Month: December 2008

If Obama chooses the socialist model, he may be sacrificing a great deal of his political honeymoon to rescue the big bosses and big unions of Detroit. As Charles Franklin explains the polling right now, this is a problem:

Given the weakness of President Bush, and the modest engagement of President-Elect Obama, leadership [on the bailout issue] has fallen to members of Congress. There the Republican and Democratic split has reinforced public opinion divisions. But the key is that Independents are more inclined to follow Republicans, at least in the absence of a more forceful (or persuasive) Democratic message.

While it looks like the Bush administration may yet offer a "bridge loan" to the industry, this is a policy area that will confront the Obama administration early. At the moment, the pro-bailout position is a minority view. Either the new president will have to persuade those Independents to change their minds, or he will find he faces an early challenge to his ability to govern from a majority position. Little will erode his strong current public support faster than pushing for policies that face majority opposition. In this case, his tepid support for the auto-industry now may have missed the opportunity to convert Independents before their opposition has hardened. Or perhaps GM and Chrysler will file for Chapter 11 and spare him the task.

A reader writes:

Gerecht, in his response to you, offers one torture justification that cries for amplification: Sixty-five years ago Americans no doubt were responsible for atrocities that shamed all involved, as he rightly points out. But what he fails to add is that those atrocities were committed under battlefield conditions — not in our prison camps. Such atrocities are to be found in all wars, committed by all involved. The kind of in-prison torture ordered by Bush administration officials, which Gerecht however-indirectly nevertheless defends, was something that even during the darkest days of World War II Americans roundly rejected.

No one doubts that in combat in war, soldiers sometimes crack under intense pressure and commit atrocities against potentially lethal foes. The difference is committing atrocities against people who are already in your custody and under your direct control. Abhorrence at this practice and a deeper understanding of how a free country was not compatible with a government with the power to torture was one of America’s founding differences. Until Bush and Cheney.

Appleyard responds to one of my posts on torture:

John Gray…used the legitimation of torture as evidence of his conviction that there is no such thing as progress. This makes more sense as it rests on a more persuasive definition of civilisation, not as an absolute progression, but as temporary respite from at least some aspects of our fallen condition.

To Gray, torture is an inevitable human crime that, with luck, we can periodically suppress. I take this to be a validation of Sullivan’s view that torture must be absolutely forbidden. The reason is that civilisations can only exist on the basis of absolutes. These may be delusory, they may be brutal, but their role is vital – the sustenance of a civilisation’s self-belief. Via Christanity and the Enlightenment, our civilisation is based on the irreducibility of the individual, on restraint and on the quality of mercy, on, in fact, the absolute wrong of torture. Maybe we can fight a war better with torture, but only by sacrificing our civilisation, which is what Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld chose to do.

If we believe we can defend our civilization through torture, we have already ended it.

Marc on how Caroline Kennedy cleared the field:

…with Clinton not protesting, Caroline Kennedy had it made. She’s very likeable and has lots of friends, including the governor.  She’ll raise a ton of money in an instant. She has no baggage. An appealing personal history. And — most importantly — the implied support of the President-elect.

The other big factor: Kennedy consultant Josh Isay. He’s THISCLOSE to Sen. Chuck Schumer. Schumer is Harry Reid’s chief political adviser. Reid’s enthusiasm today bubbled over. You can see the tectonic plates moving if you look closely.

No wonder Clinton said nice things about Palin.

Drum wonders:

….even for torture apologists like Gerecht, I wonder how far they’re willing to go. He must know that over the past few years we’ve tortured a steady and sizeable stream of people who were either decidedly small fish or else just completely innocent. How many of those people is he willing to brutalize on the slim chance that once, someday, we’ll just happen to have someone in our custody who knows about a terrorist plot scheduled for tomorrow and can be successfully tortured into giving it up in time? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? Where exactly does he draw the line?

A debate breaks out about whether WoW players ever really do any work at the office.

The Islamists are even more opposed to reality. A chart by Salman Hameed in Science:

He writes (pdf):

…although the last couple of decades have seen an increasing confrontation over the teaching of evolution in the United States, the next major battle over evolution is likely to take place in the Muslim world (i.e., predominantly Islamic countries, as well as in countries where there are large Muslim populations). Relatively poor education standards, in combination with frequent misinformation about evolutionary ideas, make the Muslim world a fertile ground for rejection of the theory. In addition, there already exists a growing and highly influential Islamic creationist movement (1). Biological evolution is still a relatively new concept for a majority of Muslims, and a serious debate over its religious compatibility has not yet taken place. It is likely that public opinion on this issue will be shaped in the next decade or so because of rising education levels in the Muslim world and the increasing importance of biological sciences.

Ezra Klein plucks out this paragraph from a report by the Center On Budget and Policy Priorities:

If we continue current policies, the federal debt will skyrocket from a projected 46 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) at the end of fiscal year 2009 to 279 percent of GDP in 2050. That would be more than two and a half times the existing record (which was set when the debt reached 110 percent of GDP at the end of World War II) and would threaten serious harm to the economy.

Ah, Republicanism.

Ross has a long, intellecually honest post on torture. Respect:

So as far as the bigger picture goes, then, it seems indisputable that in the name of national security, and with the backing of seemingly dubious interpretations of the laws, this Administration pursued policies that delivered many detainees to physical and mental abuse, and not a few to death. These were wartime measures, yes, but war is not a moral blank check: If you believe that Abu Ghraib constituted a failure of jus in bello, then you have to condemn the decisions that led to Abu Ghraib, which means that you have to condemn the President and his Cabinet.

Ross recognizes the moral evil but has  "uncertainty, mixed together with guilt, about how strongly to condemn those involved – because in a sense I know that what they were doing was what I wanted to them to do."