Month: January 2009

Joe Klein is against prosecuting Bush:

A number of readers have taken me to task for not calling for the prosecution of George Bush et al for war crimes. Glenn Greenwald has now piled on. Let me say this: I would have no moral, legal or spiritual problem with the Obama Administration pursuing this course of action, if they so choose. I do have a practical problem with it … and so does Obama, which is why he won’t pursue this for a very good reason: there are much bigger things at stake. We are in the midst of an economic crisis. We have a multitude of problems overseas to be resolved. And there are enormous political opportunities available as well–like the enactment of universal health insurance. Anything that diverts attention from these priorities, or makes it more difficult to build the consensus necessary to get them accomplished, has to be set aside. The stakes are just too high.

I disagree, although I fully understand the political calculations Joe and Obama are taking into account. The truth is, at some point, prosecutions for something as grave as war crimes will surely rise up through the legal system and demand some response from the Justice Department regardless of what we decide now. I favor a Truth Commission because I think it would help enormously to have a bipartisan factual resource for people to refer to in sorting through all this. The Commission need not be tasked with prosecuting or finding the evidence to prosecute anyone in the Bush administration. But if a credible and substantiated case emerges that a senior civilian in the Bush administration did commit war crimes – and the facts merit no other conclusion – then I cannot see how the Justice Department refuses to respond. On what grounds? That war crimes are unimportant? That it is within the attorney general’s discretion to ignore them?

Remember: even the Pentagon concedes that a dozen prisoners have been tortured to death by US interrogators. Human rights groups put that number at close to a hundred. Most of the techniques we saw displayed at Abu Ghraib were authorized by the president and vice-president. And they monitored the waterboarding sessions very closely and then sat around while the CIA openly destroyed the taped evidence of them – evidence that would prevent anyone from ever believing this wasn’t torture.

As the president said yesterday, connect the dots.

… the president of the US jumps. I can’t be the only one to have been struck by this:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel said Monday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been forced to abstain from a United Nations resolution on Gaza that she helped draft, after Mr. Olmert placed a phone call to President Bush. “I said, ‘Get me President Bush on the phone,’ ” Mr. Olmert said in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, according to The Associated Press. “They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care: ‘I need to talk to him now,’ ” Mr. Olmert continued. “He got off the podium and spoke to me.” …

Mr. Olmert claimed that once he made his case to Mr. Bush, the president called Ms. Rice and told her to abstain. “She was left pretty embarrassed,” Mr. Olmert said, according to The A.P.

If you want a glimpse of how the government of Israel was treated unlike any other government in the Bush years, look no further.

Tyler Cowen sighs:

You’ll note that Henry Paulson has been calling for the mortgage agencies to be resurrected as "public utilities" of some sort.  I don’t understand this path.  There is a very good (modern) liberal case against more home ownership: behavioral economics is true, people overestimate their prospects, poor people shouldn’t take too much risk, and the natural market tendency is too much home ownership, not too little. That’s without taking environmental issues into account.

Yglesias takes them into account.

Caleb Crain says parents are lefties:

…most parents want their children to be far left in their early years—to share toys, to eschew the torture of siblings, to leave a clean environment behind them, to refrain from causing the extinction of the dog, to rise above coveting and hoarding, and to view the blandishments of corporate America through a lens of harsh skepticism.

But fewer parents wish for their children to carry all these virtues into adulthood. It is one thing to convince your child that no individual owns the sandbox and that it is better for all children that it is so. It is another to hope that when he grows up he will donate the family home to a workers’ collective.

(Hat tip: Plumer)

Greg Dejerejian is skeptical:

For what concretely realizable ends this ghastly suffering? To re-establish a ‘new reality’ in Israel’s South? Bunk, I’m afraid, as Hamas is all but sure to preserve at least some rocket-fire capacity, unless the IDF is ready to go into each and every back alley and basement of Gaza for another 60-90 days, in hand to hand fighting that would turn Gaza into a Grozny-on-the-Mediterranean, if it hasn’t been already, or even worse. To show a re-invigorated deterrent to the ‘neighborhood’, notably Iran, after the Lebanon sortie that proved so ineffective? But the Iranians well know a campaign against Iran is of a magnitude wholly different by an exponential degree than against Gaza (so much so that even President Bush refused Israeli entreaties to pursue such an action), so they will not be particularly impressed.

Christopher Buckley thinks Obama ought to be able to keep his BlackBerry:

On a more serious note, why—pray?—do we connive at isolating our presidents, by taking away their ability even to keep a journal (might be subpoenaed!), email (see above) and now, their connective tissue to the outside world? Sure, they have access to the media. They can turn on a television or pick up a newspaper, but that’s not the same as being able to receive a message from someone who used to wipe their runny nose, saying, WHAT IN NAME OF ALL THAT’S HOLY R U DOING, INVADING IRAQ, NUMBSKULL!!!???

How to make the Gospels appeal to the NASCAR crowd:

What bothers [Mark] Driscoll … is the portrayal of Jesus as a wimp, or worse. Paintings depict a gentle man embracing children and cuddling lambs. Hymns celebrate his patience and tenderness. The mainstream church, Driscoll has written, has transformed Jesus into "a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ," a "neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that … would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell."

In a church dedicated above all to the principle that gays are evil, the single, Jewish hippie who founded it all gets to be an embarrassment after a while. Muhammed would be more their style. (Hat tip: Credo)

Huckabee is not "pro-gay", he assures us. Yes, we knew that, Mike. Coulter, meanwhile, insists on her own anti-gay credentials. Yes, we knew that too, Ann. YouTube here.

US President George W. Bush speaks during his final press conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, DC, on January 12, 2009. By Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty.