Month: February 2009

Categories
Foreign Policy Iran National Security Pakistan

Afpak & Iran

I’ve highlighted a bunch of different articles in the past week about the upcoming challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan with Iran as a potential complicating factor. Here’s my attempt to cram all of these highlights into one post…

Jodi Kantor in the New York Times on Richard Holbrooke and Afpak:

For now, Holbrooke is both raising expectations and lowering them. He is talking about Afpak – Washington shorthand for his assignment – as his last and toughest mission. But along with the rest of Obama’s foreign-policy staff, he is also trying to redefine success in the region, shifting away from former President George W. Bush’s grand, transformative goals and toward something more achievable. 

Fareed Zakaria has some ideas on what at least one of these less exalted goals should be:

In May 2006 a unit of American soldiers in Afghanistan’s Uruzgan valley were engulfed in a ferocious fire fight with the Taliban. Only after six hours, and supporting airstrikes, could they extricate themselves from the valley. But what was most revealing about the battle was the fact that many local farmers spontaneously joined in, rushing home to get their weapons. Asked later why they’d done so, the villagers claimed they didn’t support the Taliban’s ideological agenda, nor were they particularly hostile toward the Americans. But this battle was the most momentous thing that had happened in their valley for years. If as virile young men they had stood by and just watched, they would have been dishonored in their communities. And, of course, if they were going to fight, they could not fight alongside the foreigners.

In describing this battle, the Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen coins a term, “accidental guerilla,” to describe the villagers. They had no grand transnational agenda, no dreams of global jihad. If anything, those young men were defending their local ways and customs from encroachment from outside. But a global terrorist group—with local ties—can find ways to turn these villagers into allies of a kind. And foreign forces, if they are not very careful, can easily turn them into enemies.

Reduced to its simplest level, the goal of American policy in Afghanistan should be to stop creating accidental guerrillas. It should make those villagers see U.S. forces as acting in their interests. That would mark a fundamental turnaround.

Another major problems is – as Tom Ricks quotes Abu Muquwama to explain – that:

It’s tough to fight a war in Afghanistan when the opposing team decides to fight the war in Pakistan

At the same time, Pakistan seems to be dragging it’s feet with regards to destroying the forces it considered – until recently – it’s proxies in it’s struggle with India for regional power, the Taliban. This creates a nagging feeling of suspicion among Pakistan’s allies, as Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti explained in the New York Times:

In recent years, there have been some significant successes in the hunt for Taliban leaders. Pakistani operatives tracked Mullah Dadullah, a senior aide to Mullah Omar, as he crossed the Afghan border in May 2007, and he was later killed by American and Afghan troops.

Yet most of the arrests in Pakistan have coincided with visits by senior American officials.

The arrest of Mullah Obeidullah, the former Taliban defense minister, in Quetta in February 2007 coincided with the visit of Vice President Dick Cheney to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is unclear whether Mullah Obeidullah is still in Pakistani custody or was secretly released as part of a prisoner exchange to free Pakistan’s ambassador to Afghanistan, who was kidnapped last February and released three months later.

Schmitt and Mazzetti clearly convey the suspicion among top American officials that Pakistan’s wars against its terrorists are mainly a public relations effort to pacify America. Pakistan’s reluctance to fully accept America as an ally (believing we will again retreat from the region after we are done with Afghanistan one way or another, as we did after the Soviet Union was defeated there) is not our only challenge in the region. Parag Khanna of Foreign Policy describes how Afpak is also the center of maneuvering by other nations:

China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are also becoming increasingly important – not as neighbors of the chaos, like Pakistan, but meddlers in it. The United States is already failing to grasp not only the details of other powers’ maneuverings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the extent to which these dealings could eclipse even the most brilliant U.S. shuttle diplomacy by Holbrooke.

He describes how China has become Afghanistan’s largest investor, how Saudi Arabia continues to funnel enormous amounts of money to fund religious extremism in the region, including Wahabbi mosques, and how Iran is taking steps to provide energy for what they anticipate will be shortages in Afpak and India. Khanna – seeing this pipelines and other relations between Iran, India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan as inevitable as all partners stand to benefit – suggests America get out in front and support the pipeline. Better to build it ourselves than having it built without us.

Building roads and controlling their usage has for centuries been the foundation of spreading Silk Road influence, as well as the key to success in the 19th-century Great Game. Today’s struggle for control follows similar rules.

This Great Game – a term historically used to describe the strategic competition for influence in the region, especially when it involves great intrigues and turnabouts –  would seem to require us to neutralize or flip Iran into an ally. Roger Cohen of the New York Times makes the case:

Iran’s political constellation includes those who have given past support to terrorist organizations. But axis-of-evil myopia has led U.S. policy makers to underestimate the social, psychological and political forces for pragmatism, compromise and stability. Iran has not waged a war of aggression for a very long time.

Tehran shares many American interests, including a democratic Iraq, because that will be a Shiite-governed Iraq, and a unified Iraq stable enough to ensure access to holy cities like Najaf.

It opposes Taliban redux in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda’s Sunni fanaticism. Its democracy is flawed but by Middle East standards vibrant. Both words in its self-description — Islamic Republic — count.

Categories
Economics Financial Crisis

Reading the Independent Congressional Research Service Reports on the Stimulus So You Don’t Have To

[digg-reddit-me]According to Wikipedia, “the Congressional Research Service (CRS) is the public policy research arm of the United States Congress. As a legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress, CRS works exclusively and directly for Members of Congress, their Committees and staff on a confidential, nonpartisan basis. CRS reports are highly regarded as in-depth, accurate, objective, and timely, but as a matter of policy they are not made directly available to members of the public.”

Which makes the reports it has prepared on various stimulus measures extremely interesting – as their reports strive to give the consensus expert view of the issues involved, without partisan affiliation. I’ve prepared some highlights from the non-partisan (and confidental) CRS reports on the effectiveness of tax cuts and other stimulus measures (available thanks to Wikileaks…H/t Marc.)

CRS – RS21126 – Tax Cuts and Economic Stimulus: How Effective Are the Alternatives (PDF)

The summary:

While temporary individual tax cuts likely have smaller effects than permanent ones, temporary cuts contingent on spending (such as temporary investment subsidies or a sales tax holiday) are likely more effective than permanent cuts. (Sales tax holidays may, however, be very difficult to implement in a timely fashion).

The report offers a quick explanation of why tax cuts aren’t ideal short term stimulus on page 1:

A tax cut that is saved will have no short term stimulative economic effect (or long term one, if the cut is financed by a deficit, since increased private saving would be offset by decreased government saving). Thus, in general, tax cuts received by individuals will not be successful as a short run stimulus if they lead to additional saving, and tax cuts received by firms will not be successful unless they lead to spending on investment (or lead quickly to spending on consumption by shareholders).

The problem in this instance is that private virtue – saving money – undermines the public good stimulus seeks to achieve – stimulating the economy – which can only be achieved by spending money. The report discusses corporate tax cuts on page 5:

General corporate rate cuts are less likely to be effective than investment subsidies because they have a smaller “bang-for-the-buck.” because much of their cost is a windfall that only affects cash flow and not the return to new investment. Since even temporary investment subsidies do not appear to have worked effectively, a corporate rate cut would be expected to have a small effect.

CRS – Report R4104 – Economic Stimulus: Issues and Policies (PDF) (It appears the Wikileaks link is down, so try this.)

The summary:

Economists generally agree that spending proposals are somewhat more stimulative than tax cuts since part of a tax cut may be saved by the recipients. The most important determinant of the effect on the economy is the stimulus’ size. [my emphasis]

The report describes the cause of our current panic/crisis as the ripple effect of the sudden collapse of Lehman Brothers, the near miss at Merrill Lynch, and the government rescue of AIG – all following upon the failure of other large institutions over the months before hand – from Bear Stearns to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

These actions eroded market confidence further, resulting in a sudden spike of the commercial paper rate spread from just under 90 basis points to 280 basis points, a spike that in times past might have been called a panic. If financial market confidence is not restored and private market spreads remain elevated, the broader economy could slow more due to difficulties in financing consumer durables, business investment, college education, and other big ticket items.

The report doesn’t get into telling the story of how the world economy almost came to an end at 2pm on September 18. One of the problems the report explains with stimulus is that we can only design it to be effective based on our economic forecasts. As the report explains on page 8, economic forecasting has its problems:

Economic forecasts are notoriously inaccurate due to the highly complex and changing nature of the economy, so it is difficult to accurately assess how deep the downturn will be, and how much fiscal stimulus would be an appropriate response.

But the report nevertheless ventures a guess, on page 2, based not on any particular forecaster, but only the consensus among them:

Forecasters now predict that GDP will continue to contract until the second half of 2009 and the rate of decline will accelerate.  If correct, this recession would be the longest in the period since World War II.

The report discusses three elements by which to judge the stimulus – how fast it works; how effective the stimulus is per dollar paid; and the size. Predicting the right size for the stimulus must primarily be based on the economic forecasts – which the report notes are “notoriously inaccurate.” But the first two measures should be maximized no matter what the forecast is. The report describes why effectiveness is important in a section called “Bang for the Buck” on page 8:

If the goal of stimulus is to maximize the boost to total spending while minimizing the increase in the budget deficit (in order to minimize the deleterious effects of “crowding out”), then maximum bang for the buck would be desirable. The primary way to achieve the most bang for the buck is by choosing policies that result in spending, not saving. Direct government spending on goods and services would therefore lead to the most bang for the buck since none of it would be saved…

One non-spending measures the report analyzes is seen to have a good “bang for the buck” but to take too long to act:

Investment incentives are attractive, if they work, because increasing investment does not trade off short term stimulus benefits for a reduction in capital formation, as do provisions stimulating consumption. Nevertheless, most evidence does not suggest these provisions work very well to induce short-term spending. This lack of effectiveness may occur because of planning lags or because stimulus is generally provided during economic slowdowns when excess capacity may already exist.

On page 10, the report cites Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com, and an advisor to John McCain, and includes a chart of his estimates of the multiplier effect of the various policy proposals. The report qualifies it’s endorsement of Zandi’s work, saying, that there is significant disagreement about fundamental matters among economists, but that:

Qualitatively, most economists would likely agree with the general thrust of  [Zandi’s] estimates, however—spending provisions have higher multipliers becausetax cuts are partially saved, and some types of tax cuts are more likely to be saved by theirrecipients than others.

I’ve graphed the values Zandi provides to give a visual measure of the different in the types of stimulus:

[Click on the image for a larger version of the chart.]

As you can see, the spending measures have far greater “bang for the buck” values. The report acknowledges that Zandi’s and most other economic models might understate the stimulus from tax cuts – but the alternate explanation for the data given by defenders of tax cuts is that they take longer to have an effect:

there is a behavioral lag, since time elapses before the recipient of a transfer or tax cut increases their spending. For example, the initial reaction to the receipt of rebate checks was a large spike in the personal saving rate… It is unclear how to target recipients that would spend most quickly, although presumably liquidity-constrained households (i.e., those with limited access to credit) would spend more quickly than others. In this regard, the advantage to direct government spending is that there is no analogous lag.

These reports seems to provide a good deal of information mainly missing from the public debates – as Republicans talked about tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts as the best type of stimulus. Whether the stimulus bill we end up with works or not, these reports at least help explain the assumptions underlying it.

Categories
Barack Obama Financial Crisis Politics The Opinionsphere

Obama’s Long Game

Peter Baker quotes Robert Gibbs, Obama’s press secretary, in his description of Obama’s take on the state of politics and the stimulus bill:

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, decried what he called a “myopic viewpoint in Washington,” disconnected from the troubles of the country.

“It’s illuminating because it may not necessarily be where cable television is on all of this,” Mr. Gibbs said. “But you know, we’re sort of used to that. We lost on cable television virtually every day last year. So you know, there’s a conventional wisdom to what’s going on in America via Washington and there’s the reality of what’s happening in America.” [my emphasis]

John Dickerson of Slate makes a similar case:

Remember back in the Democratic primary, when the consensus was that Obama was too soft, too deliberative, and too nice to win the election? These current gripes remind me of those days. It takes time to govern.

Overall, this reinforces my post of last week about why I am (still) confident about Obama in which I wrote that:

This seems to have been Obama’s strategy – to allow his campaign to take hits and play defense, sticking to an overall strategy that would gain him a final decisive victory rather than exhausting his staff fighting every daily flair-up.

Obama is once again playing the “long game” on this stimulus fight. I wonder how many times Obama will be able to do this – lose the daily fight while winning the broader point – before the media figures out his game. Clearly some of the more astute observers have.

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Law National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

The Abuse of the State Secrets Privilege

Glenn Greenwald, yet again demonstrating his usefulness, holds Obama’s feet to the fire for the apparent decision of his Justice Department to maintain the Bush administration’s radical view on state secrets. Highlighting the ridiculousness of the Obama Justice Department’s legal position here, Greenwald points out that:

The entire claim of “state secrets” in this case is based on two sworn Declarations from CIA Director Michael Hayden – one public and one filed secretly with the court.  In them, Hayden argues that courts cannot adjudicate this case because to do so would be to disclose and thus degrade key CIA programs of rendition and interrogation – the very policies which Obama, in his first week in office, ordered shall no longer exist.  How, then, could continuation of this case possibly jeopardize national security when the rendition and interrogation practices which gave rise to these lawsuits are the very ones that the U.S. Government, under the new administration, claims to have banned? 

Greenwald follows up today with a piece that gets to the core of the issue:

Nobody — not the ACLU or anyone else — argues that the State Secrets privilege is inherently invalid.  Nobody contests that there is such a thing as a legitimate state secret.  Nobody believes that Obama should declassify every last secret and never classify anything else ever again.  Nor does anyone even assert that this particular lawsuit clearly involves no specific documents or portions of documents that might be legitimately subject to the privilege.  Those are all transparent, moronic strawmen advanced by people who have no idea what they’re talking about.

What was abusive and dangerous about the Bush administration’s version of the States Secret privilege — just as the Obama/Biden campaign pointed out – was that it was used not (as originally intended) to argue that specific pieces of evidence or documents were secret and therefore shouldn’t be allowed in a court case, but instead, to compel dismissal of entire lawsuits in advance based on the claim that any judicial adjudication of even the most illegal secret government programs would harm national security.  Thatis the theory that caused the bulk of the controversy when used by the Bush DOJ — because it shields entire government programs from any judicial scrutiny – and it is that exact version of the privilege that the Obama DOJ yesterday expressly advocated (and, by implication, sought to preserve for all Presidents, including Obama).  

Greenwald ends his piece by misconstruing a remark made by Marc Ambinder – who in fairness to Greenwald probably misunderstands the essence of this issue – and turning it into a strawman he can take down. This is Greenwald at his worst – but the start of the article is Greenwald at his best, explaining succinctly and cleary why outrage is called for. I’m sure Greenwald mocks Ambinder only because his comments are illustrative of the wrong-headed Washington establishment thinking.

More important though is the question of, ‘What’s next?’ Greenwald clearly explains how this use of the state secrets privilege is abusive – and how Obama and Biden clearly opposed it when used by Bush. So, how do we begin to pressure Obama to change this position?

Categories
Economics Financial Crisis Politics

Commenting on Paul Krugman

Daniel Drezner over at Foreign Policy on Paul Krugman:

 

I’m 50% convinced that Paul Krugman’s op-ed today is correct, and the moderates wound up damaging the stimulus more than they improved it. 

The thing is, I’m also 50% convinced that Krugman is to Keynesians as Richard Perle is to neoconservatives.  When an embittered ideologue derides his political leader for demonstrating a willingness to compromise and “negotiating with yourself,” well, one does get the sense of deja vu.

 

Will Wilkinson on Krugman:

Perhaps more than any economist of his caliber, Krugman understands that policy is largely determined by the outcome of the public opinion shoutfest. Yet this recognition seems to have no effect on Krugman’s ideas. Rather than bring inside his models disagreement over economic theory and the lack of political incentive to faithfully apply them, which would lead him to radically revise his prescriptions, Krugman leaves his textbook theory untouched and simply tries to win the shoutfest. Krugman’s often unbearable stridency seems to reflect an attempt to overcome the problems of democratic disagreement and incentive compatibility through sheer force of will–as if the deep reality of politics is no match for the rhetorical gifts and gold-plated reputation of Paul Freaking Krugman.

This is certainly my sense of Krugman as well. He lets his partisanship overcome his scholarship – but fails to account for partisanship in his scholarship.

Like Glenn Greenwald, he is a voice I hope those in power listen to – so long as they do not follow his advice too closely.

As I wrote during the earlier days of the 2008 campaign as Krugman railed biweekly against Obama:

I fear Paul Krugman is becoming the left-wing’s William Kristol in his single-minded partisan fervor, indifferent to political realities on the ground but true to the vision that shaped him years ago.  He remains interesting – much as Kristol has – but he seems to be somewhat disconnected from reality.

I drew a distinction then between Krugman’s approach to politics and Obama’s:

Paul Krugman illustrates as well as anyone the value of partisanship. For a political minority, partisanship is the key to survival, and the only means of blocking change. Partisanship is, in essence, a defense. The problem with the Democrats from 1994 to 2005, and even with some Democrats today, is that they were trying to be non-partisan in an environment that demands steadfast opposition – that demands partisanship…[But if] partisanship is the best strategy for a minority party, because, by it’s nature it is biased and divides the population; it is not the best strategy for a majority party…

Partisanship can only take us so far. In 2008, we need Barack Obama.

It is not surprising the Krugman now seeks to push Obama to abandon the politics that worked so well for Obama during his campaign – defeating the partisan fervor whipped up by Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, and then John McCain. Because – for Krugman, radicalized by the Bush years – partisanship is the only approach to politics he knows.

Categories
Humor Videos

Stephen Colbert Comments on Bill Gates’s Mosquito Attack

[digg-reddit-me]Stephen Colbert lists Bill Gates as the number 4 threat on his Threatdown for the mosquito incident:

Continue reading “Stephen Colbert Comments on Bill Gates’s Mosquito Attack”
Categories
Baseball Humor The Media

How could I be truthful with Katie Couric?

The biggest load of BS I’ve heard since John Edwards explained that his wife’s cancer was in remission when he started up with his affair:

At the time, I wasn’t being truthful with myself. How could I be truthful with Katie Couric or CBS?

That’s A-Rod’s explanation of why he lied about taking steriods when asked point-blank by Katie Couric about it.

Categories
Barack Obama Economics Financial Crisis

The Obama I Remember

[digg-reddit-me]This is the Obama I remember – the one I’ve been waiting to appear since his election back in November:

If you wonder where his urgency comes from, check out the following graphs:

This first one is from Nancy Pelosi’s blog, The Gavel:

[Click on the above image for a full size version.]

CNN released this graph at the beginning of this year, attempting to place 2008’s job losses in historical perspective:

What’s scarier is that before September, 2008 was not shaping up to be a bad year in terms of job losses. Instead, in the last four months of the year, almost 2 million jobs were lost. 

This final graph is from Stephen at Live Granades:

As you can see, the 1974 decline was steeper – and the economy was able to bounce back from that quickly – although that recession was controlled all the way by the Fed – which now has exhausted it’s power.

The escalating rhetoric out of Washington today actually reminds me a great deal of the Bush administration’s reaction to September 11. After the attack, Cheney and Bush and the rest of the team demanded unfiltered intelligence briefings regularly – and as they saw the scope and depth of the dangers that might be facing us, they panicked. Every moment, they were staring into the abyss – and they decided to take any measures possible to prevent “the next attack” which everyone saw as imminent. Their fear was an existential fear – which led them to mistake the threat from Al Qaeda for an existential threat. They weren’t entirely wrong – but where they went extremely wrong was in how they refused to back down from their emergency measures after it became clear that another attack was not imminent – or that we were not under constant assault. 

Today, Obama faces a similar crisis – one that seems – with it’s precipitious declines in economic and financial measures – to be existential. It may be so. No one knows exactly what to do to fix this problem – but they know they must do something. As with the George W. Bush administration, mistakes will be made – and given the size of the government, they will probably be large mistakes. 

But the difference will come in the next step. Responding to an unprecedented crisis, any administration will likely screw up. If you get it right, it will largely be by accident. But following the crisis – when things are beginning to improve and the imminence of the threat to the nation is no longer pressing – we must reevaluate our entire strategic framework, see what worked and what didn’t, what backfired and what might be able to be improved. The great tragedy of the Bush administration was that they refused to do this for the War Against Terrorism. They never took a step back from the emergency mentality that set in after September 11 to evaluate if our strategy was actually working – and instead attacked as weak and even traitorous anyone who suggested doing so. 

Obama will do well to remember that the measures he is taking now are emergency measures to rescue the economy – and to be prepared to re-think America’s financial and economic model as soon as this crisis has passed. He has indicated he plans to do so – with his talk of a Grand Bargain. We need to make sure he follows through.

Categories
Barack Obama Conservativism Criticism Liberalism The Opinionsphere

Greenwald’s Rhetorical Tics

[digg-reddit-me]As a regular reader of Glenn Greenwald’s blog, I have come to admire his legal precision, his passion, and his indefatiguable interest in some of the most important issues of our day. I’m sure these account for his now significant blog readership. He is certainly one of the voices I would choose to listen to if I were in a position of power – and I hope those in power do choose to look to Greenwald for advice and counsel. But as a regular reader, I’ve noticed a few rhetorical tics which stand out. I bring this issue up not because Glenn Greenwald’s blog is itself important – although one can make the argument that it is rather influential – but because these rhetorical tics are illustrative of the broader problem of political rhetoric in general. 

See if you can identify the patters I’m talking about by reading these selections of some (mostly recent) posts – all bold emphases are my own:

Rhetorical tic #1

Regarding Marty Peretz:

Objections to the Israeli attack are just “whining.”  Those are the words of a psychopath.

On Right-Wing Bloggers:

There is a reason why those who seek to demonstrate the alleged extremism and hate-mongering in the anti-Bush blogosphere need to go digging for anonymous commenters. And the converse is also true: those who document the extremism and sociopathic mentality in the right-wing blogosphere do so by citing the twisted writings of leading right-wing pundits, not randomly chosen commenters with no connection to the content or theme of the blog.

On Tom Friedman:

One should be clear that this sociopathic indifference to (or even celebration over) the deaths of Palestinian civilians isn’t representative of all supporters of the Israeli attack on Gaza. 

With a picture of Norman Podhertz:

Face of a psychopath: Norman Podhoretz casually calls for the slaughter of countless Iranians, and suggests that they be bombed to “smithereens”.

On Charles Krauthammer:

It is difficult to find someone with a more psychopathic indifference to the slaughter of innocent people in pursuit of shadowy, unstated political goals than Charles Krauthammer – he who lectures today on the evils of associating with Terrorists as a reflection of a person’s character.

On the Bush movement:

It is hardly possible for us to lose that “war” more devastatingly than we are losing it, and the obvious cause is the twisted, bloodthirsty and sociopathic mentality – shared by Osama bin Laden and the Bush movement alike – which was laid out with such ugly nakedness by the Vice President yesterday.

 

Rhetorical tic #2

On Susan Estrich:

Few things are less relevant than Susan Estrich, but this is still worth examining because it is the dynamic that predominates in our political process…

On Eric Holder:

Everyone can decide for themselves how much weight to assign to that eight-year-old episode.  It doesn’t substantially alter my view of Holder’s nomination, which I still view as being, on balance, a positive step.  The reasons for that conclusion raise some points that are well worth examining – not so much about Eric Holder, but about the Washington establishment.

On Ruth Marcus:

I want to re-iterate, [Ruth Marcus’s logic] is worth examining only because it’s the predominant mentality in the Washington establishment.

On Tom Daschle:

Just to be clear:  I didn’t write about Tom Daschle’s sleazy history in order to initiate a crusade to defeat his nomination.  I wrote about Daschle because the ways in which he is sleazy are illustrative of how the Washington establishment generally works.  Daschle is noteworthy only because he’s marginally more tawdry and transparent than the average Beltway operative…

On Peggy Noonan:

What a stupid and vapid woman this is, but respected and admired by our media class because she fits right in with them – endlessly impressed by her own sophistication, maturity and insight while drooling out platitudes one never hears except in seventh-grade cafeterias and on our political talk shows. As always, this isn’t worth noting because the adolescent stupidity on display here is unique to Noonan, but precisely because it isn’t. This is how our national elections are decided: by people like her, spewing things like this. 

These tics are rather prominent. One of the great strengths of blogging is that the reader gets a sense of what exists beyond the public face of an individual, as the sheer volume and relative lack of editing that define the medium make it hard to hold back one’s deeper feelings. When reading Greenwald’s more polished works or when seeing him speak in public, these tics are not as prominent or as repetitious as they are here, for example. 

I am not going to argue that Greenwald is wrong when he states that any of these individuals are sociopaths or pyschopaths – or that this or that individual person deserves to be castigated because their ideas are representative of a broader trend which is abhorrent. He very well may be right in his judgments – I do not know these people well enough to judge. What I want to respond to though is the pattern which I think reveals a less than objective view of those he is criticizing. 

Politics is essentially visceral and personal. Greenwald clearly is passionate about politics – and these tics reveal two things about his passion: that it leads even a nuanced and rational political thinker such as Greenwald to demonize his opponents; and that it leads him to realize this to some extent, thus his repeated need to qualify his personal attacks by rationalizing them as part of a broader problem. 

I have a theory about politics and history – and though I am sure it is not unique, I am not aware of which thinker I should credit it to – that we determine our political affiliation almost entirely based on who we empathize with in historical settings. Post World War II, for example, the dominant struggle of the time saw almost all Americans serving as or rooting for our soldiers fighting in an existential struggle. Thus, as long as their war remained the most prominent national memory, America remained largely united. After the struggles of the sixties became the dominant national memory, America fractured – as some who empathized with the police took a certain view; others empathized with hippies, etcetera. The hodge-podge of policies that make up the so-called “liberal” and “conservative” parties in America can be better explained by historical sympathies than any ideological underpinning. Our reaction to these national memories though are – in a large part – visceral – at least after we have been introduced to them as children.

It is due to this baseness of emotion that so much political debate seems to involve individuals speaking past one another. Obama’s solution to this has been civility and the avoidance of stereotypes (or perhaps the conflation of stereotypes). Obama sought to deflate the escalating moral outrage of his supporters rather than to stoke it, sometimes even scolding his supporters saying, “You don’t need to boo: you just need to vote.”

Reading Glenn Greenwald, one can clearly see the dynamic of escalating moral outrage at work. While one can make the case that any particular individual is a psychopath, it seems conventient when so many of the people you are disagreeing with turn out to be psychopaths. Greenwald demonstrates a clear contempt for these individuals – which they are often times deserving – but which nevertheless clouds his judgment. 

Seeing this at work in an intelligent and eminently rational writer such as Greenwald helps one to appreciate the serendipitous nature of Obama’s rise at this moment – with his unflagging civility and his desire to deflate the escalating outrage of his supporters as well as oppionents.

Categories
Humor Law

Exercise can cause serious or fatal injuries.

[digg-reddit-me]I bought a jump rope today. Taking off the cardboard slip it came in, I noticed the warning:

Consult your doctor before starting any exercise program. Exercise programs of any kind present an inherent danger to the participant. Serious or fatal injury can occur. All equipment is intended to be used by adults and only in the manner shown/illustrated/described. Anyone under the age of 18 should have adult supervision. Always follow instructions (if included). Always use proper techniques and common sense when exercising. Always check your equipment thoroughly.

Clark Stooksbury over at The American Conservative seems to have noticed this warning first last week.

This could easily turn into a rumination about how “overlawyered” we have become as a society – beginning with the infamous McDonald’s coffee case to now warnings about exercise causing death. But instead, taking a step back, let me make a different point. The McDonald’s case is greatly misunderstood and the facts make clear McDonald’s was negligent in the matter. And as for this warning that exercise may kill me – I’m going to chalk it up to one of those silly things companies do out of an excess of caution. The warning doesn’t hurt me – in fact, it’s somewhat amusing. Perhaps it is yet another sign that we are on a slippery slope to being drowned by laws and litigation – but