Month: April 2007

Rajasthan, India, 9.52 am.

For some doctors, it’s not that prominent a priority. For others, it is – and they can face jail. John Tierney reports.

If you think Stephen Colbert only skewers the right, check out his interview with Russell Simmons, whose new book, "Do You!", seemed to stump its author on last night’s show. The man even tried to bypass Colbert and spin his book directly to the camera. Bad idea, Mr Simmons. If you want evidence that some black millionaires are as arrogant and out of touch as, well, some white millionaires, look no further.

The interest in the candidacy of Barack Obama is at fever-pitch for a reason. The United States confronts a crisis in leadership, a paralysis not seen since the waning days of Jimmy Carter. Then the paralysis stemmed from almost pathological passivity; now it springs from almost pathological reliance on violence without order to impose values that can only be chosen. It is long past time to retire the idea that physical force alone – from bombs and bullets to torture – can solve the crisis of global Islamist terror, an ominously shifting climate, and the collapse of America’s moral standing in the world. Neither extreme of Carter-style passivity nor Bush-style aggression works; neither reflects the core character of America. And yet America remains the indispensable nation. Without America’s force, moral leadership, engagement and diplomacy, evil will win, as it is winning in Iraq and in so many places right now. The president, moreover, is partly responsible for the enemy’s success. He has divided a country when it desperately needs uniting; he has misused military power; he has permanently stained the moral tradition of this country by the indelible evil of torture. And in all this, he has made the United States far weaker than it was seven years ago. We can and should debate how this came to be the case – whether tragedy or accident or deceit or incompetence or arrogance or some hideous, toxic combination of them all. But the first thing we have to acknowledge in looking for a new leader is the bankruptcy of the current one.

Obama’s speech yesterday is his most detailed yet on foreign affairs. Read it. It is emphatically not isolationist; it is emphatically not against the use of military force when necessary; it is emphatically pro-military in its call for many more troops. On the critical issue of Iraq, Obama has taken a stand – a clear one for withdrawal, with the possibility of a strike-force over the horizon. This is a very difficult call, and the timing and execution of withdrawal will be dispositive. But one core strength of Obama’s candidacy is that he got this war right when many of us got it wrong. He deserves more of a listening than many of us do. If his speech yesterday was any indication, there will be much to chew on. I’m sorry to see no commitment to a carbon tax; I’m unsure of whether diplomacy can or will work with Pyongyang and Tehran. We will all have to listen and watch Obama closely these next few months in weighing his candidacy against others’.

But this much we can already say: Obama brings something no one else does to this moment. By replacing one of the most globally despised and domestically divisive presidents in American history with a young leader half-Kansan and half-Kenyan, America would be saying something to the world: Bush-Cheney is not who we are. America is not what it has come to appear to be. This country is among the most culturally and racially and religiously diverse on the planet. America has long been a powerful and vital beacon for human rights – not, as recently, the avatar of torture, rendition and executive tyranny. The simple existence of Obama as a new president in a new century would in itself enhance America’s soft power immeasurably, just as a clear decision to leave Iraq would provide much greater leverage for diplomacy and military force in a whole variety of new ways. Obama would mean the rebranding of America, after a disastrous eight years. His international heritage, his racial journey, his middle name: these are assets for this country, not liabilities.

This is the reason for his ascendancy. This is what the American people sense and the world awaits. This is what the Islamists fear. That last alone is reason to feel hope. Money quote:

We must [lead] not in the spirit of a patron, but the spirit of a partner – a partner that is mindful of its own imperfections. Extending an outstretched hand to these states must ultimately be more than just a matter of expedience or even charity. It must be about recognizing the inherent equality and worth of all people. And it’s about showing the world that America stands for something – that we can still lead…

[I]f the next President can restore the American people’s trust – if they know that he or she is acting with their best interests at heart, with prudence and wisdom and some measure of humility – then I believe the American people will be ready to see America lead again.

They will be ready to show the world that we are not a country that ships prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far off countries. That we are not a country that runs prisons which lock people away without ever telling them why they are there or what they are charged with. That we are not a country which preaches compassion and justice to others while we allow bodies to float down the streets of a major American city.

That is not who we are.

(Photo: Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty.)

I want to thank my guest-bloggers for their industry, energy and diversity of view this past week: Megan, Ross and Reihan. Please visit them at their regular haunts: here and here. The blog will now return to its virtually normal self. These thanks are more than formal. Blogging can become something very much like an addiction, and quitting it – even only for a week – brings that home. There are the withdrawal symptoms – continuing to post a little, twitching involuntarily at the latest gobbet of news, scanning the traffic. Then there’s depression, as the come-down hits, and you find yourself listening to a mentally disturbed mass killer in a hotel room in Chicago at 2.30 am. Then the strange experience of a weekend without a moving deadline, a chance to read the paper just because you feel like it, or take a bike ride, as I did yesterday, just because it was a beautiful early summer day, and the final blossoms in Washington were falling to the ground. This is what not-blogging is like? And now the bafflement at having to have an opinion 200 times a week. I’m sure the synapses will start firing again and I’m relieved to know that if my opinion well runs dry, yours still won’t. Thanks, again, Megan, Reihan and Ross, for the brief glimpse of what life was once like again.

[Megan} Radley Balko has a great column on convictions of the innocent up at Fox News:

It’s likely of no coincidence that the one jurisdiction where blood samples have been preserved is also one that’s finding a shocking number of convictions of innocent people.

If there’s one positive that might come out of the Duke imbroglio, it’s that the unusual demographics of the parties involved and alliances it spawned may mean some much-needed new scrutiny of the criminal justice system, and win welcome new advocates for reform.

Nifong is by no means the only overly aggressive prosecutor in this country. And Durham is by no means the only jurisdiction where the wrong people have been wrongly accused. As Seligmann suggested, the only real difference may have been that the Duke players had the resources to fight back. Many others don’t.

Examples abound.

A 2002 audit of the crime lab in Houston, Texas, found that experts may have given "false and scientifically unsound" testimony in thousands of criminal cases. Subsequent reports showed that crime lab employees often tailored their tests to fit police theories about how a crime was committed. The city is finishing up a $5.5 million review of 2,300 cases, including death penalty cases.

In 2003, Texas Gov. Rick Perry pardoned 35 mostly black residents of Tulia, Texas, who had been prosecuted for drug crimes based on testimony from undercover police officer Tom Coleman. Coleman, once named Texas "Police Officer of the Year," was found to have manufactured evidence from whole cloth.

Just last month in Maryland, self-styled ballistics expert Joe Kopera committed suicide after it was revealed that he lied about his expertise and training. Kopera had testified in hundreds of criminal trials over 40 years, many of which may need to be reopened.

A 2005 audit found critical errors in the sate of Virginia’s crime lab, considered one of the best in the country. The audit found that senior-level experts in the lab were too often persuaded by political pressure to secure convictions. The audit was ordered after the exoneration of Earl Washington Jr., a man who served 17 years on Virginia’s death row.

These are merely examples from the last several years, and they’re by no means comprehensive. Here’s hoping that the most vocal critics of Mike Nifong and the Durham justice system that relentlessly pursued the Duke lacrosse players — many of whom don’t generally speak out on criminal justice issues — will see the case as more than just an example of media bias or reverse discrimination.

It’s merely one very high-profile example of the flaws and inadequacies in our criminal justice system. And it demonstrates why we need strong protections for the accused and transparency, accountability and oversight of the system that accuses them.

The hardest part of all of this is that many of the miscarriages of justice, even many of the abuses, probably aren’t deliberate.   Anyone who’s ever done sales can tell you just how quickly you start believing your own pitch.  And while the pressure to believe that you’ve got the guy is particularly strong in high-profile cases that can turn elections, you have to remember that even in cases where there’s no publicity, police and prosecutors in these cases are dealing with a hideous crime.  That gives them a powerful psychological incentive to believe that you’ve got the guy.  So lab technicians believe their results are stronger than they are, prosecutors resist learning that their case has fallen apart, and police rewrite events in favour of guilt. 

It’s not enough, or even much of a start, to punish the prosecutors who are guilty of abuse.  There also needs to be major systemic change to correct for all sorts of psychological biases on the part of witnesses, police, prosecutors, and victims.  The evidence of innocence that DNA tests have provided should be sparking a revolution in criminal procedure, designed to protect innocents in the majority of cases where there isn’t DNA evidence.  But so far, I don’t think it has.

[Ross] If you watch The Sopranos religiously and don’t read the House Next Door’s Sopranos Mondays – well, you should.

[Reihan] Nicholas Eberstadt has written a wonderful look at America’s demographic exceptionalism.  But I take exception to a very small part of it.

What accounts for Anglo America’s unexpectedly high and stable propensity to reproduce? Carefully tailored pro-natalist government policies certainly cannot explain it: The United States has none. By the same token, U.S. labor patterns do not seem especially "family-friendly." Americans work longer hours and enjoy less vacation time than any of their European friends across the Atlantic, and none of the economic or policy explanations for the growing fertility gap between U.S. Anglos and west Europeans offers a satisfying explanation.

Eberstadt, of course, knows this subject inside and out, and I’m wary of contradicting him.  But I wonder if "carefully tailored pro-natalist government policies" in Europe (which, by the way, work pretty well) are best understood as a means of compensating not only for the "values gap" but for the fact that the broad structure of our economy is, if you will, objectively pro-natalist. 

Our high-cost metropolitan areas, for example, increasingly resemble metropolitan Europe in terms of fertility rates, etc.  But we also have a vast "hinterland," a relatively low-cost suburban frontier, that is likely to expand at a rapid clip in coming years.  The frontier is built in part of tax subsidies, cheap food, and cheap gas.  As we slowly move away from overgenerous tax subsidies and cheap gas (I’m guessing food will remain cheap), it might make sense to use carefully tailored instruments to mimic the pro-natalist effects of the old regime. 

I’m just sayin’ …

[Reihan] Many years ago, I Googled words and phrases like "conservative," "Christian Democracy," "egalitarianism," and "inequality" in a long string and I stumbled upon ConservativeHome, a website run by Tim Montgomerie.   Montgomerie had been a close advisor to the much-maligned Iain Duncan-Smith, the man who had the unenviable task of leading the Conservative Party after William Hague led them to a crushing defeat.  ConservativeHome was an extraordinary resource, and it was an organized around a basic idea Montgomerie calls the "And theory of conservatism."

‘And theory conservatives’ – or total conservatives – sign up to ‘core vote’ positions on Europe, tax, immigration and crime. To this extent they are traditionalists – but, like other Tory modernisers, they realise that this isn’t enough. They realise that conservatives also need to have answers to inner city decay, environmental deterioration and today’s other problems.  Tender policies provide many voters with the leeway to support tough Tory policies The ‘politics of and’ understands that tender policies don’t require an abandonment of tough policies. Breadth isn’t an alternative to depth – it permits it to happen. For example, a tough policy on immigration is sounder (ethically and electorally) if it is accompanied by a strong commitment to international development. A strong international development agenda (adventurously promoted and not just treated as a one speech, tick box policy) reassures moderate voters who want to know that sealed borders don’t also mean a closed mind to the needs of the world’s poorest people.

If this sounds a bit like "compassionate conservatism," you’re right to see a family resemblance.  The main difference is that Montgomerie and his fellow-travelers have been working furiously to lend policy substance to sentiment.  It helps that David Willetts and Oliver Letwin, key members of the new Tory brain trust, are thinking along similar lines.  Montgomerie is a rare example of an activist who has actually had a meaningful, positive effect on British politics.  Britain’s David Cameron and Sweden’s Fredrik Reinfeldt are, by American standards, highly unusual conservatives.  To put it bluntly, they’re both Bobos par excellence.  And they’re far friendlier to "big government," which is in part a function of the fact that Britain and Sweden both have a far larger public sector workforce.  But both have also embraced the best of social liberalism, namely tolerance and openness, and the best of social conservatism, namely support for flourishing family life.  Both men have a fairly broad understanding of what a flourishing family life would look like, and that’s all to the good.  Both are clearly heirs to the market liberalism of Hayek and Thatcher, and yet they both prefer emphasizing competition over privatization: improving services for everyone by increasing transparency and fairness.  They’re addressing a new political environment that’s quite different from the one that prevailed in the late 1970s, the era that paved the way for the last majority conservative victories. A few weeks back, David Brooks wrote about this new political environment.

Today the big threats to people’s future prospects come from complex, decentralized phenomena: Islamic extremism, failed states, global competition, global warming, nuclear proliferation, a skills-based economy, economic and social segmentation. Normal, nonideological people are less concerned about the threat to their freedom from an overweening state than from the threats posed by these amorphous yet pervasive phenomena. The ”liberty vs. power” paradigm is less germane. It’s been replaced in the public consciousness with a ”security leads to freedom” paradigm. People with a secure base are more free to take risks and explore the possibilities of their world.

Tim Montgomerie is one of the most important thinkers tackling this new environment. I’m not confident that American conservatives will pay much attention to Montgomerie’s work, not yet at least, but I wish they would.  Montgomerie has launched a new blog, Britain and America.  I sense that it will soon become indispensable reading.  I don’t always agree with TM.  For one thing, I actually think British Conservatives would be smart to emphasize their independence from the United States.  But I’ve learned enough to know that he’s always worth reading.

[Reihan]

Yesterday afternoon I saw Mike White‘s Year of the Dog, a movie I’ve been looking forward to for some time now.  I think Mike White is a genius, and both The AV Club, which I generally trust, and Lisa Schwarzbaum were glowing in their praise.  Manohla Dargis loved it too.  But what struck me most as I saw it with one of my best friends, a fellow Mike White fan, is that Year of the Dog could just as easily have been titled, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Embrace Jihad.  During the course of the movie, Peggy, as brilliantly portrayed by the criminally underrated Molly Shannon, slowly becomes … how can I put this? … she slowly becomes a total lunatic who sublimates her basic human desire for companionship into increasingly militant political causes.  It’s by no means clear to me that Peggy’s journey will end where the movie ends, in a bus ride to a peaceful demonstration.  I fear it will end somewhere far more tragic.

Thanks to a fateful encounter with a gentle man, the similarly-excellent Peter Sarsgaard‘s Newt, Peggy directs her grief over the loss of her beloved dog outward, into a rage against animal cruelty, a rage that actually become murderous. I have to wonder: is this all an elaborate prank by Mike White?  I was expecting an intelligent comedy about loneliness, and about how the love of animals can both enrich and warp our lives.  Instead Year of the Dog is a moving, intense, mostly funny but occasionally chilling look at humanity at its worst.  Peggy’s best friend is a deeply clueless woman, unattuned to the awfulness of her philandering lover.  Her brother and sister-in-law are a loathsome, narrow-minded upper-middle-class caricature.  Though very kind during an important (murderous moment), they’re also incapable of reckoning with the intensity of Peggy’s increasingly violent extremism.  That’s why it’s so baffling that reviewers are treating Year of the Dog like the cute character study I imagined it would be.  Nathan Rabin writes,

Like a distaff Marty, Dog indelibly chronicles the emotional thaw of a woman seemingly resigned to living life quietly on the sidelines until fate spurs her into action.

And yet where does Rabin detect an "emotional thaw"?  I could see it in her vulnerability, and her willingness to acknowledge her affection for Newt.  But the surprising twist at the end suggests that she’s forsaken the real love of her family and friends for love of jihad, in the name of animals she’s never met.  I’m a believer in the humane treatment of animals.  This is part of why I increasingly choose to eat Quorn and other meat-substitutes in lieu of the real thing.  I look forward to a time when synthetic meat-substitutes render industrial agriculture a thing of the past.  (Also, as New York recently pointed out, it tastes almost exactly like a Chicken McNugget.  Someone page heaven and tell them I’m already there.)  I buy the idea that our sphere of moral concern has steadily expanded over time, and that it ought to include thinking, feeling non-human animals.  I certainly don’t believe in stabbing people because they may or may not have inadvertently poisoned Pencil with snail-bait. Dargis has a similarly generous take.

In its broad outline, “Year of the Dog” is the story of a woman who goes slightly bonkers and becomes an animal-rights advocate, not because she’s bonkers, but because the love of animals is where she finally finds her peace of mind, sense of self, grace. It’s also about the creation of conscience, about what makes us human and why, a surprisingly little-told story in contemporary American cinema. You can learn a lot from our movies, like how to hold a gun and blow someone’s head off. It’s more unusual to watch a film in which the central struggle is how to be happy and sane. There’s a touch of the saint in Peggy, true, but what makes me love her is that she’s ridiculously, beautifully human.

Holy moly!  Where to begin!  Part of having a conscience is surely recognizing the limits of what we can and should say to small children.  Peggy does indeed go bonkers, and this is a sad and poignant part of the story.  And her animal-rights advocacy becomes a way of avoiding the incredibly hard choices she’d need to make to build a happy and fulfilling (not necessarily "normal") life.  I’ve seen this happen to people I care about, and it’s hard to watch.  It’s surprisingly hard to watch it happen on screen, particularly to characters who are so beautifully drawn.

Peggy is less ridiculously, beautifully human at the end of this movie than ridiculously, tragically alone and ridiculously, tragically crazy.  The truly horrible thing is that there are plenty of people who will prey on her loneliness and use her as a pawn in their larger design.  There’s nothing cute about this movie.  It might be the most important you’ll see this year, and I can assure you that it will be one of the more difficult to watch.