Month: November 2008

A reader writes:

I was reading your post about some people pushing for keeping allowances within the CIA for torture under an Obama administration. What these people seem to have forgotten in our years under Bush is that we had a very functional and effective intelligence apparatus for decades without permitting torture.  You’d be naive to think that we hadn’t tortured in all those years, but yet it was still illegal.  So why must we change this now?

The reason that it must be illegal is so that it forces those engaging in torture to weigh the value of the information against the personal consequences they may face.

It puts the burden on the interrogator to make these calls and will discourage them from torturing arbitrarily or even casually.  If it’s officially permitted, then torture is no longer seen as a last resort for a rare circumstance, but just another tool in the arsenal.  It practically guarantees that innocent people will be tortured.

Furthermore, as a practical matter, if you permit torture officially and more innocents are tortured, it means you actually get more bad information.  Innocent people can’t tell you what you need to know.  So you end up having to spend that much more time and resources just trying to weed out the extra bad information from what you really wanted to know.

Our laws about interrogation, torture, evidence, burden of proof, etc, are all there for a good reason.  We tend to think of these issues in terms of civil rights but it is also about the very real practical value of the results.  Those rules force our criminal and intelligence agencies to work harder to get the information the right way, and getting it the right way yields better results. 

J-Mart thinks Palin’s strutting around helps McCain:

The Palin obsession — which she has fed by going on a media tour and returning to the Lower 48 for the RGA meeting —   obscures the mistakes McCain made in his own campaign (though some would say one of those was in picking the Alaska governor).  The central debate in the GOP is not now what typically takes place after a party loses — what the candidate did wrong or whether he ran too far to the left, right or middle. 

Instead, it’s entirely forward-looking, and based around whether Palin represents the future of the party.   McCain will have a voice in this, yes, but the base of the party never cared much for him and McCain himself never has shown much interest in being a party leader.  So now, as the battle over Palin begins, McCain can quietly begin to reclaim his own legacy and place in public life.  That begins tonight with an appearance on Leno and will accelerate as he re-engages in the Senate.

Hilzoy breathes a sigh of relief:

Until last Tuesday, I felt I had to take arguments made at, say, The Corner somewhat seriously. They were, after all, arguments that were likely to be taken seriously by people in charge of our government, and by some voters. Starting now, though, that changes.

I will write about those arguments if they seem to be gaining broader currency, and I can imagine writing a thoughtful post on, say, what’s gone wrong with the conservative movement in which I might quote them. I will also keep reading them, just because I think it’s a good idea to know what other people are saying. But I will not feel any general need to point out when they are wrong. They have no more power. Some of them have gone so far over the edge that they have lost any credibility they might ever have had. I wish them well, but I will not comment on them unless I see some particular reason to do so. I now have the luxury of debating only thoughtful, sane conservatives who argue in good faith, and I intend to enjoy it.

Jack Shafer says not to count Drudge out:

Drudge endures, while imitators and newly minted Web stars fade, for a variety of reasons. He works incredibly hard. He cares about his site. He appears to have no interest in working for somebody else, and his entrepreneurial vigor makes the site come alive. And also because he appreciates something about readers they might not even know themselves: They want an information site that would rather err on the side of recklessness once in a while than be right all the time.

Jason Zengerle profiles Malcolm Gladwell and reviews his new book:

For all of his pop sensibility, Gladwell sees himself as something of a fuddy-duddy. If, as Michael Kinsley once observed, Al Gore was an old person’s idea of a young person, then Gladwell is a young person’s idea of an old person’s idea of a young person. Beneath the crazy hair, the slobby-chic clothes, and the buzzword-filled vocabulary is an old-fashioned guy who grew up among Mennonites in rural Ontario, didn’t have a TV until he was 23, and still prefers to do most of his research at the NYU library. Google is something of a personal hobbyhorse: “Google is the answer to the problem we didn’t have. It doesn’t tell you what’s interesting or what’s important. There’s still more in the library than there is on Google.”

Matt Steinglass is discouraged by the actions of Michael Green, US special envoy to Burma:

Green winds up calling for all the concerned parties to construct a road map to reform in Burma. And this is about as far as a serious area expert with certain neo-connish tendencies can go on the Burma issue. Burma is not Serbia, and ASEAN is not the EU, let alone NATO. The fact is, there’s very little the US or anyone can do about Burma except try to keep our hands clean and wait for the [State Peace and Development Council’s] senior leadership to die. In Southeast Asia, our tea, whether Democratic or Republican, is weak, and there is little anyone can do to change that.

More inconsistencies and weirdness about the $150,000 clothing allowance, then this:

LAUER: What was the biggest misconception that you would have loved to have corrected at the time?

S. PALIN: It started off with the rumors, the speculation, even in mainstream media, that Trig wasn’t actually my child, that Trig was somebody else’s child and I faked a pregnancy. That was absolutely ridiculous. And it took days for that false allegation (inaudible) be corrected.

And then rumors right off the bat, too, that, you know, I was some — some wacko. That as city manager I tried to ban the books in our local library, and they listed the books that supposedly I tried to ban, books like “Harry Potter” that hadn’t even been written when I was the mayor and the manager. And things like that, that so easily could have been corrected if — if reporters would have done their job.

For the record, some Harry Potter books had been written when she was mayor and manager. This is not open to factual dispute (why did Lauer not correct her?). And the "false allegation" of the "fake pregnancy" was never corrected within "days."

In fact, three days after her candidacy was announced, former Bill Kristol employee, Michael Goldfarb was prolonging the agony:

In an unguarded moment last night, McCain Report blogger Michael Goldfarb replied to my question of whether there’s any truth to the rumor that Sarah Palin’s Down Syndrome child is actually her daughter’s with the following less-than-confidence-inspiring comment: "Well, I don’t…think so."

The next day, the Palins put out a statement saying that their daughter, Bristol, was around five months pregnant (which means she is eight months pregnant now and due next month). There was no actual refutation of the rumor from the McCain-Palin campaign until the same Michael Goldfarb told Howie Kurtz of the Washington Post the following on September 25, weeks, not days, after the questions first came up:

"These rumors are false. It is her baby. The whole thing is absurd. All of this rests on the fact that she wore her pregnancy extremely well. A couple of months later, there are a ton of pictures showing she is obviously pregnant. It’s ridiculous. There’s just nothing to it. We’re not going to release her gynecological records to prove it. It’s just madness."

And no such records were ever produced. The question is still open in reality, if not in Palin’s own head, and could easily be resolved instantly, if Sarah Palin wanted it to be. But she refuses to end this ridiculous controversy by releasing actual records of her pregnancy, for reasons that remain unclear. When the reporters ask her questions in Florida, will any of them have the balls to ask her for records? Or are they going to be as pathetic as Lauer?

Yuval Levin and Jim Manzi respond elegantly to David Brooks’ remarkably crude op-ed today. Manzi urges federalism and moderation on social issues, like abortion and marriage and science. Couldn’t agree more. I’m also less convinced that David Cameron has actually squared the British conservative circle than David is, let alone the American one (I’m headed to Blighty soon to try and figure that out). This passage from Manzi is particularly fine:

Politics, properly considered, has limited aims. Attempts to use it to create heaven on earth, whether motivated by secular or religious thinking, usually backfire. Fortunately, most practical people realize this. We should be looking to build political bridges across moral divides by lowering the temperature of such debates, and keeping our expectations of what politics can accomplish appropriately humble.

Amen.

A photo-project by Richard Renaldi. From an interview with the photographer:

It is rather awkward to approach someone and ask them if they are interested in touching another stranger for a photograph.

I think maybe my nervous, slightly pleading voice kicks in, combined with a little charm. I generally give them my spiel about being a photographer working on a project, and I try to have my book, Figure and Ground, to show to them. It was never easy – though most everyone who agreed to participate was a good sport. Most people eventually grasped the concept, and often it seemed to be a pleasant distraction from their day. As far as telling them what I was after, I was initially not sure myself. That seems apparent to me now, looking at the first three or four setups I did. For those first photographs, I asked for the least amount of touching possible because I was not yet comfortable myself with this new way of working. I did however start thinking more about what I wanted to elicit from my subjects, and I studied a lot of portraiture of friends, family, and lovers together, from the 19th century in particular. As a result I became more aggressive in what I would ask the strangers to do with each other.