Month: September 2009

Jane Mayer came across this chilling passage from Arendt:

These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man—of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy, to which today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy, or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody. Indeed, if we identify tyranny as the government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done.

So many were tortured; but Nobody is responsible. Just keep walking… 

(Hat tip: Spencer.)

A reader writes:

You’re completely right to keep pointing out the

insanity of Sarah Palin and the bizarre reluctance of the MSM to mention

it.  But I think you’re theorizing in advance of the evidence with

respect to one point.

By my reading of the Vanity Fair piece, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Sarah Palin intended to fake a pregnancy and pass Bristol’s kid off as her own biological kid. Even if you accept Levi’s statement at face value, that only means that she wanted to keep Bristol’s pregnancy secret and then adopt the kid. There’s no reason she couldn’t have acknowledged publicly that the kid was adopted, without saying anything about who the birth parents were.

My reader's interpretation is certainly plausible, and he's right that Levi does not suggest Palin would fake a pregnancy for herself. But I'm not so convinced by the final sentence. If a governor wants to adopt a child, of course she'd have to explain the adoption process a little, and give some reasons for another child. That's the price of public life. My own view is that Palin could get away with quite a lot in Alaska, but she was nowhere near ready for the national stage – and the GOP and the MSM colluded to avoid revealing the depth of her loopiness.

At this point, my concern is less with Palin (just another nutter) than with McCain and the GOP. If they were reckless enough to foist Palin on us without even minimal vetting, and if they could browbeat the media into not asking certain questions out of deference, then we are in a very dangerous situation. The cynicism of the political and the media elite, and their aversion to the truth when it might impede their interests, requires vigilance.

Jon Cohn stands at the healthcare reform crossroads:

[If Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine)] signs on, according to nearly every person I consulted, it’s quite possible the legislation she supports would become the Senate’s bill with very little change–and that, in conference, the Senate bill would prevail. She’d hold the leverage, as long as the administration and Democratic leadership prefer to pass pass legislation with 60 votes. And that certainly seems to be the inclination of Obama and his advisors. (It's harder to tell about Congress, particularly the House, but they're unlikely to challenge the White House openly on this.)

Independents support it by a margin of 57 – 33.

The MSM are now treating Levi Johnston with their trade-marked breezy dismissal as a publicity whore. He sure is. Good on him. When you have been used by a political machine – when they made you cut off your mullet to make-over your image – you get a chance in America to make a few bucks by making yourself over. That means, of course, that we should be highly skeptical of what he is now saying. But in the Vanity Fair interview, which I noted a week ago, Levi nonetheless said something truly remarkable that really does get at something awry about the MSM, John McCain and the Republican machine:

Sarah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret—nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant. She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn’t have to worry about anything. Sarah kept mentioning this plan. She was nagging—she wouldn’t give up. She would say, “So, are you gonna let me adopt him?” We both kept telling her we were definitely not going to let her adopt the baby. I think Sarah wanted to make Bristol look good, and she didn’t want people to know that her 17-year-old daughter was going to have a kid.

This is a first-hand account from someone as close to Palin as possible. It alleges a proposed conspiracy by the former vice-presidential candidate to hide her daughter’s pregnancy and pass it off as her own to avoid embarrassment. It was not, according to Levi, a one-off musing. It was a persistent nagging to present a massive lie to the world about Palin’s own family life for cynical political purposes.

Does the fact that the father of Palin’s grandson believes she is capable of a totally crazy conspiracy involving a fake pregnancy ring any bells? Is anyone in the MSM going to actually, you know, ask former governor Palin if this is true, and if it was the first and only time she had this kind of kooky Desperate Housewives scheme up her sleeve?

And where are the conservative commentators denouncing Levi as nuts and batshit and loony and out of bounds and outrageous and hate-filled as they did when a handful of bloggers, armed only with a completely implausible scenario about a pregnancy, asked simply for confirmation of Palin’s maternity of her child, confirmation they never got.

And how would you pull off such a conspiracy anyway? Where would you find a doctor to fake a birth certificate? How would you persuade Bristol and Levi to go along with it? How would you find a hospital pliant enough to pull a bait-and-switch? How would you make yourself appear pregnant while your daughter was hidden away – when you are a sitting governor of a state and being photographed around the clock? How would you orchestrate not only a fake pregnancy but a fake birth? Only someone truly unhinged would dream of such a plot. And am I the only one who thinks it matters if this country might have put such an unhinged person in the most powerful office in the world?

That’s why clearing up this increasingly surreal set of tabloid stories matters. It’s not about Palin. It’s about McCain and the GOP. Did they know any of these accusations before they selected her? And how did they get the MSM to acquiesce to no press conference and no questions about this core absurdity? Levi’s new claim may be untrue, or a shot across the bow about more to come, or true only in this respect, i.e. Tripp. But if he is telling the truth – and he has been admirably straightforward for much of this psychodrama – then Mrs Palin has some ‘splaining to do. And so do Mr McCain and Mr Kristol.

A Youtube chronicling every time Kenny McCormick died in South Park in the first five seasons. It includes my favorite little ditty from the show: when alternative reality Cartman sings about his best friends. The song is after the jump at the end of the short clip. I sing it often myself:

He wielded US power for the purpose of undoing the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on Torture, and we now learn, he was eager to reverse long-standing US policy to prevent the "disappearances" of suspects:

From 2003 to 2006, the Bush administration quietly tried to relax the draft language of a treaty meant to bar and punish "enforced disappearances" so that those overseeing the CIA's secret prison system would not be criminally prosecuted under its provisions, according to former officials and hundreds of pages of documents

recently declassified by the State Department.

The aim of the global treaty, long supported by the United States, was to end official kidnappings, detentions and killings like those that plagued Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, and that allegedly still occur in Russia, China, Iran, Colombia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. But the documents suggest that initial U.S. support for the negotiations collided head-on with the then-undisclosed goal of seizing suspected terrorists anywhere in the world for questioning by CIA interrogators or indefinite detention by the U.S. military at foreign sites.

The president's calm, inspiring and somewhat stern address to students today was classic Obama. The administration made one mis-step: the language on the website asking kids to think of what they could do to help the president (they should have asked what they could do to help the country). But the uproar – especially in secessionist Texas – and the extraordinary talk radio hysteria whipped up by the loony right was the real political mistake – and it wasn't Obama's. Have these crazies learned nothing? Richard Neustadt, take a bow:

After reading the text on Monday, even Jim Greer, the Florida Republican Party chairman who last week accused the president of seeking to use the speech to foist “socialist ideology” on schoolchildren, said he could find nothing to criticize in its text. "In its current form, it’s fine,” Mr. Greer said in an interview. “But it remains to be seen if it’s the speech he’s going to give.”

That was my lone guffaw reading the paper this morning. The only way to defeat the loony right is not to take their bait, but to let them do their worst, indulge their inner Beck, and then well … beep beep.

"If we can’t trust the people and we can’t trust the elites, who can we trust? How can change be effectuated? This is one of the problems National Affairs is going to have to think through in the years ahead," David Brooks.

Indeed. But only time will tell.