Category: The Dish

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman again takes a pot-shot at your lowly blogger today. I won’t link, because the NYT has him behind a fire-wall. But allow me to explain two claims of his that evaporate upon inspection. We begin with this:

"Mr. Bush’s new conservative critics don’t say much about the issue that most disturbs the public, the quagmire in Iraq. That’s not surprising. Commentators who acted as cheerleaders in the run-up to war, and in many cases questioned the patriotism of those of us who were skeptical, can’t criticize the decision to start this war without facing up to their own complicity in that decision.
Nor, after years of insisting that things were going well in Iraq and denouncing anyone who said otherwise, is it easy for them to criticize Mr. Bush’s almost surreal bungling of the war. (William Kristol of The Weekly Standard is the exception; he says that we never made a "serious effort" in Iraq, which will come as news to the soldiers.)"

It will come as some surprise to my readers that I have not been criticizing Mr Bush’s conduct of the Iraq war. The plain record shows that I have been criticizing it since the first week it was launched. My disdain for Bush’s conduct for the war even led me to endorse John Kerry, something Bill Kristol didn’t. I criticized the conduct of the war before many other conservatives; and have done so with much more gusto. Readers will also be surprised to find that I have not owned up to "my complicity" in the decision to go to war. I specifically did so in explicit terms. Does expressing personal "shame and sorrow" not count? Then there’s this:

They can’t even criticize Mr. Bush for the systematic dishonesty of his budgets. For one thing, that dishonesty has been apparent for five years. More than that, some prominent conservative commentators actually celebrated the administration’s dishonesty. In 2001 Time.com blogger Andrew Sullivan, writing in The New Republic, conceded that Mr. Bush wasn’t truthful about his economic policies. But Mr. Sullivan approved of the deception: "Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smokescreen of ‘compassionate conservatism.’" As Berkeley’s Brad DeLong puts it on his blog, conservatives knew that Mr. Bush was lying about the budget, but they thought they were in on the con.

But Krugman is grotesquely misrepresenting me. My delusion in 2001 was that Bush was actually a conservative. I thought "compassionate conservatism" meant unleashing private armies of compassion and this emphasis on the voluntary sector would soothe and distract liberals who would otherwise demagogue cuts in public spending. I was obviously wrong – in retrospect laughably so. So as soon as I realized that I had been conned, I started complaining about the Bush spending increases – earlier and more insistently than many other conservatives. Here’s something I wrote ten months into the Bush administration:

"If Clinton was an Eisenhower Republican, Bush looks increasingly like a Nixon liberal in domestic economic policy. The Nixonian gambit of buying public support for the war by reckless, pro-corporate Keynesianism at home is a sobering precedent, and could wreck Republican credibility on the economy in the months and years ahead."

To imply, as Krugman does, that I once supported the budget chicanery and suddenly now don’t is patently dishonest. I just wanted to reduce government power and spending and thought Bush did too. Boy, was I wrong. And boy, do I deserve a shellacking for that early misjudgment. But I recognized it as soon as the fall of 2001; and my campaign against spending has been consistent thereafter; and I backed Kerry in protest. And I’m the conservative Krugman picks on?

There is a reason for this. It’s important for the left to knee-cap conservative critics of this administration in order to discredit conservatism as a whole by conflating it with the Bush debacle. That’s what these smears against Bartlett and me are about. Krugman’s gambit, of course, is to deny the facts of a massive explosion in spending under Bush. He’s stuck because he hates Bush but loves the spending. And so he decides to smear not those conservatives who went along for the ride; but those conservatives who got it right sooner than many. If he can discredit us, then his ideology advances. And that, rather than intellectual honesty, is what he cares about and what he represents. I’m sorry I have to respond  in such detail. But Krugman is published by the New York Times; and he is engaged in character assassination, based on lies. I’m not Michael Dukakis.

"There are many in America today who have little sympathy with those we torture and torment. They are our enemies, they say. They would do worse to us if the situation was reversed. Maybe so. But those young men and women who we have turned into torturers and inquisitors, they were soldiers once. What are they now?" – Jay Elias, Daily Kos.

Dick Cheney said Sunday that Iraq is not in a civil war. I just got more pessimistic. Meanwhile Don "Stuff Happens" Rumsfeld has said withdrawing from Iraq would be like handing post-war Germany back to the Nazis. How many allied troops were there in Germany in 1946? What was the ratio of allied troops to German civilians? Just asking …

An always-shrewd reader writes:

"Here’s a question: this weekend Fox’s Beltway Boys helpfully explained how the Dems need this to be a "referendum election," and that the GOP is determined to make it a "choice election."  OK, so far so good.
So how does the censure talk cut?  If you happened to see Bill Kristol on Fox News Sunday today, he had a contrary view on this. He seemed to think that all the censure talk ultimately hurts the GOP because, over time, it starts to seem less radical. He should know: in 1998 he played a key role in moving the Lewinsky story from Drudge to ABC’s This Week when he forced it on the air during a now infamous round-table appearance.
Once it became OK to talk about, well, it started to seem less radical, less fringe-like. It became just another mainstream question. Everyone had to declare either for or against, and then defend their position.
Now, censure will never happen because it lacks the votes. We all know that. As an actual outcome it is a nonstarter.
Still, let’s take a hypothetical congressional election: two candidates get asked in a town-hall meeting about censure. Even if both the Republican and the Democratic candidate declare that they are not in favor of censure, the Republican is still obliged to frame his answer as at least a partial defense of the President, while the Democrat can sound moderate by declining to endorse censure while still offering a strong critique of Bush. That sounds a lot like "referendum election" to me.
My first reaction to Feingold was that it was bad politics. But now I’m not so sure. Kristol may be on to something.."

My paper led Sunday morning with an impeachment story by Sarah Baxter. Maybe the meme has legs; and I should reconsider, as my reader has, the wisdom of Feingold’s move.

In the genre of romantic drama, "Brokeback Mountain" is now the eighth-biggest earning movie of the last quarter century. It may soon beat "Out of Africa." ‘The Bridges of Madison County" comes in at # 13. "Romeo and Juliet" is at # 23.

Update: several readers have emailed to say that Box Office Mojo doesn’t adjust for inflation. D’oh! When it is, Brokeback slips.

Reaganite Bruce Bartlett writes:

"I disagree with your characterization of Bush as being famously loyal ‚Äî a view so widely stated that you can be excused for repeating it. Bush is loyal ONLY to toadies, suck-ups and sycophants. Anyone who shows an ounce of independence ‚Äî or loyalty to the country above loyalty to him ‚Äî is punished or dispensed with.  You mention Paul O’Neill, but a better example is Larry Lindsey. His estimate of the cost of the war was mildly embarrassing back in 2002 because it was higher than the absurdly low estimates being peddled by the White House at that time.  So they threw him overboard, even though he may have done more to get Bush elected than anyone else, including Karl Rove. Now, as you know, Lindsey’s estimate looks absurdly low. As I say in my book, loyalty with Bush is strictly a one-way street: total loyalty is demanded, but none is ever really offered in return.

Given that this is the case, I have never understood why so many people ‚Äî both inside and outside the administration ‚Äî continue to give Bush so much loyalty.  I can only conclude that it is borne more from fear than agreement with his policies. I think there is genuine fear of crossing the president, although I have never been able to uncover the precise mechanism through which it is communicated ‚Äî even in my own case. Nevertheless, it is real ‚Äî just as fear of the unknown is real. I think somehow he communicates to everyone he comes in contact with that they will suffer if they go against him. And his obsessiveness about leaks ‚Äî combined with Patriot Act powers ‚Äî has shut off back channels that have previously existed in every presidency.

There is a CRYING NEED for an investigative reporter to plumb the depths of how this works and why so many people submit to it — even when Bush has poll ratings so low as to barely show a pulse. Even behind closed doors, with guarantees of confidentiality, I cannot get FORMER administration people to say a bad word about the guy even when they have been badly treated by him in some way. The climate of fear is pervasive."

Part of this may be due to the fact that Bush is personally a nice guy. Many people like him too much to tell him what a shambles his presidency has become to his face. An alternative theory to explain the mystifying deference and persistent fear is that the Bush presidency is based on religious adherence, not political judgment. Karl Rove has accelerated the transformation of the GOP from a party of limited government and individual liberty to one of Christianist fundamentalism and big government largess. The party is now essentially a religious grouping with some business interests glommed on for the ride – and a retinue of sleazeballs and lobbyists gleefully in the rear. If your career is related to that party, then any criticism of the president, regardless of the grounds for that criticism, is deemed indistinguishable from congregants taking on a fundamentalist pastor. It’s forbidden. You will be cast out of the church. His authority is rooted in his faith; to question it is to question religious authority.

The key element that binds Christianism with Bush Republicanism is fealty to patriarchal leadership. That’s the institutional structure of the churches that are now the Republican base; and it’s only natural that the fundamentalist psyche, which is rooted in obedience and reverence for the inerrant pastor, should be transferred to the presidency. That’s why I think Bush’s ratings won’t go much below 25 percent; because 25 percent is about the proportion of the electorate that is fundamentalist and supports Bush for religious rather than political reasons. They are immune to empirical argument, because their thought-structure is not empirical; it is dogmatic. If the facts overwhelm them, they will simply argue that the "liberal media" is lying. Bruce poignantly thinks the GOP is still the secular, empirical, skeptical party it once was. It’s not: it’s a fundamentalist church with some huge bribes for business interests on the side, leveraged by massive debts. So all criticism is disloyalty; and disloyalty is heresy. The facts don’t matter. Obey the pastor. Or be damned.

Just how physically and mentally exhausted is Bush’s staff? Are they sleepwalking through a second term? My take here.

(Photo: Kevin Dietsch/UPI/Landov.)

Juan Cole attempts a limited defense/elaboration of Iraqi Ayatollah Sistani’s call for executing gays "in the worst, most severe way of killing." Cole’s post is, as so often, learned, informative and revealing. But he seems caught between his commitment to defend Islam against the West, and his reluctant recognition that, with respect to gay people, Islam is barbaric, when it isn’t grotesquely sexist. So Cole tries a third option: he blames all this on what he regards as the misguided attempt to get rid of Saddam. Ah: Saddam. The pomo-left’s last great hope for Arabia.

Here’s a document from Vietnam setting out clear guidelines for humane treatment of any and all military detainees by U.S. soldiers:

Under Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, that has now changed. Here’s the new mantra:

"The reality is, there were no rules there," a Pentagon official told the New York Times about "Camp NAMA," an acronym for "Nasty-Ass Military Area" . The troops doing the abuse and torturing were not reservists on the night shift. They were an elite group either doing what their civilian masters wanted; or beyond their civilian masters’ control. Fire Rumsfeld.

It’s heating up. Keep the pressure coming. Matt Stone and Trey Parker have had a great relationship with Comedy Central for many years, and this kind of censorship decision is made at the Viacom level. If the censorship continues, should South Park tell Viacom where to shove it? Blogger Typical Joe says, with new technology, they can. Here’s a Slate piece that offers some alternatives to big media; and another on alternative forms of distribution. Meanwhile, even in Britain, Tom Cruise might have increasing trouble threatening lawsuits. Since Viacom doesn’t have the chocolate salty balls to show it, watch the episode online here. Tom Cruise cannot stop that. Yet.