Month: December 2008

That dreadful piece – cowardly in its language and stupid in its description of torture opponents as somehow all "left-wing" – also misquoted Senator Feinstein as Ackerman reports. Here’s the full quote from Feinstein, which the NYT truncated:

“The law must reflect a single, clear standard across the government, and right now the best choice appears to be the Army Field Manual,” Senator Feinstein said. “I recognize that there are other views, and I am willing to work with the new Administration to consider them. However, my intent is to pass a law that effectively bans torture, complies with all laws and treaties, and provides a single standard across the government.”

How does a competent journalist not print the sentence in italics?

The doyenne of the blogosphere liked my essay on blogging, "Why I Blog". It got lost a little in the election hoopla. But going through my emails today – and finding so many of you venting, explaining, thinking – I was reminded of this wonderful truth:

"Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader. The proximity is palpable, the moment human — whatever authority a blogger has is derived not from the institution he works for but from the humanness he conveys. This is writing with emotion not just under but always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term that really describes this is friendship. And it is a relatively new thing to write for thousands and thousands of friends."

Thanks for being there.

The issue won’t go away. Ed Morrissey isn’t happy:

I’m sure the comments section will fill with various conspiracy theories over Indonesian school records, Kenyan births, and so on.  None of it — absolutely none — has any real, solid evidence showing that Obama was born anywhere else than Hawaii apart from sheer speculation and hearsay, and even less evidence that Obama’s stepfather renounced Obama’s birthright citizenship, which he didn’t have the power to do anyway.  It’s a conspiracy theory spun by conspiracy theorists (Philip Berg is a 9/11 truther) who use their normal thresholds of evidence for this meme.

Jacob Grier, an indie coffee shop aficionado, praises the corporate behemoth:

The charge that Starbucks was driving other shops out of business was never justified. Competitor Peet’s weathered the attack and continues to thrive. Relative newcomer Caribou Coffee has expanded to become the nation’s second largest coffee chain. Most importantly, there are more independent coffee shops today than ever before. The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA), a trade group that tracks the market for high-end coffee, reports spectacular growth in the industry. In 1989, the SCAA estimated that there were just 585 coffee retailers in the United States. By 2006 that number had risen to nearly 24,000. Sixty percent of these shops are independently owned or part of micro-chains of less than ten units.[…]

Starbucks was the gateway drug to specialty coffee. Customers tried it there first and then graduated to the often-superior products sold by indie shops. Even Duane Sorensen, owner of the proudly anti-corporate Stumptown Coffee in Portland, Oregon, concedes that Starbucks raised standards in the industry. Ward Barbee, publisher of the coffee publication Fresh Cup, is even more effusive. “Every morning, I bow down to the great green god for making all of this possible,” he told the Willamette Weekly in 2004. In short, Starbucks and indie shops grew up side by side. Indie shops learned from Starbucks’s retailing genius and built off its customer base. Then the indie shops left Starbucks in the dust.

Move over, Jon Cohn. Ezra Klein points out the sublime rationality of socialism:

In 2006, adjusted for purchasing power, the United Kingdom spent $2,760 per person on health care. America spent $6,714. It’s a difference of almost $4,000 per person, spread across the population. That’s $4,000 that can go into wages, or schools, or defense, or luxury, or mortgage-backed securities.

And there’s no evidence that Britain’s aggregate outcomes are noticeable worse. But they do say "no" a lot more than we do. Their system refuses to pay high prices for medical technologies and pharmaceuticals that it judges insufficiently effective. They’ve forced themselves to make choice, because they have something we don’t have: A global budget. They are willing to spend a certain number of dollars (well, pounds) on health care each year, and no more than that. If resources aren’t unlimited, then choices need to be made. It’s not quite correct to say that those choice will mean letting someone die, but they do mean putting limits on what we will spend to keep them alive.

One reason I’m a conservative is the British National Health Service. Until you have lived under socialism, it sounds like a great idea. It isn’t misery – although watching my parents go through the system lately has been nerve-wracking – but there is a basic assumption. The government collective decides everything. You, the individual patient, and you, the individual doctor, are the least of their concerns. I prefer freedom and the market to rationalism and the collective. That’s why I live here.

Greenwald points out Feinstein’s and Wyden’s sudden change in rhetoric on torture:

What makes this so notable is that, for the last year, Feinstein and Wyden were both insistent that the only way to end torture and restore America’s standing in the world was to require CIA compliance with the Army Field Manual — period.  But as long as George Bush was President, it was cheap and easy for Feinstein and Wyden to argue that, because they knew there was no chance it would ever happen.  As they well knew, they lacked the votes to override Bush’s inevitable veto of any such legislation.  So as long as Bush was President, it was all just posturing, strutting around demanding absolute anti-torture legislation they knew would never pass. 

But that has all changed now.

Although Obama’s top intelligence adviser, John Brennan, has questioned whether it was necessary or wise to do so, Obama himself said repeatedly and unequivocally during the campaign that he supports legislation to compel CIA compliance with the Army Field Manual, making it virtually impossible for him to veto any such legislation if Congress passes it.  Thus, Senate Democrats now know that if they pass the law they claimed so vehemently to support, it would actually get enacted.

So now, suddenly, Feinstein and Wyden are sending at least preliminary signals that they are far more "flexible" on the issue — I believe the all-justifying catchword in vogue now is "pragmatic" — than they ever were before.  What had been an unequivocal principle has instantly transformed into caveat-riddled buzzphrases.  I’m sure we’ll be hearing shortly — from many precincts — that those of us who insist that Democrats fulfill their commitment to compel the CIA’s compliance in all cases with the extant Army Field Manual (not some brand new, more permissive set of guidelines written and issued in secret and which provides for exceptions), are guilty of being dreaded "ideologues," purity trolls and civil liberties extremists.

Scott Horton weighs in:

As I discovered in studying the [NYT’s] reporting over a period of year, when a neighbor plays his stereo too loudly in the apartment next door, that is “torture.” But when a man is stripped of his clothing, chained to the floor in a short-shackle position, subjected to sleep deprivation and alternating cold and heat, and left to writhe in his own feces and urine—that, in the world of the Times, is just an “enhanced interrogation technique.” Shane and Mazzetti do us one better in this piece. Figures who criticize torture and Brennan’s fitness to be DCI are, we learn, the “left wing of the Democratic Party.” That’s a remarkable characterization for a group that is led by retired generals and admirals, as well as many of the nation’s most prominent religious leaders.

In so many ways, it’s a very small issue, directly affecting only 2 to 3 percent of the population. But the gay issue really is becoming a defining catalyst for Republicanism in many ways. New polling on Prop 8 reveals the kind of political coalition that focusing on same-sex marriage has created for the GOP:

• Evangelical or born-again Christians (85%) were far more likely than others (42%) to vote yes.
• Three in four Republicans (77%) voted yes, two in three Democrats (65%) voted no, and independents were more closely divided (52% yes, 48% no).
• Supporters of Republican presidential candidate John McCain were far more likely than those who backed President-elect Barack Obama to vote yes (85% vs. 30%).
• Latinos (61%) were more likely than whites (50%) to vote yes; and 57 percent of Latinos, Asians, and blacks combined voted yes. (Samples sizes for Asians and blacks are too small to report separately.)
• Voters without a college degree (62%) were far more likely than college graduates (43%) to vote yes.

The trouble for the GOP is that this is one of very few issues on which Asians, Latinos and blacks vote for them. But it reinforces the identity of the party as primarily that of white, less educated fundamentalist voters. I’ve no doubt there’s a place for such a party in American politics. I also have little doubt it will never be a majority.

Mona Charen was expecting Huey Newton:

If the economic team is centrist, the foreign policy team (and I pinch myself as I say this) leans a little to the right. Did you notice that in introducing his choices, the president-elect used the term "defeat our enemies"? … And that, along with the other appointments, is enough to keep some of us smiling at a time when we were expecting to be in deep anguish.

Did Charen not hear Obama promise to defeat our enemies in the debates? Did she never read his iconic Iraq speech where he said he wasn’t against war, just dumb wars? Or were her ears and eyes clogged with partisanship?

A reader writes:

I’ve been following you on Iraq this week, and allow me a dissent. I think your frame is wrong. The fighting in Iraq was not between Sunnis and Shiites per se, as much as between parties that sought a confessional war (al Qaeda, the Iranian special groups, elements of Moqtada al Sadr’s Jaish e Mahdi) and those parties that sought to prevent one (the Iraqi government, the US Marines, the Anbar Awakening). The anti-competitive-genocide alliance won. The forces that sought civil war are either destroyed (al Qaeda) or reconciled to the new order of things (most of JAM).

It’s always possible that the forces of chaos can reconstitute themselves. Iran has an interest in doing just that. But they will do so without a crucial advantage, support from the local population, who fought side by side with Americans against the agents of chaos for the last 2 years. I think those battles will have a lasting impact and we will see that impact when Iraqis begin to write the history of this period. Also your thesis has to a degree been tested. The Marines have largely left Anbar and the expected reprisals against the Shiite pockets in western Iraq have not occurred.

This rubric, to be perfectly honest, is the first time I’ve heard how a frame for success could actually work long term. At least the first time I’ve heard it laid out so crisply and clearly.

I have two worries.

First is that tiny Shiite pockets in Anbar are not the same as Mosul, Kirkuk, Diyala and Baghdad. Second, I suspect that the sectarian divides of the ancient and recent past are deeper forces than recent unifying experiences. But the truth is that neither my reader nor I can know what will happen when US forces start withdrawing. I suspect the worst. I should say this, though: I truly hope he’s right. And if this frame really does exist, and if in a couple of years, we see the theoretical possibility of an actual future on these lines, and if keeping residual US forces in the country could help sustain that, and if all Iraqi parties asked us to stay in something more than a symbolic form on those grounds, then one might imagine staying past 2011.

But those are several huge ifs. My Tory pessimism suggests they won’t pan out. My American optimism hopes they do. I guess the point is as it long has been: constant vigilance to changing events and a willingness to rethink upon new information. That’s what I’ve tried to do on Iraq these past few years. I hope to keep doing so in the next few as well. If there’s still a path to success, we should try to find it.