Author: Andrew Sullivan

Bruce Bartlett:

Some Pollyannas, like my friend Larry Kudlow, think we can just grow our way out of the debt by cutting taxes. But this is not really possible given the magnitude of our problem. First, increasing real growth doesn't have as much effect on the debt as one might imagine. According to OMB, raising the rate of productivity, the basic component of real GDP growth, by 0.5% per year over the next 75 years only reduces the long-run fiscal gap by 17%.

Moreover, raising productivity even that much would be hard; over the last five years the productivity growth rate has averaged 1.8% per year, so we would have to raise it by one-fourth just to reduce the projected debt by 17%.

He also explains why the debt can't be inflated away.

Peter Beinart asks whether this will be Iraq's last national election:

My guess is that [Tom] Ricks’ view [that withdrawal from Iraq should be slowed] will prevail. The military has invested epic quantities of money and blood in Iraq, and U.S. commanders don’t want it to be in vain.

Plus, an Iraqi civil war that sucked in its neighbors—as civil wars often do—would be horrendous. Although the Democratic base wants out of Iraq, the lesson of Afghanistan is that the military’s view matters more. “When push comes to shove,” notes Biddle, the Obama administration will “vote for not losing a war.”

It all sounds very sensible, until you remember that the United States is nearly bankrupt. Defense spending, which has grown 9 percent per year over the last decade, now comprises well over 50 percent of U.S. discretionary spending. Unless some president reins that in, there’s no real chance of getting U.S. debt under control…

Cohn defends the health care bill once more.

Encouragingly, an entire swathe of Republican lawyers and former officials – from Kenneth Starr to Ted Olson, Phillip Zelikow and John Belllinger – have responded firmly and eloquently to the recent low-point of Cheney-Kristol McCarthyism. The statement, composed by Ben Wittes, is so eloquent I reproduce it here in full:

The past several days have seen a shameful series of attacks on attorneys in the Department of Justice who, in previous legal practice, either represented Guantanamo detainees or advocated for changes to detention policy. As attorneys, former officials, and policy specialists who have worked on detention issues, we consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications.

The American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old as John Adams’s representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston massacre.

People come to serve in the Justice Department with a diverse array of prior private clients; that is one of the department’s strengths. The War on Terror raised any number of novel legal questions, which collectively created a significant role in judicial, executive and legislative forums alike for honorable advocacy on behalf of detainees. In several key cases, detainee advocates prevailed before the Supreme Court. To suggest that the Justice Department should not employ talented lawyers who have advocated on behalf of detainees maligns the patriotism of people who have taken honorable positions on contested questions and demands a uniformity of background and view in government service from which no administration would benefit.

Such attacks also undermine the Justice system more broadly. In terrorism detentions and trials alike, defense lawyers are playing, and will continue to play, a key role. Whether one believes in trial by military commission or in federal court, detainees will have access to counsel. Guantanamo detainees likewise have access to lawyers for purposes of habeas review, and the reach of that habeas corpus could eventually extend beyond this population. Good defense counsel is thus key to ensuring that military commissions, federal juries, and federal judges have access to the best arguments and most rigorous factual presentations before making crucial decisions that affect both national security and paramount liberty interests. To delegitimize the role detainee counsel play is to demand adjudications and policymaking stripped of a full record. Whatever systems America develops to handle difficult detention questions will rely, at least some of the time, on an aggressive defense bar; those who take up that function do a service to the system.

Benjamin Wittes

Robert Chesney

Matthew Waxman

David Rivkin

Lee Casey

Philip Bobbitt

Peter Keisler

Bradford Berenson

Kenneth Anderson

John Bellinger III

Philip Zelikow

Kenneth W. Starr

Larry Thompson

Charles "Cully" D. Stimson

Chuck Rosenberg

Harvey Rishikoff

Orin Kerr

Daniel Dell’Orto

(Illustration: John Trumbull's painting, Declaration of Independence, depicting the five-man drafting committee of the Declaration of Independence presenting their work to the Congress.)

Another depressing sign of intolerance:

Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School, in Boulder, has refused to readmit a preschooler because the child has two moms. Her parents are lesbians. "God and Jesus would not allow discrimination in that way," said Joellen Raderstorf, one of about two dozen demonstrators who turned out at Sunday's church service. Most of the protesters stood silently, across the street, holding signs. One read "God loves all people."

“I was excited about Palin; I’m more excited about Liz. The same sort of excitement you get when you hear her father, except she’s this petite blonde with five kids … You have a little crush on her. It’s hard not to," – Michael Goldfarb.

How the Middle Eastern press is reporting Iraq's elections:

Nations that have adversarial relationships with the United States, namely Syria and Iran, viewed the vote largely through the prism of the planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Likewise, the Iranian state-run Press TV covered Moktada al-Sadr’s address in Tehran in which he urged his Shiite followers to use their votes to help end the occupation.

Syria, still overwhelmed with Iraqi refugees, is likely to view internal instability in Iraq as a threat to its own security and to its expectation of finally having the U.S. out of the region. And while Tehran may prefer a strong, centralized Iraqi government as its ally, the possibility could further alienate Saudi Arabia, which fears a powerful Iraq aligned with Iran. Ali Yunis, an analyst who appeared on Al Arabiya television on Saturday, warned that “if the new government is a nationalistic Iraqi government, not allied with Iran, in America’s terms, the Americans will act differently,” meaning an earlier troop withdrawal.

This was how Chris Wallace addressed Bill Kristol on the matter of Iraq on Fox News Sunday this past weekend. No, I'm not kidding. So let's review Mr Kristol's expertise on Iraq these past few years, shall we?

September 19, 2002: Saddam Hussein was "past the finish line" in developing nuclear weapons.

February 20, 2003: "He's got weapons of mass destruction."

February 2003 (from his book, "The War Over Iraq"):

"The United States may need to occupy Iraq for some time. Though U.N., European and Arab forces will, as in Afghanistan, contribute troops, the principal responsibility will doubtless fall to the country that liberates Baghdad. According to one estimate, initially as many as 75,000 troops may be required to police the war's aftermath, at a cost of $16 billion a year. As other countries' forces arrive, and as Iraq rebuilds its economy and political system, that force could probably be drawn down to several thousand soldiers after a year or two."

(Reality check: The war has cost over a trillion dollars and 120,000 US troops remain there seven years later.)

February 24, 2003: "In retrospect, [the Bush administration] probably shouldn't have gone down the inspections route … Doing so merely handed the Europeans and the U.N. — neither of them known for their dissatisfaction with Saddam's rule — a say in the process. The idea, of course, was to mollify them (as well as Colin Powell) and in the process hope that inspectors would stumble across a casus belli. But neither aim has been accomplished.

February 24, 2003: "Having defeated and then occupied Iraq, democratizing the country should not be too tall an order for the world's sole superpower."

March 1, 2003: "Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president."

March 5, 2003: "We'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction."

April 1 2003: "On this issue of the Shia in Iraq, I think there’s been a certain amount of, frankly, Terry, a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular."

Look: we all make mistakes. I did. But unlike Kristol I have tried to account for them. And unlike Kristol, no one on Fox News or anywhere else would call me an "expert" on Iraq. If you want a glimpse into the utter corruption of the Beltway punditariat in which no one is ever accountable for anything they ave ever said, in which individuals who have gotten things so wrong in the past that hundreds of thousands of innocents are now dead continue their lucrative careers, in which no one in the media elite is ever fired for being wrong, only for losing ratings … then the career of Bill Kristol is Exhibit A. Remember that after this record on Iraq, he was rewarded with a column in the New York Times and now has a column on Fred Hiatt's op-ed page in the Washington Post.

The only thing Kristol is expert in is Rovian politics, shamelessness and propaganda.

Ackerman spells it out.