Month: May 2011

A reader writes:

I’m no attorney – but it seems to me that Thiessen is describing something far more heinous than has been admitted to before. He is talking about not just a ticking time-bomb scenario, but doing deep psychological damage – breaking someone down until they become compliant. This is no longer morally justifiable, if it ever was. This is not the “24 Hours” of Jack Bauer or the “Dirty Harry” problem. Thiessen is now talking about, and admitting to, institutionalized evil. Abu Ghraib is no longer a few bad apples, even according to the Bush apologists.

I, like many, am very conflicted by Obama’s decision not to pursue prosecution of these war criminals. Today I am left wondering if at some point a fool like Mark Thiessen, emboldened by this administrations inaction, might actually say something stupid that makes prosecution totally unavoidable. Think Jack Nicholson in a “Few Good Men”. I guess it’s the only hope left for justice.

I feel the same way. None of us knows for sure what went on in those torture chambers and black sites, although one has an idea from the fact that the CIA destroyed the tapes to protect themselves. But it has been clear to me for a long time that Abu Ghraib was the rule, not the exception, that the torture program was a system of institutionalized sadism unrelated to any professional interrogation program, and about as far away from the ticking time bomb exception as you can imagine.

It was concocted ad hoc out of Cheney's immediate rage and guilt after 9/11about as coherently as it has been defended post hoc. It's worth your time – if you can stand it – to watch AEI's torture panel, moderated (!) by war criminal, John Yoo. Listening to Thiessen describing waterboarding as non-torture made me physically ill. To listen to a former attorney-general defend the legality of systemic torture and urge its reinstatement also beggars belief.

Few showed up, even at AEI. How, one wonders, can an institution dedicated to freedom also be dedicated to torture?

Newt Gingrich: ‘Any Ad Which Quotes What I Said On Sunday Is A Falsehood’

Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin: ‘I just hope the lamestream media won’t twist my words by repeatin’ em verbatim’.

Krauthammer says Gingrich is done:

Gingrich has since apologized to Ryan. Josh Marshall is amazed by how terribly Newt has run out of the gate:

There's a lot of fear among House Republicans — especially the many freshmen from competitive districts — about this Medicare vote hanging over them. They all have to realize that they have to hang together on this. Division is lethal. So it's no surprise that Newt's flippant criticism — in characteristically brash and florid style — are bringing them down on him like a ton of bricks. It's aggression rooted in fear.

JPod goes deeper:

There is nothing wrong in itself with Gingrich saying he opposes aspects of Ryan’s budget plan. That plan is not the flag; it does not need to be saluted. It’s a set of proposals and, as Gingrich noted, the proposal involving Medicare isn’t popular taken in isolation. Debating the issues is perfectly fine. It’s the way Gingrich talks about things that is so awful. He is incapable of disagreeing on any matter about anything without creating a whirlpool of negativity that ends up sucking in his own confreres while leaving his partisan and ideological antagonists amazingly untouched.

I hate to sound all pious and stuff, but this dynamic doesn't help us on the debt question at all. What Ryan has done, I fear, is stigmatize the case for entitlement reform by essentially ending one entitlement altogether and replacing it with an insufficient subsidy. Mathematically, if you just want to free the federal government from this burden, it works. Politically, it is so ham-handed on Medicare that it has actually failed to move the goalposts to the right and may be moving them toward the left.

We may have two consecutive elections based on Medicare scares. First: fear of Obamacare. Second: fear of Ryan's Randian radicalism. And now Coburn is bailing.

Politico wakes up. Jonathan Martin's piece after Huckabee's exit managed to avoid any mention of Palin – entrenching the Village's insistence that she is over as a candidate. McGinniss notes:

Let’s not ignore what Rachel Weiner reported in the Washington Post: [Palin] just sent out 400,000 solicitations seeking donations to SarahPAC. She entitled her pitch letter “2012 Can’t Come Soon Enough.” Does this sound like someone who’s not planning to enter the race?

Jared Bernstein emphasizes it:

[A]s the figure [above] shows, for recipients age 65 and up on, Social Security is about two-thirds of their income and that share grows with age—for the old-elderly, it’s closer to 70% of their income.  Other data show that for a third of those over 65, Social Security accounts for at least 90% of their income.

Derek Thompson points out that Social Security isn't the only important program. In response, Bernstein notes that "poverty among the elderly goes from 9% with Social Security benefits to 45% without them."

A reader notes this passage from the Dish on December 2, 2009, trying to understand Obama's just-announced Afghanistan policy:

The final piece of the puzzle strikes me as this: the big ramp up in CIA activity in Pakistan. This is the second channel, the one Obama barely mentioned last night. It may be the more important one. My sense is that Obama wants to get bin Laden. Well, of course he does. Which president wouldn't? But the international and domestic impact of such a coup is hard to overstate and Obama's sense of how it would transform him and the entire dynamic of the terror war is typically cunning. I see the Afghan effort as one last chance to get al Qaeda's leadership, to bring justice to the 9/11 perpetrators, while hoping, in the medium term, to tamp down the raw civilizational conflict that empowers them.

"This is a case about the hatred of the have-nots for the haves, and that’s what it’s all about," – Ben Stein on the rape allegations against DSK.

A bear for the bears.

Will Wilkinson won't rule out the possibility:

Mr Romney may have failed last week to satisfy wonkish politics junkies, but his federalist case for state experimentation in health-care policy sounds both sensible and conservative—at least if one doesn't push on it too hard, and most voters won't. Perhaps most importantly, when he talks about this issue, he comes off as an impressively capable man. It seems too early to say for certain that it's beyond Mr Romney's considerable powers to bluster his way past this issue and sell Republican voters on the idea that he's the electable turnaround artist America needs.

A novel idea:

Yglesias opines:

I don’t really know what to make of this slightly mind-boggling concept. But any day is a good day for a reminder that we currently have in this country a hideously regressive system of sales taxes on imported clothing that hurt poor Americans while also making it harder for poor foreign countries to get on the first rung of the industrialization ladder.