Categories
Humor The Web and Technology

I’m with #teamconan

Not only am I a fan of Conan, but Leno’s smugness – especially in light of all this – really pisses me off.

Conan O’Brien Image by Mike Mitchell licensed as “Show the world whose side you’re on! Feel free to use on blogs, twitter, etc.”

Categories
History

The Value of Military Innocence

Reviewing the new history of the Civil War by John Keegan, the eminent military historian of World War II, for Slate, Daniel W. Blight observes that some of Keegan’s key insights come from parallels he finds with World War II:

He invokes World War II as well, noting that Antietam was bloodier than D-Day or Iwo Jima, and reflects that Winston Churchill, an experienced soldier, declined in effectiveness as his war ensued, while Lincoln, a “military innocent,” learned and grew in ability as commander in chief as his war enveloped him.

That’s a fascinating historical judgment by Keegan – and one that my lesser knowledge of history also supports.

Categories
Criticism Domestic issues Health care History Politics The Opinionsphere

The Continued Failure of Right Wing Social Engineering

[digg-reddit-me]At some point it became part of the standard Republican playbook to criticize liberals for engaging in “social engineering.” Liberals – in this telling – see humans as perfectible creatures who just need the guidance of the a centralized state with scientific-minded engineers to become better. With proper planning and direction longstanding human problems could be taken care of and humankind would exist in a socialist utopia. This view was always a caricature – indeed an appropriation of a term created to describe the early efforts at deliberate manipulation of large populations through marketing and propaganda – from the Nazis to American corporations. But Republicans co-opted this term to describe the grand government projects taken on at the apex of mid-20th century liberalism, as in our hubris we sought to “engineer” enormous changes to the benefit of all society.

This story – this narrative framework – was influential because it struck a note of truth. Mid-2oth century American liberalism saw an exceedingly confident America which believed in the nearly limitless potential of American government action. After all, America – led by its government – had defeated a seemingly unstoppable enemy, pulled the nation and world out of a Great Depression, learned how to split atoms and create enormous destructive and productive power, finally begun to deal with the legacy of slavery, begun providing generous benefits to the elderly, and even sent a man to the moon. The declarations of American liberals of this time were bold and utopian. FDR declared that America must ensure that every individual in the world must have “freedom from want,” a sort of economic right. Lyndon Johnson declared War on Poverty! Richard Nixon (a realist in a liberal era) declared War on Cancer, War on Crime, and War on Drugs! Today this hopefulness seems painfully naive as we learned that every massive government “war” has had massive side-effects while not, as yet, achieving its desired result.

As confidence in government declined in the 1970s, the more thoughtful critics of this liberal tendency saw its core failing as hubris. They suggested a more modest approach in which government would act more as a gardener “cultivat[ing] a growth by providing the appropriate environment” rather than as some craftsman or engineer creating society anew through government coercion and radical changes.

But the Republicans who eventually took power on the wave of disgust, disappointment, resentment, and anger at liberalism’s excesses did not adopt this epistemologically modest approach. Reagan and his ilk replaced liberals’ confidence in the good government could do with the insistence that government was just getting in the way. Their conclusion was simple: Government wasn’t the solution to these problems – it was the problem! Rather than seeing the hubris of liberals as the problem, they thought liberals simply were certain about the wrong things. Their shorthand for this moral lesson was to accuse liberals of attempting “social engineering.” The solution was to cut taxes, to prune government, and to hold out the promise of slashing it eventually (to starve the beast.)

Politics though is about creating and shaping a society that we want to live in. It is less a matter of ideology and policy positions, and more about values. Right wingers saw that the problems they had identified as resulting from liberalism’s excesses did not cease as Republicans cut taxes and regulations and pulled the government back from involvement in the economy. Blaming liberal government action for upsetting the “natural” balance, right wingers yearned to shape society themselves in order to recreate what they had lost. They branded themselves as individualists even as they promoted the tyrannical, collectivist organizations commonly called corporations. From a complex web of ideological positions taken by the Republican Party to build their political coalition came a hodge-podge of goals which (though perhaps not cohering immediately) have solidified into an agenda of right wing social engineering. The Republicans began to use government to encourage the traditional nuclear family of a man, woman and 2 and 1/2 children; to promote and encourage a christianist lifestyle and increase the role and funding of religious institutions; to encouraged a particular brand of “rugged” individualism; and to aid the rise of American corporations at home and abroad.

The logical culmination of this new big government conservatism, this right wing social engineering, was the presidency of George W. Bush, as he increased the size of government mainly by outsourcing work and responsibilities to corporations, as he began 2 wars leading to 2 massive social engineering projects in the Middle East, as he allowed and encouraged government funding of faith-based charities, and most dramatically through his Ownership Society as he sought to transform America into a nation of homeowners with 401Ks and Health Care Savings Accounts instead of Social Security and Medicare and rentals. The right wing’s social engineering agenda extended past Bush though. The main right wing health care alternative adopted in some measure by Milton Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, and John McCain seeks to transform American society to make its citizens more individualistic. This alternative begins by eliminating tax credits for employer-sponsored health insurance and the encouragement of Health Savings Accounts and the evisceration of all regulations on the insurance industry (by allowing competition across state lines where most regulations exist thus creating a “race to the bottom” as states attempt to attract the health insurance industry.) It would culminate in the elimination of Medicare and Medicaid. Many on the right have also made clear their goal remains to obstruct any liberal attempt to solve the fiscal problem they have engineered to give them the opportunity to re-write the social contract.

Looking at current Republican agenda – you see a similar hubris to what they decried as liberals’ “social engineering” – as they seek to remake the entire health care sector and the economy.

Meanwhile, it is the Democrats who had adopted an epistemologically modest approach – of tinkering with our current system to try to save it rather than to provoke a crisis to remake society, tearing apart the social bargain between citizen and government.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

Categories
Uncategorized

No post today.

Due to my frustration with a work-related matter.

2parse will be back tomorrow with a post about Right Wing Social Engineering.

Categories
Criticism Humor Politics The Bush Legacy

John Yoo’s Scandalous Affair With George W. Bush!

Is it okay to laugh at a clever remark by a man who instituted torture in America with his infamous and incompetent “torture memos”? Well, when the line is this – I’d have to say sure. John Yoo as interviewed by Deborah Solomon for the New York Times, as she tries to press him for how close he was to George W. Bush – and he demurs, explaining that he was low-ranking rather than really answering the question:

Q: So you’re saying you were just one notch above an intern, you and Monica Lewinsky?
A: She was much closer to the president than I ever was.

Stay tuned for Jon Stewart’s interview of Yoo tonight. Given how Stewart has taken on the architects of the Iraq war when they appeared on the show, there seems little doubt he will go after Yoo regarding his extraordinary legal justifications for the expansion of the powers of the executive branch, and most specifically, for the torture memos. Yoo, for his part, seems as if he will try to dodge the questions with cute one-liners as he did in this interview – which he does rather well I would say.

[Image by sixes and sevens licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Criticism Politics Scandal-mongering The Media The Opinionsphere

What passes for journalism today is faux-outrage presented without any perspective.

[digg-reddit-me]Reading the New York Times over the weekend, I came across a story that neatly symbolized one way the mainstream media perverts the news:

Mark Leibovich has an almost self-reflectively parodic digression in his article on the Peter Orszag “scandal”:

“Everyone feels the need to say, ‘I’m really sorry I have to ask you about this’ and ‘I’m only carrying out orders from my boss,’ ” Mr. Baer said. (For the record: this reporter was only acting on orders from his boss.) And, of course, the Very Serious Media are not writing the Orszag Love-Child Story, they are merely writing about the media frenzy surrounding it.

The race to cover the scandal-of-the-day is one of the worst aspects of contemporary journalism – but the Orszag scandal is perhaps a fluffy variation of this dangerous habit. Where the danger lies is in how it affects political fortunes and policy. I am all for scandal-mongering about public officials – and invading their personal lives but only – as I wrote before in defense of indiscretion: “If the media wants to report on some lewd scandal, they can at least do their audience the favor of avoiding the hypocritical moral posturing and just revel in the tawdriness of it. It would at least be honest.” This faux-outrage – this sense that we must hold public officials to some imagined moral standard that has little to do with their actual job – is merely a crude excuse to allow “journalists” to cover tabloid gossip. Tabloid gossip is fun and interesting – but when it is always framed as a serious judgment on some public figure or policy – it disfigures the political conversation. You get the insanity of people claiming Bill Clinton is a bad president because he was an unfaithful husband. You get people trying to claim Tiger Woods held himself up as some moral role model when in fact, he just claimed he was a really good golfer. You get outrage over any statement deemed “insensitive” – from Harry Reid to Sonia Sotomayor to Trent Lott.

And much worse, when it comes to judging policies and legislation, journalists follow the same mentality – picking out scandalous elements at the expense of understanding what is going on. Death panels! Stimulus money going to “imaginary” (i.e. mistyped) districts! Emails from climate change scientists that “prove” it is a hoax! Bailouts to health insurance companies! Giant vampire squids searching for cash!

These stories are presented to the public as the story when in fact they are mere sideshows – hence the name given to the media-political atmosphere that arose under Bill Clinton and has remained until today: The Freak Show. This scandal-mongering creates reporting on policy that is entertaining but conveys a fundamentally limited view of what is actually being done and proposed. As Ezra Klein has pointed out:

[N]ewspapers work very hard to report things that are true, but they are less concerned with whether the overall impression from their reporting is a true impression.

The end result that we read day after day is faux-outrage presented without any perspective – with the citizenry being blocked from actually knowing what is going on behind the billowing smoke of scandal.

Categories
National Security Politics The War on Terrorism

Pinhead of the Week: NJ Dem Frank Lautenberg

From the Associated Press:

New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who was briefed on the arrest, said authorities found Jiang with “sheer, hard police work” of sifting through records and following leads. But he expressed anger that Jiang faces a charge he described as a “slap on the wrist” and will only be given a fine of about $500.

“This was a terrible deed in its outcome — it wasn’t some prank that didn’t do any harm — it did a lot of harm because it sent out an alert that people can get away with something like this,” Lautenberg said.

The senator called Jiang’s actions “premeditated” and said even though the his actions were relatively benign, “what he did was a terrible injustice” to the thousands of people who were inconvenienced. [my emphasis]

Follow this train of logic:

A guy wanted to kiss his girlfriend goodbye at the airport. Security was so lax, he was able to slip past to be with her in the secure zone. Many people were inconvenienced by this as the entire airport was briefly shut down. But the headline statement Lautenberg makes is that this man should be punished more harshly and that the deed “did a lot of harm because it sent out an alert that people can get away with something like this!”

There are two subjects here:

  1. The guy knowingly broke the rules to kiss his girlfriend goodbye – and this breach caused the airport to shut down. For this, it would make sense to levy a significant fine to ensure that others are less likely to do such things.
  2. Security was unconscionably lax to allow this to happen. This isn’t the guy’s fault – and it’s not his fault that his getting by security so easily “sent out an alert that people can get away with something like this.” The way to fix this is to fix security – and not to attack this guy for acting on an understandable impulse.

[Image by Bob F. licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
The Web and Technology

Brief Thoughts for the Week of 2010-01-08

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Categories
Domestic issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

The Rhetorical Phantoms of Their Own Making

Timothy Egan discusses Mitt Romney’s health care hypocrisy, and slams the Republican party with this comment that summarizes the Republican approach to Obama this year:

[T]he [Republican] party’s voice has been dominated by people who make things up, and then condemn the rhetorical phantoms of their making.

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Uncategorized

Must-Reads of the Week: Pete King, Manzi’s Thesis, Obama’s WoT, Literary Sex, and American Jeremiads

1. Pete King: Terrorist Sympathizer.

2. Manzi’s Provocative (& Conservative) Thesis. Jim Manzi wrote a really great piece that I was trying to figure out how to respond to for the National Interest – and it has gotten quite a lot of play in the opinionsphere. I found his piece rather compelling actually – as the description of a problem – although some commenators have pointed out some flaws in the statistics he used to back up his piece.

Read the responses by Jonathan Chait, Ross DouthatDemocracy in America, with Andrew Sullivan following it all closely and aggregating other responses (here, here, here, here…)

My sense now – without having fully delved into the back and forth and figured out who is right and wrong about the issues – is that Manzi confused his arguments a bit, massaging some data to back up one thesis when his real point was another. But he offers the first coherent conservative response to the world that Niall Ferguson described in an essay some months ago. (Ferguson had been bemoaning the fact that liberals had the only credible response to our globalizing world – but he tried to give the outlines of a conservative response.)

I’ll be writing more about this as time goes on – and in fact, it follows closely from the conclusions to my pieces on America’s fiscal crisis. (Introduction, Republicans, Democrats.)

3. Obama’s War on Terror. When Pete King told George Stephanopoulos that Obama’s mistakes in the War on Terrorism had lead to the attempted Christmas bombing, Stephanopoulos followed up and asked what specific steps King wanted Obama to take. King’s response was priceless: “I think one main thing would be to — just himself to use the word terrorism more often…” Thank you, Rep. King!

Peter Baker in an upcoming piece for the New York Times Magazine meanwhile reports on some of the many aspects of the Obama administration’s War on Terror – and how the administration sees Obama’s Cairo speech, its position on Israeli settlements, its outreach to Iran, its increased use of Predators and other military interventions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and its gradual shift to a more Rule of Law oriented approach at home are all part of a comprehensive strategy. One interesting tidbit from the piece comes as the incoming Obama administration and outgoing Bush administration coordinated their response to what were seen as credible reports of Somali terrorists traveling to Washington to attack Obama’s inauguration. The threat was serious enough – and the desire to maintain some continuity of government important enough that they took measures to ensure an orderly transition even if Obama, Bush, and all of the Cabinet members were taken out:

[E]veryone eventually agreed that Gates should stay away from the inauguration in a secret location. With no other member of Obama’s cabinet confirmed by the Senate, Gates — an incumbent cabinet officer who also had the imprimatur of the newly elected commander in chief — was the most logical person in the line of succession to take over the presidency should the worst happen.

4. Literary Sex. Katie Roiphe wrote a provocative column for the New York Times on how safe literary writing about sex has been since the much criticized Roth, Updike, et al. Ross Douthat followed up with some wry comment. And it all reminded me of this excellent blog post from Womanist Musings.

5. American Jeremiad. James Fallows writes an interesting piece from a more internationalist perspective that offers in its own way an informal counter to Manzi’s article above.