Month: December 2010

Bruce Bartlett reads Mike Pence's speech on economics:

[S]tagflation isn’t the problem today. We have stagnation all right, but the “flation” we are suffering from today doesn’t stand for inflation, but deflation. But because it is always 1980, right wingers are incapable of seeing that monetary policy functions very, very differently in an inflationary and a deflationary environment. They seem utterly incapable of comprehending constraints like the zero-bound problem, which sets a floor on how low interest rates can go. They are also incapable of seeing the exchange value of the dollar except in macho terms, which demands that the dollar be strong at all times.

Yglesias follows up:

There do seem to be a lot of people, Pence among them, who have a weird amount of trouble with the idea that you do different things in different circumstances. If inflation’s too high, you need tighter money—that’s the early 1980s. But if nominal expenditures are too low, you need looser money. If high deficits are forcing the central bank to keep nominal interest rates high, you need a lower deficit—that’s the early 1990s. But if nominal rates are at zero and total spending is still too low, then you need a bigger deficit.

Aaron Bady's post on Wikileaks' overall strategy is among the most insightful:

[W]hile an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to "think" as a system, to communicate with itself. The more conspiratorial it becomes, in a certain sense, the less effective it will be as a conspiracy. The more closed the network is to outside intrusion, the less able it is to engage with that which is outside itself…

An example:

[T]he point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire. 

(Hat tip: Jesse Walker)

A reader writes:

Regarding the “I wonder if you can" line in the song, when Neil Young performed it at the concert to honor the victims of 9/11, he changed the line to “I wonder if I can?”  Not so sanctimonious that way, but rather a humble challenge to himself.  That one word changes the whole song.

Another writes:

On Lennon's "Imagine," here's a vomit-mitigating factor: 

As he played it live (see: "Sometime in New York City"), he changed the line to "Imagine no possessions; I wonder if WE can." I give Lennon credit that he often knew if he was being sanctimonious and frequently turned his barbs toward himself in this way.  Similarly, he's claimed that his criticisms of Paul McCartney in "How Do You Sleep?" could apply equally to himself.  Either way, the point of "Imagine" seems to be a thought-experiment – to imagine a possibly-unattainable goal.

Another:

Something you wrote in the latest entry really irked me. To point out the hypocrisy in John Lennon’s “Imagine,” you wrote:

Lennon did not have to imagine, he could have sold every thing he owned to the poor as Jesus recommended to the rich young man. But life in the Dakota was somehow preferable.

This reminds me of the attacks that conservatives often use on wealthy Democrats who advocate for better policies for the poor. It brings to mind the attacks on John Edwards. Critics said that he had some nerve talking about poverty when he lived in a mansion. Now, I realize this is a bad example. Edwards’s character was worthy of criticism, to say the least. But what about FDR? What about Warren Buffett? What about the countless other millionaires who support tax cuts for the middle class and tax increases for the rich? These people understand that success in life is – to a great extent – about luck as much as hard work, skill, or talent.

John Lennon advocated for a world with no materialsm, no unnecessary war, and no bigotry and hatred posing as religious piety because he knew that people would listen to him. In this world, you have to have the means to get your voice heard if you want to make a difference. I could quit my job and stand on a street corner, singing “Imagine,” but I doubt that my voice would carry very far. But according to you, having those means renders him unsuitable to make the statement. In this world, the poor will never have a voice, and the rich will only get richer.

This deserves a pile on. A reader writes:

If we raise $2 million, will they stay dead? That's a cause worth throwing some money at.

Another writes:

Stephen Colbert hit it on the nose last night:  "Just stop at $999,999.00.  That's the best of both worlds!"

Another:

It took me a moment to realize they had to get the $1m collectively. Because otherwise … Swizz Beatz?

For all you sadistic voyeurs out there, enjoy this compilation of stunts and feats gone wrong last month. We have been waiting weeks for an excuse to post this one:

Pick your political metaphor.

It can be read in full here. The committee won't vote on the plan until Friday. Ezra Klein goes through it point by point. Yglesias notes:

Surely the strangest thing about the Bowles-Simpson debt reduction plan is that, relative to current law, it . . . increases the public debt load over the next ten years … Obviously starting around 2020 or so Bowles-Simpson starts doing better than current law, but it’s difficult for the current congress to tie the hands of future congress.

As noted earlier Bill Kristol is at it again, in an item titled "Whack Wikileaks." Says Matt Welch:

If the Weekly Standard editor is the voice of Establishment Republicanism, then Establishment Republicanism remains as flippantly authoritarian as it was back when it held executive power.

Kristol isn't the only one calling for blood.

Zarate, Argentina, 11 am

Ross sharpens his point:

Fallows makes the point, correctly, that most liberals haven’t suddenly fallen in love with the anti-terrorism measures — wiretapping and Guantanamo, drone attacks and assassinations — that Barack Obama has either accepted or expanded. (“I don’t know of any cases of Democrats who complained about these abuses before and now positively defend them as good parts of Obama’s policy,” he writes, “as opposed to inherited disasters he has not gone far enough to undo and eliminate.”) But what they’ve done instead — which many honorable exceptions, obviously — is downgraded the importance of those issues, in much the same way that conservatives downgraded the importance of being against “big government” when a big-government Republican occupied the Oval Office.

It wasn’t that most right-wingers explicitly changed their opinions on the wisdom of, say, expanding Medicare just because George W. Bush was championing a new prescription drug benefit: Conservative journals still editorialized against Medicare Part D, and conservative activists stored away the issue as an example of why Bush fell short of the Reaganite ideal. But if you followed the national political conversation from 2000 through roughly 2006, it was clear that most Republican partisans learned to live with spending and deficits that would have inspired, well, Tea Party-style activism if they had been the work of a Democratic administration. And the same thing has happened with many, many Democrats today: They aren’t happy, exactly, that Obama has expanded drone attacks (which are arguably more morally troubling than many “enhanced interrogation” procedures) along the AfPak frontier, but they seem to have downgraded these kind of policies from “grave threat to the very foundation of the republic” to “unfortunate failure that we have to learn to live with, because the Republicans are worse.”

On the last point, I don't believe drone attacks are morally more troubling than torture (if Ross reads his catechism, he'll come to the same conclusion) – and dismayed that Ross would use the Orwellian term, "enhanced interrogation" to justify what the church would describe as an absolute evil. The acquiescence of a movement premised in indivual liberty to the right of the executive to torture anyone he wants is of a different magnitude of betrayal and cynicism than anything we have seen on the left with respect to Obama and the war in Afghanistan (which, obviously, he promised in the campaign to wage aggressively).

Even so, this blog, for example, has clearly opposed the ramping up of the war in Af-Pak, and raised questions about the morality of drone attacks. And, frankly, the reaction of the left-wing blogosphere to Obama's centrism has been highly critical – light years more impressive than the supine silence of the intellectual right as Bush eviscerated every principle conservatives were supposed to uphold. Ah, yes, as Ross says, they "stored away" the criticism until later. Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know about the Washington right's utter lack of intellectual or moral integrity?

Ask yourself: what was the equivalent of the Huffington Post under Bush? Who served the equivalent role of, say, Glenn Greenwald in lacerating the president's policies?

Yes, Bartlett and yours truly qualify but – importantly – we were thereby stripped of any public identity as conservatives. Greenwald is not now derided as some kind of insane whackjob by the left. Where was the right's Marcy Wheeler under Bush? Where were the mass demonstrations from the base – like the gay equality march – that challenged the Bush administration's betrayal of certain principles?At what point did a key Bush supporter, on a key Bush policy, ever write blog-posts with headlines like "The Fierce Urgency Of Whenever" as I have done with respect to Obama.

Where was the Tea Party freedom-fanatics when the president ordered wire-tapping without warrants, the right to seize anyone he deemed an enemy combatant and torture them without due process? Where were the fiscal hawks demanding an end to the spending spree – unjustified by anything close to the kind of depression Obama faced in coming to office? Where was the outrage – not the token credentializing column – when Bush rammed through Medicare D, with parliamentary tactics that were Putinesque?

The notion that the right under Bush showed anything like the integrity of the left under Obama is preposterous. Ross would like to think so, because it would make his own acquiescence to torture, debt, nation-building and unfunded entitlements look particularly craven and partisan. But reality shows no such equivalence, and I say this with great dismay.

The American right has proven itself more cynical, more power-hungry and less principled than any equivalent group on the left in this past decade. No amount of pirouetting now will erase that fact.

Another reminder:

I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think – I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets.

Adam Serwer adds:

[T]his kind of statement makes the "Wikileaks strikes a blow against American Empire!" and "Assassinate Julian Assange!"crowds look equally ridiculous.