I'm split on whether or not it's okay for the University of Texas to have all those statues of Confederate leaders on campus. I think that people who bitch about a big statue of Robert E. Lee should calm down and be quiet. On the other hand, I think a statue of Jefferson Davis might be a little much. So why the difference?
I think it's because people aren't nostalgic for the values of the Confederacy, nor do they want to go back to that time period. Rather, their ancestors fought and died in large numbers to protect something, a culture, a society, in which they deeply believed. Robert E. Lee seems to commemorate that history and that sacrifice, whereas Jefferson Davis seems to more concretely represent the outdated values.
Let it not be said that I'm all right with Confederate ideals or the glorification thereof. (I spent four hours yesterday watching Gone With The Wind, though.) I just don't think you should go to the campus of the University of Texas and be shocked or offended by statues of Davis or Lee. Like...you were expecting...?
In closing. Jefferson Davis? Wellll.... General Lee? Definitely.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Holy Crap.
It's been two years already?
Politically speaking, it's felt like a lot longer. Iraq got worse. Partisanship got worse. Bush's strategy, to pander to his base and stay the course in Iraq brought him to the inevitable, unalterable destination- defeat.
I don't have real words to describe this, but I about broke into hysterical tears of happiness when I heard that Rumsfeld was stepping down in the face of the inevitable Democratic onslaught. And then I heard "It's over, the Democrats won" out of the President's mouth. (More on that below.)
I'm not even ecstatic, I'm just satisfied. Do we remember how crushed we all were, two years ago? The talk of moving to Canada, of disgust with our fellow countrymen, of futile, unbridled rage. I wonder how the Republicans feel?
Probably a lot like we did. Although they're doing a fairly decent job of eating crow. They had a hell of a lot more warning than we did in '04, since the weight of the electorate was clearly leaning in this direction for a matter of weeks. Their fears were confirmed last night, so I don't think it came as any huge surprise. They lost a few heartbreakers, and their hopes of holding the Senate to a 50-50 tie are flickering and fading under the specter of an Allen recount. I've never been politically active in the era of a Democratic Congress. This should be interesting.
The Weekly Standard is chock-full of election night tales of woe, if you want to exercise your constitutional right to schadenfreude. Watching Fox News today (ironically) I saw George Bush say the words, "It's over. The Democrats won," and couldn't stop grinning. I should point out that this happened in a room full of arch-conservative military police officers. Also, their boss had just resigned. I left, rather quickly.
But even they could probably understand my giddy confusion. This President has built a political legacy on the solid bedrock of denying the blatantly obvious. I saw a new man on television today, who said he'd work with us because we controlled the House of Representatives. To be honest, I almost thought he would declare martial law before allowing a Democratic majority to take over the House (and, pray God, the Senate.) But he didn't. He conceded defeat, he was relatively mature about it, and he stood up in front of a TV camera to acknowledge reality. He acknowledged what has been abundantly obvious for over a year- people think he and his buddies suck.
I actually walked by his house last night, through Lafayette Park, in the cool Washington rain. The flag was still flying above the White House as Bush awaited the election returns, and the camera crews had decided there were more ratings to be found in the Democratic parties than the Republican wakes. Inside, the most powerful man in the world was watching as Rove's tinted political windows, shielding him from the enormity of his mistakes, were torn away on CNN. I almost felt bad for the man.
HAH! Just kidding.
One point in the Republican column. They're not talking about moving to...damn, I can't even think of a country more conservative than this one. Saudia Arabia? The Vatican? Russia? Anyway, they're not talking about leaving the country, staging a coup (probably more up their alley) or advocating any other kind of departure from civil society.
It's an exciting time to be an American. It'd be more exciting if a Democratic Congress was starting out with the opportunity to build something, instead of the task of digging ourselves out of someone else's hole.
Politically speaking, it's felt like a lot longer. Iraq got worse. Partisanship got worse. Bush's strategy, to pander to his base and stay the course in Iraq brought him to the inevitable, unalterable destination- defeat.
I don't have real words to describe this, but I about broke into hysterical tears of happiness when I heard that Rumsfeld was stepping down in the face of the inevitable Democratic onslaught. And then I heard "It's over, the Democrats won" out of the President's mouth. (More on that below.)
I'm not even ecstatic, I'm just satisfied. Do we remember how crushed we all were, two years ago? The talk of moving to Canada, of disgust with our fellow countrymen, of futile, unbridled rage. I wonder how the Republicans feel?
Probably a lot like we did. Although they're doing a fairly decent job of eating crow. They had a hell of a lot more warning than we did in '04, since the weight of the electorate was clearly leaning in this direction for a matter of weeks. Their fears were confirmed last night, so I don't think it came as any huge surprise. They lost a few heartbreakers, and their hopes of holding the Senate to a 50-50 tie are flickering and fading under the specter of an Allen recount. I've never been politically active in the era of a Democratic Congress. This should be interesting.
The Weekly Standard is chock-full of election night tales of woe, if you want to exercise your constitutional right to schadenfreude. Watching Fox News today (ironically) I saw George Bush say the words, "It's over. The Democrats won," and couldn't stop grinning. I should point out that this happened in a room full of arch-conservative military police officers. Also, their boss had just resigned. I left, rather quickly.
But even they could probably understand my giddy confusion. This President has built a political legacy on the solid bedrock of denying the blatantly obvious. I saw a new man on television today, who said he'd work with us because we controlled the House of Representatives. To be honest, I almost thought he would declare martial law before allowing a Democratic majority to take over the House (and, pray God, the Senate.) But he didn't. He conceded defeat, he was relatively mature about it, and he stood up in front of a TV camera to acknowledge reality. He acknowledged what has been abundantly obvious for over a year- people think he and his buddies suck.
I actually walked by his house last night, through Lafayette Park, in the cool Washington rain. The flag was still flying above the White House as Bush awaited the election returns, and the camera crews had decided there were more ratings to be found in the Democratic parties than the Republican wakes. Inside, the most powerful man in the world was watching as Rove's tinted political windows, shielding him from the enormity of his mistakes, were torn away on CNN. I almost felt bad for the man.
HAH! Just kidding.
One point in the Republican column. They're not talking about moving to...damn, I can't even think of a country more conservative than this one. Saudia Arabia? The Vatican? Russia? Anyway, they're not talking about leaving the country, staging a coup (probably more up their alley) or advocating any other kind of departure from civil society.
It's an exciting time to be an American. It'd be more exciting if a Democratic Congress was starting out with the opportunity to build something, instead of the task of digging ourselves out of someone else's hole.
Monday, July 10, 2006
North Korea and the Deficit
North Korea, for all the trouble it's causing, is making life very easy for comedians. The favorite joke is that while Iraq (no weapons, minimal threat) got a full-scale invasion, Iran (moderate threat, developing weapons) is just getting a lot of diplomacy thrown at it, and the North Koreans (in possession of nuclear weapons, testing delivery systems, major threat) require a concerted effort, on our part, to even assemble a strongly-worded protest when they cook off a couple of bottle rockets over Japan.
(Full disclosure, I just got XM Satellite Radio for my car, and I've been listening to the comedy channels, on average, around two hours a day. They're pretty helpful when you're driving for extended periods of time.)
So we all get a good laugh. The Bush administration is so silly! They attack the wrong countries! Another favorite joke is about how Kim Jong-Il, like Rodney Dangerfield, doesn't get no respect. He builds nukes, threatens World War III, shoots off missiles and kidnaps random Japanese citizens. And we're committed to negotiating with him. Poor guy can't get any attention.
The fact is that Kim Jong-Il knows that he has a lot more leverage than Saddam ever had. He's got nuclear weapons (although, by all accounts, they're still a little too big and clunky to be effectively delivered by rockets or aircraft) as well as an enormous military. These guys have the ability to rain 100,000 artillery shells an hour on Seoul, as well as a million-man army, a vast network of underground bases, and command-and-control systems designed to defeat the U.S. military's electronic surveillance capabilities.
Let's review. Enormous, scary military. Nuclear capability. Budding intercontinental rocketry program. Tough to surveil due to underground sites. These guys are bad news. And KCNA, North Korea's propaganda Wal-Mart, likes to threaten nuclear holocaust, total battle, and World War III. Why have we not wiped these guys off the map? And why are we getting wiped off the map in Iraq?
The answer is that North Korea can materially damage our vital national interests. It is in no one's interest to see the Korean Peninsula go up in nuclear smoke. (Where would we get our Hyundais?) South Korea is a vital trading partner, not to mention Japan. And our relations with China, no matter how a war turned out, would inevitably suffer, which may not be that bad diplomatically but would have ugly consequences for the American economy. So while North Korea would undoubtedly lose a war (if they went nuclear, we would retaliate) and their country would fall apart at its starving seams, the consequences would be entirely too terrible to contemplate for our country.
North Korea keeps demanding one basic thing- security for their regime. Kim Jong-Il is a paranoid psychotic who actually abducted Japanese actors, via his special forces troopers, to force them to act in (awful) movies he makes himself. He demands non-aggression pacts, which the U.S. can't honor because it would bind our hands if he started pulling anything more ridiculous inside his little nuclear treehouse. North Korea's primary demand is, let us stay in power.
The thing is, he's not crazy and their country isn't crazy. But they really want us to believe that it is. It's good political thinking, actually. If your opponent thinks that you're totally insane, he's just going to go attack you, since he has no chance. If he thinks you're totally rational, he might still attack you, or otherwise exploit you, because he can take advantage of your weaknesses. In the mindset of deterrence posture, being just a little crazy keeps you unpredictable, and therefore, difficult to take advantage of.
The North Koreans don't want to be boxed in by our demands anymore (and our primary demand is, don't go to war.) You'd think this would be simple. They don't go to war against South Korea (or anybody else,) we're happy to let them stay in power. But the X-factor is Kim Jong-Il's itching, burning case of paranoia and megalomania. He wants to be a member of the nuclear club, to have a button to put his finger on. And he wants to be able to make threats, even though his country is starving and he has to rely on counterfeiting and drug dealing to fund his military machine. So we can't rule out kicking his ass.
But they guy is gonna die anyway. Whether a smart bomb does it, or coronary artery disease from the expensive imported foods that he eats, Kim Jong-Il can't escape death. And he's too paranoid to appoint an heir apparent, since that person would become an immediate threat in his mind (and maybe in reality.) Kim holds enormous power, and would create an even-more-enormous power vacuum after his death, which the rest of the world sincerely hopes a better alternative would fill.
The North Koreans have nukes. No amount of intervention is going to change that. If we give them a reason to use them, they just might do it, too. But the only way they're going to do that is if Kim Jong-Il says so. So we have to play nice until the guy croaks, because going to war against a nuclear and conventional power like North Korea would be (even with our enormous military) incredibly costly. This policy of hands-off, wait-and-see, actually does make sense.
Unless.
North Korea needs money. We've been over this. They need it bad, and they're willing to do things like counterfeit and run drugs to get it. They've even got their hands in kidnapping and extortion. It's the world's first gangster nation. They'll sell anything to get their hands on cash, and that could easily include the nuclear weapons they've claimed to have built. They could become a nuclear K-Mart (a favorite grim joke of international relations types.) And that would be unacceptable. But are they doing this? Do they have buyers? Do they even have anything worth buying?
So we find ourselves coming back to one of my favorite complaints. We're sinking enormous- ENORMOUS- amounts of money into tax cuts for the super-wealthy and the war in Iraq. If we were to, say, remove the now-nearly-permanent tax cut and drastically scale back operations in Iraq (where it's becoming abundantly obvious that our presence perpetuates, rather than suppresses, the insurgency) we would have a lot of cash available to do three things that really need to get done.
1) Pay down the deficit. Oh, God, I don't even need to go into detail here. The Bush economic side effects are like Reaganomics but even more retarded. We're spending money we don't have and treating our international credit rating like a puppy treats a hardwood floor. If you support this administration because you've been living under a rock for the last six years, consider this: the war in Iraq is being paid for with money borrowed from shining beacons of international morality like, I don't know, China. Yep. That M-16 that's firing at Iraq insurgents got bought with yuan, boy.
2) Secure the homeland. It's not happening for a lot of different reasons. Some of them include the behavior of the recipients of federal homeland security grants- police and fire departments tend to spend the money on pretty toys like command vehicles and SWAT teams, rather than on the training and specialized equipment they'd need to deal with WMD attacks. But security for our seaports, our rail and public transit systems, and our borders (don't get me started) has been woefully underfunded. Airports still aren't properly secured, even given America's propensity for defending ourselves against the attacks that have already happened. The next one will arrive through a venue that a $2.1 million mobile command center that gets 247 movie channels cannot block.
3) Return our intelligence agencies to worldwide prominence. The CIA's analytical capabilities have been gutted by a power grab from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. One of the NSA's hands is trying to fend off Congress while the other is trying to sort through billions- literally billions- of electronic intercepts across the globe, and then (through some act of God) make sense of them. The DNI is trying to create their own in-house intel agency instead of forcing everyone else to work together. And the FBI's attempts at collecting domestic intelligence still get drawn into the stovepipe of their own bureaucracy instead of being properly shared with CIA or NSA. The war on terror will be won only when we can have people on the ground, infiltrating terrorist groups and collecting HUMINT. Fancy satellites and UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles) aren't going to do the job, especially in places like hermetically-sealed North Korea. We're not going to get our way in the Korean Peninsula by force of arms alone. We'll need the old CIA, the kind of guys who (while I'm not encouraging this behavior wholesale) started revolutions and infiltrated governments.
Enormous operations like Iraq waste money and lives while creating abundant reasons for new terrorists to join the cause. A low-intensity shadow war would give us the opportunity to suppress the Hydra-headed, decentralized al Qaeda that military expeditions will only strengthen. And it'd be exponentially cheaper. Can you imagine the things the CIA could do with 10% of the money we're spending on Iraq? We could have a Guantanamo Bay in every strip mall!
Okay, maybe not such a good idea to go that far. But I think the point is made. Iraq and tax cuts are sapping money away from an actual defense of the homeland, and if places like North Korea decide to start selling nukes to terrorists, we have no way of detecting, deterring, or defending against utter mayhew. The current administration has chosen a path of unnecessary strength and unaffordable weakness.
(Full disclosure, I just got XM Satellite Radio for my car, and I've been listening to the comedy channels, on average, around two hours a day. They're pretty helpful when you're driving for extended periods of time.)
So we all get a good laugh. The Bush administration is so silly! They attack the wrong countries! Another favorite joke is about how Kim Jong-Il, like Rodney Dangerfield, doesn't get no respect. He builds nukes, threatens World War III, shoots off missiles and kidnaps random Japanese citizens. And we're committed to negotiating with him. Poor guy can't get any attention.
The fact is that Kim Jong-Il knows that he has a lot more leverage than Saddam ever had. He's got nuclear weapons (although, by all accounts, they're still a little too big and clunky to be effectively delivered by rockets or aircraft) as well as an enormous military. These guys have the ability to rain 100,000 artillery shells an hour on Seoul, as well as a million-man army, a vast network of underground bases, and command-and-control systems designed to defeat the U.S. military's electronic surveillance capabilities.
Let's review. Enormous, scary military. Nuclear capability. Budding intercontinental rocketry program. Tough to surveil due to underground sites. These guys are bad news. And KCNA, North Korea's propaganda Wal-Mart, likes to threaten nuclear holocaust, total battle, and World War III. Why have we not wiped these guys off the map? And why are we getting wiped off the map in Iraq?
The answer is that North Korea can materially damage our vital national interests. It is in no one's interest to see the Korean Peninsula go up in nuclear smoke. (Where would we get our Hyundais?) South Korea is a vital trading partner, not to mention Japan. And our relations with China, no matter how a war turned out, would inevitably suffer, which may not be that bad diplomatically but would have ugly consequences for the American economy. So while North Korea would undoubtedly lose a war (if they went nuclear, we would retaliate) and their country would fall apart at its starving seams, the consequences would be entirely too terrible to contemplate for our country.
North Korea keeps demanding one basic thing- security for their regime. Kim Jong-Il is a paranoid psychotic who actually abducted Japanese actors, via his special forces troopers, to force them to act in (awful) movies he makes himself. He demands non-aggression pacts, which the U.S. can't honor because it would bind our hands if he started pulling anything more ridiculous inside his little nuclear treehouse. North Korea's primary demand is, let us stay in power.
The thing is, he's not crazy and their country isn't crazy. But they really want us to believe that it is. It's good political thinking, actually. If your opponent thinks that you're totally insane, he's just going to go attack you, since he has no chance. If he thinks you're totally rational, he might still attack you, or otherwise exploit you, because he can take advantage of your weaknesses. In the mindset of deterrence posture, being just a little crazy keeps you unpredictable, and therefore, difficult to take advantage of.
The North Koreans don't want to be boxed in by our demands anymore (and our primary demand is, don't go to war.) You'd think this would be simple. They don't go to war against South Korea (or anybody else,) we're happy to let them stay in power. But the X-factor is Kim Jong-Il's itching, burning case of paranoia and megalomania. He wants to be a member of the nuclear club, to have a button to put his finger on. And he wants to be able to make threats, even though his country is starving and he has to rely on counterfeiting and drug dealing to fund his military machine. So we can't rule out kicking his ass.
But they guy is gonna die anyway. Whether a smart bomb does it, or coronary artery disease from the expensive imported foods that he eats, Kim Jong-Il can't escape death. And he's too paranoid to appoint an heir apparent, since that person would become an immediate threat in his mind (and maybe in reality.) Kim holds enormous power, and would create an even-more-enormous power vacuum after his death, which the rest of the world sincerely hopes a better alternative would fill.
The North Koreans have nukes. No amount of intervention is going to change that. If we give them a reason to use them, they just might do it, too. But the only way they're going to do that is if Kim Jong-Il says so. So we have to play nice until the guy croaks, because going to war against a nuclear and conventional power like North Korea would be (even with our enormous military) incredibly costly. This policy of hands-off, wait-and-see, actually does make sense.
Unless.
North Korea needs money. We've been over this. They need it bad, and they're willing to do things like counterfeit and run drugs to get it. They've even got their hands in kidnapping and extortion. It's the world's first gangster nation. They'll sell anything to get their hands on cash, and that could easily include the nuclear weapons they've claimed to have built. They could become a nuclear K-Mart (a favorite grim joke of international relations types.) And that would be unacceptable. But are they doing this? Do they have buyers? Do they even have anything worth buying?
So we find ourselves coming back to one of my favorite complaints. We're sinking enormous- ENORMOUS- amounts of money into tax cuts for the super-wealthy and the war in Iraq. If we were to, say, remove the now-nearly-permanent tax cut and drastically scale back operations in Iraq (where it's becoming abundantly obvious that our presence perpetuates, rather than suppresses, the insurgency) we would have a lot of cash available to do three things that really need to get done.
1) Pay down the deficit. Oh, God, I don't even need to go into detail here. The Bush economic side effects are like Reaganomics but even more retarded. We're spending money we don't have and treating our international credit rating like a puppy treats a hardwood floor. If you support this administration because you've been living under a rock for the last six years, consider this: the war in Iraq is being paid for with money borrowed from shining beacons of international morality like, I don't know, China. Yep. That M-16 that's firing at Iraq insurgents got bought with yuan, boy.
2) Secure the homeland. It's not happening for a lot of different reasons. Some of them include the behavior of the recipients of federal homeland security grants- police and fire departments tend to spend the money on pretty toys like command vehicles and SWAT teams, rather than on the training and specialized equipment they'd need to deal with WMD attacks. But security for our seaports, our rail and public transit systems, and our borders (don't get me started) has been woefully underfunded. Airports still aren't properly secured, even given America's propensity for defending ourselves against the attacks that have already happened. The next one will arrive through a venue that a $2.1 million mobile command center that gets 247 movie channels cannot block.
3) Return our intelligence agencies to worldwide prominence. The CIA's analytical capabilities have been gutted by a power grab from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. One of the NSA's hands is trying to fend off Congress while the other is trying to sort through billions- literally billions- of electronic intercepts across the globe, and then (through some act of God) make sense of them. The DNI is trying to create their own in-house intel agency instead of forcing everyone else to work together. And the FBI's attempts at collecting domestic intelligence still get drawn into the stovepipe of their own bureaucracy instead of being properly shared with CIA or NSA. The war on terror will be won only when we can have people on the ground, infiltrating terrorist groups and collecting HUMINT. Fancy satellites and UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles) aren't going to do the job, especially in places like hermetically-sealed North Korea. We're not going to get our way in the Korean Peninsula by force of arms alone. We'll need the old CIA, the kind of guys who (while I'm not encouraging this behavior wholesale) started revolutions and infiltrated governments.
Enormous operations like Iraq waste money and lives while creating abundant reasons for new terrorists to join the cause. A low-intensity shadow war would give us the opportunity to suppress the Hydra-headed, decentralized al Qaeda that military expeditions will only strengthen. And it'd be exponentially cheaper. Can you imagine the things the CIA could do with 10% of the money we're spending on Iraq? We could have a Guantanamo Bay in every strip mall!
Okay, maybe not such a good idea to go that far. But I think the point is made. Iraq and tax cuts are sapping money away from an actual defense of the homeland, and if places like North Korea decide to start selling nukes to terrorists, we have no way of detecting, deterring, or defending against utter mayhew. The current administration has chosen a path of unnecessary strength and unaffordable weakness.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Status Update
Tom Daschle's Ghost is on a fact-finding road trip throughout Red-State America. He will return in the last week of June.
-Mgmt.
-Mgmt.
Saturday, June 03, 2006
Political Expediency
I was really hoping that the Bush Administration and congressional Republicans weren't actually going to go through with the anti-gay-marriage push that every news outlet has been predicting. I don't know why I was hoping that, since it makes a lot of sense for them and the politics of energizing the base, though roundly battered in the press, are still enshrined in Republican strategic doctrine.
Shockingly enough, my hopes were not fulfilled. Starting Monday, the administration is launching a push for an anti-gay-marriage amendment to the Constitution, and Bush hopes to spark a national debate on the subject. (He used his weekly radio address to discuss his plans.) It's blatant, it's ridiculously partisan, and to claim that it isn't motivated by the basest- no pun intended- political intentions is totally disingenous, especially since it's destined to fail.
It also tells us that Karl Rove is still running the show from behind the scenes.
An anonymous Republican said that Karl Rove was not particularly excited about where he had been sent during the White House "shake-up" of a few months ago. But I mentioned then, in a post on the subject, that Rove wasn't going too far away. He'd just become too much of a liability to parade around in front of the cameras all the time, and would be hanging around behind the scenes to pull strings.
This bears the hallmark of classic Rove. We're losing thousands of American lives and billions of your tax dollars in Iraq. There is a crisis of ethics in Congress right now. The administration's neglect allowed an American city to drown. And now, Bush wants to focus the national debate on a subject designed to promote intolerance and division just to mitigate the damage during an election year.
True conservatives- the kind who have all but disappeared these days- would be outraged at the concept of Big Government trying to step in and tell women what not to do with their bodies and decide which couples can get married. And a few of them are. The Cato Institute, for example, is a conservative think tank that's come out against this amendment because it runs entirely contrary to American values (and their own values of limited government.)
I would like to think that the elements within the American right who still believe in limited government would unite with those of us on the left who believe that gay people deserve to be treated like, well...people. However, I hope this whole thing just quietly dies. Dick Cheney used to be great at this- since he has a lesbian daughter, Congressman Cheney was always able to quietly kill anti-gay legislation without making the headlines. Despite his enormous power, that ain't gonna fly now.
The best thing would be for this amendment to avoid the kind of lengthy "national debate" that Bush wants. It's obviously going to fail, because lawmakers in Congress are not insane. But giving religious conservatives prime-time opportunities to whip up the fervor of their voters is going to do bad things in the fall for Democrats.
Therefore, to paraphrase the President's thoughts on confirming justices, I urge a swift, up-or-down vote upon this important national issue. That way, we can defeat it and get to work on the real problems affecting America. Like that war, that just doesn't seem to play nice and go away.
Shockingly enough, my hopes were not fulfilled. Starting Monday, the administration is launching a push for an anti-gay-marriage amendment to the Constitution, and Bush hopes to spark a national debate on the subject. (He used his weekly radio address to discuss his plans.) It's blatant, it's ridiculously partisan, and to claim that it isn't motivated by the basest- no pun intended- political intentions is totally disingenous, especially since it's destined to fail.
It also tells us that Karl Rove is still running the show from behind the scenes.
An anonymous Republican said that Karl Rove was not particularly excited about where he had been sent during the White House "shake-up" of a few months ago. But I mentioned then, in a post on the subject, that Rove wasn't going too far away. He'd just become too much of a liability to parade around in front of the cameras all the time, and would be hanging around behind the scenes to pull strings.
This bears the hallmark of classic Rove. We're losing thousands of American lives and billions of your tax dollars in Iraq. There is a crisis of ethics in Congress right now. The administration's neglect allowed an American city to drown. And now, Bush wants to focus the national debate on a subject designed to promote intolerance and division just to mitigate the damage during an election year.
True conservatives- the kind who have all but disappeared these days- would be outraged at the concept of Big Government trying to step in and tell women what not to do with their bodies and decide which couples can get married. And a few of them are. The Cato Institute, for example, is a conservative think tank that's come out against this amendment because it runs entirely contrary to American values (and their own values of limited government.)
I would like to think that the elements within the American right who still believe in limited government would unite with those of us on the left who believe that gay people deserve to be treated like, well...people. However, I hope this whole thing just quietly dies. Dick Cheney used to be great at this- since he has a lesbian daughter, Congressman Cheney was always able to quietly kill anti-gay legislation without making the headlines. Despite his enormous power, that ain't gonna fly now.
The best thing would be for this amendment to avoid the kind of lengthy "national debate" that Bush wants. It's obviously going to fail, because lawmakers in Congress are not insane. But giving religious conservatives prime-time opportunities to whip up the fervor of their voters is going to do bad things in the fall for Democrats.
Therefore, to paraphrase the President's thoughts on confirming justices, I urge a swift, up-or-down vote upon this important national issue. That way, we can defeat it and get to work on the real problems affecting America. Like that war, that just doesn't seem to play nice and go away.
Monday, May 15, 2006
Walking the Border
This border security plan that Bush laid out tonight is stomach-turningly cynical. It's a blatant ploy to pander to two constituencies within the Republican Party which ordinarily agree but are facing each other down over this.
If you're a big-money, heavily-contributing Republican businessman, illegal immigrants are http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OcZiel6D18. You don't have to provide them benefits. You don't have to pay them minimum wage. In fact, you barely have to do anything except give them the opportunity to work and conceal their undocumented status, and you have an excellent source of cheap labor that is not going to be unionizing any time soon.
On the other hand, if you're a social conservative, then illegal immigrants are a hot-button issue. Illegal immigrants represent massive, widespread flouting of immigration law, allowing literally millions of people make a mockery of our national sovereignty. And they also represent a nearly-criminal security failure where anyone who can smuggle a family of illegals or a bale of marijuana into the country can also smuggle, say, an al-Qaeda cell or a nuclear weapon.
I happen to be on the conservative side here, which is an uncommon, if not unheard of, occurrence. Not because I have anything against illegal immigrants- they work a hell of a lot harder than some Americans and are willing to risk death to do it- but because the situations which allows them entry into the country is, as I mentioned, incredibly detrimental to our border and homeland security efforts. Now obviously, I'm fine with a guest worker program. I think it's a good idea, although I dislike the fact that up to 50% of their earnings will probably be sent out of our economy as remittances. Also, I don't oppose the idea of allowing "earned citizenship" if people have been here for a long time and want to become legitimate. But I'd rather expend the scant federal dollars locking down the borders than funding additional bureaucracy.
The Minutemen, those crazy loons who sit out on the Arizona border (and, hilariously enough, the Vermont border, too, if you watch The Daily Show) gave Bush a May 25th deadline to either secure the border or they'd start building their own freakin' wall, on private land, of course. So to avoid an embarrassing confrontation with them, and with his conservative allies, Bush is trying to split the difference- placating business while placating hard-core conservatives who want the Mexicans out and the border closed.
Here's the problem. You can't logically close the border, while still allowing a guest worker program and a path to "earned citizenship." Why not, you ask? Because it does not make any sense whatsoever to tell people, "Yeah, if you made it here already, you're cool, but dammit, don't try to cross the Rio Grande tomorrow, because now we're serious about border security!"
Earned citizenship is going to be an incentive for people to run across the border and avoid enrolling in the guest worker program, because that program would end up just shipping them back to their home country in a few years. Why do that, when you can claim you've been here longer than you have (who's got the records to prove otherwise?) and "earn" your citizenship?
Basically, I would have been happy (okay, maybe not, probably still a little grumpy) if Bush had decided to pick border security or a soft-border guest worker and earned-citizenship program. But now he's sending the same message to two different constituencies- I want to keep everybody happy by not doing enough on either end.
If you're a big-money, heavily-contributing Republican businessman, illegal immigrants are http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OcZiel6D18. You don't have to provide them benefits. You don't have to pay them minimum wage. In fact, you barely have to do anything except give them the opportunity to work and conceal their undocumented status, and you have an excellent source of cheap labor that is not going to be unionizing any time soon.
On the other hand, if you're a social conservative, then illegal immigrants are a hot-button issue. Illegal immigrants represent massive, widespread flouting of immigration law, allowing literally millions of people make a mockery of our national sovereignty. And they also represent a nearly-criminal security failure where anyone who can smuggle a family of illegals or a bale of marijuana into the country can also smuggle, say, an al-Qaeda cell or a nuclear weapon.
I happen to be on the conservative side here, which is an uncommon, if not unheard of, occurrence. Not because I have anything against illegal immigrants- they work a hell of a lot harder than some Americans and are willing to risk death to do it- but because the situations which allows them entry into the country is, as I mentioned, incredibly detrimental to our border and homeland security efforts. Now obviously, I'm fine with a guest worker program. I think it's a good idea, although I dislike the fact that up to 50% of their earnings will probably be sent out of our economy as remittances. Also, I don't oppose the idea of allowing "earned citizenship" if people have been here for a long time and want to become legitimate. But I'd rather expend the scant federal dollars locking down the borders than funding additional bureaucracy.
The Minutemen, those crazy loons who sit out on the Arizona border (and, hilariously enough, the Vermont border, too, if you watch The Daily Show) gave Bush a May 25th deadline to either secure the border or they'd start building their own freakin' wall, on private land, of course. So to avoid an embarrassing confrontation with them, and with his conservative allies, Bush is trying to split the difference- placating business while placating hard-core conservatives who want the Mexicans out and the border closed.
Here's the problem. You can't logically close the border, while still allowing a guest worker program and a path to "earned citizenship." Why not, you ask? Because it does not make any sense whatsoever to tell people, "Yeah, if you made it here already, you're cool, but dammit, don't try to cross the Rio Grande tomorrow, because now we're serious about border security!"
Earned citizenship is going to be an incentive for people to run across the border and avoid enrolling in the guest worker program, because that program would end up just shipping them back to their home country in a few years. Why do that, when you can claim you've been here longer than you have (who's got the records to prove otherwise?) and "earn" your citizenship?
Basically, I would have been happy (okay, maybe not, probably still a little grumpy) if Bush had decided to pick border security or a soft-border guest worker and earned-citizenship program. But now he's sending the same message to two different constituencies- I want to keep everybody happy by not doing enough on either end.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Goss Incompetence
The Bush Administration brought Porter Goss, a former Republican congressman and chair of the House Intelligence Committee, into the CIA to “clean up” the ideologically suspect agency. The CIA’s staff, in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, had the audacity to tell some people that the Bush administration was picking and choosing their intelligence and squashing dissent on the Sacred Goal.
The guy publicly got up and said he was surprised at how much work it took to be the Director of the CIA. Oh, man, for one well-placed punch in the mouth. Are you kidding? Even if you think it, you don’t SAY it! The administration called him a “transition” figure and nobody expected him to be around for too long, but he let relations with foreign intelligence agencies atrophy because he didn’t like traveling and didn’t feel like entertaining their staff when they visited.
The guy was a stooge. When former CIA leaders tried to give him advice, he refused to meet with them. Staffers who sent in assessments on the Iraq situation that didn’t match the Defense Department’s were asked about party affiliations. This is coming pretty close to enforcing Soviet-style ideological unity.
In keeping with the Soviet comparison, Russian military units would have a commanding officer, and then a second-in-command, the “political officer,” whose job was to maintain loyalty to Moscow and to the communist ideal. Basically, Goss was a political officer who got put in charge of the whole show. He sucked and it’s probably good that he’s gone.
What worries me is his replacement, who will probably be General Michael Hayden. He’s clearly competent, smart, and has had a lot of intelligence experience. The problem is the kind of intelligence experience he’s had. He worked at the NSA for a long time, and is an avowed expert on technical intelligence- the kind that lets us read Ahmadinejad’s license plate or see how many people are working in a nuclear weapons facility at midnight.
The problem is that we already do such things very well. We have the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency, and the vast (and totally secret) resources of No Such Agency...erm, the NSA. What those advanced satellites and eavesdropping technologies cannot do, however, is give us the kind of intelligence that we need to penetrate terrorist networks, locate radical leaders, or prevent an attack.
There are two basic types of intelligence. One is called TECHINT, and the other is called HUMINT, out of the intelligence community’s love for acronyms. TECHINT, or technical intelligence is what we’re so good at. Listening to people’s phone calls. Mapping terrain changes that could indicate buried hideouts. Spotting some terrorist in his car in the Yemen desert and blowing him up with a Predator drone (which, let’s be fair, was awesome.)
HUMINT, surprisingly enough, is human intelligence. This is occasionally the cloak-and-dagger stuff, but it’s more about cultivating relationships. You need officers on the ground in a lot of different places to make connections with locals, develop leads, and generally get your ear to the ground. And if you’re capable of pulling that off, you might even be able to develop a source within a terrorist organization, and all the technical intelligence in the world can’t provide that kind of data.
The CIA used to do an amazing job with this, especially against the Russians. But since the inception of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA has seen its analysts transferred to DNI, its funding cut, and its direct line to the President (the CIA directors of old would always deliver the Presidential intelligence briefing) eliminated. Staffers report a morale problem, and the Washington Post quoted one as saying the CIA was “hemorrhaging officers.”
Enter General Hayden, a guy whose Trailblazer modernization program at the NSA was a dismal failure and whose career specialty has been technical intelligence. Do we really think that he’ll go around improving our ability to collect human intelligence? If the CIA was adrift beforehand, I could see this guy providing a steady hand to guide it in exactly the wrong direction.
The guy publicly got up and said he was surprised at how much work it took to be the Director of the CIA. Oh, man, for one well-placed punch in the mouth. Are you kidding? Even if you think it, you don’t SAY it! The administration called him a “transition” figure and nobody expected him to be around for too long, but he let relations with foreign intelligence agencies atrophy because he didn’t like traveling and didn’t feel like entertaining their staff when they visited.
The guy was a stooge. When former CIA leaders tried to give him advice, he refused to meet with them. Staffers who sent in assessments on the Iraq situation that didn’t match the Defense Department’s were asked about party affiliations. This is coming pretty close to enforcing Soviet-style ideological unity.
In keeping with the Soviet comparison, Russian military units would have a commanding officer, and then a second-in-command, the “political officer,” whose job was to maintain loyalty to Moscow and to the communist ideal. Basically, Goss was a political officer who got put in charge of the whole show. He sucked and it’s probably good that he’s gone.
What worries me is his replacement, who will probably be General Michael Hayden. He’s clearly competent, smart, and has had a lot of intelligence experience. The problem is the kind of intelligence experience he’s had. He worked at the NSA for a long time, and is an avowed expert on technical intelligence- the kind that lets us read Ahmadinejad’s license plate or see how many people are working in a nuclear weapons facility at midnight.
The problem is that we already do such things very well. We have the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency, and the vast (and totally secret) resources of No Such Agency...erm, the NSA. What those advanced satellites and eavesdropping technologies cannot do, however, is give us the kind of intelligence that we need to penetrate terrorist networks, locate radical leaders, or prevent an attack.
There are two basic types of intelligence. One is called TECHINT, and the other is called HUMINT, out of the intelligence community’s love for acronyms. TECHINT, or technical intelligence is what we’re so good at. Listening to people’s phone calls. Mapping terrain changes that could indicate buried hideouts. Spotting some terrorist in his car in the Yemen desert and blowing him up with a Predator drone (which, let’s be fair, was awesome.)
HUMINT, surprisingly enough, is human intelligence. This is occasionally the cloak-and-dagger stuff, but it’s more about cultivating relationships. You need officers on the ground in a lot of different places to make connections with locals, develop leads, and generally get your ear to the ground. And if you’re capable of pulling that off, you might even be able to develop a source within a terrorist organization, and all the technical intelligence in the world can’t provide that kind of data.
The CIA used to do an amazing job with this, especially against the Russians. But since the inception of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA has seen its analysts transferred to DNI, its funding cut, and its direct line to the President (the CIA directors of old would always deliver the Presidential intelligence briefing) eliminated. Staffers report a morale problem, and the Washington Post quoted one as saying the CIA was “hemorrhaging officers.”
Enter General Hayden, a guy whose Trailblazer modernization program at the NSA was a dismal failure and whose career specialty has been technical intelligence. Do we really think that he’ll go around improving our ability to collect human intelligence? If the CIA was adrift beforehand, I could see this guy providing a steady hand to guide it in exactly the wrong direction.
Friday, April 28, 2006
Plug-In Hybrids
So the energy industry is celebrating windfall profits for this quarter, especially ExxonMobil, whose executive board is now considering the purchase of Australia for "company outings." Inside sources report that the island-continent will be turned into "the world's largest 18-hole golf course" for the private use of oil company executives.
I made that up, except for the first part about the profits. But here's what drives me bonkers. Bush has been refusing to tax their insanely high profits, instead emphasizing they should "reinvest" the money into new energy technologies (instead of- and this is just a guess- $400 million retirement packages for their executives. Looking at you, Lee Raymond.)
But the technologies he mentions include such random panaceas as "plug-in hybrids." Now we know how hybrids work- rechargeable battery charged by brake friction, along with gas-powered motor. Works pretty well, I'm actually hoping to get one soon. Plug-in hybrids save more gas because they run off home electricity.
You have now picked up on the obvious problem. We're saving gas in our cars by taxing the energy grid, which is powered by- what- magical freaking elves? Plugging our cars into the wall is just going to create more demand for oil and gas for the power plants!
By the way, the proponents of these cars claim that people will put solar panels on their roofs, and not just charge them off normal electricity. Trust me, I'll be holding my breath for widespread purchases of solar panels.
I made that up, except for the first part about the profits. But here's what drives me bonkers. Bush has been refusing to tax their insanely high profits, instead emphasizing they should "reinvest" the money into new energy technologies (instead of- and this is just a guess- $400 million retirement packages for their executives. Looking at you, Lee Raymond.)
But the technologies he mentions include such random panaceas as "plug-in hybrids." Now we know how hybrids work- rechargeable battery charged by brake friction, along with gas-powered motor. Works pretty well, I'm actually hoping to get one soon. Plug-in hybrids save more gas because they run off home electricity.
You have now picked up on the obvious problem. We're saving gas in our cars by taxing the energy grid, which is powered by- what- magical freaking elves? Plugging our cars into the wall is just going to create more demand for oil and gas for the power plants!
By the way, the proponents of these cars claim that people will put solar panels on their roofs, and not just charge them off normal electricity. Trust me, I'll be holding my breath for widespread purchases of solar panels.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Big Mistake, Big Opportunity
If you look a little closer at the confrontation between the U.S. and Iran, you'll see something very interesting. The military forces of both countries are within spitting distance of each other, since Iran shares a massive border with Iraq, where our troops are currently soaking up the sun and the shrapnel. In fact, the U.S., Iran, and Iraq all share the same security problem, namely, the swirling vortex of crap that is the budding Iraqi civil war.
So a little lower down the bill from the nuclear posturing was a proposal for the U.S. and Iran to hold bilateral talks on the best way to stabilize the Iraq situation. Somewhat disingenuously, Iran's President Ahmadinejad (see? I got the name right) said today that there was "no need" because the Iraqi compromise candidate for Prime Minister, Jawad al-Maliki, was forming what Ahmadinejad called "a permanent government of Iraq."
Okay, I'll wait until you all stop laughing. Ahmadinejad (while crazy) is certainly not stupid, and obviously he realizes that a new government is not going to be able to turn on the lights, get the sewers working, and stop the festival of destruction that insurgents are constantly celebrating on the streets of Iraq. And since they can't do that, the security concerns that the U.S. and Iran share, are not going to go away. What this boils down to is, Ahmadinejad is just being a jerk. Go figure.
But in his statement on the need (or lack thereof) for bilateral talks on security in Iraq, Ahmadinejad said something very interesting on the possibility of sanctions against his country. Keep in mind, the Bush administration is publicly pushing diplomacy while busily preparing for all-out war. He said, "I think it is very unlikely for them to be so stupid to do that [impose sanctions,]" and continued, "I think even the two or three countries who oppose us are wise enough not to resort to such a big mistake."
In the words of Jon Stewart, "Whaaaa?" Ahmadinejad has claimed that his country has the right to enrich as much uranium as it wants (highly enriched uranium, by the way, is one of two excellent ways to make a nuclear weapon.) He's been testing nuclear-capable missiles equipped with countermeasures that could dodge Israeli air defenses. He's announced the production of a nuclear-capable torpedo that could take out one of our carrier battle groups. And he's saying that sanctions are intolerable?
Let's get this straight. Sanctions do not hurt us. Hell, we've had sanctions in place against Tehran since their fundamentalist college students decided to hold an Iranian frat party and invaded the American embassy. If we could convince other countries (not Russia, since they've got lucrative energy contracts with Iran) such as France, China, India, and Pakistan to impose sanctions, we might actually be able to shut down this lunatic's nuclear program.
What we're claiming is that Ahmadinejad doesn't have the right to a nuclear weapon. He's saying that he's not building one, and we're trying to take away his right to peaceful nuclear technology and that his country has the right to produce their own nuclear fuel. (Why a country that sits on a vast wealth of oil and gas reserves needs nuclear fuel so badly, I'll never know.) Of course, if we do attack him, he threatens all kinds of outlandish doom for America, most of which has a decidedly radioactive theme.
The real problem is that enriching nuclear fuel is the height of dual-use technology. Dual-use technologies are capable of being used either for peaceful or warlike purposes, like pesticide components that can kill bugs or (with a little tweaking) people, or fermenters that can brew beer or anthrax. Uranium, enriched to 3%, is effective nuclear fuel, and with a little extra time in a centrifuge, can be enriched to 90%, which is an effective core for a nuclear weapon.
Iran has no need for actual nuclear fuel. Its energy needs are more than met by its oil and gas reserves, and if it really wanted nuclear fuel it could buy it (at a substantial U.N. discount) from any other nuclear power in the world. What they clearly want is a bomb. The problem is, they want to build a bomb because they fear for their security- specifically, they fear an American invasion. Of course, we only really want to invade them if they try to build a bomb. Is this sounding circular?
The point is that every time we start beating our chests and saying Iranian nukes are "unacceptable" and practice dive-bombing missions in the Persian Gulf, we give them more of an incentive to build a bomb. And every time they get closer to a bomb, we get more nervous and ramp up our military posturing. In a poorly-covered press conference today, Ahmadinejad showed us that there are consequences Iran fears that don't involve invasion.
I'd like to see a carrot-and-stick approach being adopted (similar to what was previously attempted) but the old military stick replaced with a stick of unacceptably harsh sanctions. We address their security concerns- meet with them on low levels, quietly outline how badly we want to get out of Iraq, and maybe (God forbid) eat a little humble pie on our regional ambitions. One thing that is near-unacceptable to Rumsfeld, but would go a long way towards defusing the Iran situation, would be a quiet pledge to abstain from establishing permanent military bases in Iraq.
You're not going to see Iran giving up its nuclear program under any circumstances. But what we could work for (if President Bush weren't messianicly obsessed with the invasion of Iran and didn't see it as his "true legacy") would be a steady defusing of the nuclear tensions in the area and a return on the Iranian side to actually-peaceful nuclear power. This is not going to happen by addressing their energy concerns, it's going to happen by making concessions and working towards fixing their security concerns. Could America lose some military influence in the area? Definitely. But is avoiding that loss worth another war we can't afford, a war that would ignite global Islamic tensions and unleash a tidal wave of new terrorists? Definitely not.
So a little lower down the bill from the nuclear posturing was a proposal for the U.S. and Iran to hold bilateral talks on the best way to stabilize the Iraq situation. Somewhat disingenuously, Iran's President Ahmadinejad (see? I got the name right) said today that there was "no need" because the Iraqi compromise candidate for Prime Minister, Jawad al-Maliki, was forming what Ahmadinejad called "a permanent government of Iraq."
Okay, I'll wait until you all stop laughing. Ahmadinejad (while crazy) is certainly not stupid, and obviously he realizes that a new government is not going to be able to turn on the lights, get the sewers working, and stop the festival of destruction that insurgents are constantly celebrating on the streets of Iraq. And since they can't do that, the security concerns that the U.S. and Iran share, are not going to go away. What this boils down to is, Ahmadinejad is just being a jerk. Go figure.
But in his statement on the need (or lack thereof) for bilateral talks on security in Iraq, Ahmadinejad said something very interesting on the possibility of sanctions against his country. Keep in mind, the Bush administration is publicly pushing diplomacy while busily preparing for all-out war. He said, "I think it is very unlikely for them to be so stupid to do that [impose sanctions,]" and continued, "I think even the two or three countries who oppose us are wise enough not to resort to such a big mistake."
In the words of Jon Stewart, "Whaaaa?" Ahmadinejad has claimed that his country has the right to enrich as much uranium as it wants (highly enriched uranium, by the way, is one of two excellent ways to make a nuclear weapon.) He's been testing nuclear-capable missiles equipped with countermeasures that could dodge Israeli air defenses. He's announced the production of a nuclear-capable torpedo that could take out one of our carrier battle groups. And he's saying that sanctions are intolerable?
Let's get this straight. Sanctions do not hurt us. Hell, we've had sanctions in place against Tehran since their fundamentalist college students decided to hold an Iranian frat party and invaded the American embassy. If we could convince other countries (not Russia, since they've got lucrative energy contracts with Iran) such as France, China, India, and Pakistan to impose sanctions, we might actually be able to shut down this lunatic's nuclear program.
What we're claiming is that Ahmadinejad doesn't have the right to a nuclear weapon. He's saying that he's not building one, and we're trying to take away his right to peaceful nuclear technology and that his country has the right to produce their own nuclear fuel. (Why a country that sits on a vast wealth of oil and gas reserves needs nuclear fuel so badly, I'll never know.) Of course, if we do attack him, he threatens all kinds of outlandish doom for America, most of which has a decidedly radioactive theme.
The real problem is that enriching nuclear fuel is the height of dual-use technology. Dual-use technologies are capable of being used either for peaceful or warlike purposes, like pesticide components that can kill bugs or (with a little tweaking) people, or fermenters that can brew beer or anthrax. Uranium, enriched to 3%, is effective nuclear fuel, and with a little extra time in a centrifuge, can be enriched to 90%, which is an effective core for a nuclear weapon.
Iran has no need for actual nuclear fuel. Its energy needs are more than met by its oil and gas reserves, and if it really wanted nuclear fuel it could buy it (at a substantial U.N. discount) from any other nuclear power in the world. What they clearly want is a bomb. The problem is, they want to build a bomb because they fear for their security- specifically, they fear an American invasion. Of course, we only really want to invade them if they try to build a bomb. Is this sounding circular?
The point is that every time we start beating our chests and saying Iranian nukes are "unacceptable" and practice dive-bombing missions in the Persian Gulf, we give them more of an incentive to build a bomb. And every time they get closer to a bomb, we get more nervous and ramp up our military posturing. In a poorly-covered press conference today, Ahmadinejad showed us that there are consequences Iran fears that don't involve invasion.
I'd like to see a carrot-and-stick approach being adopted (similar to what was previously attempted) but the old military stick replaced with a stick of unacceptably harsh sanctions. We address their security concerns- meet with them on low levels, quietly outline how badly we want to get out of Iraq, and maybe (God forbid) eat a little humble pie on our regional ambitions. One thing that is near-unacceptable to Rumsfeld, but would go a long way towards defusing the Iran situation, would be a quiet pledge to abstain from establishing permanent military bases in Iraq.
You're not going to see Iran giving up its nuclear program under any circumstances. But what we could work for (if President Bush weren't messianicly obsessed with the invasion of Iran and didn't see it as his "true legacy") would be a steady defusing of the nuclear tensions in the area and a return on the Iranian side to actually-peaceful nuclear power. This is not going to happen by addressing their energy concerns, it's going to happen by making concessions and working towards fixing their security concerns. Could America lose some military influence in the area? Definitely. But is avoiding that loss worth another war we can't afford, a war that would ignite global Islamic tensions and unleash a tidal wave of new terrorists? Definitely not.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Ha!
Did I call it or did I call it? McClellan's toast. Also, don't expect to see Karl Rove going anywhere. He's working more on "campaign issues" now? Everything in Washington is a campaign issue. He might not stay as visible but Uncle Karl is still going to be looking over George's shoulder.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
"I'm the Decider"
This has had me chuckling all freakin' day long. Bush declared, "I'm the decider, and I decide what is best" when it comes to White House personnel issues. Apparently, the national news and wire services are getting a laugh out of it too, because when he spouts a Bushism on the subject of the week's news cycle, it's just too good to pass up.
On a slightly more important note, Bush has been noticeably absent from the role of "decider" with the recent shakeups in the White House staff. The new Chief of Staff, Josh Bolten, recently told anyone who was going to leave the staff to do it now, so it didn't appear that they were being forced out later on. The Chief of Staff is the real center of power behind any President (or most- in this case, I think Dick Cheney's the real driving force.)
It occurs to me that the President is perfectly content to have the support personnel in the White House get shuffled around, since the guy really doesn't listen to anyone except his chief advisers anyway, and they aren't going anywhere. There has been great demand for a shakeup at the White House (primarily espoused, actually, by Republican strategists who want to see the President do a better job.) But in all likelihood, any personnel shakeups are just going to be window dressing. I think the worst we could expect would be the departure of Scott McClellan, who is almost universally despised by the White House press corps.
But since the big shots are going to keep running the show, "shakeups" are going to happen on a less-visible level. If I were a mid-level White House functionary, I would not be putting a down payment on anything bigger than a Happy Meal right about now.
On a slightly more important note, Bush has been noticeably absent from the role of "decider" with the recent shakeups in the White House staff. The new Chief of Staff, Josh Bolten, recently told anyone who was going to leave the staff to do it now, so it didn't appear that they were being forced out later on. The Chief of Staff is the real center of power behind any President (or most- in this case, I think Dick Cheney's the real driving force.)
It occurs to me that the President is perfectly content to have the support personnel in the White House get shuffled around, since the guy really doesn't listen to anyone except his chief advisers anyway, and they aren't going anywhere. There has been great demand for a shakeup at the White House (primarily espoused, actually, by Republican strategists who want to see the President do a better job.) But in all likelihood, any personnel shakeups are just going to be window dressing. I think the worst we could expect would be the departure of Scott McClellan, who is almost universally despised by the White House press corps.
But since the big shots are going to keep running the show, "shakeups" are going to happen on a less-visible level. If I were a mid-level White House functionary, I would not be putting a down payment on anything bigger than a Happy Meal right about now.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
The Donald
Has it occurred to anyone what a phenomenally bad job Donald Rumsfeld has to be doing, for his commanders to complain about him?
This was actually brought up in Hersh's New Yorker article that I mentioned a few days ago, buried in one paragraph maybe halfway through. The civilian leadership at the Pentagon, or OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) is pushing very hard to keep tactical nuclear weapons on the table as an option against Iran. And the military leadership in the Pentagon is institutionally opposed to this. As much as some of us on the left think that the military always wants to light off its biggest firecrackers given the chance, those with their fingers on the button (actually a series of keys) are very cautious about even talking about nuclear usage.
This is a connection that I hadn't seen until tonight, when it hit me. The Pentagon leadership is clearly unhappy with Donald Rumsfeld, who is pushing nuclear first use (a highly aggressive doctrine in the world of strategic policy) against Iran in "contingency plans." The Joint Chiefs have actually discussed a public dissent against the OSD (all deniable, of course.)
And now a chorus of Pentagon officials (all recently departed) speak out about how Donald Rumsfeld is doing a bad job? Maybe these two things aren't a coincidence. The war planning against Iran is clearly kicking into high gear, and there are serious concerns in the military about its course (and the ways it might be fought.) Maybe these anti-Rumsfeld voices might have been pushed by current Pentagon brass to try to weaken him, interfering with Rumsfeld's ability to plan a nuclear attack.
It definitely got me thinking.
This was actually brought up in Hersh's New Yorker article that I mentioned a few days ago, buried in one paragraph maybe halfway through. The civilian leadership at the Pentagon, or OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) is pushing very hard to keep tactical nuclear weapons on the table as an option against Iran. And the military leadership in the Pentagon is institutionally opposed to this. As much as some of us on the left think that the military always wants to light off its biggest firecrackers given the chance, those with their fingers on the button (actually a series of keys) are very cautious about even talking about nuclear usage.
This is a connection that I hadn't seen until tonight, when it hit me. The Pentagon leadership is clearly unhappy with Donald Rumsfeld, who is pushing nuclear first use (a highly aggressive doctrine in the world of strategic policy) against Iran in "contingency plans." The Joint Chiefs have actually discussed a public dissent against the OSD (all deniable, of course.)
And now a chorus of Pentagon officials (all recently departed) speak out about how Donald Rumsfeld is doing a bad job? Maybe these two things aren't a coincidence. The war planning against Iran is clearly kicking into high gear, and there are serious concerns in the military about its course (and the ways it might be fought.) Maybe these anti-Rumsfeld voices might have been pushed by current Pentagon brass to try to weaken him, interfering with Rumsfeld's ability to plan a nuclear attack.
It definitely got me thinking.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Nuclear Issues
There has been a lot of talk about Seymour Hersh’s article in this week’s New Yorker, which interviews a bunch of anonymous sources within the Bush Administration, the Pentagon, and political circles throughout Washington on the subject of Iran. There are a couple major points. The administration refuses to allow Iran to get nuclear weapons, regardless of what it has to do to stop them. The administration believes that a bombing campaign will endear us to the hearts and minds of Iranians and that 1.2 billion Muslims around the world will not be pissed about this. And (over the violent objections of the Pentagon) they are willing to use tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s nuclear-production facilities.
This. Is. Bad. Contained within the article is one source’s report that Bush wants to do what no Republican or Democratic president would have the courage to do in the future- effect full regime change in Iran. He supposedly wants this to be his legacy.
Before I go too far here, I should point out that it's a little shaky to base an enormous article full of groundbreaking foreign policy conclusions on a body of sources, of whom 75% insist on anonymity. I was always taught that with every anonymous source, the credibility of your articles goes down a little more. True, these folks probably need to protect their jobs, but if no one is willing to go on the record with their concerns, apparently, no one is too worked up yet.
Obviously the Bush administration came out with guns blazing (in a figurative sense) insisting diplomacy was their chosen track and the crisis could be resolved peacefully. It all rang a bit hollow in the context of Hersh’s article, and it didn’t help that the president of Iran (whose name is totally impossible to pronounce and I feel hypocritical trying to type) had made an enormous speech earlier in the week claiming that his country had “joined the nuclear club,” which I mentioned yesterday.
(If you want a really funny bit of trivia, go back to CNN.com or the AP or wherever and look up some pictures of the Iranian president delivering his “nuclear club” speech. In what I find incredibly hilarious, he’s giving the “we’re a nuclear nation now” speech in front of a mural full of white doves and peace signs. Unbelievable.)
On an immediate level, I get nervous because of the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Whether or not U.S. Navy aircraft have actually been practicing nuclear dive-bombing in the Gulf, there’s something called “the nuclear taboo” in international politics. There’s an unspoken agreement that, since Nagasaki, nuclear weapons should never actually be used. They can be threatened, of course- but they should remain essentially a defensive technology, making the cost of invasion or attack on a nuclear state unacceptable high.
If we break the nuclear taboo, we shatter one of the fundamental tenets of world peace for the last 60 years and permanently undermine the international non-proliferation effort. It would be a case of “do as I say, not as I do” that ended in a mushroom cloud, and America would cement its place on the world stage as an untrustworthy evil empire.
But here’s what spooks me even more than the use of nuclear weapons, on a broader level. There seem to be credible portions of Hersh’s article pointing to a Bush-administration assumption that the Iranians are going to rise up and welcome us as liberators. Never mind that the Shiite majority in Iraq is going to start a civil war (okay, more of a civil war) if we go after Iran. The Bush administration has learned absolutely nothing from their experience in Iraq. Muslim fundamentalists are going to fight us until the entire country is a graveyard and they’ll be thrilled to do it, too.
Most Democrats agree that, even though we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, we’re going to have to clean up the mess that this administration made. And that’s smart. But I can see a major fight brewing, especially if Congress’s Republican majority gets shaved thinner or even eliminated this fall, when the Bush rhetoric starts to escalate towards action. We cannot afford to go to war with Iran. The rest of the world will go from distrusting us to actively balancing their forces against our military. The international leadership we have accumulated since World War II will crumble before our eyes, and the economy, school systems, and homeland security (which we’ll desperately need) will be under-funded to a laughable extent.
The only chance we have of preventing this from happening (and, at this rate, it will probably happen) is a Congress, either Democratic or moderately Republican, which is willing to stand up to the President and tell him and his advisors that the country is not going to support this. Iran having a nuclear weapon would be extremely, extremely bad. That is true. However, going to war with them to prevent that from happening would destroy the tattered remnants of our credibility in the wider world and strain our relationships with key allies like Britain and western Europe to the breaking point.
This. Is. Bad. Contained within the article is one source’s report that Bush wants to do what no Republican or Democratic president would have the courage to do in the future- effect full regime change in Iran. He supposedly wants this to be his legacy.
Before I go too far here, I should point out that it's a little shaky to base an enormous article full of groundbreaking foreign policy conclusions on a body of sources, of whom 75% insist on anonymity. I was always taught that with every anonymous source, the credibility of your articles goes down a little more. True, these folks probably need to protect their jobs, but if no one is willing to go on the record with their concerns, apparently, no one is too worked up yet.
Obviously the Bush administration came out with guns blazing (in a figurative sense) insisting diplomacy was their chosen track and the crisis could be resolved peacefully. It all rang a bit hollow in the context of Hersh’s article, and it didn’t help that the president of Iran (whose name is totally impossible to pronounce and I feel hypocritical trying to type) had made an enormous speech earlier in the week claiming that his country had “joined the nuclear club,” which I mentioned yesterday.
(If you want a really funny bit of trivia, go back to CNN.com or the AP or wherever and look up some pictures of the Iranian president delivering his “nuclear club” speech. In what I find incredibly hilarious, he’s giving the “we’re a nuclear nation now” speech in front of a mural full of white doves and peace signs. Unbelievable.)
On an immediate level, I get nervous because of the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Whether or not U.S. Navy aircraft have actually been practicing nuclear dive-bombing in the Gulf, there’s something called “the nuclear taboo” in international politics. There’s an unspoken agreement that, since Nagasaki, nuclear weapons should never actually be used. They can be threatened, of course- but they should remain essentially a defensive technology, making the cost of invasion or attack on a nuclear state unacceptable high.
If we break the nuclear taboo, we shatter one of the fundamental tenets of world peace for the last 60 years and permanently undermine the international non-proliferation effort. It would be a case of “do as I say, not as I do” that ended in a mushroom cloud, and America would cement its place on the world stage as an untrustworthy evil empire.
But here’s what spooks me even more than the use of nuclear weapons, on a broader level. There seem to be credible portions of Hersh’s article pointing to a Bush-administration assumption that the Iranians are going to rise up and welcome us as liberators. Never mind that the Shiite majority in Iraq is going to start a civil war (okay, more of a civil war) if we go after Iran. The Bush administration has learned absolutely nothing from their experience in Iraq. Muslim fundamentalists are going to fight us until the entire country is a graveyard and they’ll be thrilled to do it, too.
Most Democrats agree that, even though we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, we’re going to have to clean up the mess that this administration made. And that’s smart. But I can see a major fight brewing, especially if Congress’s Republican majority gets shaved thinner or even eliminated this fall, when the Bush rhetoric starts to escalate towards action. We cannot afford to go to war with Iran. The rest of the world will go from distrusting us to actively balancing their forces against our military. The international leadership we have accumulated since World War II will crumble before our eyes, and the economy, school systems, and homeland security (which we’ll desperately need) will be under-funded to a laughable extent.
The only chance we have of preventing this from happening (and, at this rate, it will probably happen) is a Congress, either Democratic or moderately Republican, which is willing to stand up to the President and tell him and his advisors that the country is not going to support this. Iran having a nuclear weapon would be extremely, extremely bad. That is true. However, going to war with them to prevent that from happening would destroy the tattered remnants of our credibility in the wider world and strain our relationships with key allies like Britain and western Europe to the breaking point.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Positive Omens
The immigration debate right now has me very happy for one particular reason. The reason George Bush won the White House in 2004 was The Base. I’ve written about this before- it’s the evangelical roots of the Base, its ability to shut out economic problems and foreign policy disasters in favor of unity over comparatively pointless social lightning rods, along with its friendly laissez-faire business philosophy, that fuels the Republican Party.
So immigration reform is the perfect issue to rip the right’s little Coalition of the Willing apart. You’ve got big business and Republican moderates on one side, who want illegal immigrants in the country because they’re good for the economy. On the other side, you’ve got hard-right conservatives who want to make it a deportable felony to be an illegal immigrant and want to build an Israeli-style border fence through the desert.
Here’s a rare glimpse of me-as-hard-liner. I actually support the hard-right conservatives on this one. If people come into this country illegally, we really ought to make it illegal. When you fly in, we don’t just say, “We’d really prefer you come through immigration,” but let people walk through to the taxi stand anyway. We don’t put up a sign that says “Welcome to America” on the highway from Mexico and just wave people through. But if you’re an illegal and you’ve been here for more than a few years, we ought to give you a chance to become a citizen. I think that people who sneak through illegally shouldn’t run around with the claim that “we’re Americans, too.” Uh, no. Not yet. And it’s not racism or bias to expect that people who illegally entered the country to maybe make some amends for doing that.
But it doesn’t really matter what I think. The fact is, the Republican Base is split cleanly in two on this one. Republicans are walking a ridiculous tightrope to ensure they don’t upset too many of their core voters, but they don’t know how many of their core voters are on one side of the debate or the other! They know that all of them are anti-abortion, most are anti-gay marriage, and most are pro-gun, but immigration?
The real problem, to be honest, is that Republican money says illegals are good, and Republican voters say illegals are bad, and that’s not a winning combination.
Here’s the other interesting thing. Iran announced today that they were “joining the nuclear club,” purportedly by enriching uranium. But they chose their words carefully. The Nuclear Club means, in everybody’s mind, the club of countries with nuclear weapons. They’re going to have a bomb soon, and they’ve got weapons with the advanced delivery systems to have an offensive capability. This represents (alongside North Korea) one of the most fundamental failures of the Bush foreign policy. They got nukes while we screwed around in a country that wasn’t even trying to get them in the first place. Good job, George.
The point is, the Republican Party is getting pulled in too many directions. 63% of Americans want a Democratic Congress this fall, and if things keep going in the direction the Bush administration is busily pushing them, we’re going to get one.
So immigration reform is the perfect issue to rip the right’s little Coalition of the Willing apart. You’ve got big business and Republican moderates on one side, who want illegal immigrants in the country because they’re good for the economy. On the other side, you’ve got hard-right conservatives who want to make it a deportable felony to be an illegal immigrant and want to build an Israeli-style border fence through the desert.
Here’s a rare glimpse of me-as-hard-liner. I actually support the hard-right conservatives on this one. If people come into this country illegally, we really ought to make it illegal. When you fly in, we don’t just say, “We’d really prefer you come through immigration,” but let people walk through to the taxi stand anyway. We don’t put up a sign that says “Welcome to America” on the highway from Mexico and just wave people through. But if you’re an illegal and you’ve been here for more than a few years, we ought to give you a chance to become a citizen. I think that people who sneak through illegally shouldn’t run around with the claim that “we’re Americans, too.” Uh, no. Not yet. And it’s not racism or bias to expect that people who illegally entered the country to maybe make some amends for doing that.
But it doesn’t really matter what I think. The fact is, the Republican Base is split cleanly in two on this one. Republicans are walking a ridiculous tightrope to ensure they don’t upset too many of their core voters, but they don’t know how many of their core voters are on one side of the debate or the other! They know that all of them are anti-abortion, most are anti-gay marriage, and most are pro-gun, but immigration?
The real problem, to be honest, is that Republican money says illegals are good, and Republican voters say illegals are bad, and that’s not a winning combination.
Here’s the other interesting thing. Iran announced today that they were “joining the nuclear club,” purportedly by enriching uranium. But they chose their words carefully. The Nuclear Club means, in everybody’s mind, the club of countries with nuclear weapons. They’re going to have a bomb soon, and they’ve got weapons with the advanced delivery systems to have an offensive capability. This represents (alongside North Korea) one of the most fundamental failures of the Bush foreign policy. They got nukes while we screwed around in a country that wasn’t even trying to get them in the first place. Good job, George.
The point is, the Republican Party is getting pulled in too many directions. 63% of Americans want a Democratic Congress this fall, and if things keep going in the direction the Bush administration is busily pushing them, we’re going to get one.
Sunday, March 05, 2006
The Politics of Life or Death
Democrat John Giannetti represents a number of Washington suburbs in the Maryland General Assembly. He’s a freshman state senator, and while he’s a Democrat, he has a thoroughly crappy record on gun control. He voted against a number of common-sense gun control measures, including a firearm accountability system and the assault weapons ban. Basically, the guy likes his weapons a little too much to be a good Dem.
What’s weird is that Giannetti represents, at least in part, Prince George’s County. For those of you who don’t listen to rap music or know the Mid-Atlantic very well, Prince George’s (better known as “PGC”) is one of the most violent municipalities in America, with a murder rate that’s starting to play in the same league as Baltimore. Last year, PGC (with a population of 850,000) went up to 173 murders, while Baltimore fell to 269 with 650,000 residents. PG is rapidly rivaling “The City That Bleeds” as one of the most dangerous places in America.
(If you’re interested in learning more about how dangerous these “suburbs” can actually be, Gory Prince George’s does a pretty good job of tracking violence in the county, in the same manner that Baltimore’s City Paper tracks them with “Murder Ink.”)
Here’s the point. PG Police Chief Melvin High repeatedly stressed the need to take guns off the street, even instituting the uncreatively-named “Take Away Guns,” or TAG program. Yet Giannetti seems to do an outstanding job of undercutting the safety of his own constituents by denying police officers the common-sense gun control laws that they desperately need.
So the Brady Campaign has targeted (forgive the expression) Giannetti in this primary, hoping to replace him with, in their words, “someone who will make sensible gun laws a priority.” It’s set to be an ugly race between him and Jim Rosapepe, a member of the University of Maryland Board of Regents who’s practically salivating at the chance to attack Giannetti’s gun control record.
So last Wednesday night, Rosapepe was at dinner in Annapolis when he started choking. A friend tried the Heimlich maneuver to remove the airway obstruction, but it didn’t work. Suddenly, someone waiting at the take-out counter ran over and performed it correctly. The food came loose and Rosapepe’s life was saved.
As you probably guessed, the guy at the take-out counter was none other than Giannetti. He didn’t recognize his opponent until afterwards. Maryland’s Senate President expressed his hope that the incident would lead to a much more “uplifting” campaign.
I just find it funny that Democrats who hate each other will jump in to save each other’s lives, while Republicans will shoot their campaign donors in the face.
What’s weird is that Giannetti represents, at least in part, Prince George’s County. For those of you who don’t listen to rap music or know the Mid-Atlantic very well, Prince George’s (better known as “PGC”) is one of the most violent municipalities in America, with a murder rate that’s starting to play in the same league as Baltimore. Last year, PGC (with a population of 850,000) went up to 173 murders, while Baltimore fell to 269 with 650,000 residents. PG is rapidly rivaling “The City That Bleeds” as one of the most dangerous places in America.
(If you’re interested in learning more about how dangerous these “suburbs” can actually be, Gory Prince George’s does a pretty good job of tracking violence in the county, in the same manner that Baltimore’s City Paper tracks them with “Murder Ink.”)
Here’s the point. PG Police Chief Melvin High repeatedly stressed the need to take guns off the street, even instituting the uncreatively-named “Take Away Guns,” or TAG program. Yet Giannetti seems to do an outstanding job of undercutting the safety of his own constituents by denying police officers the common-sense gun control laws that they desperately need.
So the Brady Campaign has targeted (forgive the expression) Giannetti in this primary, hoping to replace him with, in their words, “someone who will make sensible gun laws a priority.” It’s set to be an ugly race between him and Jim Rosapepe, a member of the University of Maryland Board of Regents who’s practically salivating at the chance to attack Giannetti’s gun control record.
So last Wednesday night, Rosapepe was at dinner in Annapolis when he started choking. A friend tried the Heimlich maneuver to remove the airway obstruction, but it didn’t work. Suddenly, someone waiting at the take-out counter ran over and performed it correctly. The food came loose and Rosapepe’s life was saved.
As you probably guessed, the guy at the take-out counter was none other than Giannetti. He didn’t recognize his opponent until afterwards. Maryland’s Senate President expressed his hope that the incident would lead to a much more “uplifting” campaign.
I just find it funny that Democrats who hate each other will jump in to save each other’s lives, while Republicans will shoot their campaign donors in the face.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Globalization and Other Minor Issues
So, I’ve decided to pick back up on this thing. Here goes nothing.
I just got back from a lecture by the NYT’s Tom Friedman in Baltimore. He’s still in the process of promoting his book The World Is Flat, which approaches the subject of globalization with wide-eyed, almost childish optimism through the lens of information technology. He’s a smart guy and by the end, I was pretty well on board with his basic thesis- that IT technologies developed in the last 15 years are going to reshape the world on the scale of electricity.
My personal gripe was that he never really addressed the problem of access, since information technology is still, fundamentally, a first-world luxury. Though terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan might use Outlook Express, very few of Africa’s 850 million people even have access to the Internet in the first place. And given the deplorable condition of education and human rights in the third world, a high-speed Internet connection doesn’t level the playing field for an illiterate subsistence farmer.
Regardless of the hole (or hole) in Friedman’s arguments, his talk got me thinking about what seems like a gaping double standard in American trade policy. The Bush administration is a loud proponent of globalization, and if you listen to Scott McClellan, you’d believe that we’re on the march across the planet to spread social and economic freedom. The people of Iraq might not believe it, but at least Bush does.
For all of its crappy implementation, globalization a la Bush is an admirable goal. I can’t deny that a world with fewer trade barriers and increased global communication would be more productive and (since it would be so interdependent) probably a little more peaceful. But the problem is, America in general (and Bush in particular) don’t quite get that it’s a two-way street.
America is great at doing things, but in the last 30 years, we’ve lost the competitive edge in making things. And we tend to be pretty crappy when it comes to admitting that other people do a better job. From Canadian lumber to Korean steel, the United States has been trying to prevent inexpensive foreign goods of comparable quality from making it into our markets, using a battery of legal (and illegal) measures.
Let’s start with the Korean steel. Up until the winter of 2003, the United States was putting heavy tariffs on foreign steel (especially East Asian products coming out of South Korea, Japan and China.) The American steel firms couldn’t effectively compete without the U.S. government’s help, and they had plenty of friends in that government. Eventually, however, this proved counterproductive- the WTO came pretty close to slapping sanctions on American exports and the Bush administration buckled and removed the tariffs. We didn’t even pretend they were legal.
On the other hand, with Canadian timber, we have a semi-legal method of recourse to supposed predatory trade practices known as “anti-dumping legislation.” Foreign goods sold significantly below the current market value of domestic goods can (under WTO rules) be subjected to tariffs. In theory, this prevents countries like China or India from flooding other markets with dirt-cheap goods and driving domestic manufacturers out of business. In practice, however, it’s usually used as a tool by the United States to keep foreign competitors from getting too competitive, as in the case of the Canadian lumber industry.
We’ve invoked anti-dumping protections against Canadian wood products because (according to Congress) their government owns 95% of the Canadian timberland and leases it to local mills for about half of market value. Granted, it sounds pretty bad. Our logging industry, it’s true, can’t really compete with subsidized Canadian timber. Isn’t Canada violating the founding principles of free trade? What about NAFTA?
Well, not really, if you consider the fact that every taxpayer spends around $500 a year to subsidize America’s farmers. American farm subsidies are bad for our economy, and bad for everyone else. The vast majority of the money goes to support large corporate farms that reap- quite literally- billions of dollars in tax breaks every year (think of what that money could be doing if we invested it in education, or maybe small-business loans.)
So, not only is tax time pretty much stress-free, but every American farmer gets a guaranteed minimum price at which to sell their crops. So when we’re done selling all this cheap produce at home, it gets shipped off to the rest of the world and- you guessed it- dumped on domestic markets, bankrupting local farmers.
It’s true that Canada is being pretty unfair with the softwood lumber issue, but the damage they’d be doing to our logging communities is positively laughable compared to the damage we’re doing to local farmers around the world, and all to subsidize a nearly-extinct conception of the “family farm” that has been replaced by massive corporate entities.
All of this makes me a little bit surprised to see George Bush stepping into the fray on (at least what I perceive to be) the right side of the globalization debate, in regards to this ridiculous controversy about port ownership. I guess, after six years of unmitigated disasters, he had to get one right. Monkeys on a typewriter, maybe.
In terms of security, it really, truly, does not matter who owns the company, who owns the company, who owns the companies, who own American ports. American port security was crappy before 9/11. It remains crappy after 9/11. And regardless of whether a company based in the United Arab Emirates buys the British firm that’s been controlling the ports of Miami, Baltimore, Newark, Philadelphia, New Orleans and New York.
The main, articulated fear is that a company based in the same country as two of the 9/11 hijackers would somehow be tainted by Islamic extremism. This could, in theory, compromise port security and allow terrorists and weapons into the country. This is crap. More specifically, this is pure, unadulterated xenophobia, allowing Congressional politicians to grandstand during an election year about a homeland security issue that is really quite pointless. Okay, some of the hijackers came from Dubai. Well, shoe-bomber Richard Reid and Timothy McVeigh came from Britain and New York State. How about we start preventing British people and New Yorkers from owning transportation assets?
I live in one of those cities. I am not worried about who owns the port. The Bush administration is spending billions of dollars on a pointless war in Iraq that could have been spent (among a zillion other things) on equipping those ports with more ICE inspectors, radiological detection devices, and X-ray systems. The likelihood of a nuclear bomb making into my city by sea, is not going to change based upon the nationality of who owns the port. What interest does any company, be it based in Dubai, Manhattan, or Outer Mongolia, have in allowing terrorists to blow up its assets?
If we really intend to promote freedom and free trade throughout the world, we’re going to have to suck it up and play by the rules that we want everyone else to play by. America is historically bad at this. Take national security. We don’t want to allow anyone else to have nuclear weapons, but we’re perfectly comfortable not only retaining them, but threatening to use them. We don’t want to allow cheap foreign products into our markets but we have no problem flooding others with our exports.
As David Brooks of the NYT mentioned, the people who own the ports in Dubai are some of the few Arab folks who still like us, and now we’re pissing them off. If we’re going to get behind globalization and the free flow of economy activity, we have to play by the rules, and that means we’re not always going to come out on top.
I just got back from a lecture by the NYT’s Tom Friedman in Baltimore. He’s still in the process of promoting his book The World Is Flat, which approaches the subject of globalization with wide-eyed, almost childish optimism through the lens of information technology. He’s a smart guy and by the end, I was pretty well on board with his basic thesis- that IT technologies developed in the last 15 years are going to reshape the world on the scale of electricity.
My personal gripe was that he never really addressed the problem of access, since information technology is still, fundamentally, a first-world luxury. Though terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan might use Outlook Express, very few of Africa’s 850 million people even have access to the Internet in the first place. And given the deplorable condition of education and human rights in the third world, a high-speed Internet connection doesn’t level the playing field for an illiterate subsistence farmer.
Regardless of the hole (or hole) in Friedman’s arguments, his talk got me thinking about what seems like a gaping double standard in American trade policy. The Bush administration is a loud proponent of globalization, and if you listen to Scott McClellan, you’d believe that we’re on the march across the planet to spread social and economic freedom. The people of Iraq might not believe it, but at least Bush does.
For all of its crappy implementation, globalization a la Bush is an admirable goal. I can’t deny that a world with fewer trade barriers and increased global communication would be more productive and (since it would be so interdependent) probably a little more peaceful. But the problem is, America in general (and Bush in particular) don’t quite get that it’s a two-way street.
America is great at doing things, but in the last 30 years, we’ve lost the competitive edge in making things. And we tend to be pretty crappy when it comes to admitting that other people do a better job. From Canadian lumber to Korean steel, the United States has been trying to prevent inexpensive foreign goods of comparable quality from making it into our markets, using a battery of legal (and illegal) measures.
Let’s start with the Korean steel. Up until the winter of 2003, the United States was putting heavy tariffs on foreign steel (especially East Asian products coming out of South Korea, Japan and China.) The American steel firms couldn’t effectively compete without the U.S. government’s help, and they had plenty of friends in that government. Eventually, however, this proved counterproductive- the WTO came pretty close to slapping sanctions on American exports and the Bush administration buckled and removed the tariffs. We didn’t even pretend they were legal.
On the other hand, with Canadian timber, we have a semi-legal method of recourse to supposed predatory trade practices known as “anti-dumping legislation.” Foreign goods sold significantly below the current market value of domestic goods can (under WTO rules) be subjected to tariffs. In theory, this prevents countries like China or India from flooding other markets with dirt-cheap goods and driving domestic manufacturers out of business. In practice, however, it’s usually used as a tool by the United States to keep foreign competitors from getting too competitive, as in the case of the Canadian lumber industry.
We’ve invoked anti-dumping protections against Canadian wood products because (according to Congress) their government owns 95% of the Canadian timberland and leases it to local mills for about half of market value. Granted, it sounds pretty bad. Our logging industry, it’s true, can’t really compete with subsidized Canadian timber. Isn’t Canada violating the founding principles of free trade? What about NAFTA?
Well, not really, if you consider the fact that every taxpayer spends around $500 a year to subsidize America’s farmers. American farm subsidies are bad for our economy, and bad for everyone else. The vast majority of the money goes to support large corporate farms that reap- quite literally- billions of dollars in tax breaks every year (think of what that money could be doing if we invested it in education, or maybe small-business loans.)
So, not only is tax time pretty much stress-free, but every American farmer gets a guaranteed minimum price at which to sell their crops. So when we’re done selling all this cheap produce at home, it gets shipped off to the rest of the world and- you guessed it- dumped on domestic markets, bankrupting local farmers.
It’s true that Canada is being pretty unfair with the softwood lumber issue, but the damage they’d be doing to our logging communities is positively laughable compared to the damage we’re doing to local farmers around the world, and all to subsidize a nearly-extinct conception of the “family farm” that has been replaced by massive corporate entities.
All of this makes me a little bit surprised to see George Bush stepping into the fray on (at least what I perceive to be) the right side of the globalization debate, in regards to this ridiculous controversy about port ownership. I guess, after six years of unmitigated disasters, he had to get one right. Monkeys on a typewriter, maybe.
In terms of security, it really, truly, does not matter who owns the company, who owns the company, who owns the companies, who own American ports. American port security was crappy before 9/11. It remains crappy after 9/11. And regardless of whether a company based in the United Arab Emirates buys the British firm that’s been controlling the ports of Miami, Baltimore, Newark, Philadelphia, New Orleans and New York.
The main, articulated fear is that a company based in the same country as two of the 9/11 hijackers would somehow be tainted by Islamic extremism. This could, in theory, compromise port security and allow terrorists and weapons into the country. This is crap. More specifically, this is pure, unadulterated xenophobia, allowing Congressional politicians to grandstand during an election year about a homeland security issue that is really quite pointless. Okay, some of the hijackers came from Dubai. Well, shoe-bomber Richard Reid and Timothy McVeigh came from Britain and New York State. How about we start preventing British people and New Yorkers from owning transportation assets?
I live in one of those cities. I am not worried about who owns the port. The Bush administration is spending billions of dollars on a pointless war in Iraq that could have been spent (among a zillion other things) on equipping those ports with more ICE inspectors, radiological detection devices, and X-ray systems. The likelihood of a nuclear bomb making into my city by sea, is not going to change based upon the nationality of who owns the port. What interest does any company, be it based in Dubai, Manhattan, or Outer Mongolia, have in allowing terrorists to blow up its assets?
If we really intend to promote freedom and free trade throughout the world, we’re going to have to suck it up and play by the rules that we want everyone else to play by. America is historically bad at this. Take national security. We don’t want to allow anyone else to have nuclear weapons, but we’re perfectly comfortable not only retaining them, but threatening to use them. We don’t want to allow cheap foreign products into our markets but we have no problem flooding others with our exports.
As David Brooks of the NYT mentioned, the people who own the ports in Dubai are some of the few Arab folks who still like us, and now we’re pissing them off. If we’re going to get behind globalization and the free flow of economy activity, we have to play by the rules, and that means we’re not always going to come out on top.
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