Month: April 2009

After The Banana Republic

Josh Marshall inspects the vestiges of the Republican party:

 Republicans have tried to distance themselves from President Bush's fiscal profligacy. But on the core value issues of militarism and human rights violations and keeping faith with the war criminals of the previous regime they really couldn't be more unified or on message. If you were plopped down on earth today in front of a TV set in the United States, on the testimony of the party members themselves, you might easily get the idea that state-sanctioned torture was the main policy legacy of the outgoing administration. Sort of like Democrats looked back on late 90s budget surpluses with a proud defiance in the aftermath of the Clinton years.

The View From Your Recession

A reader writes:

I arrived on these shores 17 years ago with $2.35 and a college scholarship. I studied like my life depended on it (because, in a way, it did), and my work paid off. I'm now a software engineer with 2 BS degrees and an MS. Having emigrated from hell (ok, maybe not quite hell — Nigeria — but definitely hell-adjacent), I know first-hand what it is like to live in a society without an economic safety net. I had gone to bed many times with unresolved pangs of hunger. I wasn't going to take a chance that it would ever happen again.

I worked and saved carefully. Pinched pennies, dined on Ramen noodles and turned down the thermostat in the winter. My house has always been the smallest among my colleagues and my car is over a decade old. So, what did I do with all this money I scrimped and saved? Well, I put 70% into real-estate and 30% into retirement accounts. Big mistake. Huge!

To be clear, I have never flipped a single house. I stayed away from it because it clearly looked like a get-rich quick scheme. Instead, I purchased single family houses and apartments. Nothing flashy, just basic homes. I live in the Midwest, so we have very few multi-million dollar condos here anyway. When a few "For Sale" signs popped up, it was barely anything to take note of. But when the signs started rusting, attention begged to be payed.

Now those houses are in foreclosure and the signs are everywhere. Many are already boarded up to keep out vagrants. I owe more on most of my properties than they can be sold for because similar houses are being auctioned off at a fraction of what I paid. My girlfriend still thinks I'm loaded. I have no idea what she'll say when she realizes that the sacrifices won't bear any financial fruits.

I don't think I did anything but follow a tried-and-true path to investing. My conservative approach would have probably paid off at any other time in the history of this country. In the past 10 years I have never been without 3 jobs — my standard 9-5, a software consulting gig and a teaching gig at my friends software training firm. My 9-5 is relatively safe (thank goodness), but my software consulting gig has been cut from 12 hours a week to 3 hours, and my friend's training business is circling the drain. Ironically, now that I most need to, I feel I don't have the strength to abuse myself like I did the last decade.

In January, I took some money out of what was left of the carnage and went to Las Vegas. After seven years without a vacation, I felt I owed something to my battered state of mind. Disillusionment is the appropriate word for my current condition. If I had been profligate, at least I would have the memories. It's hard to muster the discipline to save again. It was difficult (horrendous even) to work an average of 75 hours a week for over a decade. It stings to realize that it was all for naught. I just might go back to Vegas again. At least while I lost money there, I got drinks and — from what I can remember – had a heck of a time.

Straw Men

William Saletan compares torturers to people who execute death-row prisoners and people who perform abortions. He writes:

In the fury of a moral backlash, naming names and holding people accountable feels like the right thing to do. But before you go down that road, remember that the choice of targets won’t always be yours.

A reader points out the false equivalence:

His logic would be acceptable if it wasn’t that execution is legal under public law while torture is only ‘legal’ under executive secret law. Conflating the two is extremely dangerous and factually wrong.

How does anyone get to the utilitarian argument without confronting the illegal argument? I guess I’ve been asking this question for six years so it’s a little optimistic to expect clarity at this point.

Why Debate The T-Word?

Steve Chapman asks the torture supporters a question:

…if effectiveness is the only gauge, why even debate whether these techniques fit the definition of torture? The problem with using "it worked" as an argument is that it justifies too much. By that rationale, we can justify subjecting enemy captives to every form of torture ever devised. We can even justify torturing and killing their spouses, siblings, parents, and children, right in front of them.

Cheney and others have yet to advocate going that far. But if they really believe what they say about the techniques we've used, here's a question they need to answer: Why not?

Trying to find a consistently principled position among these people is hard. Why? Because their arguments, like those of Yoo, Bradbury and Bybee, are entirely designed to legitimize decisions already made.

As time goes by and we learn more and more, the clearer it is that the decisions to deploy torture and invade Iraq were effectively made by one man very shortly after 9/11. Everything else was cover for this act of will. Reality and morality be damned: this was about creating reality and enforcing Cheney's will – against all legal and moral precedent, against the facts on the ground, against the professional opinion of government institutions and experts, against the allies, against the Congress, against the State Department, and against anyone who dissented, from CIA officers to low-ranking grunts.

It was despotism cloaked by a faux constitutionalism and legalism.

It was an attack on this country's constitution. And that matters.

The Fallible Infallible Executive

Radley Balko:

Cheney’s theory of executive power rests on the notion that only the executive can be trusted to protect national security—that the courts and the Congress are too burdened by political maneuvering, ego, and ivory tower theory to be entrusted with our safety. The irony here is that from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib to torture, the Bush administration’s utter and complete incompetence has become a more devastating counterargument to Cheney’s position than any of Bush’s critics could have conjured up themselves.

It is very rare to get someone with the same stratospheric levels of arrogance and incompetence as you find in Dick Cheney. Let's go to the tape: A war launched on false premises, a trillion dollar debt in a period of growth, a destruction of America's moral standing, the loss of one major city (New Orleans) and the devastation of another (New York City), two horribly bungled military campaigns that have trapped his successors for decades, a political party decimated for a generation, his closest aide in jail for obstruction of justice, his own daughter and grand-child targeted by his own party as second-class citizens in the state they live in. And a war criminal. Did I miss anything?

Why is this man not laughed off every TV set he walks onto?