Month: March 2006

An update on a fascinating and revealing moment in Noam Chomsky’s deplorable career.

This is a wonderful quote from an Afghan judge about a man who faces the death penalty because of his conversion to Christianity:

"We will invite him again because the religion of Islam is one of tolerance. We will ask him if he has changed his mind. If so we will forgive him."

There are many Muslims in the West and elsewhere who do not support or tolerate this kind of medieval oppression. I look forward to hearing their protests. Please let me know of any I might have missed.

He’s a fascinating character, and this blog discussed him here and here. He’s the former fundamentalist who became an agnostic after studying the various textual sources for the Bible. Here’s a 40 minute interview with him on NPR’s usually great "Fresh Air".

A reader writes:

"Your blood-and-thunder, hateful tirades against our commander-in-chief in time of war and at a vulnerable point IN that war has at last marked a watershed in your ‘evolution’ from long-ago conservative to current leftist-in-just-about-everything-name [sic].
Your language, your attitude and your position have finally placed you pretty firmly in the camp of Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin and the Hollyweird left in general.
It confirms my ‘bigotry’ from the get-go: Gays cannot sacrifice enough of their sexual self-interest to adhere to an ideology as austere as conservatism. The pull to the left is too strong for homosexuals to resist for very long. So formalize and render legit your new political ‘awakening’: declare conservatism behind you.
There is a long, proud history of betrayal in the homosexual community, whose most celebrated example – the locus classicus, if you prefer – is Philby and his crew.
Congratulations on joining that fine tradition!"

So let’s recap: I’m in favor of Bush’s tax cuts, but want spending cuts to match them; I favor balanced budgets; I favored and favor the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns, but want to execute them competently, with enough troops, and in adherence to America’s long tradition of humane warfare; I oppose affirmative action and hate crime laws; I favor privatizing social security; I opposed the Medicare prescription drug entitlement; I want more money for defense, specifically more troops; I favor states’ rights; I’m a First Amendment nut; I have few problems with gun rights; I would criminalize third trimester abortions; I support marriage rights for everyone, because marriage is a critical institution fostering self-reliance and responsibility. And all of this now makes me part of the "left," equatable with individuals who betrayed their own country for Stalin’s Russia. I notice that my correspondent describes conservatism as an "ideology." I think that speaks volumes about what has happened to what was once regarded as the antidote to ideology.

The Republicans have just raised the debt limit to $9 trillion. The president’s incompetence has led us into a very difficult time in Iraq. They have few substantive proposals to offer the public. So what are they going to do to stop a Democratic landslide this November? Yes, you guessed it: another bout of hysteria around the terribly dangerous prospect of gay couples settling down and committing to each other. Fred Barnes lets us know what’s coming down the pike. No worries, Fred. We know by now what we’re going to be dealing with. It happens like clockwork every summer before an election year. I remember the first time, back in 1996. But each time, it gets a little staler, doesn’t it? The bigotry gets a little more obvious – and the threadbare nature of what’s left of the conservative movement a little bit starker.  But hang in there. You can maybe squeeze a few more votes out of it. And, by this time, you certainly know how. Joe Gandelman rounds up bloggy reax here.

The great conundrum of the stoner is the inevitable existential tension between the marijuana and the munchies. But in this almost-free country of ours, someone found a way to combine the two: cannabis candy. Yes, according to the Smoking Gun, an enterprising crew created marijuana-based candy bars: the products "carried labels such as Toka-Cola, Pot Tarts, Puff-A-Mint Pattie, Stoney Ranchers, Munchy Way, and Buddahfinger." Here’s a visual sample from TSG:

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman again takes a pot-shot at your lowly blogger today. I won’t link, because the NYT has him behind a fire-wall. But allow me to explain two claims of his that evaporate upon inspection. We begin with this:

"Mr. Bush’s new conservative critics don’t say much about the issue that most disturbs the public, the quagmire in Iraq. That’s not surprising. Commentators who acted as cheerleaders in the run-up to war, and in many cases questioned the patriotism of those of us who were skeptical, can’t criticize the decision to start this war without facing up to their own complicity in that decision.
Nor, after years of insisting that things were going well in Iraq and denouncing anyone who said otherwise, is it easy for them to criticize Mr. Bush’s almost surreal bungling of the war. (William Kristol of The Weekly Standard is the exception; he says that we never made a "serious effort" in Iraq, which will come as news to the soldiers.)"

It will come as some surprise to my readers that I have not been criticizing Mr Bush’s conduct of the Iraq war. The plain record shows that I have been criticizing it since the first week it was launched. My disdain for Bush’s conduct for the war even led me to endorse John Kerry, something Bill Kristol didn’t. I criticized the conduct of the war before many other conservatives; and have done so with much more gusto. Readers will also be surprised to find that I have not owned up to "my complicity" in the decision to go to war. I specifically did so in explicit terms. Does expressing personal "shame and sorrow" not count? Then there’s this:

They can’t even criticize Mr. Bush for the systematic dishonesty of his budgets. For one thing, that dishonesty has been apparent for five years. More than that, some prominent conservative commentators actually celebrated the administration’s dishonesty. In 2001 Time.com blogger Andrew Sullivan, writing in The New Republic, conceded that Mr. Bush wasn’t truthful about his economic policies. But Mr. Sullivan approved of the deception: "Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smokescreen of ‘compassionate conservatism.’" As Berkeley’s Brad DeLong puts it on his blog, conservatives knew that Mr. Bush was lying about the budget, but they thought they were in on the con.

But Krugman is grotesquely misrepresenting me. My delusion in 2001 was that Bush was actually a conservative. I thought "compassionate conservatism" meant unleashing private armies of compassion and this emphasis on the voluntary sector would soothe and distract liberals who would otherwise demagogue cuts in public spending. I was obviously wrong – in retrospect laughably so. So as soon as I realized that I had been conned, I started complaining about the Bush spending increases – earlier and more insistently than many other conservatives. Here’s something I wrote ten months into the Bush administration:

"If Clinton was an Eisenhower Republican, Bush looks increasingly like a Nixon liberal in domestic economic policy. The Nixonian gambit of buying public support for the war by reckless, pro-corporate Keynesianism at home is a sobering precedent, and could wreck Republican credibility on the economy in the months and years ahead."

To imply, as Krugman does, that I once supported the budget chicanery and suddenly now don’t is patently dishonest. I just wanted to reduce government power and spending and thought Bush did too. Boy, was I wrong. And boy, do I deserve a shellacking for that early misjudgment. But I recognized it as soon as the fall of 2001; and my campaign against spending has been consistent thereafter; and I backed Kerry in protest. And I’m the conservative Krugman picks on?

There is a reason for this. It’s important for the left to knee-cap conservative critics of this administration in order to discredit conservatism as a whole by conflating it with the Bush debacle. That’s what these smears against Bartlett and me are about. Krugman’s gambit, of course, is to deny the facts of a massive explosion in spending under Bush. He’s stuck because he hates Bush but loves the spending. And so he decides to smear not those conservatives who went along for the ride; but those conservatives who got it right sooner than many. If he can discredit us, then his ideology advances. And that, rather than intellectual honesty, is what he cares about and what he represents. I’m sorry I have to respond  in such detail. But Krugman is published by the New York Times; and he is engaged in character assassination, based on lies. I’m not Michael Dukakis.

"There are many in America today who have little sympathy with those we torture and torment. They are our enemies, they say. They would do worse to us if the situation was reversed. Maybe so. But those young men and women who we have turned into torturers and inquisitors, they were soldiers once. What are they now?" – Jay Elias, Daily Kos.

Dick Cheney said Sunday that Iraq is not in a civil war. I just got more pessimistic. Meanwhile Don "Stuff Happens" Rumsfeld has said withdrawing from Iraq would be like handing post-war Germany back to the Nazis. How many allied troops were there in Germany in 1946? What was the ratio of allied troops to German civilians? Just asking …

An always-shrewd reader writes:

"Here’s a question: this weekend Fox’s Beltway Boys helpfully explained how the Dems need this to be a "referendum election," and that the GOP is determined to make it a "choice election."  OK, so far so good.
So how does the censure talk cut?  If you happened to see Bill Kristol on Fox News Sunday today, he had a contrary view on this. He seemed to think that all the censure talk ultimately hurts the GOP because, over time, it starts to seem less radical. He should know: in 1998 he played a key role in moving the Lewinsky story from Drudge to ABC’s This Week when he forced it on the air during a now infamous round-table appearance.
Once it became OK to talk about, well, it started to seem less radical, less fringe-like. It became just another mainstream question. Everyone had to declare either for or against, and then defend their position.
Now, censure will never happen because it lacks the votes. We all know that. As an actual outcome it is a nonstarter.
Still, let’s take a hypothetical congressional election: two candidates get asked in a town-hall meeting about censure. Even if both the Republican and the Democratic candidate declare that they are not in favor of censure, the Republican is still obliged to frame his answer as at least a partial defense of the President, while the Democrat can sound moderate by declining to endorse censure while still offering a strong critique of Bush. That sounds a lot like "referendum election" to me.
My first reaction to Feingold was that it was bad politics. But now I’m not so sure. Kristol may be on to something.."

My paper led Sunday morning with an impeachment story by Sarah Baxter. Maybe the meme has legs; and I should reconsider, as my reader has, the wisdom of Feingold’s move.