Month: January 2009

Richard Perle:

[A]bout the many mistakes made in Iraq, one thing is certain: they had nothing to do with ideology. They did not draw inspiration from or reflect neoconservative ideas and they were not the product of philosophical or ideological influences outside the government.

The Panetta pick essentially shows that the long, tough struggle to get Obama elected was worth it in a fundamental, vital way. For me, as my endorsement indicated, a return to decency and the rule of law was the overwhelming priority in the last election. In that critical respect, we just won. In Spencer’s words:

Second, and more important from a human-rights perspective, was what [Obama] said about torture and interrogations: "We must adhere to our values diligently and with no exceptions." No exceptions. None of this ticking-bomb crap that doesn’t exist in the real world, none of these Jack Bauer distortions.

America is back. Know hope.

Simon Dumenco questions whether Huffington Post is worth $200 million, notwithstanding the recently committed $25 million in venture capital money. This stopped me a little short:

Consider, for starters, HuffPo’s revenue. As Nat reported, from January through August of last year — the site’s most-trafficked year — "the site collected just $302,000 in ad revenue, according to an estimate from TNS Media Intelligence."

Gulp. But Huff is expanding into many non-political areas and has great brand recognition, even if it doesn’t actually, er, pay the vast majority of people who contribute to it. Dumenco proposes:

Maybe the Huffington Post could be worth more if it further cut its burn rate. For instance, rather than not pay its bloggers, it could charge them — for the privilege of getting to help maintain the jetsetting lifestyle of the Great Arianna, of course. As for some of the people the site does pay, like its tech staff? Those jobs could be offshored to, I dunno, Third World child labor. If HuffPo takes such steps, I could see the site being worth maybe $4 mil.

The grim reality for online journalism is that we have yet to find a way to make money from it. We need advertizing. 2009 is not the best moment to seek it.

(Hat tip: Frank Wilson)

The New York Times gets creative with new media. This may be its future.

Concord, Massachusetts, 9 am.

I met Richard John Neuhaus only a couple of times, but he took the second occasion to tell me to my face, with his clerical collar on, that I was "objectively disordered". I remember this rather well because we were in an elevator at the time and I didn’t quite know where to look. I have no way to judge him as a person, but admired his candor in a way, and the many glowing personal obits are testament to a man who clearly made great friends and was a witty, funny, humane companion. I knew his work and read it closely and appreciated his influence, which is why I’ve done what I can to engage and counter it.

Neuhaus began on the very far left and ended up rather quickly on the very far right.

The transition from Communist to Catholic in the 20th century was not unknown, but Neuhaus’s rapid shift can only be understood through the prism of the 1960s, Vatican II, the sexual revolution and the rise of the New Left. He remains of that generation genuinely and permanently horrified by the 1960s and 1970s – and determined to move the culture back past them. Neuhaus and Benedict are twins in this respect.

Damon Linker has the most balanced assessment here. Neuhaus was at once an intellectual father of Christianism – the transformation of Christianity into a political movement allied with other fundamentalist faiths – and a fierce opponent of any civil equality for gay human beings. There can be no such inequality in heaven, of course, where no such boundaries endure. Maybe I’ll meet him in an elevator up there one day. I wonder which of us will be more surprised to see the other.

Auguste plucks out another data set from this report:

After-tax income
Lowest quintile: 15,300
Second quintile: 33,700
Middle quintile: 50,200
Fourth quintile: 70,300
Percentiles 81-90: 96,100
Percentiles 91-95: 125,500
Percentiles 96-99: 200,500
Percentiles 99.0-99.5:413,300
Percentiles 99.5-99.9: 830,100
Percentiles 99.9-99.99: 3,191,600
Top 0.01 Percentile: 24,286,300

Krugman is restless about the stimulus and Gupta (no Michael Moore critics are allowed in Obamaland). And John Conyers chimes in against "Sunjay" referring to Krugman’s "Noble" Prize.

Michael Weiss:

What would Allan Bloom think about Joe on the frontlines?  Does it even matter anymore?

A reader writes:

You mentioned in your first post on this that you thought you might be missing something from Just War, and I think I know what it is: the "supreme emergency exemption", a controversial part of the Just War story which posits, as you can probably guess, that in certain grave emergencies you basically do what you need to do to survive, even if it’s morally untenable by standard jus in bello norms. As you can imagine, this is controversial stuff: you won’t find anything about it in international law, but it does have its supporters, among them Rawls, Walzer, and most famously, Winston Churchill.

Walzer’s argument is probably the most succinct version and it goes like this: a country which is a victim of aggression, and which has jus ad bellum on its side, can, in extreme emergencies, jettison the norms of jus in bello (the example which he offers for this is, not surprisingly, Nazi Germany). In this case, Walzer argues, even deliberately killing civilians could have been justifiable in order to try and stave off Hitler. His argument is derived largely from Churchill’s decision to loose the Royal Air Force on german cities, and premised on the idea that the threat at hand could not simply be measured in terms of occupation or "run-of-the-mill" injustices, but rather that it posed something so morally reprehensible as to be "evil objectified in the world."

So how does all of this relate to Israel and Gaza? For starters, when a country sees itself as having just cause, as Israel invariably does, and when it feels that its very survival is at stake, it often feels morally justified in abandoning the prohibition of hitting civilians and so forth. Now, I’m not saying that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians, or even that this argument is right, but simply that according to this supreme emergency argument, you can see how the broader logic carries out — jus in bello gets tossed and the bombs start dropping.

But the real question we ought to be asking, it seems to me, is whether this sort of argument is morally acceptable. The problem — whether it’s Israel in 2009, or America in 2002 — is that countries nearly always argue that threats are supreme emergencies which threaten their existence or way of life.  What’s more, if this caveat is used every time you bring up Just War, you’ve got to ask yourself what kind of theory you have on your hands. Of course states aren’t going to like arguments that seek to restrain the means at their disposal.

I’m in agreement with the last paragraph. And it remains an absurd proposition that Israel is at that kind of threat from Hamas as currently constituted.