Month: October 2007

I haven’t written much about the Walt-Mearesheimer book because it’s long and I haven’t had time to read it. (There’s a concept: a blogger not posting about something he knows nothing about.) But it is interesting, it seems to me, that the debate about the Middle East does indeed feel freer in Israel than in the US, where some American Jews have a defensiveness and anger that makes calm debate very difficult. (I guess I should add that my impression of the Walt-Mearesheimer book – I did read the original article – is that it’s shoddy enough to merit Jewish defensiveness and anger. Sigh.) Here’s an interesting piece on the press debate in Israel and the US. Matt comments here. Megan offers her suggested reasons for the discrepancy between the much better-informed and more diverse debate in Israel. Money quote:

1) No one in Israel is worried about being called anti-semitic.

2) Ethnic groups in safe exile tend to be more committed to territorial possession than the people back home who actually have to get shot at in order to obtain or retain the land. This is certainly true of the Irish.

3) Being correct about Israel/Palestine matters a lot more in Israel than it does in America. People expressing views here (or in Europe) are more often staking out ethnic or political solidarity with a cause. People in Israel have a certain level of solidarity assumed, and are in a high-stakes battle for the lowest cost solution, which permits and even demands a wider breadth of views.

4)  Newspapers in Israel are just better than newspapers here.

I’ll take the first three.

Radley Balko struggles to find much daylight between the Clintons and Bush-Cheney in critical respects:

It’s difficult to see Hillary Clinton voluntarily handing back all of those extra-constitutional executive powers claimed by President Bush. Her husband’s administration, for example, copiously invoked dubious "executive privilege" claims to keep from complying with congressional subpoenas and open records requests—claims the left now (correctly, in my view) regularly criticizes the Bush administration for invoking.

Hillary Clinton herself went to court to keep meetings of her Health Care Task Force secret from the public, something conservatives were quick to point out when leftists criticize Vice President Cheney’s similar efforts to keep meetings of his Energy Task Force secret.

"I’m a strong believer in executive authority," Clinton said in a 2003 speech, recently quoted in The New Republic. "I wish that, when my husband was president, people in Congress had been more willing to recognize presidential authority."

That jibes with a February 2007 New York Times article on Clinton explaining her refusal to back down from her vote for the Iraq war: "Mrs. Clinton’s belief in executive power and authority is another factor weighing against an apology, advisers said… she believes that a president usually deserves the benefit of the doubt from Congress on matters of executive authority."

Such is why President Bush has recently had some nice things to say about Hillary Clinton, leading some to speculate that Bush sees her as the Eisenhower to his Truman—a candidate from the opposing party who criticizes his foreign policy during the campaign, but will likely pursue a very similar policy should she be elected.

You want a change from the Bush era? Only pure partisans think a third term for a Clinton co-presidency would do it. Yes, it would give every partisan Democrat a thrill. But if you care about the damage done by this president to the constitutional order, don’t believe for a minute that the Clintons would reverse it. They love their power. 

       

Even Forbes is getting more enviro-friendly. But the greenest states are still mainly blue:

On top: Vermont, Oregon and Washington. All have low carbon dioxide emissions per capita (or "carbon footprints"), strong policies to promote energy efficiency and high air quality, as indicated by their major metro areas that are low in smog and ozone pollution. They’re also among the states with the most buildings (on a per capita basis) that have received the U.S. Green Building Council’s benchmark certification, known as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).

A clutch of Eastern states round out the top 10.

Christianist-majority states tend to care less about God’s creation.

Even gayer than the GOP? We may finally be about to find out.

A reader writes:

It’s not just Bush-Cheney. The Clinton Administration argued in court (1) that the president is exempt from regular legal process while serving in office, and (2) that Secret Service officers are prohibited from testifying about any crimes they may witness in the White House.  I have yet to hear the Democratic front-runner asked whether she agrees with her husband’s views on this.

Fortunately neither argument prevailed in court.  The argument on the first point was that the constitutional provision for impeachment is the sole method by which legal process may touch a sitting president, who otherwise is cloaked with immunity for any actions he may take, whether personal or professional. The argument on the second point was that because the president is the personification of the law, protecting the person of the president outweighed any other obligation that law enforcement officers would have, such as enforcing the law.

But, of course, the president is not above the law, nor is the president the personification of the law — except in Bill Clinton’s and Dick Cheney’s dreams.  And Hillary Clinton’s?  I’d like to know.

One small point. The total secrecy of Dick Cheney’s meetings over energy policy in his first term did have one obvious precedent: Hillary Clinton’s secret meetings about healthcare policy in her first term as co-president. If you are concerned about the abuse of executive power – as in, say, I don’t know, pardons? – then it’s hard to see, given their records, how returning the Clintons to the White House will solve our problems.

Buried beneath the blather, Scott Johnson is clearly accusing Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership of raising the Armenian genocide resolution at this time to sabotage the war effort in the Middle East. Charles Krauthammer aired the "stab-in-the-back" meme only to dismiss it – an act of Insta-level passive aggression. But Powerline goes there:

I doubt that stupidity is a sufficient explanation in this case.

Which leaves treason, right?

"In April, a single fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000. When Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) ran for president in 2004, he received $24,000 from Chinatown." Clinton has enlisted the aid of Chinese neighborhood associations, especially those representing recent immigrants from Fujian province. The organizations, at least one of which is a descendant of Chinatown criminal enterprises that engaged in gambling and human trafficking, exert enormous influence over immigrants. The associations help them with everything from protection against crime to obtaining green cards. Many of Clinton’s Chinatown donors said they had contributed because leaders in neighborhood associations told them to. In some cases, donors said they felt pressure to give," – a commenter on Ben Smith’s blog. For some reason, Smith wants to downplay what will doubtless be one of a series of sleazy stories to come out of the Clinton machine. Does no one remember the 1990s?

He’s opening his heart on abortion:

"My political record and my head were always there, always has been there, but I must say that it took life’s experiences for me to absorb the real importance of it all. I had been blessed early in my life when I was young…and I have been blessed when I was not so young. I’ve had the the ultimate tragedy that a father can have and the ultimate blessing that a father can gave. With regard to Ms. Hayden, I can only say that after the first time in my life, seeing the sonogram of my own child. I will never think exactly the same again. I will never feel exactly the same again. Because my heart now is fully engaged with my head."

A standing ovation.

Kleiman:
 

I understand Mukasey is supposed to be a reasonably good guy, by comparison with the run of Bush appointees.  But if Mukasey won’t say that waterboarding is torture and claims that the President has some undefined power to violate statute law — even criminal laws, such as the ban on torture and other war crimes — under his "Article II powers," then why should the Senate Judiciary Committee even bring his nomination to a vote? If he says he hasn’t read the latest torture memos or decided whether waterboarding is torture, Sen. Leahy ought to tell him to read the memos and observe a waterboarding session and come back when he’s done his homework.

Matt calls him "completely unacceptable." Having read the testimony, I’m afraid I have to abandon my early hopes and agree. An attorney general who believes a president has a permanent right to ignore the rule of law because peacetime is now wartime for ever, is an attorney-general defending the rule of one man over the rule of law. If I were a Senator, (heh, indeed) I’d vote no. This is the faultline of our time. If we are redefining war as a permanent state of being, and redefining presidential authority to give him/her extra-legal and extra-constitutional power to what s/he wants anywhere in the world, including the United States and to its citizenry, then American liberty is in extreme peril. To approve an attorney general who does not dissent from this position is a terrible precedent.

Don’t people see that this is what Cheney is doing? He is setting precedent after precedent for totalist, secret executive power. And with each precedent for unchecked, uncontrollable executive power – including the power to detain and torture within the United States – the America we have known is being surrendered. This is the other war – a constitutional war at home against American liberty and the Constitution – as dangerous in a different way as Islamism. One attacks our freedom from the outside; the other hollows out our freedom from within. The fight against both is the calling of the time.

I think we’re in denial about this. Following Mukasey’s statements with confirmation would set a precedent we may well deeply regret. Think of another terrorist attack. Think of the Cheney precedents. Think of Giuliani in the White House. Now think of what would be left of democracy and the Constitution the day after.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)