.) 81 percent of Iraqis now think better of Moqtadr al Sadr than they did three months ago (but only 2 percent would elect him president). Allawi scores 24 percent support; al Sadr gets 67 percent. A staggering 92 percent view the Coalition forces as “occupiers” as opposed to 2 percent who consider them “liberators;” and 55 percent say they would feel more safe if the Coalition forces left (that number was 11 percent last November). It doesn’t get more decisive a judgment than that.

SILVER LININGS? Hard to find – but they do exist. 63 percent are happy to have an interim Iraqi government after June 30; 51 percent feel “very safe” in their neighborhoods; 64 percent say that the conflicts in Fallujah and Karbala have made Iraq more unified; 51 percent are now more interested in joining the Iraqi security forces than they were three months ago; 87 percent believe that the Iraqi security forces will be capable of keeping order without the help of the coalition forces. Abu Ghraib didn’t have much of an impact. Most Iraqis say that the abuses are what they expect from Americans (54 percent believe all Americans are like Lynndie England). But the fundamental reason that U.S. forces are opposed is because they are viewed as an occupation, not because of their conduct. Most believe that the violence is a function of a collapse in respect for the Coalition forces and a function of external meddling (which gets it roughly right). The obvious conclusion is that we have lost the window of opportunity to use the good will gained from the ouster of Saddam to leverage a pro-American democracy in non-Kurdish Iraq. But a democracy is still possible, and it’s hard to think of a more rational way forward than the one now proposed. The task now is to achieve some kind of workable pluralist, non-Islamist government that will not be a major anti-American force in the region. That’s much better than leaving Saddam in power; but it’s far less than we might once have hoped for. Maybe in a decade or so, we’ll see the real fruits of this noble, flawed experiment. I’m still hoping.

It appears Senator Rick Santorum will try and get a vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment in the Senate just before the Democratic Convention. The limited goal now is to use this issue against Democratic Senators especially in the South. That, of course, was always part of the game-plan. You will recall that, completely coincidentally, the Defense of Marriage Act was also introduced in the summer before a presidential election in 1996. On the bright side, I don’t know many who believe that this can get the necessary 67 votes; and one reason some in the House want the Senate vote is to declare the FMA dead and so avoid ever having to vote on it. But for Santorum, Rove and Dobson, this will now become a bi-ennial ritual – a means to gin up social conservative votes and energy before elections. They’re foolish, I think. By introducing the FMA, the Santorumites have changed the topic from gay marriage as such to the topic of amending the Constitution. John Kerry’s position – against gay marriage but against the FMA – is not an electoral loser. It’s closer to the American center on this subject than George W. Bush is.

“Slave-holding agro-phile Jefferson was not too sophisticated in his understanding of economics. He drove himself into debt for one thing; his friends held a lottery at one point late in his life to raise money for him. Turning to him for a quote on debt is like turning to Larry King for an analysis of hip hop music. How about quoting instead our first Secretary of the Treasury, who said ‘a national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing?'” Ouch. More ouches on the Letters Page.

UKIP’S STAR: Here’s a useful profile of Robert Kilroy-Silk, the suave British version of Phil Donahue who led the UK Independence Party to 17 percent of the vote in last week’s European elections. One thing worth recalling about him. He was fired by the BBC for making allegedly Islamophobic remarks. I wonder if his public support comes somewhat from that. He’s a mix of Bill O’Reilly and Pim Fortuyn. Dick Morris advised the UKIP and brags about it (justifiably, I guess) here.

BROOKHISER ON DERBYSHIRE: Just two elegant and kindly put-downs – here and here of National Review’s out-and-proud bigot, John Derbyshire.

It reads a lot like the old one.

But who knows whence it comes?

Now here’s an interesting analogy:

With the whole stem-cell debate, the President’s rationale (I assume) is that “While you may not care about these little old stem cells, once you start making them and doing experiments you are on the whole slippery slope to killing people for medical research”. A position which I agree with, on balance.
Compare this, sadly, to his position on torture, where he did not seem to realise that while it may seem OK to slightly torture some cunning terrorist mastermind, you are then on the same slippery slope to a bunch of soldiers messing with random foreigners just for kicks.
Likewise, as I’m sure we’ll hear over the next few years, the Patriot Act is probably being used for all kinds of non-national-security related criminal investigations.

Slippery slope arguments are dubious, to my mind, but I see the point here. The concrete issue we have to figure out is how the special rules for Guantanamo got transferred to Abu Ghraib. The obvious theory: once the insurgency got even more deadly, the Pentagon got frustrated with their lack of actionable intelligence. Some of the Gitmo techniques had apparently succeeded in getting some useful info, so a decision was made to experiment with them more widely in Iraq – against people who might well not have been in al Qaeda or merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. You can understand the motive, but the risks were under-estimated, and the abuses predictable. Well, we’ll find out soon enough.

DANISH MARRIAGE: It’s the welfare state, stupid.