The Dish

"The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people. A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against enterprises of an aspiring prince," – Edward Gibbon, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."

Twin Cities, 8.30 am this morning.

Marty Lederman homes in on a strange silence these past few years in the commments section from this Volokh post:

The odd thing is figuring out why many of the Volokh Conspiracy bloggers have not been interested in becoming more informed about these questions, and about this legislative intiative — not because they are bloggers or even legal bloggers (heaven knows we don’t want every legal blog to pretend to be expert in such questions), but because many of them are committed libertarian bloggers who are obviously impassioned and informed about many other arrogations of state power and threats to individual liberty.

This bill, and all of the related issues surrounding torture and unchecked executive authority (whether constitutional or, now, statutory), implicate traditional libertarian concerns about as much as anything I can recall in my lifetime. Which is why, for instance, Andrew Sullivan has been so committed and eloquent on these matters. Andrew and I certainly do not share a common worldview on many important issues of the day, but these threats and questions have fallen smack dab at the intersection of our liberal and libertarian commitments.

Eugene has, in fact, not been silent on these matters. For several years before Hamdan was decided, he wrote posts in support of torture (recall the Iranian public torture example), in favor of extensive delegations of authority to the Executive in wartime, and against extending any statutory or constitutional rights to aliens detained in war…

If I didn’t know better, I would have expected Eugene and other professed libertarians and skeptics of state power to have been front and center in the opposition to torture, executive aggrandizement, elimination of checks and balances, a vast detention power, etc. I regret that they haven’t been. But more to the point, I wonder why they get far more exercised about, e.g., fairly trivial proposed gun regulations than they do about the profound challenges and questions raised by this set of issues. From where I sit, it sure looks like a case of fiddling while Rome burns.

Just to be clear: I do not think that Eugene, et al., are insincere when it comes to their libertarian impulses and commitments. I have every reason to believe they are heartfelt, not pretextual. Eugene and other libertarians at the VC and analogous sites are not typically party-line advocates willing to shill for whatever will advance the interests of the Republican Party or President Bush. This site is obviously (and thankfully) quite different from Power Line or LGF. Which is perhaps why we haven’t seen much in the way of cheerleading here lately for torture or unbridled executive power.

But no apparent concern for it, either? What’s the explanation?

One might ask the same of Glenn Reynolds, but I fear his cooptation by the administration is pretty near complete.

I was reading Playboy the other day – psych! Actually, a reader informs me that the aggressively hetero magazine has named me their favorite blogger on the web. I have been unable to confirm. Maybe other readers can, er, look it up.

A reader writes:

I understand, or at least I hope I do since I’m not gay, what you write about the closet with regard to Mark Foley. What I don’t understand is that you appear to be defending Foley’s pedophilia. I have always have had many gay friends, and to the best of my knowledge they are interested in individuals of consenting age.

Indeed. But the problem with this argument with respect to Foley is that the page in question was of a consenting age, which is 16 in the District of Columbia. (Maybe emailing the teen in Florida or Louisiana, where the consent laws are 17 and 18, makes a difference, but even there, since there was no actual sex or physical contact, I don’t think we have a legal issue). I hasten to add that this doesn’t make Foley’s internet interactions less gross or inappropriate or unethical. But they were not illegal in D.C., even if they had led to actual sexual intercourse, which, so far as we know, they didn’t.

"As the troops said, they drank the Kool-Aid," – general Jay Garner, describing this administration’s utter refusal to grapple with reality in Iraq.

Then there’s this:

"I give us a B-minus for policy development and a D-minus for policy execution."

That’s Stephen Hadley! In 2005 – when much of the right-wing blogosphere was denouncing most criticism of the war’s conduct as the froth of leftist rage. Kissinger’s strategy (I wonder what Hitch will make of his arch-nemesis crafting the Iraq "strategy"?) was victory as the only exit strategy. FIne, but that only makes sense of you have some plan for actual victory. When you don’t, and you have refused to commit the manpower and resources to succeed, it is a recipe for digging a deeper and deeper grave. Not for Bush: he’ll be fine. But for America, the soldiers who defend us, and the constitution that protects us.

If they ran the country or a war with the attention to detail with which they run campaigns, they might even deserve re-election.

That’s the picture from Woodward’s book, according to Kakutani. Money quote:

As depicted by Mr. Woodward, this is an administration in which virtually no one will speak truth to power, an administration in which the traditional policy-making process involving methodical analysis and debate is routinely subverted. He notes that experts — who recommended higher troop levels in Iraq, warned about the consequences of disbanding the Iraqi Army or worried about the lack of postwar planning— were continually ignored by the White House and Pentagon leadership, or themselves failed, out of cowardice or blind loyalty, to press insistently their case for an altered course in the war.

Mr. Woodward describes the administration’s management of the war as being improvisatory and ad hoc, like a pickup basketball game, and argues that it continually tried to give the public a rosy picture of the war in Iraq (while accusing the press of accentuating the negative), even as its own intelligence was pointing to a rising number of attacks against American forces and an upward spiral of violence. A secret February 2005 report by Philip D. Zelikow, a State Department counselor, found that “Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change” and concluded that the American effort there suffered because it lacked a comprehensive, unified policy.

It’s hard for the Reynolds-Malkin-Hinderaker right to discredit Woodward – because he wrote books once beloved of the Bush administration and its acolytes. Now the worst fears of those of us who saw the consequences of incmpetence as soon as the rubber hit the dust in Iraq are being borne out. It’s too late now, of course. But it is not too late to send a message. The election is November 7.

It’s there, all right, which makes Bush’s ultimate decisions all the more maddening. You can see it in the rational attempts of people like Gordon R. England, the acting deputy secretary of defense, and Philip D. Zelikow, the counselor of the State Department. You see it in Condi Rice who knows that the legacy of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib – both direct consequences of Bush’s decision to abandon Geneva rules – have severely damaged America’s reputation and made winning the war of ideas infinitely harder. But ee come back to the central issue: the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis of brutal incompetence. An attempt to deal rationally with detained terror suspects was proposed by some last year, but the unhinged Rumsfeld blew one of his famous gaskets:

When the paper first circulated in the upper reaches of the administration, two of those officials said, it so angered Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that his aides gathered up copies of the document and had at least some of them shredded.

"It was not in step with the secretary of defense or the president," said one Defense Department official who, like many others, would discuss the internal deliberations only on condition of anonymity. "It was clear that Rumsfeld was very unhappy."

Then there’s this astonishing quote from a senior Pentagon official, obviously worried about Captain Queeg:

"The problem fell for some period of time into the too-hard category," one senior administration official said. "It fell so far into the too-hard category that it was lost from view."

I guess the Iraq war also fell into that "too-hard" category. There’s more:

The element of the new legislation that raised the sharpest criticism among legal scholars and human rights advocates last week was the scaling back of the habeas corpus right of terrorism suspects to challenge their detention in the federal courts. But in dozens of high-level meetings on detention policy, officials said, that provision was scarcely even discussed.

Habeas Schmabeas. The more we know, the more we find out that this administration is deeply dysfunctional, its members at war with each other, and headed by a weak, brittle, overwhelmed president unable to rally them to a common cause. In normal times, this would be distressing. In today’s world, it’s alarming.

Princeton, New Jersey, 4.30 pm.