Year: 2005

We can craft a better balance than we now have. My latest column is now posted opposite.

LEO STRAUSS AND AMERICA: Few thinkers have been subjected to as many ignorant smears as Leo Strauss. He was, in my view, an exceptionally gifted, funny, shrewd and daring interpreter of some of the most critical texts in the Western canon. I’m proud to have been taught by some of his students, and wish I could attend a conference at the New School later this week. It’s open to the public, and looks riveting.

The U.S. is currently holding many completely innocent men in indefinite detention. Remember that around 90 percent of Abu Ghraib inmates were later deemed innocent of any crime. Here’s an important piece by a lawyer for an innocent detainee that I missed today, but is well worth reading.

That’s the news for president Bush from the latest Gallup poll. Money quote:

A 53% majority say they trust what Bush says less than they trusted previous presidents while they were in office. In a specific comparison with President Clinton, those surveyed by 48% – 36% say they trust Bush less.

People aren’t fools. When a president says “We do not torture,” and the evidence is overwhelming that we do, and have done, repeatedly, then your credibility suffers. The president has to put this issue behind him – soon. (Hat tip: Mike.)

Armando has an unseemly fit about Fred Hiatt. Hiatt’s point seems completely legit to me. Money Hiatt quote:

The Democrats could be responsible and fiercely critical, too, as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has shown throughout the war. When they pull a stunt such as insisting on a secret Senate session, it could be to debate Bush’s policies on torture and detention. They could ask whether everything possible is being done to furnish the Iraqi army with protective armor. They could question whether anyone inside the administration is focusing with the same urgency on prodding Iraqi politicians toward compromise as are America’s ambassador and top generals in the field.
Individual Democratic senators have focused on individual questions such as these (for example, Michigan’s Carl Levin on torture), but for the caucus and its leader, Harry Reid (Nev.), the key questions are all about history.

I have no problems with investigating the pre-war intelligence process. But we are still at war, and a responsible opposition does more than oppose: it offers an alternative for the future. How do we win? What do we do now? What specific reforms are needed? Better training for Iraqi forces? Better monitoring of the Syrian border? An end to torturing detainees? More Dems need to be making positive pro-active arguments for winning this war. Until they do, they will deserve the label of ‘unserious.’

A classic of the genre.

One consequence of the WMD intelligence fiasco in Iraq is that no one in the international community gives the U.S. the benefit of the doubt any more on intelligence. We may have come across the mother-lode of computer evidence of Iran’s nuke program. But why should anyone believe us now? They keep suspecting it’s faked.

A picture-guide to her prose.

The great virtue of Madonna, apart from her Catholic roots, is her lack of musical pretension. She’s a pop artist, not a “rock star.” I loathe most rock criticism, as I loathe most of rock and roll, because of its absurd pretension to seriousness. Madonna isn’t innocent here, of course. She has made her fair share of dumb-ass pronouncements in her time. But at her best, she is a pure pop performer. Her new album is the best she has ever done, in my opinion. You can’t stop enjoying its shameless superficiality, its joyous rhythms, its ’80s disco uplift. Yeah, I know this will look like a suck-up to my new hosts, but Time’s Josh Tyrangiel gets it exactly right:

Over a pulsing synthesizer, a ticking clock, a rumbling timpani and countless other perfectly calibrated whirs and beeps, Madonna declares, “I don’t like cities, but I like New York/Other places make me feel like a dork.” This is not the most ridiculous lyric ever uttered in a pop song–that remains “Yummy yummy yummy/I got love in my tummy.” Still, it is awfully silly, and before you press on with the album, you will need to ask yourself, Am I a serious person who listens to music for intellectual enlightenment and makes it a point of pride not to dance under any circumstances? Or am I merely a semi-serious person who makes it a point not to be seen dancing under any circumstances? If you’re the former, Confessions on a Dance Floor is not for you. If you’re the latter, close the blinds.

The DP and I have had the blinds closed for a while now. The groove goes on …

This morning’s NYT has an insightful op-ed on how the interrogation techniques now used by the U.S. were actually first developed by the Communist interrogators of the Soviet-controlled world. They were designed not to get actionable intelligence but to destroy a person’s soul and enforce ideological conformity. In this “Animal Farm” moment, where the United States has literally adopted the immorality of its erstwhile enemy, it’s hard to improve on this email:

The audacity of what the WSJ and the White House are trying to do is staggering. What they are attempting to do is one of the most profound moral outrages that Orwell (and myself) ascribed to the left, which is simply redefining a word and insisting on that redefinition in the political discourse, until that word has lost its original primary function. The academic establishment has gone a long way in changing the word “tolerance” to have overtones of being sympathetic to a thing, whereas it used to have a meaning similar to this: “In the use of torture, many people have a threshold of pain beyond which they cannot tolerate it and will give in to the demands of their captors.” I will not be a part of this debate anymore, because anybody with an 8th grade education knows exactly what both “torture” and “tolerate” mean here. The president and his allies are (characteristically) pulling one out of the Orwellian left playbook to redefine the word into irrelevance. In other words, if “torture” means “organ failure” or “death” as the White House has argued (and let’s open our eyes and notice that organ failure is a corrolary to death without immediate, radical medical treatment, e.g. a liver transplant or permanent dialysis), then the above statement becomes nearly nonsense, because dead people are by definition unable to give in to the demands of their captors. A good way to settle a dispute among rational parties is to find an impartial, mutually respected source to arbitrate. I often find that people go around spilling a lot of words in a discussion without resolution in cases where consulting the definitions of words provides so much clarity that people are rendered without argument. From the “Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,” torture:

A noun 1. Originally, (a disorder characterized by) contortion, distortion, or twisting. Later, (the infliction of) severe physical or mental suffering; anguish, agony, torment. b transf. A cause of severe pain or anguish. 2. The infliction of severe bodily pain as a punishment or as a means of interrogation or persuasion; a form or instance of this. b transf. An instrument or means of torture. B verb trans. 1. Subject to torture as a punishment or as a means of interrogation or persuasion. 2. Inflict severe mental or physical suffering on; cause anguish in; torment. Also, puzzle or perplex greatly. 3. figuratively, to force violently out of the original state or form; twist, distort; pervert. Also followed by /into/. 4. extract by torture.

Torture is defined purely in terms of inflicted suffering. These people who want to argue the point in the face of the definition are not engaging in a rational discussion, and should be treated as such. I will point out that the one sense of torture here that is not referring to concrete torture describes their tactics. They are, in fact, attempting verb form number 3 of torture on the word torture. They are trying to twist, distort and pervert the word out of its agreed definition.

Yes, they are. And they are doing so because what they have done and permitted to be done is so outrageous to civilized norms that they have no option but to destroy the very language that we use. We do not have to be a party to this. We have to expose it for what it is.

The strongest arguments against can be found here.

ALITO AND ABORTION: Professor Bainbridge claims vindication over Harriet Miers.