Category: Law

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Criticism Domestic issues Economics Law Libertarianism Political Philosophy Politics The Web and Technology

Capitalism in Practice

[reddit-me]I’ve started Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, a history of information industries in America; and having read Ayn Rand’s fictional Atlas Shrugged earlier this year — I wonder what Rand would make of this history of industrial warfare.

One of the motifs of Wu’s history is a theme of Rand’s novel — the extreme lengths the rich and powerful will go to in order to quash a disruptive technology. In the novel, it was Rearden steel — a metal stronger, cheaper, and better in every way than ordinary steel; in Wu’s history, it is every technological innovation from the phone to FM radio to television to the internet. In both history and the novel, the established industry used corrupt scientific experts, intimidation of suppliers, government regulation, and the blocking of financing to prevent the disruptive technology from taking off.

Rand’s novel though divides the everyone into two categories: the productive who are proud, competitive, inventive individuals who make everything of worth; and the looters who are unproductive and seek to leach off of the productive using the government, religion, and pity.

Wu’s history reveals a rather different story. There is no figure in history to match the strong, creative, independent, self-made industrial magnate Dagny Taggart. There are few who resemble her brother, the weak, dependent, self-loathing James Taggart who adds nothing of worth to the business except to plead with the government to stop his competitors because their superiority is unfair,

Only rarely do the inventors become rich. More often, they are outmaneuvered by corporate titans who use every means at their disposal to win. When Edwin Armstrong invented FM radio in 1934, he had pioneered a technology that allowed for better sound quality and that could fit more stations in the same radio spectrum with less interference. David Sarnoff, a major figure in the AM radio industry, was able to prevent FM radio from gaining wide acceptance until the 1970s through a combination of public propaganda, lobbying to change obscure rules relating to radio spectrum usage, and control over the manufacturing of radio players. David Sarnoff managed a vast business empire; he was at the cutting edge of innovations in radio and television. He won not because he was weak and unproductive (as Rand’s villains are) — but because he was ruthless.

Rand’s many fans aren’t typically the creative inventors. They are the very businessmen who see moral justification for their wealth in her philosophy. But they, like the businessmen in Wu’s history, are distinguished not for their purity of motive or love of competition, but their willingness to use any means at their disposal to achieve the corporate empire they seek. Unlike the fictional heroes of Rand’s novel, they do not seek competition. They seek a final victory and end to the competition.

In the theories of Rand and many of her acolytes, capitalism is about competition. In practice, capitalism has about brute strength and force used in restraint of competition.

[Image by Ron Schott licensed under Creative Commons.]

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Barack Obama Law Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

How the Supreme Court Nomination Process Rewards the Type of People Who Defer to Presidential Authority

[digg-reddit-me]David Brooks did a great job today of describing the type of individual our current Supreme Court confirmation process tends to reward (to paraphrase):

A person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess, and who therefore we are forced to construct arguments based on speculation because they have been too careful to let their actual positions leak out.

Brooks locates this type of individual — as is his wont (see for eg. bobos) — in a general sociological group:

About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.

If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic.

Brooks sees this as a flaw in his evaluation of Elena Kagan:

Kagan has apparently wanted to be a judge or justice since adolescence (she posed in judicial robes for her high school yearbook). There was a brief period, in her early 20s, when she expressed opinions on legal and political matters. But that seems to have ended pretty quickly…

But I was struck by the similarity of David Brooks’s evaluation of Elena Kagan now and Dahlia Lithwick’s evaluation of John Roberts when he was nominated:

I knew guys like [John Roberts] in college and at law school; we all knew guys like him. These were the guys who were certain, by age 19, that they couldn’t smoke pot, or date trampy girls, or throw up off the top of the school clock tower because it would impair their confirmation chances. They would have done all these things, but for the possibility of being carved out of the history books for it…

My sense that Roberts has been preparing for next month’s confirmation hearings his whole life was shored up by a glance at the new memos released by the Library of Congress yesterday. As early as 1985, Roberts was fretting about how federal government records disclosed to Congress before confirmation hearings could tank a nomination.

Roberts was widely seen to have been very “careful” and “cautious” throughout his life — intellectually and otherwise. Yet David Brooks had a different reaction to Roberts nomination:

Roberts nomination, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Less important than this minor bit of hypocrisy (which Bill Scher for the Huffington Post mines for all it’s worth) — or perhaps partisan blindness — on the part of David Brooks (and haven’t we all been there?) — is the substance of his critique. Brooks never quite connects the dots — but seems on the verge of making a profound point.

There seems to be a connection between the personality type of Kagan and Roberts — the type of cautious, establishment-minded personality rewarded by our current nomination process — and the tendency of this type of person to defer to the highest authority figure in the American psyche, the President of the United States. In Roberts and Alito, we have 2 of Brooks’s Organization Kids who also happen to be 2 of the most pro-presidentialist Supreme Court justices in history. Though Kagan’s views on this aren’t clear — as she has made some comments indicating an expansive view of executive power only in the context of discussing the views of others — we do know that she felt the Bush administration went too far, unlike Roberts and Alito.

Though I would have preferred a justice more wary of executive power, for me personally, this concern is not enough to give me reason to oppose Kagan’s nomination and appointment. I do want to know more about Kagan’s views on this — to see whether and to what degree she conforms to Glenn Greenwald’s fears (which are, as it should go without saying regarding Greenwald, hyperbolic). Lawrence Lessig has pushed back convincingly against Greenwald on this issue — and of course, Greenwald responded by going ad hominem.

Both Greenwald’s and Brook’s critique ignores the structural element to this pick as neither addresses the degree to which our current confirmation process tends to reward cautious people whose public views are somewhat ambiguous but who are close enough to those in the executive branch that the President nominating them trusts them. The type of person who would meet these criteria would not tend to be the strongest supporters of the Court as a check on executive power. Even aside from the generational category of “Organization Kids,” this would tend to place people deferential to presidential authority into the Supreme Court.

—–

Also interesting: Ezra Klein posits a better analogue than John Roberts to understand the Kagan pick is Barack Obama himself:

When Obama announced Kagan’s nomination, he praised “her temperament, her openness to a broad array of viewpoints; her habit, to borrow a phrase from Justice Stevens, ‘of understanding before disagreeing’; her fair-mindedness and skill as a consensus-builder.” This sentence echoes countless assessments of Obama himself.

Obama is cool. He makes a show of processing the other side’s viewpoint. He’s more interested in the fruits of consensus than the clarification of conflict. In fact, just as Kagan is praised for giving conservative scholars a hearing at Harvard’s Law School, Obama was praised for giving conservative scholars a hearing on the Harvard Law Review. “The things that frustrate people about Obama will frustrate people about Kagan,” says one prominent Democrat who’s worked with both of them.

[Image by the Harvard Law Review licensed under Creative Commons.]

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Barack Obama Criticism Law Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

The Escalating War Over Judicial Appointments

I recall the Wall Street Journal editorial page making a big deal about the “unprecedented” blocking of appointees to the Judiciary while George W. Bush was in power. The editors considered it a travesty that the a minority would take such “unprecedented” and “anti-constitutional” steps to preserve their “last toehold on power” using “not-so-democratic tactics” (the filibuster) to “block, delay and besmirch” Bush’s judicial nominees in an “assault on democracy” whose purpose was “judicial Armageddon.” (I’ve excerpted some examples below the fold.)

Clearly, the Wall Street Journal opposes “judicial filibusters” (though it wrongly credits the Democratic Party for inventing them.) So you would think that they would make a point – just to appear consistent – of calling on the Republicans to stop the practice of judicial filibustering. (There was one guest editorial to this effect since Obama’s election that my research has found.) Instead, most readers of the editorial page would have no idea that Republicans have in fact escalated the judicial war that has been going on since the 1980s. As Doug Kendall writes in Slate:

Over the past several decades, senators in both parties have used an escalating set of procedural tactics to block confirmations, particularly near the end of an out-going president’s term in office. To date, however, the tit-for-tat game has played out within a fairly narrow category of nominees who are deemed controversial. [my emphasis]

Now, Kendall points out, the Republicans are slowing down all judicial appointments rather than just the handful of controversial ones.

Kendall compares how Bush nominees fared at the end of Bush’s term with the Congress controlled by Democrats:

In the last two years of Bush’s term with a Democrat-controlled Congress, 26 of 68 nominees were confirmed less than three months after the president nominated them, with 100 confirmations total during that time.
In the first nine months of Obama’s term with an even more Democrat-controlled Congress, 0 of 22 nominees were confirmed less than three months after the president nominated them, with 3 confirmations total during that time.

Kendall points out that Obama’s nominees have all been uncontroversial so far – supported by their home state senators, even when they are conservative Republicans. (The support of your home state senator is an important measure used for judging nominees.) And that they have been blocked even when passing the Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support:

Two additional nominees, Andre Davis of Maryland and David Hamilton of Indiana, cleared the Senate judiciary committee way back on June 4—144 days ago. Yet their floor votes are still pending.

Davis and Hamilton have spent longer in this particular form of limbo than any Bush nominee confirmed from 2007-08. Yet Davis cleared the judiciary committee by a bipartisan vote of 16-3 and can’t remotely be considered controversial. Hamilton has the strong support of his home state Republican senator, Richard Lugar. Beverly Martin, an appeals court nominee supported by Georgia’s two conservative Republican senators, was unanimously reported out of the Senate judiciary committee by a voice vote more than 46 days ago. She, too, has not received a Senate floor vote. Five other Obama nominees, all well-qualified and without any serious opposition, similarly await floor action.

I personally would not begrudge the Republicans the ability to filibuster and try to block nominees whose views they deemed controversial. I would oppose any justice who believed the president possessed the powers of a monarch in times of war (as Justices Alito and Roberts seem to) and I can see grounds for opposing some leftist nominees as well. But to hold up the entire judicial appointment process is a clear abuse. I await the Wall Street Journal‘s imminent essay on the “judicial Armageddon” that these “anti-democratic” and “anti-constitutional” actions by the Republican Party they sympathize with will clearly lead to. Especially as the Republicans in Congress have pushed the filibuster to historically unprecedented levels.

Continue reading “The Escalating War Over Judicial Appointments”
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Criticism Law The Opinionsphere

Mining Right Wing Critiques for Some Honesty

I’ve gotten tired of being outraged at every self-serving lie and every new line crossed and picking apart idiotic arguments by right wingers. This served some purpose during the campaign – and I believe it is important to do when disinformation campaigns are being waged (as during August of the health care debate). But it is not what I feel most comfortable doing.

At the same time, I believe Republicans are undermining the two-party system and our democratic institutions by using their considerable clout to promote fantastical claims and lies about the efforts of their opponents instead of engaging in more pragmatic or fair-minded criticisms. Right wingers who back the Republicans have likewise mainly fallen into this trap – aside from a few notable exceptions (Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, David Frum, Bruce Bartlett, David Brooks.)One of my goals then will be to not only promote these individuals – as Andrew Sullivan for example is – but to read the propagandist crap from more mainstream right wingers and mine it for legitimate criticism.

I’ve had this thought in my head for a few weeks – and have been reading wit this in mind. But when reading items like this by Steve Huntley in the Chicago Sun Times, it becomes very difficult:

Someone’s brain is clearly addled – for there is nothing contradictory about claiming you inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression (which it technically was) and that it is even worse than was thought (especially as several weeks after Biden’s remark, the Department of Commerce released the official statistics revising its statistics down for the past year as it periodically does.)

It amazes me that such paragraphs get past an editor.

Other concerns – while perhaps legitimate – are so self-serving they are hard to reconcile with past views. For example, Wesley Smith over at National Review‘s The Corner did not from my reading of him bring up the subject of the “rule of law” at all during George W. Bush’s presidency. However, now he brings it up with a hard criticism of the Obama administration’s position on medical marijuana:

Part of the sleight of hand here is a subtle mischaracterization of the change. Obama is not “refusing to enforce federal marijuana laws” but rather shifting resources away from targeting these groups, or as Devlin Barrett of the Associated Press described it, prosecutors will be told that “it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state law.” And Smith doesn’t acknowledge the long tradition (he refers only to Andrew Jackson) of presidents refusing to enforce laws as part of the checks and balances described in most textbooks on the Constitution. Smith also ignores the far more serious violations of the rule of law that Bush committed in actually ordering the law be broken and declaring it void when it violated his duty to protect Americans.

This sudden concern for the rule of law – concern suggesting it was incredibly fragile and can be destroyed in an instant – seems to reinforce the point I made earlier – that the strong positions taken by conservatives regarding curbing executive power and discretion are entirely unprincipled. They have everything to do with the fact that a liberal is now in power and will be abandoned again when they have power.

However, I did find one conservative critique I could endorse: Marie Gryphon’s piece in the National Review that makes the case against scapegoating Ken Lewis of Bank of America. To blame him for accepting the deal he did – especially given the amount of pressure he was under from Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and those working with them is ridiculous. Whether or not there is a legal case against him, it should not be pursued.

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

Former Bush Attorney General: American Justice System Led to September 11

[digg-reddit-me]I already commented on this Mukasey piece – but I wanted to follow up and make clear why this piece from a well-respected “conservative” demonstrates how far the conservative movement, the right wing, and the Republican Party have fallen. First, it’s important to note Mukasey’s position under Bush – as the chief proponent and custodian of our justice system. Second, one should remember that he was long considered a moderate in the party.

Yet Mukasey literally blames September 11 on American values, on the American justice system:

[W]e put our vaunted civilian justice system on display in these [previous terrorism] cases…

In return, we got the 9/11 attacks and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents….

Or, as the subhead put it:

We tried the first World Trade Center bombers in civilian courts. In return we got 9/11 and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents.

This is not a conservative approach to the issue. It is a radical one. The accumulated wisdom of our forerunners is thrown out the window in the favor of a shiny, new and “improved” justice system. And even worse the barratuve being built is clearly unhinged from reality. Its only purpose seems to be the same as Cheney’s – to preemptively politicize the aftermath of the next attack. Reading his argument analytically, it’s hard to see how he reaches the conclusion he does regarding the American justice system. The list of deficiencies are all manageable – perhaps with some tweaks – within our legal system. Perhaps they suggest we should try a system of national security courts. But Mukasey concludes instead that they necessitate throwing out our values and the institutions which represent the accumulated wisdom of our democracy.

This leap comes from the narrative. The rationale Mukasey offers is deeper than any of the actual facts he cites – and is emotional rather than logical. For him, September 11 happened because our justice system doesn’t work against terrorism. It is an argument parallel to Cheney’s – that September 11 happened because we were weak – and as a result of this mindset, Cheney set out demonstrating our strength by bullying other nations, withdrawing from treaties, avoiding multilateral institutions, invading Iraq, avoiding the Middle East peace processes, refusing to talk to our adversaries, labeling them evil. But in each case, despite the emotional “logic,” the narrative itself is unhinged from reality.

The fact that a “moderate” in the Republican Party has been so radicalized demonstrates how far from common sense the right wing movement has fallen.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

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

The Fallacies of Mukasey

[digg-reddit-me]Michael Mukasey’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal yesterday continues to demonstrate the collapse of common sense in the Republican Party. His thesis is that “civilian courts are no place to try terrorists.” His main supporting argument – and the subheadline – suggests that there is a direct link between trying terrorists in a criminal proceeding and September 11. He doesn’t explain the link anywhere in the piece – but as the subhead says:

We tried the first World Trade Center bombers in civilian courts. In return we got 9/11 and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents.

Mukasey himself concludes his piece:

Nevertheless, critics of Guantanamo seem to believe that if we put our vaunted civilian justice system on display in these cases, then we will reap benefits in the coin of world opinion, and perhaps even in that part of the world that wishes us ill. Of course, we did just that after the first World Trade Center bombing, after the plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific, and after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

In return, we got the 9/11 attacks and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents. True, this won us a great deal of goodwill abroad—people around the globe lined up for blocks outside our embassies to sign the condolence books. That is the kind of goodwill we can do without. [my emphasis]

The “if…then…” relationship between these two is tenuous – and if you read the piece, you notice that Mukasey does not try to make it. And his laziness is evident elsewhere as he tries to attack Attorney General Eric Holder’s contention that a certain group of terrorists was prosecuted successfully on the grounds that (a) they were not executed because a jury member lied about his willingness to impose the death penalty; and (b) because one prisoner attacked a guard and injured him seriously.

The bulk of his piece does not attempt to further the narrative about how American justice leads to terrorist attacks on America – it instead raises a number of other issues, which have often been gone over. There is some legitimacy to this critique – so I do not mean to dismiss it outright. Phillip Bobbitt and some other legal scholars on the left have used it to make the case for “National Security Courts” which would solely deal with issues of terrorism and national security threats. Mukasey though uses them to make the more radical argument that our justice system itself is incapable of dealing with the threat – and so he proposes a kind of preemptive surrender of values.

These are the basic issues he raises:

  • Trying terrorists would require extra security for judges, jurors, prosecutors, etcetera.
  • This extra security (and additional caseload) would further burden an overloaded system.
  • The court itself would become a target.
  • Trying terrorists in a court would encourage litigation of national security issues.
  • If terrorists are convicted and put into the general prison population, they would be able to try to recruit converts to jihad.
  • Those suspected terrorists held by George W. Bush weren’t treated consistently with American standards of justice – and due to various reasons, we cannot make any case against many of them.
  • Part of our justice system involves the full disclosure of evidence to the defendants; this would allow information to leak, including possibly about intelligence means and methods.

Only the last two are legitimate issues that are difficult to deal with. The first five all have relatively easy solutions if we decide that our American justice system is capable of handling the threat from terrorism. We will provide the extra security. We will hire more judges and prosecutors and get the necessary resources to handle the additional caseload – getting this done would be as much a priority as having enough troops to accomplish a mission in Iraq. We would house terrorists separately from the general prison population – and I haven’t seen anyone suggest otherwise. (Though it’s worth noting that the example Mukasey gives is of a man who was radicalized in prison without being housed with terrorists.)

The issue of what to do with the prisoners George W. Bush was responsible for is a thorny one. Bush and Mukasey left the situation unresolved, and however it is resolved, it will prove politically and legally hazardous. But Obama seems to be approaching this situation pragmatically – and avoiding letting a desire for consistency to constrain him. This is the overall right approach, though the details could obviously be resolved poorly.

Regarding the last issue, Mukasy raises a very salient point – one which a National Security Court would resolve. This issue was also raised with respect to the War on Drugs and efforts to prosecute organized crime, and in each case, a new court with a new justice system was proposed. But our justice system proved able to handle these issues after early setbacks. Perhaps a new court is needed here, as our adversarial system can work to the advantage of organized groups opposing it. This is an issue to be debated – and a serious one. I would tend to believe that our courts – perhaps with some extra rules or procedures designed to mitigate the downsides – can handle these cases.

[Image by threecee licensed under Creative Commons.]

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Humor Law

Souter’s Books

Katie Zezima in the New York Times:

Justice Souter told a Weare neighbor, Jimmy Gilman, that the two-story farmhouse was not structurally sound enough to support the thousands of books he owns, according to The Concord Monitor, and that he wished to live on one level. [my emphasis]

Wow. That’s gotta be quite a collection.

Categories
Law Politics The Bush Legacy

Alberto Gonzales: Sharp Like An Old Crayon

The Times always gets an interesting array of questions written by prominent individual for its pre-Confirmation hearing piece with questions for the nominee. This last attempt was no different – but as always – the questions often revealed more about the questioner than their intended answerer. For example, Alberto Gonzalez suggests Sotomayor be asked:

Some overseas critics have questioned the legality of United States government policies on the war on terrorism. Should America’s standing in the world, to the extent it may be affected by the outcome of a case, ever inform a judicial decision?

Clearly, Gonzales thinks it should affect the outcome of cases – but it seems impossible to see how this principle would be applied. But one can guess that this argument was used to push Gonzales into taking positions he might not have otherwise as David Addington, Scooter Libby, and other top Bush administration officials working under Cheney pushed various extreme positions in secret – and then to cover up the excesses while Alberto “I Don’t Recall” Gonzales was Attorney General.

But it takes some sharp like Gonzales (sharp like an old crayon) to expose the underlying idea so baldly. Presumably Gonzales thinks American citizens have a right to know what the American government is doing in their name – but that this right must be counterbalanced by a Court acting as a kind of public relations arm of the U.S. government. As Glenn Greenwald said (in a piece I cannot find at the moment, so I paraphrase): “The inevitable logic of this position is that the worse the crime is, the greater the necessity to cover it up to protect America’s image.” This obviously creates an incentive for administration officials to make sure that their crimes are so bad future administrations will be compelled to protect them – to prevent information from becoming public and damaging America’s reputation.

[Image by Matthew Bradley licensed under Creative Commons.]

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Law National Security Politics

Cokie Roberts Thinks the Rule of Law Might Be More Important Than A Pleasant Atmosphere in Washington

[digg-reddit-me]When I heard Cokie Roberts saying this on Sunday my jaw dropped:

The self-centeredness of the response – and the fact that she showed no shame about explaining this as her reasoning on national television when she was supposed to be acting as a serious commentator. Though it is pretty awesome that she is willing to undergo the inconvenience of the “bad atmosphere” in Washington as a result of attempting to uphold the Rule of Law. I’m glad she is willing to make the sacrifice for the rest of us.

It’s pretty telling that committing war crimes isn’t what is credited with souring the mood – but instead the blame is foisted onto those who uphold the law…

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Barack Obama Criticism Foreign Policy History Iran Law National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

McNamara, Cuomo, Bearing Witness, Iran’s Bomb, Sri Lanken Victories, and Historical Dignity

It’s that glorious time of the week – Friday. So, here’s my recommendations of some interesting reads for this weekend that came up this past week…

  1. There were a number of excellent obituaries of Robert McNamara published upon his death. But what I would recommend would be reading this speech given in 1966 at the height of his power.
  2. Another speech worth reading is Mario Cuomo’s “Our Lady of the Law” speech from November 2007 which was published for the first time on this blog earlier in the week.
  3. Roger Cohen in the New York Times tries to express the insufficiency of online reporting aggregating news and media – as Andrew Sullivan and Nico Pitney did so usefully did during the Iranian protests. As these two journalists amassed tweets, photos, videos, news stories and every other bit of information about what was going on in Iran, Roger Cohen himself was in Tehran having evaded the Iranian censors. He went to the protests, interviewed the protesters, ran from basij with them. What I could see then was that while what Sullivan and Pitney were doing was new and unique – and extremely useful for understanding what was happening, it was missing a certain urgency that Cohen was able to provide with his bylines from Tehran. So he writes here about the “actual responsibility” of the journalist – to “bear witness:

    “Not everyone realizes,” Weber told students, “that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar. This is particularly true when we recollect that it has to be written on the spot, to order, and that it must create an immediate effect, even though it is produced under completely different conditions from that of scholarly research. It is generally overlooked that a journalist’s actual responsibility is far greater than the scholar’s.”

    Yes, journalism is a matter of gravity. It’s more fashionable to denigrate than praise the media these days. In the 24/7 howl of partisan pontification, and the scarcely less-constant death knell din surrounding the press, a basic truth gets lost: that to be a journalist is to bear witness.

    The rest is no more than ornamentation.

    To bear witness means being there — and that’s not free. No search engine gives you the smell of a crime, the tremor in the air, the eyes that smolder, or the cadence of a scream.
    No news aggregator tells of the ravaged city exhaling in the dusk, nor summons the defiant cries that rise into the night. No miracle of technology renders the lip-drying taste of fear. No algorithm captures the hush of dignity, nor evokes the adrenalin rush of courage coalescing, nor traces the fresh raw line of a welt.

  4. Robert Patterson in Foreign Policy brings some measured historical analysis to what would happen if Iran got the bomb.
  5. Robert Kaplan in The Atlantic explains how the Sri Lankan government was able to achieve a monumental victory over a terrorist group – and also why America should not imitate its methods in any way. He concludes bleakly:

    So is there any lesson here? Only a chilling one. The ruthlessness and brutality to which the Sri Lankan government was reduced in order to defeat the Tigers points up just how nasty and intractable the problem of insurgency is. The Sri Lankan government made no progress against the insurgents for nearly a quarter century, until they turned to extreme and unsavory methods.

  6. David Brooks wrote about dignity:

    In so doing, [George Washington] turned himself into a new kind of hero. He wasn’t primarily a military hero or a political hero. As the historian Gordon Wood has written, “Washington became a great man and was acclaimed as a classical hero because of the way he conducted himself during times of temptation. It was his moral character that set him off from other men.”