Month: April 2009

Someone just told Powerline's Scott Johnson what tea-bagging is. The post is an instant camp classic:

There is something funny going on here, if not exactly where Cooper, Maddow and Sullivan find it. Cooper is widely reputed to be homosexual. Maddow and Sullivan are of course public homosexuals. It is funny in an ironic sort of way that these folks choose to disparage the tea party protestors from somewhere inside the homosexual subculture. Why not just call the protestors girly boys and let everyone in on the joke? Or would that spoil the fun?

I can assure Mr Johnson that teabagging knows no bounds on sexual orientation – and the vast majority of tea-bagging is purely heterosexual – and no disparagement or celebration of the teabaggers' sexual orientation is implied or imagined. I believe in tea-bag equality for all – gay and straight – myself. So does Samantha.

Ever wonder why the GOP is losing the next generation?

Peter Coy wonders about the future:

Once this crisis is past, the next agenda for macroeconomists will be to help make the economy far more robust—enough to survive the blunders of politicians, bankers, and economists of the future. Taleb, the scholar of unpredictability, notes that nature achieves robustness through a redundancy that economists would consider wasteful: two hands, two eyes, etc. Blake LeBaron of Brandeis University suggests preventing huge crises by tolerating small disturbances, the way foresters use controlled burns to eliminate flammable underbrush. Perhaps out of the ashes of failure will emerge a better macroeconomics profession.

Meet the Youtube Symphony Orchestra, as music playing meets the Internet age:

Greenwald tackles Allen:

Note, too, the sequence of events as Allen describes them:

While I was writing the piece, a very well-known former Bush administration official e-mailed some caustic criticism of Obama’s decision to release the memos. I asked the former official to be quoted by name, but this person refused, e-mailing: “Please use only on background.”

So these quotes arrived in Allen’s email inbox with no agreement that the quotes were off the record.  Thus, Allen was free to publish them and identity for his readers what Bush officials were saying about Obama.  But — exact like Tim Russert — Allen apparently treats his conversations with Bush officials as “presumptively confidential,” i.e., like a good and loyal P.R. spokesman, he will only report what he learns if they give him permission to do so — even in the absence of an explicit off-the-record agreement. 

Glenn then gets tough:

Allen’s excuse for anonymity was that readers could decide for themselves whether the anonymous Bush criticisms “sounded defensive or vindictive.” But he then confesses that he edited out “the most incendiary parts,” including “several ad hominems.” So, like a good servant-editor, he first helpfully sanitized the Bush official’s smears by making them appear more sober and substantive than they actually were — by removing all the parts that reflected vindictiveness towards Obama — and then justified the anonymity he granted by saying he wanted readers to see for themselves if the criticisms of Obama’s decision were grounded in vindictiveness. He evidently confessed all of that without realizing that his actions completely negate his claimed justification.

His story is well known by now. Wiki’s entry on him is here. if you have not read Ron Suskind’s “One Percent Solution”, it’s time you did. The significant Washington Post piece is here. The critical thing to remember is that the first person to be subjected to the torture program was not the person Bush and Cheney thought he was, gave up lots of useful (and accurate) information under traditional interrogation techniques, had no information that came close to the “ticking time bomb” criterion used to justify the torture program … and was brutally tortured anyway. More to the point, the idea that CIA officers were begging to use these torture methods is nonsense. They were forced to do so by higher ups. And all of this took place before they had even instructed Bybee and Yoo to construct patently bad faith legal defenses for all of it. Money quote:

[T]he harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said. Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, “seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect.”

And what was the effect of this very dramatic and clear first foray into the dark side? It was not to reassess and pull back, given the horror and failure of the first act of torture; it was to press on, get legal cover, and set up a program to finesse and intensify torture. Part of the problem is that the president had already bragged in public that Zubaydah was a central figure, and Ron Suskind has argued that the torture was ordered in part to save Bush’s face. Tenet denies that strongly. If it’s true, then president Bush, if he still has a conscience, must have a hard time sleeping at night.

Torture, you come to realize, was the tip of the spear of the Bush-Cheney war on terror. After first blood, they sharpened it.

A reader writes:

The comments by your dissenting reader and Abe Greenwald both contain a typical point made by the pro- "coercive interrogation" crowd. Namely, that the techniques used in the interrogations are not only not torture, but that they are barely mild annoyances, and that it's ludicrous to be making a fuss about them. Some have even gone so far as to apply that characterization to waterboarding, calling it merely a "splash in the face" or a "dunk in the water". What bothers me about this viewpoint is that if these techniques are so harmless, then how do they even work?

 If a face slap is not big deal, then how does it result in information? If putting an insect in a cage with a prisoner is something to laugh about, why are they insisting that it works? Do they really imagine that enemy prisoners with incredible, ticking time-bomb information fold so easily?

Or might it take an extra slap or two? Maybe a bit harder to get to a level that is tougher to withstand? Maybe a few days with no sleep? Still nothing? Ok, then perhaps a stress position as well? Hey, are we getting some weeping? Good, now we're getting somewhere.

Step by step, pushing harder ever more slightly. Until the prisoner breaks, and we get some information. And if the prisoner doesn't break? Then we simply push even harder. After all, our country is at stake, right?

And this leads me to my second point. In the Hayden and Mukasey article today, they make a point that these interrogations are about getting information, not confessions. But what if the captive doesn't have the intelligence we want or has already told us all he knows? If he says he has no further information, do we believe him? Or do we start pushing a little, to see what else might be there? And when that yields nothing, what then? If we truly believe this person has critical intelligence, can we stop?

The soviets used these techniques to elicit false confessions. That is what they were designed for.

Nairobi, Kenya, 6.15 am

Ross says goodbye to The Atlantic:

Like any human enterprise, the Atlantic is only sometimes all that it could be. The fact that conservatives have complained to me about the magazine's liberal bias, for instance, and liberals about its rightward tilt, doesn't mean that we've achieved a perfectly Broderesque balance between the factions; sometimes it just means we're promiscuous in our unfairness. And if you've picked up an issue last month or last year and found something that made you groan or roll your eyes, there's a perfectly good chance you were right to do so – that in that instance, at least, we aimed high but ended up blowing it.

But sometimes we do succeed.

(I'd even suggest that often, we do succeed – but then of course I'm biased.) And without getting too goo-goo-ish about our polarized media, or too maudlin about the decline of long-form journalism, I'll just say that I think the continued pursuit of the Atlantic's particular kind of success is a tremendously good thing, one that's worth your support, and worth all the effort that goes into it – the long and stressful hours, the wrangling with editors over the perfect mix of stories and with writers over the perfect turn of phrase, the unsung labors of the fact checkers and copy editors, and the patience of our publisher with a business model that no investor looking for a quick profit would ever get involved in.

Dish alum and former Palin booster Reihan Salam comes out against Palin:

Palin’s campaign antics can be forgiven. What can’t be forgiven is the ham-handed way she’s tried to build her national profile since she returned to Alaska. She’s abandoned the bold right-left populism that won over Alaska voters—and me—in the first place in favor of an increasingly defensive and harsh partisanship. After making her name as a determined enemy of Alaska’s corrupt Republican establishment, she recently called for Democratic Sen. Mark Begich to step down so the hilariously crooked Ted Stevens could get another crack at the seat. She loudly promised to leave federal stimulus money on the table before clawing that promise back with a whimper. One can’t help but get the impression that Palin is a clownish, vindictive amateur … Has Sarah Palin undergone some kind of secret lobotomy?