Month: April 2009

A round up of reactions in the blogosphere to Specter’s party switch. Matt Welch:

Jonathan Chait:

Jay Nordlinger:

Steve Benen:

But if reaching the 60-vote threshold doesn’t make Arlen Specter’s big switch “huge,” what makes today’s news a seismic political shift? It’s further evidence of a Republican Party in steep decline, driven by a misguided ideological rigidity. Indeed, Specter suggested as much in his statement: “Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right.”

Kos:

Interestingly, he remains a foe of EFCA, which means that labor is free to fund and help a real Democrat in the Democratic primary. Bizarre choice. Had he decided to back EFCA, as he has always done so in the past, he’d have labor’s full support. Now, he gives the opposition an opening to take him out in the Democratic primary.

A.L.:

…from a political perspective, instead of facing serious pressure from the Right (because of Toomey’s primary challenge), he will now face serious pressure to move to the left on various issues. That’s because he’s now going to have to run in a Democratic primary, and though the party will do what it can to clear the field for him, he’ll still likely face some competition. And whoever he faces in the primary will play up his or her own Democratic bona fides while attacking Specter’s lack thereof. So Specter will have to do things to prove that he is a legitimate Democrat. And if he proves to be a major obstacle to Obama’s agenda, he’ll suffer for it; the honeymoon will be over very quickly.

Nate Silver:

This defection, coming at a time when historically low numbers of Americans are identifying themselves as Republican, would seem to be a manifestation of [the Republican] Death Spiral. These problems, indeed, were particularly acute in Pennsylvania, where many of the state’s more moderate Republicans had re-registered as Democrats to vote in the state’s extremely contentious primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Thus, given an extremely conservative Republican electorate, Specter appeared to be an underdog against his extremely conservative primary challenger, Pat Toomey, and switched parties in order to increase his odds of survival.

Former Republican John Cole:

I’m still waiting on my Soros check and forty virgins, so don’t get too excited, Arlen. Oh, and by the way, wingnuts- how is that Republican purity treating you? Is the GOP small enough to drown in a bathtub yet? Going to love hearing how a loyal foot soldier for three decades in the GOP wasn’t “conservative enough.”

Megan:

Instant analysis:  this is probably not a good sign for the future of the Republican party, not because Arlen Specter is so crucial to its ideological or political integrity, but simply because he’s a seasoned politician from a swing state, and what does he know that other Republicans don’t?

Ed Morrissey:

 I’m in the good-riddance category here.  Normally I argue for a big tent and the need to woo moderates by focusing on core values.  Specter betrayed those values in his Porkulus vote and cloture cave.  He could have forced Obama, Pelosi, and Reid to start negotiating in good faith with his Republican colleagues, but instead allowed them to shove a bad bill down their throats.

Malkin:

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty.)

Arlen Specter, my kind of Republican in many ways, calls it quits:

I find it interesting that a stimulus spending package in the midst of the steepest recession in memory is the sticking point. For the GOP to have remained mute under the massive increases in spending and borrowing under Bush but to make resistance to the Obama stimulus package a litmus test for conservatism reveals that the deepest principle of the Republican base is partisanship.

Schweppes Burst from Peter Solovey on Vimeo.

Ramesh Ponnuru asked last Friday:

I think we know the answer.

Larison responds to Manzi:

Read it all.

The NYT revisits former CIA officer John Kiriakou's ABC interview about Abu Zubaydah's interrogation. Kiriakou claimed that Zubaydah broke after “probably 30, 35 seconds,” of waterboarding, but the recently released torture memos showed Zubaydah was waterboarded "at least 83 times." Drum responds:

Greenwald has more. Spencer Ackerman imagines another possibility:

Was it to buttress a casus belli against Iraq? There are arguments for and against. But surely the point is that we cannot know for sure based on the shards of evidence in front of us. Worse: because torture has been introduced into the equation, we will probably never know what was true or false, what leads were valid and which were not, which questions were asked in good faith and which were not.

The torturing of these suspects ineluctably renders them pliable for whatever truth the torturers wanted to believe. This is how torture creates reality – and that reality is always for the purpose and benefit of those with the power to torture. How many torturers over the centuries have publicly acknowledged they got nothing from it? The stigma is such that they have to claim it worked – or face a double shame. And the capacity of torturers for self-deception is profound. Even Cheney wants to sleep at night. Even Cheney wants to believe he did the right thing.

But even if you trust Bush and Cheney to be torturing with the right motives (yes, I wrote those words), the act of torture itself obliterates the saliency of motive. Because the power it gives the torturer removes him from the regular to and fro of human life. Torture, when used, is like Tolkien's ring, when slipped on. It becomes its own power and its own rationale because it can coerce its own results. This is why civilized societies have placed the torture option off limits – way off limits with a wide berth in law and custom. Because it destroys the core elements of truth, freedom and fairness that are foundational for Western civilization.

Bush and Cheney removed those foundations and where they once were, a deep and dark hole lies open to the world.

It is their Ground Zero.

Tyler Cowen is against torture prosecutions:

At many blogs (Sullivan, Yglesias, DeLong, among others) you will find ongoing arguments for prosecuting the torturers who ran our government for a while.  I am in agreement with the moral stance of these critics but I don’t agree with their practical conclusions.  I believe that a full investigation would lead the U.S. public to, ultimately, side with torture, side with the torturers, and side against the prosecutors.  That’s why we can’t proceed and Obama probably understands that.  If another attack happened this would be all the more true.

Yglesias responds:

I don’t really consider myself an enthusiast for torture prosecutions. In part for reasons related to what Cowen says, I’m less interested in seeing the guilty punished than in seeing at least some of them and their political supporters admit that they were wrong and acting unwisely under the influence of the atmosphere of panic that prevailed in the aftermath of 9/11. How exactly you achieve that isn’t totally clear to me. But I think it’s plausible that some threat of prosecution, coupled with the ready availability of clemency for people prepared to come clean, plays a role.

I find the current situation more dangerous than Tyler does. In our current world, the laws against torture, we now know, were over-ridden with impunity or, at the very least, treated as obstacles to be overcome by bad faith lawyering, Orwellian language and political brinksmanship. Absent any serious attempt to get to the bottom of this and prosecute the guilty, the US’s commitment to the Geneva Conventions and to the UN Convention on Torture is transparently insincere – and the entire international legal edifice restraining such barbarism gutted by its ostensible global leader. Bush and Cheney will not just have destroyed the integrity of America, they will have done more to advance the use of torture worldwide than anyone since the Conventions were first set up. The civilizational consequences of America’s endorsement of torture as a “no-brainer” in the words of the last vice-president are incalculable.

A conscious refusal to enforce Geneva and the UN Convention when there is no doubt at all that torture took place – and is celebrated as a “no-brainer” decision by the former vice-president – is to treat such treaties as null and void. It means this: the global power that set up the Geneva Conventions has declared them optional.

Cowen’s position is what Glenn Reynolds’ was: Americans are a bloodthirsty, lawless lot and any attempt to restrain torture on the downlow would lead to its unmitigated and enthusiastic legalization in the wide open. Better then to stay in a zone of law-free ambiguity and hypocrisy than a zone where the US is a global leader in “enhanced interrogation.” Call me naive but I do not share their view of American depravity. And I do not believe that constitutional and democratic societies should encourage and excuse leadership that is openly committed to violating the laws.

We have two honest options: to investigate the torture and prosecute the guilty or to formally withdraw from Geneva and the UN Convention on Torture. I know it would be more convenient if we could all just move on and avoid this. But we can’t. So which one?

A decline in disapproval and rise in approval in the last couple of weeks:

The Plank interviews a global health expert, and Obsidian Wings features a guest post by immunization, vaccine, and bioethics directors. A dispatch from Mexico City:

New York, New York, 9.30 am