The Dish

Just a reminder. December 2006:

I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq. I heard on the news about the new deployments, and while I support our president, Condoleezza Rice and the administration, I want to know that we have an exit plan in place; I want assurances that we are doing all we can to keep our troops safe.

My italics. Today:

“I want our president and this administration to listen to the advisers who they hired. McChrystal, for one, back in March, telling the president, 'Here's what we're going to need there' and then ramping up that advice lately, saying, 'Mr. President, here's what we need in Afghanistan to win, to make sure that those terror cells don't grow, so that those terrorists don't come back over to the homeland in America, on our soil, and kill innocent Americans.'”

Haleakala National Park, Hawaii, 12.22 pm

Tyler Cowen joins the fray:

Krugman writes: "Belgium is politically weak because of the linguistic divide; Italy is politically weak because it’s Italy. If these countries can run up debts of more than 100 percent of GDP without being destroyed by bond vigilantes, so can we."

I would interpret this evidence differently.  A high deficit often is an unfavorable symptom of bad politics, even if you think the high deficit is economically OK on its own terms.  It's a sign that you have dysfunctional institutions and decision-making procedures, as indeed they do in Belgium and Italy.  I believe that the not-always-swift American voter in fact understands high deficits — correctly — in this light.  They don't hold theories about "crowding out," rather they sense something in the house must be rotten.  And so they rail against deficits, as do some of their elected representatives.  It's a more justified reaction than the pure economics alone can illuminate.

When water regularly overflows from your toilet, you want the toilet fixed, whether or not the water is doing harm.

I'm a worry-wart on this as readers know. I understand the dangers of deficit reduction when demand is so vulnerable. But the dangers of the kind of debt the US is now holding are immense. It's textbook imperial collapse/welfare state sclerosis combined.

And it's driven in my view by three interest groups: corporate America, the elderly, and the military. Until conservatives tackle all three – ending corporate welfare through radical tax reform and simplification, controlling middle-class entitlements by raising the retirement age, and ending defense expenditures that underpin an unsustainable global hegemony – their message will not convince.

But if conservatives can show that they can tackle corporate welfare as well as entitlements, and if they can begin the task of realizing that their occupations of two countries are government programs with no end in sight, and if they can drop their fundamentalist approach to social policy, and allow for states to go their own way, then we're talking.

I just see a long way from here to there. But maybe all this ugliness and its political futility will help accelerate the end of denial and rage and begin a process of thought and argument. I can hope, can't I?

Palin is now accusing president Obama of not acknowledging the sacrifices of the troops:

“There’s been a lack of acknowledgement by our president in understanding what it is that the American military provides in terms of, obviously, the safety, the security of our country. I want him to acknowledge the sacrifices that these individual men and women — our sons, our daughters, our moms, our dads, our brothers and sisters — are providing this country to keep us safe.”

One imagines that, to take just two recent examples, she did not hear the president's Fort Hood speech or know of his recent trip to Dover. But of course, the reality is not what matters. What matters is attacking the president of the United States as a traitor to his own soldiers. And what is in the interest of those soldiers? More war, of course. And no presidential analysis of strategy – just being "tough" and adopting maximalist interventionism.

Check out Ron Brownstein's weekend health insurance reform post, which president Obama instructed his aides to read at yesterday's senior staff meeting. It's an argument that the Reid bill is actually much better on cost-containment than some feared; and closely aligns itself with Baucus. Money lede:

When I reached Jonathan Gruber on Thursday, he was working his way,

page by laborious page, through the mammoth health care bill Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had unveiled just a few hours earlier. Gruber is a leading health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulted by politicians in both parties. He was one of almost two dozen top economists who sent President Obama a letter earlier this month insisting that reform won't succeed unless it "bends the curve" in the long-term growth of health care costs. And, on that front, Gruber likes what he sees in the Reid proposal. Actually he

likes it a lot.

"I'm sort of a known skeptic on this stuff," Gruber told me. "My summary is it's really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can't think of a thing to try that they didn't try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here….I can't think of anything I'd do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn't have done better than they are doing."

Gruber may be especially effusive. But the Senate blueprint, which faces its first votes tonight, also is winning praise from other leading health reformers like Mark McClellan, the former director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services under George W. Bush and Len Nichols, health policy director at the centrist New America Foundation. "The bottom line," Nichols says, "is the legislation is sending a signal that business as usual [in the medical system] is going to end."

The rest here.

Peter Beinart tries to determine why Joe Lieberman - a domestic liberal who regularly received "nearly perfect scores from the American Public Health Association, which backs a single-payer health-care system" – is suddenly trying to sink the public option:

Because he’s bitter. According to former staffers and associates, he was upset by his dismal showing in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary. And he was enraged by the tepid support he got from many party leaders in 2006, when he lost the Democratic primary to an anti-war activist and won reelection as an independent. Gradually, this personal alienation has eaten away at his liberal domestic views. His staff has grown markedly more conservative in recent years, and his closest friends in Congress are now Republicans John McCain and Lindsey Graham. For Lieberman, the personal has become political, and it has pushed him further to the right. […H]e's becoming a standard-issue conservative.

Make that a standard issue Republican.

(Photo: US Senator and Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Joe Lieberman listens to testimony during a full committee hearing on 'The Fort Hood Attack: A Preliminary Assessment' on November 19, 2009 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.By Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images)

Conor Friedersdorf sizes up Glenn Beck's latest scheme:

Remember when Glenn Beck accused President Obama of winning followers like a totalitarian demagogue, warned against the nefarious tendencies of community organizers, and was himself defended against critics by Jonah Goldberg, who called Beck "a libertarian populist?” Now the cable television host is touting a "radical," details-to-be-announced mass movement that promises to save the United States. Its name: "The Plan."

It includes a series of adult education seminars where citizens will be taught political activism, self-reliance, and the dread community organizing. The often tearful Fox News personality also promises a book that will include more specifics.

"We need to start thinking like the Chinese," Mr. Beck said at a recent rally. "I’m developing a 100 year plan for America."

At long last, prudent conservatives and libertarians are growing uncomfortable with Mr. Beck's rhetoric. I hope Mr. Goldberg is among them, as there isn't anyone better to write a National Review take-down of The Plan, titled Libertarian Fascism: How Glenn Beck Got Cover from the Right Until It Was Too Late to Stop Him. It wouldn’t require much work. Large excerpts could be copied and pasted from the paperback version of Liberal Fascism, Mr. Goldberg’s recent bestseller.

The weird thing is: some aspects of the current tea-party movement appeal to me. Its deep concern with debt and spending is shared by the Dish and has been since its inception. And a conservative critique of unrestrained capitalism – especially the reckless speculation and banking sector in the past decade – is vital if we are to save capitalism from itself. But Beck is not Richard Posner or Bruce Bartlett or Charles Murray, whose ideas are worth taking seriously. As Charles Murray puts it:

"Beck uses tactics that include tiny snippets of film as proof of a person’s worldview, guilt by association, insinuation, and occasionally outright goofs like the fake quote. To put it another way, I as a viewer have no way to judge whether Beck is right. I have to trust that the snippets are not taken out of context, that the dubious association between A and B actually has evidence to support it, and that his numbers are accurate. It is impossible to have that trust."

No wonder Palin feels a kindred spirit. The two of them represent the degenerate expression of cliches that used to be ideas (and ideas worth retaining and adjusting to new circumstances). But the vessel for rethinking will not come from proud ignoramuses and populist Elmer Gantrys. It will not come from reiterating propaganda but from confronting unpleasant facts about conservatism's recent catastrophic failures and mistakes.

They're not thinking; they're emoting.

They're not engaged in reforming conservatism; they're engaged in escapist denialism about real problems.

They are a sign of profound cultural sickness, not resurgent political and civic health.

Human Rights Watch releases a new report:

The damning report, which the UN body says is based on interviews with the suspects, their families and lawyers, warned the UK government that it was on the verge of losing its moral  legitimacy as it faces a "legally, morally and politically invidious position".

It added that British officials who interrogated four suspects detained in Pakistan could not have missed "clear and visible signs of torture" including the removal of fingernails. The report concluded that "the UK complicity is clear" despite a lack of evidence indicating direct involvement.

British and American agents involved in one case were not only "perfectly aware that we were using all means possible to extract information…[but]…grateful that we were doing so," one Pakistani intelligence source told HRW.

Notice that American agents were involved as well. Norm Geras writes:

HRW's finding of British complicity in torture is … a matter for serious concern and its demand for an independent public inquiry fully justified. Crucial in this regard is the finding that:

In… five cases, British officials and agents first colluded with illegal detention by the Pakistan authorities and then took the collusion further by repeatedly interviewing or passing questions to the detainees between or during torture sessions. [Italics mine.]

Article 4.1 of the UN Convention Against Torture reads:

Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.

Generalized statements by government ministers on this matter do not answer to the gravity of the findings in HRW's report. An inquiry is called for.

Agreed. And the responsible parties need to be held accountable – under the law. Including, if necessary, former prime minister Tony Blair and current prime minister Gordon Brown.

"That's a huge amount of hired guns."

"Is a sociopath sane?" legislative aide John Bitney, on his former boss, Sarah Palin.

Bitney is the latest to claim that Going Rogue is full of fabrications:

"I'm just pilloried right and left and turned into the big bad wolf here for stuff I didn't do," said Bitney, who is now an aide to Valdez Republican Rep. John Harris. "It's like I'm this fictional character that she's decided to make me out to be this sort of incompetent slob." …

Bitney said he tried to be fair to Palin when national media kept "crawling up my backside" over the past year to interview him about her. But the book is too much, he said. "I've had it. Enough. Just enough; leave me alone," he said.