Category: Old Dish

Worthwhile piece from Peter Robinson on the big government assumptions behind Bush’s address. Money quote:

On domestic policy, a “broader definition of liberty?” Citing as useful precedents the Homestead Act, the Social Security Act, and the G. I. Bill? Compare what Bush said today with the inaugural address of Lyndon Baines Johnson and the first inaugural address of Ronald Reagan and you’ll find that Bush sounds much, much more like LBJ. He as much as announced that from now on the GOP will be a party of big government.

Well, if this is news to Robinson at this point, he’s been snoozing for a while. Bush killed off small government conservatism years ago. Bush is a Wilsonian liberal abroad and a Bismarckian at home.

I wonder if Mike Gerson and John McConnell were thinking of this wonderful Lincoln quote in their skilled speech: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” Lincoln said that in Cleveland, Ohio February 15, 1861, according to an alert reader. If they did, it wouldn’t surprise me. If they didn’t, they’re on the same wavelength as Lincoln. Either way: not too shabby.

Two emails caught things I didn’t:

How convenient that the two Cheney daughters were seated with their mother and each of their spouses seated behind them. Funny, all the Bush relatives were seated side-by-side with their spouses. Why do you suppose?

Could be chair-spacing, I don’t know. Even I’m not that paranoid. Then the answer we’ve all been waiting for:

Justice Breyer was wearing a silk cap of a sort the court used into the 1930s. If you look at Chief Justice Hughes swearing in President Roosevelt you will see him wearing the same sort of headgear. If memory serves its revival was another of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s little nods to court tradition.

That and the Gilbert and Sullivan costuming.

MICKEY AGAIN: In response to some emails, I have no idea why Mickey Kaus has gone on a tear against me lately. But his latest post again misses an important point. I never believed and still do not believe that Hans Blix or the U.N. would ever have been able to confirm beyond doubt that Saddam had gotten rid of all his WMD stockpiles or research ambitions. So I stand by my opposition to the NYT’s pre-war position that the U.N. could solve this if given more time. (The only reason for delay would have been to win over more allies, principally the Turks. We now know the urgency wasn’t necessary – but we couldn’t have known that then.) But hindisght also works in my favor. Given how much we know now about the deep corruption of the U.N. oil-for-food program, I’m even more relieved they are not the instrument for keeping Saddam contained. They were and would be the instrument for empowering Saddam and further impoverishing the Iraqi people. Bush was right to do what he did. And no amount of criticism of the conduct of the war will take that away.

Who could disagree with the stirring, elegant and somewhat sweeping address the president just gave? Well: here’s a rough shot. The speech was a deep rebuke to conservative foreign policy realists. Its fundamental point, it seems to me, is that security is only possible through the expansion of liberty abroad. In the long run, that’s indisputable. In the short run, there are sometimes trade-offs to be made. What Bush was saying was that he will not trade liberty for security. Translation: he will stick to the democratization of Iraq. That was the main point of the address on the major policy issue in front of us. In that sense, it was an old-style liberal speech, about as far from the conservative tradition in foreign policy as can be imagined. And at its most ambitious, it was a fusion of liberal internationalism with realism – saying that the latter cannot be secured without the former. It was ecumenical; and it was rightly thematic. If I could offer one criticism, I’d say it could have been shorter. There were times when the liberty theme became repetitive. And, of course, the relationship of rhetoric to reality is, as always with Bush, problematic. How do you reconcile the expansion of freedom with Bush’s expansion of government? How do you square domestic freedom with the curtailment of civil liberties in a war on terror? How do you proclaim that America is a force for freeing dissidents, when the government now has unprecedented powers to detain anyone suspected of terror across the globe and subject them to coercive interrogation techniques that the government will not disclose? Perhaps these questions do not need to be answered in an inaugural address. But they linger in the air, even as Bush’s eloquence and idealism lifts you up and gives you hope.

BEST LINE: “Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.”

MOST SIGNIFICANT LINE: “So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

MY PERSONAL FAVORITE: “Americans, at our best, value the life we see in one another, and must always remember that even the unwanted have worth. And our country must abandon all the habits of racism, because we cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time.”

WORST HAT: What was Stephen Breyer wearing?

“Poll: Nation split on Bush as uniter or divider,” – CNN.com. Says it all today, doesn’t it?

GONZALES’ ANSWERS: Marty Lederman goes through the fine print of the Senate responses from the nominee to run the Justice Department. Plenty of reason to delay the vote on his confirmation. Money quote:

The responses confirm what has been manifest for a while now: The Administration has concluded that the CIA, when it interrogates suspected Al Qaeda detainees overseas, may lawfully engage in “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment–i.e., treatment that would “shock the conscience,” and thus be unconstitutional, within the United States–as long as that treatment does not constitute “torture” under the very narrow meaning of that term in the federal criminal law.

Translation: America is now a torturing nation, under any reasonable definition of the word “torture”. This is president Bush’s achievement. When Gonazales was given an opportunity to disown such practices as “forced enemas, infliction of cigarette burns, and binding detainees hand and foot and leaving them in urine and feces for 18-24 hours,” he replied that it was not appropriate for him to “attempt to analyze” the legality of such techniques. We want this guy for AG? Lederman also notes how the administration, despite saying that the war in Iraq falls under the Geneva Conventions, nevertheless exempts insurgents from the protections. How conveeenient. So it’s open season for any suspected insurgent in U.S. custody in Iraq. (And the word “suspected” is apposite here. The dozens of inmates abused at Abu Ghraib were part of a random intake that was up to 90 percent innocent.) Abu Ghraib begins to make more sense, doesn’t it, as does the pattern of abusive behavior by scattered U.S. (and now British) troops across the areas of combat. Then there’s this:

Moreover, Gonzales suggests that the Fourth Geneva Convention, with its protection of civilians, no longer applies to civilians detained by the U.S. now that the U.S. is no longer an occupying power.

Wow. Once sovereignty was transferred, we’re no longer at war and therefore no longer formally bound by Geneva. I can’t imagine how stressed out soldiers might feel they’ve been told they can treat Iraqi civilians however they want. Given these responses, a vote for Gonzales is to my mind very hard to defend. What he didn’t say was legion; what he did say was chilling.

Yes, the British Conservatives have finally decided to campaign as a lower-tax party. Halleluia. The notion that all government spending is good is buried deep in the British psyche – and nurtured by that statist creation, the BBC. But it can be challenged. And if the Tories are ever to regain the political initiative, cutting taxes on the poor and streamlining government will be their path back to power.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Look, the truth cannot be offensive. Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is ‘offensive’ even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don’t get the concept of a university or free inquiry.” – Steven Pinker. (Hat tip: Jonah).

JibJab has gone a bit soft, but this cartoon skit is still funny.

Ron Rosenbaum says what must be said.

Defending Summers, knocking the prince: my take at TNR. (Subscription required.)

An interesting take on the bloggers-for-hire issue. Trippi paid the bloggers for the Dean campaign. He ought to know what went on.

MICKEY BAITS: And I nibble! I’m afraid I don’t see his point. I have never said I don’t agree with Bush’s decision to go to war with Saddam. I’ve merely said the obvious – that we now know that, given Saddam’s lack of WMD stockpiles, the urgency, with hindsight, was misplaced. Does that mean I have to apologize to Howard Dean? Sure, if Howard Dean had argued that there were no WMDs and that was why we shouldn’t go to war, and I had trashed him for it. To Hans Blix? Sure, if he had said the same thing. But they didn’t. And I didn’t. Almost no one argued against the war on the basis that the WMD stockpiles didn’t exist (except, hilariously, Baghdad Bob). So Bush was right to go to war when he did on the evidence in front of him. The only apology I owe is to those, like Jim Falllows, who correctly foresaw the immense difficulties after the liberation. But my apology must merely be for not taking his argument seriously enough. I never attacked it. As for Mickey’s previous championing of Heather Mac Donald’s exoneration of the Bush administration on torture, he seems to have retreated. He acknowledges that Mac Donald is simply repeating the official Bush line, which has been torn to shreds by the evidence. And he’s right to say I have no memo from Bush saying “torture these guys”. But does he think that Bush would be dumb enough to do such a thing? Far smarter to sign a memo saying that our detainees are scum, deserve to be treated as such, but, er, be nice, except when you need to be nasty. And then to exempt the CIA from even these milque-toast restrictions. The case against Bush and Rumsfeld is so far about the terrible consequences of dumb decisions – and the need to take responsibility for them. But we do know from Gonzales’ documents released yesterday that the Bush administration wants to reserve the right to torture detainees for the CIA. Rice has also confirmed this. They refuse to specify what “coercive interrogation techniques” they are sanctioning for security reasons. They say they don’t want to tip off al Qaeda. So we don’t have a right to know if the government is practising torture as policy? I guess not. We have now crossed a line where the CIA can torture anyone they deem to be an enemy combatant, with no one outside the inner circle knowing, in places no one knows about. Isn’t that worth debating?