Month: August 2007

So, courtesy of that "civil liberties-minded" Democratic Congress, the President now gets to wiretap with few restraints.  I won’t bother restating that I don’t think that what Congress passed was the best way to go, from a liberties standpoint, but I did want to comment on one point made by Jennifer Rubin at the AmSpec blog.

Jennifer and I both write at the New York Sun, and I agree with a lot of what she says, but I did raise my eyebrow at this. She writes today that “Red State Democratic Senators like Webb, Salazar, Pryor and Nelson voted yes. Hillary, Biden, Obama and the Blue State Democrats voted no. There were a few exceptions- Baucus and Tester from Montana voted no.”

I dispute her definition of “red state”: in what respect can Montana, with a Democratic Governor and two Democratic Senators still be described as “red?” Montana is purple at best. Ditto Colorado, which now has a Democratic Governor, one Democratic Senator (soon to be two Democratic Senators based on my reading of the 2008 race out there), and four Democrats out of seven Congressmen total– plus Democratic majorities in both of its state houses? And Arkansas? They also have a Democratic Governor, and two Democratic Senators, and most of their Congressmen are Democrats. Arkansas may not be a liberal state, but it certainly isn’t red, in my estimation.

It’s always been my observation that the key reason why this is an issue at all is because it involves the word "marriage." In my opinion, the state’s only interest in this matter involves its general interest in the law of partnerships, which is a subset of the law of agency. In principle, there is no difference between a man and woman getting married and choosing to share their economic resources and any two people starting a business and doing the same.

Of course, in this instance I am referring to childless couples.  The presence of children obviously changes the equation. But I think that children are best dealt with, legally, through a separate category of law that may or may not having anything to do with marriage, especially today when DNA tests can easily ascertain paternity.

In other words, what I am saying is that from the state’s point of view, there should be civil unions for everyone. The question of whether such unions constitute a "marriage" is none of the state’s business. Therefore, it makes no difference whatsoever, from the state’s point of view, whether a couple is of opposite sexes or the same sex. Does the government inquire as to the sex of two people who establish a business partnership? Of course not.

The question of "marriage" is purely a religious one, as I see it. It’s between you and your church.  If your church does not recognize your union, then you can either try to change its mind or find a new church. As far as the government is concerned, there is no reason for it to care whether your relationship is called a "marriage" or a civil union.

I think Stephen would agree with this, but I would appreciate his thoughts since he is a legal scholar who comments often on religious matters.

I completely agree with you, Stephen, that Roe v. Wade was a huge mistake, taking an important political question out of the democratic arena on the basis of some very shaky legal logic. We’d be better off if it had never happened. The trouble is that at this point I’m not all that sure we’d be better off with the alternative, overturning it, which could itself cause a whole lot of social and political upheaval. And then there’s the huge risk that a right-wing court might swing the pendulum the other way, declaring a constitutional right to life for an embryo and outlawing all abortions entirely. Basically, we’re in the toilet no matter what we do.

As for gay marriage, the issue is complicated by the modern scientific consensus, finally spreading throughout the general public, that homosexuality is for the most part an in-born trait. And that means failure to include gays in our social institutions really does become a civil/human rights issue. And as much as I’d hesitate to impose gay marriage in places like Kentucky or Missouri, there is a serious human rights question here.

Take Brown v. Board of Education. Without a doubt, it was a counter-democratic decision that foisted racial integration on a majority that didn’t want it. But it was simply the right thing to do, finally backing up promises made in the 14th Amendment that the politicians were simply not going to actually make good on. Can you honestly say that if you could go back in time, you would prevent it from happening?

As for gay marriage, I guess I’m in favor of the approach we’re on, of letting individual states fight this out under their own constitutions, and have the federal courts defer any judgment on it.

DOMA, however, presents a huge problem with even that moderate approach, in that the federal government refuses to recognize relationships that are fundamentally created by the states. And as for giving permission to states to ignore other states’ gay marriages, that’s just loony. If the states have the constitutional ability to not recognize gay marriages from other states due to political reasons — and by the way, I think they do have some loopholes on Full Faith and Credit to do just that — then they don’t need the federal government’s permission. And if they don’t have that constitutional ability under Full Faith and Credit, then the feds can’t legally grant it to them by statute.

So I guess my bottom line stance on this for the foreseeable future, is to have the federal government take no position at all. This means no federal court decisions, no DOMA, no constitutional amendments, no nothing. If a state court grants gay marriage rights and the people don’t like it, they can amend their constitutions. But if a state court pushes on the issue and the people turn out to be fine with it, so much the better. It’s certainly not a perfect approach, but I really do think it’s the best we can do for now.

I was looking around YouTube and found this. It’s possibly the best anti-Apartheid song produced in the 1980’s, at least as far as those made outside of South Africa were concerned:

Over at the Washington Monthly blog, Kevin Drum discusses my previous post about not believing what Bush said in 2000. In a comment, Al Gore’s college roommate Bob Somerby asks what I said about George W. Bush contemporaneously. This is a reasonable question, so I went back and looked at every column I wrote in 2000.

I see that I very seldom mentioned the campaign one way or another. The vast bulk of my writings dealt with current policy issues–the Federal Reserve, estate taxes, the state of the economy and so on. I wrote a couple of columns critical of Gore, but I could only find one largely devoted to Bush. I see in that column I was hopeful that the high quality of Bush’s advisers indicated good judgment on his part. I knew most of his economic advisers personally and had a high opinion of all of them. On foreign policy, I mentioned Colin Powell’s likely appointment as secretary of state as indicating a steady, moderate approach by Bush in this area.

I found a column I wrote for the Los Angeles Times on September 20 about Bush’s tax plan that was decidedly lukewarm. I held out hope that once in office he would take the opportunity to fine-tune his campaign tax plan, about which I was unenthusiastic.

What comes across to me in rereading what I wrote is that Bush was simply the lesser of two evils. He might not have been very good, but at the time I thought he was better than Gore. I still don’t think Gore would have been a good president. But I sure wish the Republicans had nominated someone else.

I’m not prepared to say that George W. Bush is the worst president, but at this point we have to be open to the possibility that he might be — and if he’s not, he’s certainly down there. Sure, he has illustrious competition, containing names like Woodrow Wilson in his second term, Franklin Pierce, John Tyler, James Buchanan, John Adams the Elder, Herbert Hoover, etc. Plus we have another year and a half of him. Anybody who says it can’t get any worse isn’t paying close attention.

It’ll take some time to know for sure. History will judge just how bad he’s been. But if Iraq gets worse and worse, and there’s no real reason to think it won’t, we can judge unnecessary deaths by the total dead minus the number who would have died under Saddam anyway. And the difference just keep on climbing, along with the general instability that we’ve created in the region.

With Bush, it’s the sum total of his record. We have: piling up massive debts; cutting taxes during a time of war; simultaneously enacting a whole new social-welfare entitlement with no means of paying for it, or even an attempt to figure that out; corruption and the open abetting of lawlessness; botched wars; the glaring fact that Osama Bin Laden is still alive almost six years after 9/11; and so on and so on.

If he’s not winning the title of worst president ever, at the rate he’s going he’s at least a quarterfinalist. And he has the advantage (and we have the disadvantage) that he’s working on a much larger scale than many of his predecessors.

Let’s at least agree that he’s the worst of the last 50 years. If Bush had been a Democrat, the Republican Congress of the last six years would have impeached him. And they might have just gotten a conviction, too.

"I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more." Network, one of the best movies ever made, in my view.

It is becoming increasingly common to read comments like Eric’s, saying that George W. Bush is or may be the worst president ever. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said so forthrightly a few days ago. Although I am strongly tempted to agree, I know it’s not true–not because I have a higher opinion of Bush than people like Reid, but only because I’ve looked a little more carefully at some of the disasters of the past.

Before one can begin to make a judgment about this question of who is the worst president, I think one has to have some objective criteria on which to do an evaluation. Too many of the presidential ratings that have been done over the years are just popularity polls that tell us absolutely nothing of substance. For myself, I think the most important criteria ought to be how many people did a president kill unnecessarily?

Obviously, this means making a judgment about which of our wars were justified and which weren’t. Among the big ones, I would say that the Civil War and World War II were justifiable. But I have never been able to figure out what vital interest we had at stake in World War I or why we got involved. For that reason, I consider every American death in that war to have been unnecessary. At more than 100,000 deaths, this makes Woodrow Wilson our worst president in my book.

Of course, we have also had lesser wars that were motivated by nothing but imperialism–the Mexican War and Spanish-American War, for example. But very few people died in these wars and at least they were successful in the sense of accomplishing their purpose. Other wars fall somewhere in the middle–they may not have been motivated by imperialism or other base motives, but neither do they fall clearly into the "good war" category. These would include Korea and Vietnam. People can make their own judgments about those. War casualty data can be found here.

Of course, there is also the question of killing foreigners unnecessarily. This raises the difficult question of Truman’s use of the atom bomb against Japan. Today, incidentally, is the day the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Thursday will be the anniversary of the Nagasaki bomb.

My feeling is that the Hiroshima bomb was clearly justified and I think Truman was right to use it. But I have always had problems with the Nagasaki bomb, especially since it came so soon after the first bomb. I think a strong case can be made this bomb constituted unnecessary overkill. Therefore, one might reasonably say that Truman killed 74,000 Japanese unnecessarily.

Finally, there are certainly other issues on which we reasonably judge the success or failure of our presidents. The economy is an important one. In this regard, it is hard to put anyone except Herbert Hoover at the top of the list for failure. His signing of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was one of the great blunders in American history and it is doubtful he will ever have any competition for incompetence in the economic area because his policies essentially brought on the Great Depression.

Thus without even considering the merely incompetent presidents who did no lasting harm, we see that George W. Bush has very heavy competition for the title of worst president. Of course, he still has time to make a bigger mess of Iraq and maybe bring on an economic crisis. But absent that, I just don’t see how he can be considered the worst when there is so much stronger competition for that title.

I’d have to say Krugman is wrong on this one. There has been plenty of substance in the Republican field. The problem is that it’s all bad substance.

The frontrunners are all campaigning on a platform of continuing and even expanding upon George W. Bush’s policies. Not one of the major candidates will state the plain and obvious truth that George W. Bush has been a horrible president — quite possibly the worst ever — and as a result we’re getting absolutely no real explanations of how they’d repair this mess. And that’s the real question people want to see answered, but it can’t be answered until we first make that crucial admission.

The only reason to say there’s no substance is that it’s an act of repression, an emotional defense mechanism against the sheer mess we’re seeing. But as you said, Bruce, anybody who knows what to look for can see what their policies would be.

I have more to say about the long-term budget situation, but I think Andrew’s right that we should move on.

So on another topic, I was reading Paul Krugman this morning and he was complaining about the lack of substance in the Republican campaign so far. He compares the situation to 2000 when the Republicans nominated George W. Bush without really knowing what he thought about the issues.

Actually, with the benefit of hindsight it was pretty clear that Bush was no Reaganite, small-government kind of guy. He gave plenty of speeches on the need to expand government for all kinds of things. My friend Ed Crane of the Cato Institute is always reminding me that he wrote an article in the New York Times back in 1999 that fingered Bush’s big government proclivities pretty accurately. It was also pretty clear that he was a foreign policy neocon. In short, it was all there for those who knew what to look for.

My own excuse for not predicting the disaster that Bush’s presidency has been is that I simply didn’t believe a word he said during the 2000 campaign. I assumed that every word out of his mouth had been put there by Karl Rove and it was all based on polling and focus groups. I knew that Bush is a bit of a dim bulb, so it never occurred to me that he actually had any ideas of his own. I just assumed that he would be a rerun of his father. I was never a big fan of George H.W., even though I worked for him at the Treasury Department, but looking back I can appreciate that he had his virtues. Bush 41 was at least a serious, responsible person–exactly the opposite of his oldest son.

My point is that it is very easy to get cynical about politics and think it is all a game. That was the mistake I made in 2000, along with lots of other people. If we don’t want to make the same mistake again, all of us who comment on politics need to pay closer attention to what these guys are saying and make some allowance for the possibility that they actually believe it.