Category: The Opinionsphere

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Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Bipartisan in Substance

Ezra Klein makes an important observation that – for those who accept it – changes dramatically how the political battles of the Obama administration are viewed:

We are less bipartisan in process even as we have become more bipartisan in substance.

Klein points out – as I had earlier – how Obama’s proposals for health care reform and cap and trade for example both have a solid grounding in previous Republican approaches to these problems – and in fact take into account many of the Republicans’ deep-seated distrusted of government action in general. Yet despite this, Republicans have continued to claim that Obama is the second-coming of Stalin – repudiating ideas they only a short time ago embraced.

One can see the seeds of this entrenchment against Obama in the Republican reaction to Bill Clinton – as they truly hated and demonized the man as a radical leftist even as he governed as a moderate liberal. Republicans were still willing to work with Clinton on a number of initiatives including welfare reform. Thus far, they have embraced a nihilistic path of pure opposition to Obama.

The Democrats did not similarly react to George W. Bush – as they proved willing to work with him on matters that they held to be important and/or which were popular with their constituencies. For example, the No Child Left Behind Act, Bush’s several rounds of tax cuts, and Medicare Part D. Democrats were willing to work with the White House despite the extremely partisan processes instituted in Congress cutting Democrats off from policy-making. And they were willing to hand Bush victories that were not “bipartisan in substance” – most especially his tax cuts which were thoroughly partisan and ideologically motivated.

In other words – Klein’s statement that, “We are less bipartisan in process even as we have become more bipartisan in substance” only holds true for the past year. To some degree, this is House Democrats fault for making the process less bipartisan – but I find it hard to blame them considering the unprecedented procedural tactics used by the Republicans as well as their unprincipled intransigence.

Categories
Criticism Economics The Opinionsphere

Victor Davis Hanson’s “Productive Classes”

It’s always interesting to watch a pundit venture from his field of “expertise.” Scratch a bit beneath the surface, and anywhere outside of their expertise they tend to be rabid ideologues. Every virtue they bring to their perspective on what they are an expert in vanishes. Generalists on the other hand seem to bring the same worldview to everything – whatever it may be. (My goal with this blog is to be a rather amiable generalist.)

For example, Victor Davis Hanson is an expert on ancient warfare. However, he wrote last week a column in the National Review about the “war” on the “wannabe rich.” His evidence of such a war is based on the idea that someone who is extremely wealthy has far more money than he or she needs – and so, increased taxes don’t hurt them much. Which is, of course, the entire basis for the progressive taxation that Hanson is trying to reject – that money beyond a certain base of income serves little use. The utility of more income for someone making $500,000 a year is undoubtedly less then for someone making $50,000.

Hanson also attempts to play the populist card in the class struggle between the “haves” and the “have mores” – or the “haves” and the “have yachts.” According to Hanson, those making between $200,000 and $500,000 are the “productive classes who want to be rich” (the 95% of Americans making less are not mentioned) and those making more are the corrupt elites. It’s a rather interesting view – quite Randian in its conclusion: “continue to punish and demonize [the productive classes], and the country will grind to a halt – as we are seeing now.”

More mature libertarians and conservatives often look at Rand through the somewhat rosy lens of adolescence when they first discovered her – but they find her theories to be fundamentally lacking. Hanson though seems to still view the world through this adolescent lens – and doesn’t realize how it sounds to claim that those who are still making $500,000 in the midst of this recession are deliberately grinding the economy to a halt because they feel demonized and burdened by paying a slightly higher percentage of their taxes than they did a few years ago (but still less than they did under Clinton, Bush I, or Reagan.)

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Politics The Opinionsphere

The Utter Moral Certainty of Right Wing National Security Policy

Andrew Sullivan:

[Obama] is the barrier between us and a form of fascism, imbued with utter moral certainty, that now animates the core of the GOP.

I’m less taken with Sullivan’s invocation of fascism to describe the core of the Republican position on national security than I am with his description of their “utter moral certainty.” The proto-fascism charge may be accurate, but as a matter of political rhetoric, it has little impact due to its overuse – as George Orwell acknowledged years ago in his Politics and the English Language. This charge of “utter moral certainty” though is specific and captures something essential about the national security positions of the right wing. That, plus an unbounded faith in the power of centralized government action. How else can one understand the defense of torture? Or the expansion of secrecy? Of the unprecedented expansion of the power of the executive? The holding of prisoners by executive authority alone?

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Criticism The Opinionsphere The Web and Technology

“The past should stay in the heart, where it belongs.”

I believe it was Ezra Klein who posted a link to this article with the note that he’s read authors on the same themes, but that this was better written than any other similar piece. I agree. William Deresiewicz writes a truly conservative piece – by which I don’t refer to the right-wing community held together by ressentiment, but a political and social temperament that sees value in tradition – a conservatism that stands athwart history yelling, “Stop” as William F. Buckley wrote. Deresiewicz explains how  Facebook is destroying friendship:

Facebook holds out a utopian possibility: What once was lost will now be found. But the heaven of the past is a promised land destroyed in the reaching. Facebook, here, becomes the anti-madeleine, an eraser of memory. Carlton Fisk has remarked that he’s watched the videotape of his famous World Series home run only a few times, lest it overwrite his own recollection of the event. Proust knew that memory is a skittish creature that peeks from its hole only when it isn’t being sought. Mementos, snapshots, reunions, and now this—all of them modes of amnesia, foes of true remembering. The past should stay in the heart, where it belongs. [my emphasis]

Even so, you should become a fan of 2parse.com on Facebook today!

Categories
Barack Obama Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

The Obvious Truths Neglected in Responses to the Christmas Bomber

[digg-reddit-me]As I mentioned today, David Brooks has been writing some damn good columns in recent weeks – and in his most recent, he reiterated a point I had made earlier. As I wrote:

Few seem willing to admit the obvious truth: No centralized power can keep us safe. No intelligence system will be perfect. No watch list will be all-inclusive. No screening procedures are foolproof. We can make it harder for a terrorist to succeed, but in order to win, we need to prevent every attack; while they only need to slip through the cracks once. And there will always be cracks. Even in a totalitarian regime, there are cracks. Part of the price we pay for a free society is vulnerability.

Brooks compared how the Greatest Generation – which greatly expanded government during the Great Depression and World War II – viewed government to how people presently seem to view government:

During the middle third of the 20th century, Americans had impressive faith in their own institutions. It was not because these institutions always worked well. The Congress and the Federal Reserve exacerbated the Great Depression. The military made horrific mistakes during World War II, which led to American planes bombing American troops and American torpedoes sinking ships with American prisoners of war.

But there was a realistic sense that human institutions are necessarily flawed. History is not knowable or controllable. People should be grateful for whatever assistance that government can provide and had better do what they can to be responsible for their own fates.

That mature attitude seems to have largely vanished. Now we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved…

Brooks got a minor point wrong here – as he claims we “expect perfection from government.” My impression is that we demand perfection from the government and expect incompetence, which I would suggest has something to do with government clusterfuck that the 1970s represented along with the demonization of government bureaucracies by the Republican Party starting with Ronald Reagan coupled with the constant invocations of an all-powerful and competent government national security apparatus in mainstream thrillers and right-wing politics. Brooks continues:

At some point, it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t the centralized system that stopped terrorism in this instance. As with the shoe bomber, as with the plane that went down in Shanksville, Pa., it was decentralized citizen action. The plot was foiled by nonexpert civilians who had the advantage of the concrete information right in front of them — and the spirit to take the initiative.

For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action. We’ve done this in many spheres of life. Maybe that’s wise, maybe it’s not. But we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.

Greenwald is able to overcome his ressentiment for once (“I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but David Brooks actually had an excellent column…”) Greenwald continues to develop the idea:

The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety.  Even though they knew that doing so would help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy and convictions based on hearsay, and outlawed cruel and unusual punishment.  That’s because certain values — privacy, due process, limiting the potential for abuse of government power — were more important than mere survival and safety.  A central calculation of the Constitution was that we insist upon privacy, liberty and restraints on government power even when doing so means we live with less safety and a heightened risk of danger and death.  And, of course, the Revolutionary War against the then-greatest empire on earth was waged by people who risked their lives and their fortunes in pursuit of liberty, precisely because there are other values that outweigh mere survival and safety.

I have yet to see any right winger continue to histronically attack Obama while acknowledging either of these two (essentially undisputed) points. Instead, they are forgotten or shunted aside as Obama is accused of all sorts of malfeasance and naïveté.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

Categories
Barack Obama Politics Reflections The Opinionsphere

David Brooks Is Writing a Damn Good Column These Days

David Brooks has been writing these extraordinary columns recently – providing a remarkable sense of historical perspective in his commentary on contemporary events. First was his column on Obama’s Christian Realism, placing Obama firmly in the tradition of Cold War Liberalism, of Reinhold Niebhur, of George Kennan and George Marshall, of Scoop Jackson and Peter Beinart. Brooks explained a core difference that he saw between Obama and many other contemporary “secular” Democrats and liberals:

Obama’s speeches [at West Point and Stockholm] were thoroughly theological. He talked about the “core struggle of human nature” between love and evil.

These speeches are grounded in an approach – according to Brooks – that acknowledges our own human frailty:

[A]s you act to combat evil, you wouldn’t want to get carried away by your own righteousness or be seduced by the belief that you are innocent. Even fighting evil can be corrupting.

Then Brooks attempted to explain the long-term shift in America’s economy from manufacturing to “protocols.”

In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass.

Brooks examines the implications of this shift moving forward. He doesn’t address the long-term consistency of America’s manufacturing output as a percentage of global output though – as we continue to produce large numbers of “things” while employing fewer workers to do so. He also doesn’t address the extent to which government policy, most specifically under Ronald Reagan, deliberately favored the financial sector over manufacturing. But, in only a few hundred words, he conveys quite a bit of this broad shift.

His next two columns were his annual Sidney Awards (Part I and Part II) for best long-form magazine reporting. Always interesting.

And then finally, in his latest he makes the same points I did regarding the infantile response of so many citizens and reporters to the latest attempted terrorist attack.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

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Prose Reflections The Opinionsphere

Fiercely Honoring Hope Witsell

Sylvia over at Sylvia Has a Problem posted an extraordinary rant several weeks ago that should stand as a testament to the value of opinionated blogging. There may be too much self-indulgent crap and too little fact-checking in the blogosphere – of course, the same could be said of most opinion-spouters on op-ed pages and on cable news. But every once in a while, something extraordinary breaks though – and this piece on Hope Witsell is exactly that sort of extraordinary thing.

I won’t post an excerpt. Just read the piece.

Categories
History The Opinionsphere

A Witness Who Thinks

George Brock, writing about Timothy Garton Ash (the noted journalist of the people power movements that ended the Cold War) for the British Times Literary Supplement, uses a profound phrase to describe what Ash does – creating the “first rough drafts of history” (borrowing a phrase) “written by a witness who thinks.” [My emphasis.]

I suppose I like the phrase because it is what I seek to be – a witness to history who thinks.

With that, welcome to 2010, and happy new year.

Over the long weekend, I’ve decided on 2 changes to the blog:

First, and a long time coming, I’ve decided to focus more on research and reporting – and to make that a regular feature. Given my time constraints, I’m expecting to have about 1 story a month with a significant amount of original reporting and research – with some more in-depth research and reporting complementing other opinion pieces. I have also decided to attempt to get responses from every subject of a piece who I criticize before publishing it – which I have tried to do sometimes but not always managed to do.

Second, rather than the 1 or 2 long posts a day, I’ve decided to sprinkle in another 4 or so shorter posts passing along links or making minor points.

[Image by me].

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism National Security Politics The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Get It Through Your Heads: No President Can Keep You Safe

[digg-reddit-me]Speaking of rooting for catastrophes, it’s hard to see anther reason for Dick Cheney’s continued attempts to politicize national security issues and terrorism. There is a ghastly calculation at work – as Cheney is attempting to set the scene for a Republican reemergence in the aftermath of the next successful terrorist attack.

There is so much glaring idiocy at work in the opinion page responses to the attempted Christmas bombing. Few seem willing to admit the obvious truth: No centralized power can keep us safe. No intelligence system will be perfect. No watch list will be all-inclusive. No screening procedures are foolproof. We can make it harder for a terrorist to succeed, but in order to win, we need to prevent every attack; while they only need to slip through the cracks once. And there will always be cracks. Even in a totalitarian regime, there are cracks. Part of the price we pay for a free society is vulnerability.

Yet, instead we seem to blame or credit the President himself for whether or not he kept us safe. We “got lucky” this time – it is said – but the President should get his act together and prevent another attempt. It was nonsense to say that George W. Bush kept us safe after September 11. And it is nonsense to say that Barack Obama has kept us safe since being elected. They simply do not have the power to do this, fictional narratives like Vince Flynn’s and 24 notwithstanding.

What the president is responsible for – along with the rest of the government – is creating policies and enforcing laws that balance freedom and security. There were failures that allowed the now-spayed bomber to get through security. But – and let me speak clearly here – assholes like Rep. Pete King, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, and former Vice President Dick Cheney who are trying to exploit Al Qaeda’s bombing attempt to score political points are beyond contempt. Cheney especially seems to have made the calculation that he can preemptively politicize the aftermath of the next attack.

What further demonstrates the bad faith of these assholes is that they offered no such criticisms of George W. Bush after the “shoe bomber” slipped through security and attempted to blow up another plane in December, after which Bush failed to immediately call it terrorism, and after which he did not immediately comment. I didn’t blame Bush for this at the time – and neither did the Democrats. Yet now, when Al Qaeda attempts an attack, rather than unifying us, provides yet another excuse for King, Hoekstra, and Cheney to bash the man whose agenda they despise.

Even worse, in doing so, they support the illusion that a tough President has the power to keep us safe – that if only we acceded enough power to Big Brother, everything would be alright.

Categories
National Security Politics The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Christopher Hitchens Speaking Uncomfortable Truths

Christopher Hitcehns is a true polemicist – in a way that Glenn Greenwald is unable to be. He takes daring positions and supports them. He pushes his points obstinately, until he falls back. And in some ways, he is the best thing a writer can be: engaging with the real world, grappling with the consequences of what he says and believes – rather than blithely hiding behind some ideology. (See this article on his support for the Iraq War and how it directly lead to the death of a young soldier, and this video and article in which he tests out his belief that waterboarding is not torture.) He can also be a royal prat.

In response to the attempted Christmas bombing, he is in his best form. Hitchens:

What nobody in authority thinks us grown-up enough to be told is this: We had better get used to being the civilians who are under a relentless and planned assault from the pledged supporters of a wicked theocratic ideology. These people will kill themselves to attack hotels, weddings, buses, subways, cinemas, and trains. They consider Jews, Christians, Hindus, women, homosexuals, and dissident Muslims (to give only the main instances) to be divinely mandated slaughter victims…We can expect to take casualties. The battle will go on for the rest of our lives. Those who plan our destruction know what they want, and they are prepared to kill and die for it. Those who don’t get the point prefer to whine about “endless war,” accidentally speaking the truth about something of which the attempted Christmas bombing over Michigan was only a foretaste. While we fumble with bureaucracy and euphemism, they are flying high.

[Adapted from an image by ensceptico licensed under Creative Commons.]