Category: The Bush Legacy

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Barack Obama Criticism Foreign Policy Health care National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Must-Reads: Uighurs, Gay in Middle School, Vidal, Larison, the Public Option, and the End of Pax Americana

The Worst of the Worst? Del Quinton Wilber tells the story of two of the “worst of the worst,” the Uighur brothers Bahtiyar Mahnut and Arkin Mahmud. Neither brother was affiliated with the Taliban or Al Qaeda or had any reason to bear ill will towards the United States before their long detention. Bahtiyar, the younger brother, recently turned down an offer from the nation of Palau to leave Guantanamo to stay and look after his older brother, who was captured and turned over to the United States only because he went searching for his brother at their parents’ request. Arkin is the only one of the Uighurs not to be invited to Palau because he has developed serious mental health issues while in American custody.

How Things Change. Benoit Denizet-Lewis in the New York Times wrote on Sunday about a new reality that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago – of gay and lesbian middle schoolers coming out. It’s hard to describe how moving the piece was in how it so clearly suggested progress (reporting on the happy side of the news without focusing on the bad.) Slate’s Culture Gabfest followed up with an excellent discussion of the issues suggested by the piece – and even managed to link it to Fox’s new hit Glee. (Relating to the link to Slate’s Culture Gabfest, I must apologize for the lack of a direct one. The podcast doesn’t seem to be posted anywhere that accessible, but if you search for or subscribe to Slate’s iTunes podcast feed, it will be readily accessible.) Relating to Glee and gay youth, I would also recommend this interview of the creator of Glee by Terry Gross.

Gore Vidal. I’m not sure I agree with anything Gore Vidal said in his interview with Tim Teeman for the Times of London, but he proved interesting time and again, speaking of his long series of supportive letters to Timothy McVeigh, his disappointment with Obama, and his conviction that America is “rotting away at a funereal pace” and that a military dictatorship is coming. His opinions carry a unique weight given his proximity to so many centers of power in his time – from presidents to Hollywood to the media, and his series of perspectives on the matter, as historian, intellectual, novelist, activist.

A Hawk versus a Sane Person. Daniel Larison demonstrates once again thatThe American Conservative is one of the few magazines out there providing a coherent conservative worldview instead of mere anti-Obama bile with his post comparing Obama’s and Bush’s foreign policies:

What conservative critics ignore and what Andrew only touches on towards the end is that the Bush administration oversaw setback after failure after defeat for American influence and power. Iran has become a far more influential regional power thanks to the folly of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, democracy fetishists helped to strengthen the hold of Hamas in Gaza to the detriment of Palestinians and Israelis, and Russophobes helped to encourage Saakashvili’s recklessness with talk of NATO membershop and provoked Russian ire with the recognition of Kosovo that led to thede facto permanent partition of an American ally. Hawks have routinely unleashed forces they do not understand, cannot control and are unwilling to contain, and they still have the gall to shout “Appeasement!” when someone else tries to repair some small measure of the damage they have done. Compared to this partial list of Bush’s major failures, Obama has done reasonably well simply by not persisting in some of his predecessor’s errors, but it is far too early to speak of success or payoff and it is a mistake to measure Obama’s success in the way that his supporters wish to do. [my emphasis]

The secret to understanding where so many conservative and right wing publications have failed is their failure to acknowledge – as Jesse Walker of the libertarian Reason magazine does that “Obama is no radical.”

The Dearth of Support for the Very Popular Public Option. Ezra Klein continues his excellent health care blogging with a post describing the problem of the distribution of support for the public option. Klein explains:

It’s not a coincidence that the chamber representing the American people will pass a bill including the public option while the chamber representing American acreage is likely to delete it. The public option has majority support. But a lot of that popularity comes because a lot of people live in liberal centers like California and New York. It actually doesn’t have a majority in Nebraska, where not very many people live, or, I’d guess, in North Dakota, where even fewer people live. In the American political system, it’s not enough to be popular among the voters. You also have to be popular among wide swaths of land. Didn’t you watch “Schoolhouse Rock”?

The political answer this suggests is to allow individual states (or states banding together) to create a public option within their borders – which not coincidentally is exactly where the debate is now headed.

Pax Americana. Michael Lind at Salon describes the end of Pax Americana. Lind gives short shrift however to defenders of American empire – never clearly articulating their point of view as he attempts to debunk it. For a rather effective defense of the alternate point of view, I would look to Niall Ferguson’s excellent Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. (Ferguson is rather influential among conservative circles, and was one of McCain’s advisors in the 2008 election.)

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Criticism National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Our “Small Freedoms”

[digg-reddit-me]I’ve kept a printout of this blog post from Andrew Sullivan for a long while now, meaning to comment on it – his reflective September 11 piece from earlier this year. I kept it because of this one sentence by Sullivan that moves me – and then with the last clause irks me.

Sullivan sets up the sentence by framing September 11 around his experience on his blog:

I’m sitting in the same spot as I was on that fateful morning, writing the same (if much more evolved) blog.

He continues, as longtime readers remember his almost hysterical blog response in which he seemed to equate all leftists with Al Qaeda, not quite making an excuse but offering an explanation for his gradual shift:

The human psyche is built to recover from trauma, and so we should not be surprised or alarmed that the emotions of that day are less vivid to us now.

It seems to me that this is an effective counter to Glenn Beck’s 9/12 project which seeks to recover the spirit in the immediate days of the aftermath (which Beck oddly seems to remember having a distinctly libertarian edge.) More important, it is an essential truth. Sullivan goes on:

But it is worth, it seems to me, remembering its extraordinary power. It was one of the most despicable mass murders in human history, conducted by religious fanatics bent on destroying Western civilization.

And then came the quote that moves me:

It was terrifying because they achieved this with only 19 men, some box-cutters and the small freedoms that we once took for granted in this country…

For me, this is the key fact about September 11 – that the “small freedoms” we take for granted are so powerful – that those who are willing to disregard them so completely can cause enormous damage. In a less dramatic way, Bernie Madoff revealed in a similar way how a man, willing to disregard the rules so dramatically, can cause enormous damage.

And in both cases, the response has been – and almost has to be – overwhelming and entirely out of proportion to the impact of the particular event. But what bugged me about this nearly perfect sentence was how it ended:

…the small freedoms that we once took for granted in this country and now have no longer.

At that point, Sullivan seemed to strike a false note – as civil libertarians too often do – when they confuse the theoretically grave but rare breaches of liberty that the Bush administration was castigated for (torture, preventive detention by an unaccountable executive, etcetera) with the every day liberties which were barely affected. To a large degree, that is why the measures George W. Bush took didn’t alarm most Americans. (The measures should have, and I stand with the civil libertarians on this. Even though the fact that Bush ordered, for example, torture didn’t inconvenience 99.99% of Americans, it was a breach of the rule of law and undermined our democratic system itself.) And those every day liberties that were affected aren’t disputed as much – having to take off one’s shoes before going on an airplane, the numerous measures to harden potential targets that inconvenience many.

It seems to me that we continue to enjoy many “small freedoms” – even as others are taken away (from random bag searches to go on the subway, to having armed soldiers patrolling sensitive locations, etc.) – and that these “small freedoms” together are an immense vulnerability of our society. But they are being chipped away at; and the grave breaches of the rule of law by the Bush administration have eroded the normal system of checks and balances, and Obama has not yet been able to, and seems to have barely tried, to restore this balance. I guess this is what bothers me: We Americans have not yet given up our “small freedoms;” and we still will and do fight for them, whether against the tyranny of big corporations, against the encroaching government (and this), against terrorists. September 11 changed many things, but it has not yet changed this fundamental aspect of America. Deciding how to react to these challenges to our freedoms is the basic task of our politics, and the inherent conflict that makes liberalism a living force.

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Barack Obama Criticism National Security The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Glenn Greenwald’s Civil Libertarian Propaganda

[digg-reddit-me]Last week, Glenn Greenwald felt compelled to make the same basic point that Jack Goldsmith did back in May just before the dueling speeches by Cheney and Obama – that the Obama administration’s national security policies do not make for as sharp a break from Bush’s as they have been portrayed. As Goldsmith described the similarity:

[T]he Obama practices are so close to the late Bush practices is that the late Bush practices were much different than the early ones. In 2001-2003, both fear of terrorism and Bush unilateralism were at their height. But in the last six years, the terror threat has appeared to fade (at least to the public), and Congress and the courts have engaged on terrorism issues, pushing back on some, approving others, and acquiescing in yet others…In these and many other ways, U.S. terrorism law looked wholly different at the outset of the Obama administration than in 2001-2003. The law was much clearer in 2009, and there was much greater consensus–across political parties and the branches of government–about permissible policies and their limits. Many Obama policies reflect that consensus.

Goldsmith doesn’t mention another relevant fact about the Bush administration’s approach – that even as it scaled back the vast powers it asserted in the aftermath of September 11 and rolled back certain practices, it was careful to never admit a mistake or repudiate the extreme measures it had used. At the same time, even to the extent that it did do so, the Bush administration had no credibility because they had lied about what they were doing in the first place – from warrantless wiretaps to torture.

Greenwald though omits this vast change of behavior between the worst practices of the early Bush administration and its later years. Because to bring that up would undermine his propagandistic purposes which involves attacking Obama. See what I mean:

This leads to a more general point:  when it comes to uprooting (“changing”) the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism and civil liberties — the issue which generated as much opposition to the last presidency as anything else — the Obama administration has proven rather conclusively that tiny and cosmetic adjustments are the most it is willing to do.  They love announcing new policies that cast the appearance of change but which have no effect whatsoever on presidential powers.  With great fanfare, they announced the closing of CIA black sites — at a time when none was operating.  They trumpeted the President’s order that no interrogation tactics outside of the Army Field Manual could be used — at a time when approval for such tactics had been withdrawn.  They repudiated the most extreme elements of the Bush/Addington/Yoo “inherent power” theories — while maintaining alternative justifications to enable the same exact policies to proceed exactly as is.  They flamboyantly touted the closing of Guantanamo — while aggressively defending the right to abduct people from around the world and then imprison them with no due process at Bagram.  Their “changes” exist solely in theory — which isn’t to say that they are all irrelevant, but it is to say that they change nothing in practice:  i.e., in reality.

Greenwald makes a big deal of the fact that the changes are in “theory” not “in reality” – but neglects to mention that most of the worst aspects of Bush’s abuses of power were only present in theory by the time Obama took office – due to pushback from Congress, the Courts, etcetera. Bagram is a serious issue – and Greenwald is entirely justified in talking about that particular hypocrisy. But the “ideological wind tunnel” that is Greenwald’s calling card causes him to omit key facts here – as it so often does.

And you n0tice – in setting up his own “spike,” Greenwald implicitly accepts Goldsmith’s contentions – that the Bush administration had stopped torturing, had reconstituted its wiretapping program with Congressional and court approval, and had otherwise already ceased the worst abuses of power.

A final note: Greenwald’s approach to Obama seems to have more to do with his discomfort with defending any establishment than with actual policy. There are certainly reasons for civil libertarians to be unhappy with Obama, but for Greenwald, there’s a strong sense he wishes no part in defending any Establishment. This makes him a gadfly – which while often useful does not make him right all the time.

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History National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Reevaluating George W. Bush’s Legacy

I think Ross Douthat gets something rather right in his column today – though I can’t quite endorse his thesis wholeheartedly. One glaring omission from Douthat’s analysis of the Bush presidency is the overall War on Terror – and especially the extraordinary legal measures Bush took in the aftermath of September 11, from instituting a policy of torture to various executive power grabs to the twin wars in the Middle East.

But what Douthat gets right is that Bush’s presidency was truly radical and ideological in the first term and caused significant damage to America’s power, both its base at home and in its influence abroad. And then, Bush spent most of his last term moderating these excesses and trying to undo the damage he had caused. In Douthat’s words:

America has had its share of disastrous chief executives. But few have gone as far as Bush did in trying to repair their worst mistakes. Those mistakes were the Iraq war — both the decision to invade and the conduct of the occupation — and the irrational exuberance that stoked the housing bubble. The repairs were the surge, undertaken at a time when the political class was ready to abandon Iraq to the furies, and last fall’s unprecedented economic bailout.

Both fixes remain controversial. But for the moment, both look like the sort of disaster-averting interventions for which presidents get canonized. It’s just that in Bush’s case, the disasters he averted were created on his watch.

This capacity to turn around and change (always while avoiding manning up and taking the blame) is one of the core components of Bush’s presidency. But one must also look to the damage Bush did to our civil institutions in the name of the War on Terror; one must look to the effects of avoiding taking any serious action on climate change; one must look at the fiscal shape he left America in heading into a time when we needed greater government spending.

I once wrote a post defending George W. Bush’s legacy – arguing that he had been just bad enough to exacerbate our longstanding problems without escalating them beyond the point of no return – and that he had created a unique moment where the next president who I believed would be Obama would be able to take advantage of the situation. But given the the financial crisis and the continuing domestic polarization over War on Terror policies, I’m not sure how true this still is.

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National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism Videos

The Rift Torture Created Between the CIA and FBI Made America Less Safe

[digg-reddit-me]Tom Ridge makes a number of extraordinary statements here, but I want to highlight one:

[The Patriot Act] tore down the wall, the legal barrier, between law enforcement and intelligence. You couldn’t talk to each other. Patriot Act destroyed the wall. Very important. [Threatening to prosecute CIA interrogators now] is almost like putting up a psychological barrier…

What makes this statement so extraordinary is that the torture itself created a psychological barrier – as novice CIA interrogators and independent contractors (with no experience in interrogation) neither of whom were experts in the Arab world, Islam, or Al Qaeda took over interrogations instead of the experienced FBI hands such as Ali Soufan. Not only were the more experienced and knowledgeable interrogators subordinated to novices, but they were eventually forced to withdraw all agents from any interrogation sites due to the torture they witnessed. Soufan explained this in the Times back in April:

One of the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the C.I.A. and F.B.I., similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him. [my emphasis]

In a recent Times op-ed, he sounded almost plaintive as he reflected on the Bush administration decisions that removed him along with all other FBI agents from being able to interrogate the highest level detainees:

Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him.

And as Soufan pointed out in earlier testimony to Congress, the bulk and the most important of the true information derived from Abu Zubaydah came from FBI interrogation techniques. (Soufan himself conducted the interrogations, or attempted to, as conflicting orders from Washington kept putting inexperienced CIA contractors in charge.)

Ridge’s statement is extraordinary then for its ignorance of how torture itself affected the relationship between the FBI and the CIA – how, despite the important provisions of the Patriot Act that allowed sharing of information, CIA torture effectively reinstated the wall. He gets it backwards – it is not the prosecution of torture that is creating the psychological barrier to the sharing of information; it was the the crimes of torture themselves that did.

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Barack Obama Criticism National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Obama’s Dangerous Hypocrisy on Prisoners at Guantánamo and Bagram

[digg-reddit-me]As a strong supporter of Barack Obama’s candidacy, and of his administration in general, I must concede that Glenn Greenwald yesterday proved why he is such a valuable commentator in taking the administration on. He kept his rhetorical tics to a minimum and avoided the “ideological wind tunnel” effect that so much of his writing produces – and this allowed his piece to have a broader impact.

Alright – he started off with the same weirdly exaggerated sense of perspective – proving my previous point that Glenn Greenwald uses hyperbole the way other writers use punctuation:

It’s now apparent that the biggest sham in American politics is Barack Obama’s pledge to close Guantanamo and, more generally, to dismantle the Bush/Cheney approach to detaining accused Terrorists. [my emphasis]

But Greenwald quickly got down to making the substantive case – which on this front is extremely strong. On my blog and elsewhere, I have brought up Bagram as an example of Obama’s most clear failure, though I haven’t yet made the sustained case as Greenwald does.

As I wrote earlier, the Supreme Court’s rulings on the rights of detainees to certain basic rights at Guantánamo was based on the idea that our government should not be able to deprive an individual of rights merely by moving them to a particular location. Yet this is exactly what the Obama administration is claiming. Our nation’s freedoms are grounded in our traditions, and at the base of these traditions is a single, fundamental restriction on the state. To quote Winston Churchill:

The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.

Greenwald does not attempt to reconcile Obama’s views about Guantánamo as a candidate with the positions taken by his administration now – he simply hurls the well-justified charge of hypocrisy while tossing in a few snide remarks about those who continue to support Obama (which is a Greenwald staple.) He does not try to grapple with the issues the Obama administration faces in trying to deal with the political, legal, and strategic consequences of the radical actions taken by the Bush administration.

Greenwald is not the “fox” of Isaiah Berlin’s parable, but the very Bushian hedgehog. And on this issue, the hedgehog has grasped the basic truth: In condemning Bush for Guantánamo and the secret CIA prisons while expanding Bagram and using this different location for the same or similar purposes cannot stand, the Obama administration is engaging in rank hypocrisy which we cannot let stand. (As Greenwald points out, its unclear what exactly Bagram is being used for as the Obama administration has been keeping too many documents secret.) I highly reccomend you read Greenwald’s important post from yesterday.

By acting this way regarding detainees at Bagram, Barack Obama threatens the very Rule of Law that he came into office promising to protect – and that he swore to protect when taking the oath of office. Liberals must oppose this; conservatives must oppose this; libertarians must oppose this; Americans must oppose this, and be guided by “Something wiser than our own quick personal impulses… [&] sweeter than the taste of a political victory.”

We must be guided, simply, by Our Lady of the Law.

[Image by DVIDSHUB licensed under Creative Commons.]

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Criticism History Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

Dana Perino’s Misleading Spin Regarding Matt Latimer

That’s how the media world works, unfortunately. But since I was there, I will try to do my part to stamp out myths before they gain traction.

[digg-reddit-me]Yesterday, I came across (from multiple sources) a piece in the new edition of GQ by a former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer – a kind of tell-all purporting to reveal what Bush really thought at the end of his term. (Beware: GQ has designed this piece to maximize page views, so it’s a pain to read, though overall worth it.)

The piece was interesting enough, though one could feel the editing of someone intent of keeping the material fresh and with the intent of enhancing the reputation of the author, so I wouldn’t classify it as inherently trustworthy. Latimer portrayed Bush as an almost comic figure – one who believed he had remade conservatism, who derided the “conservative movement,” who had excellent political instincts, who was willing to buck the crowd, and who governed and authorized statutes he had not quite understood. Overall, Latimer’s portrait represents a positive reappraisal of George W. Bush as a flawed but complex figure.

Dana Perino though will have none of it – and responds to the post with an extremely misleading post at NRO’s The Corner. For example, she makes a big deal of this as undermining Latimer’s account:

And I don’t think [Bush has] ever even said the word ‘keister.’ C’mon.

Yet the passage she’s referring is this one:

‘Wait till her fat keister is sitting at this desk,’ he once said (except he didn’t say ‘keister’).

She also writes:

For example, [Latimer] writes that President Bush didn’t know who Sarah Palin was.”

But in Latimer’s tale, he doesn’t claim this. Rather, he quotes President Bush as joking around after the announcement:

“I’m trying to remember if I’ve met her before. I’m sure I must have.” His eyes twinkled, then he asked, “What is she, the governor of Guam?”

I’m no defender of Matt Latimer – but also not a fan of dishonest spin.

Edit: I’ve emailed Ms. Perino as the obviousness of her misleading statements seems a bit too much to see if she is considering retracting them or has any other response.

Updated: Peter Robinson, also at The Corner also points out the two specific inaccuracies I mentioned. Perino them responded with a quasi-apology and seems to admit that she hadn’t actually read the piece. Her lack of knowledge though that did not stop her from smearing Latimer. But no surprise, she somehow ends up blaming the media coverage, though I would hope any old flack – let alone someone with her soapbox – would take the time to read something before attacking it in print.

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National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

A Reactionary Politics Leads To Torture

[digg-reddit-me]Adam Serwer over at The American Prospect:

We’re not seeing too many “professionals” argue the case for torture — instead we see those who believe fighting terrorists is about some kind of contest of will between Islam and the West romanticizing criminal behavior as “necessary” because, for some reason, they think protecting American society requires that take our cues from those we’re fighting.

H/t Andrew Sullivan.

Which brings them roughly in line with my earlier definition of reactionaries:

[R]eactionary groups are defined primarily by their worst fears of their enemy – which they then internalize and model their own organization on.

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New York City Reflections The Bush Legacy The War on Terrorism

What We Forgot All Too Quickly

[digg-reddit-me]This morning, I re-read George W. Bush’s September 20, 2001 address to a Joint Session of Congress. You should too.

It is an impressive speech – both in its temperance and quality of rhetoric and how it so clearly set up the tragedies that were to come. Re-reading the words written so near the aftermath of this attack, it is remarkable how clearly they foreshadow what came next. It is as if the Bush administration never recovered from this attack – and never took time to reflect after those panicked moments when the towers fell. Bush used the now ubiquitous formulation, “We will never forget,” repeatedly in the speech – though all too quickly, we seemed to forget all of those things he said we never would:

America will never forget the sounds of our National Anthem playing at Buckingham Palace, on the streets of Paris, and at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.

We will not forget South Korean children gathering to pray outside our embassy in Seoul, or the prayers of sympathy offered at a mosque in Cairo.

We will not forget moments of silence and days of mourning in Australia and Africa and Latin America.

Nor will we forget the citizens of 80 other nations who died with our own: dozens of Pakistanis; more than 130 Israelis; more than 250 citizens of India; men and women from El Salvador, Iran, Mexico, and Japan; and hundreds of British citizens.

Yet too often since then, “We will never forget,” is used as a code word for the other elements of his speech that came to dominate the polarizing battles as America re-polarized: from his declaration that every nation must be either with us or with the terrorists to his declaration that terrorism was motivated by the hatred of our freedom to his understated plea for more centralized executive power. (I’ve always found it interesting that the loudest voices railing against any curbs on government power used to defeat terrorism seem to live in areas remote from danger. The cities – where terrorism is much more likely – are hotbeds of liberalism and civil libertarianism. I, for one, work in a landmark building and pass through Penn Station, Times Square, and Grand Central Station.) Ignored from the text are the pleas for understanding of those different from us, his appreciation for the support of the world, and his declaration that in our response, America proved itself resilient and strong.

But for me, the two most memorable lines are the following – at the beginning and then end of the speech:

Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done…

Fellow citizens, we’ll meet violence with patient justice – assured of the rightness of our cause, and confident of the victories to come.

This is the path not taken. In our response, we often failed to live up to these words, these noble goals. Our justice system was deemed too weak for terrorists. Patience was abandoned in favor of short-term actions.  And all too quickly, the Baby Boom generation re-polarized along partisan lines as Karl Rove sought to turn what he saw Bush’s greatest weakness into his strength. And, in neglecting to reflect on the events of that day, we learned the wrong lessons – focusing on a “by any means necessary” response indicative of panic that undermined our power rather than the true lesson about America’s core strength that was revealed in the efficacy of the local responses and in the only thwarted attack:

The best defense of our way of life, of our institutions, of our government, of our people is the American people themselves – properly informed.

We should never forget this – and remembering this day should reinforce our resolve to “meet violence with patient justice” and to stand for the civilization, freedom, the rule of law in the face of fear and terrorism rather than being cowed into preemptive surrender.

[Image by amarine88 licensed under Creative Commons.]

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Barack Obama Criticism Economics Financial Crisis History Morality Political Philosophy Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

Must-Reads of the Week: Krugman v. Ferguson, Ted Kennedy again, Hank Paulson, Sedaris, and Phreaking

This week there are quite a few good pieces to take a look at over the long weekend – in between games of beer pong, or BBQs…

Krugman v. Ferguson. Matthew Lynn in the Times of London wrote a feature on the “war” over the response to the economic crisis going on between the American Princeton Professor, New York Times columnist, Nobel-prize winner, and noted liberal Paul Krugman and British Harvard Professor, Financial Times columnist, and noted conservative Niall Ferguson. I had been following it closely already, but this article had a number of more details and conveyed the story arc well. Meanwhile, Krugman released another attack on Ferguson – indirectly though – in which he laid out his vision (as a kind of short intellectual history of economics in the 20th and 21st centuries) of what happened in the most recent crisis, why so many economists got it wrong, and why we’re taking the right steps now:

As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

The article is missing Krugman’s usual zingers and partisan swipes – and is really quite good. It also reminds you that Ferguson is an historian – not an economist.

Ted Kennedy, leaky vessel. Sam Tanenhaus writes about Senator Ted Kennedy as a kind of magnificent character, capturing him and the movement he led better than most others:

But if the art of governance did not redeem Mr. Kennedy, it irradiated him, and the liberalism he personified. At a time when government itself had fallen into disrepute Mr. Kennedy applied himself diligently to its exacting discipline, and wrested whatever small victories he could from the machinery he had learned to operate so well. Whether or not his compass was finally true, he endured as the battered, leaky vessel through which the legislative arts recovered some of their lost glory.

Hank Paulson. Todd Purdhum of Vanity Fair finally writes his piece about his many conversations with Hank Paulson before and during the financial crisis – a piece notable for the fact that Paulson seemed exceptionally forthcoming as he knew the piece wouldn’t come out until well after he had left public office.

The Wisdom of David Sedaris. A nice story from last week’s New Yorker:

[S]he invited us to picture a four-burner stove.

“Gas or electric?” Hugh asked, and she said that it didn’t matter.

This was not a real stove but a symbolic one, used to prove a point at a management seminar she’d once attended. “One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.” The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.

Pat has her own business, a good one that’s allowing her to retire at fifty-five. She owns three houses, and two cars, but, even without the stuff, she seems like a genuinely happy person. And that alone constitutes success.

I asked which two burners she had cut off, and she said that the first to go had been family. After that, she switched off her health. “How about you?”

I thought for a moment, and said that I’d cut off my friends. “It’s nothing to be proud of, but after meeting Hugh I quit making an effort.”

“And what else?” she asked.

“Health, I guess.”

Hugh’s answer was work.

“And?”

“Just work,” he said.

Phone Phreak. David Kushner in Rolling Stone features the story of a poor, fat, lonely, blind boy who finds a way to be happy as a phone phreaker (a kind of hacker on telephone lines.) The boy – Matthew Weigman – submerges himself in the culture, and due to his unique skillset is able to become an almost cartoon villain, without the manic desire to take over the world. Instead, he unleashes SWAT teams on girls who refuse to have phone sex with him, as he fakes calls from inside their house pretending he is holding them hostage; or ferrets out all the names and biographies of the team tracking him down, which he jovially explains to an FBI agent who comes to recruit him.