Month: February 2010

Matt Steinglass on global warming and the media:

The media like big numbers. Reporters will naturally take a 3,000-page report like that of the IPCC and skim through it, looking for affected populations over 1 billion, percentages over 50%, and catastrophes occurring within the next 30 years. The resulting picture in the media will exaggerate the results of the scientific research. In some cases, scientists who work on climate-change issues, and those who put together the IPCC report, must be truly exasperated to have watched the media first exaggerate aspects of their report, and then accuse the IPCC of responsibility for the media's exaggerations.

Bernstein considers the consequences:

If Obama and Holder decide to prosecute, there's little question of the results: Republicans of all stripes would rally around their now-persecuted  friends from the Bush administration.  Republicans of all stripes would feel the need to justify the actions that the torturers took, and to do so they would double down on tales of how effective torture was at supposedly stopping all sorts of nasty terror attacks.

Republicans, I tend to think close to unanimously, would refuse to have any part in any Truth Commission.  They wouldn't serve on it, and they wouldn't accept its results; they would brand it a partisan witch hunt.  Torturers and those who worked with torturers wouldn't testify.  How could they?  They'd be incriminating themselves and their coworkers.  So the commission might demonstrate some of the truth, but would achieve no reconciliation at all.  The deterrent factor for the future would rest on one thing alone, the ability of the Justice Department to obtain convictions and serious sentences, although such sentences would be gone, at least for policy makers once the next Republican president was sworn into office.  And yet even then, the more Republicans solidify into the torture party, the more they would be likely to change the law and treaty obligations once they win the White House.  In my view, a not at all unlikely result of prosecutions is withdrawal from Geneva during the next Republican administration.

More civil disobedience against war criminal John Yoo at a speech at Johns Hopkins. These criminals must be confronted – peacefully, civilly but insistently – on their crimes anywhere they are given any credibility as anything but torturers and violators of core human rights. This protest is silent. It in no way prevents his free speech. How can silence do such a thing? Everywhere he goes. Everywhere he speaks. Stand up and confront him with his crimes.

Non violence and silence is the best strategy. But it is very important that these individuals are not allowed to be re-established as individuals who are not clearly subject to future prosecution. I don't mean those who simply argue for torture. I mean those who helped devise, defend and implement it in office. That includes Thiessen, Yoo, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bybee, Bradbury, Addington, Tenet and the rest of those around the vice-president who remain subject to prosecution for war crimes.

That the Washington Post has hired one of them for its op-ed page – after its editorial page described Thiessen's boss as the "vice-president for torture – is beyond my comprehension.

Arch-conservative Catholic blogger, Mark Shea, takes on Thiessen:

[T]he thing I find most baffling about all this: the spectacle of pro-lifers going to the mat to defend torture, all while claiming that it is virtually impossible to even know what torture is.

The ridiculous and insulting tendency among so many who do this is to imply that if you oppose torture you do so because you are secretly supporting abortion or trying to derail the pro-life movement. The obvious reply to this is that it is precisely Catholic pro-life belief that rejects the ends-justifies-the-means thinking behind both abortion and torture advocacy.

If pro-lifers would simply stop defending the use of torture, there'd be no problem and I for one would never make another peep about it. But the fact is (as Raymond Arroyo, Marc ("Scott Brown Shows Waterboarding Wins") Thiessen, Austin Ruse and a depressing roster of other prolife Catholics demonstrate in percentages greater than the average population, we are now so required to be in bed with whatever consequentialism the GOP leadership demands that a principled prolife stand that rejects consequentialism in all its forms is spoken of as betrayal of the prolife movement.

The solution is simple: it's not that Catholics who repeat the plain and repeated teaching of the Church should be quiet about torture. It's that Catholics who claim to have no idea if the Bush Administration committed torture or not (since they are helpless to define torture) should stop defending what everybody (including the Reagan Administration and the Vatican, as well as Geneva, the UN, Britain and the Red Cross, as well as the rest of the civilized world) calls torture.

My take here.

Chris Mathias:

You’ve got to love the local news. Only there can a man with a penis tree-sculpture in his yard get a three-minute lead story at 5:30, reported on by entirely straight-faced reporters. There is so much to love: after they slip in a shot of the pine-dick near the beginning, they blur out the wooden member (as if it was actual nudity) for the rest of the clip, or show it at obscure and unintelligible angles. Perhaps even crazier, they get through the entire segment without ever saying the word ‘penis.’

Loury and Yglesias continue their discussion:

A reader writes:

I have trouble taking your New York correspondent's problem with Grindr seriously: "I've been to gay bars where several hot guys will be standing next to each other at the bar, each one with his nose buried in Grindr instead of, you know, talking to the hot guys next to him."

I remember 25 years ago, walking into the new "video bar" in Chicago and seeing all the hot guys standing around not talking to one another or looking at each other. They just stared at the music videos on the TV screens.

The same bar now spans four storefronts and is the most popular gay bar in Chicago–and it's still a video bar. But now the patrons talk to one another, cruise, and interact with the video (especially on showtunes night). Just a few years later, there was a fear that the local BBSs (the predecessor to today's Internet) would devastate gay public life. Then the demon was gay chatrooms on AOL and then other gay profile/hookup sites.

There's a kind of absorption to the new, but eventually it gets integrated into our lives. The same will happen with Grindr.

Walt responds at length. Some of the more salient points he makes:

[T]he real differences between Judis and us is how one defines the “lobby” and how one interprets the role of the neoconservatives. He concedes that the neoconservatives were the primary architects of the war, and he presumably understands that the war would not have occurred absent their influence. But like some of our other critics, Judis wants to define the “lobby” narrowly.

Specifically, he wants to confine it to formal organizations like AIPAC that engage in actual “lobbying” activities and exclude the neoconservatives completely. He also wants to exclude academics and commentators who have strong attachments to Israel and who consistently defend the U.S.-Israel “special relationship.” Employing this narrow definition enables Judis to argue that the “lobby” had little to do with the war.  In short, Judis is attacking me for claims I did not make…

We defined the “Israel lobby” as a “loose coalition” of individuals and groups that actively works to promote and defend the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel (i.e., the policy of generous and unconditional U.S. support). Having a favorable view of Israel or generally pro-Israel attitude doesn’t make someone part of the Israel lobby; to qualify, a person or group has to devote a significant portion of time, effort or money to promoting that “special relationship.”

Read the whole thing, but this seems to me to be a powerful counter-factual:

What if staunchly pro-Israel pundits like Charles Krauthammer, Max Boot, Kenneth Pollack, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Thomas Friedman, among others, had spent 2002 raising questions about the wisdom of an attack, or arguing as passionately against the war as they did in favor of it? It’s possible that Bush & Co. still might have been able to stampede the country to war, but surely it would have been much harder. 

Add me and Mike Kelly to the mix, to reiterate that this was not a solely Jewish-American group of writers or bloggers or pundits.

The Atlantic is now taking applications for its July-December 2010 internship program. The Dish is looking for two Dish interns, i.e. under-under-bloggers, to assist myself, Chris, and Patrick. Apply here.