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Articles filed under Politics
What About the Innocents?
Over at True/Slant, I rebut the latest from Andrew McCarthy, the National Review writer who is one step away from declaring the lawyers for Gitmo detainees to be enemy combatants.
An excerpt:
Andrew McCarthy continues to write as though every detainee ever held at Guantanamo Bay is a member of al Qaeda. Nowhere does he acknowledge that some people designated as enemy combatants by the Bush Administration were actually innocent, or that some of the lawyers he is maligning deserve credit for helping to free innocent men. Had Mr. McCarthy’s preferred policies remained in effect, these innocent men would still be rotting in a Gitmo prison cell today. In that way, he transgresses against the core American principle that all men are endowed by their creator with an inalienable right to liberty.
Mr. McCarthy’s writing on detainee issues would be far more intellectually honest if he acknowledged rather than elided the existence of these innocent people.
The rest is here. It tackles specific passages in recent posts by Mr. McCarthy, and quotes him making one of the most odious statements I’ve ever seen in mainstream political discourse. His rhetoric is getting so extreme that even Mark Levin can’t believe it.
In which permanent war is located
The Al Qaeda Seven debate puts me back in the frame of mind of puzzling out some of the larger-scale oddities in the Cheneyite wing of American foreign policy thinking, which is to say I’m about to sketch a broad inconsistency or self-contradiction that has many individual exceptions but also, I think, some validity as a critique, or as an arrow pointing to genuinely disturbing inclinations. On one hand, in the more Wilsonian redoubts of American hawkishness, confidence and moral self-assurance in the use of American force in Iraq drew heavily on the idea that the invasion represented a sort of end-game: democratic transformation in Iraq as a way of replacing a posture of permanent war with something resembling normalized and organically peaceful relations among democratic states, first, certainly, with Iraq itself but eventually the region as a whole, at least in the minds of some. On the other hand, from the same hawkish Wilsonians who envisioned a new Prague on the Tigris, we get something resembling Schmittian* realism when it comes to the disposition of American law towards terrorism suspects – that is, well, a posture of permanent war, in which long-term, highly public exceptions to American legal norms are not just tolerated but actively maintained, because the claims of law are trumped by the claims of war, and the effectively endless nature of the war in question causes no anxiety on behalf of American law. Those who push for a normalization in the legal status of detainees because we don’t like the corrosive precedent it sets for American law, and we don’t think the American Constitution should be asked to countenance this stuff indefinitely, are told, “This is war, yella-belly. Get used to it.”
(*I mean no slur-by-association with the Carl Schmitt reference. It’s merely the most apt theoretical precedent I could think of. I myself find Schmitt enlightening reading on related matters. But then, I come from an academic environment where people just pick up and read Heidegger without a single worry about who might be watching (except maybe the worry that nobody’s watching). We come by literary guilt and outrage only with great resistance, is what I’m saying.)
Another Weak Defense of Keep America Safe
Over at True/Slant, I have explained why Andrew McCarthy’s latest op-ed in USA Today, titled “No right to Counsel: Of all the causes to volunteer for, these lawyers chose our enemies,” is unpersuasive and wrongheaded. Here I want to address Jonah Goldberg, who says he doesn’t even understand why the Keep America Safe ad is controversial:
…was the Keep America Safe ad too strident? Maybe. Reasonable people can differ on that. But on the general question of whether it’s permissible in a democratic society to criticize lawyers for the kinds of clients they take, I’m baffled as to how this suddenly became a serious debate. And on the question of whether it is legitimate to question the past clients of lawyers working in the Justice Department, all I can say is “huh?”
Mr. Goldberg’s argument is misleading — he makes it appear as though at worst, the Keep America Safe ad was a bit too strident in asserting that lawyers can be criticized for the kinds of clients they take, when in fact the ad’s most objectionable feature isn’t criticizing lawyers for representing Gitmo Bay detainees, it is implying that those lawyers are in league with our terrorist enemies. That aspect of the ad is rather heavy handed: there’s the foreboding music, the shadowy lawyer figures, the decision to label them the “Al Qaeda seven” (despite the fact that not all of them represented Al Qaeda members), and the implication that these lawyers share the values of Al Qaeda rather than their fellow citizens. Were Michael Moore to produce a commercial criticizing John Yoo for his torture memos, calling him “The Inquisitor” for abetting the use of barbaric torture methods, and asking whether he shared the values of terrorists or Americans, does anyone think that Mr. Goldberg would see the commercial and say merely that reasonable people can agree as to whether it is too strident?
Mr. Goldberg is of course correct that in all cases, the Justice Department should respond in a transparent fashion to inquiries about the past clients of its attorneys, even when the inquiries are from modern day McCarthyites, and it is obviously “permissible” in a democratic society to criticize lawyers for the kinds of clients they take.
It is also permissible in a democratic society to accuse people of being Communists, or to call them racial epithets, or to do any number of things that are unseemly and wrong. I am sure Mr. Goldberg can find a convenient liberal blogger who makes the weakest of all arguments against Keep America Safe. Everyone on his side of this debate seems to have a special talent for responding only to the weakest criticisms offered against the group. What he cannot rebut is the stronger argument against Keep America Safe: that in this particular case, it is wrongheaded for the group to criticize lawyers of Gitmo detainees for taking those specific clients, and that it is especially wrong to do so in an ad calculated to make it appear as though they share the values of al Qaeda terrorists.
Mr. Goldberg writes:
When did lawyers become this infallible priesthood of do-gooders? As a general rule, mob lawyers are somewhat less admirable than, say, first-amendment lawyers. Personal-injury lawyers understandably get less respect than civil-rights lawyers. I spent much of the 1990s listening to liberals like James Carville demonize dirty, filthy, “tobacco lawyers.” Of course, honorable lawyers sometimes pick unsavory or unpopular clients on principle. I think reasonable people can debate the merits of those decisions. I think it ludicrous, however, to simply have a flat rule that any lawyer who represents any unpopular villain is heroic — and beyond criticism — for doing so. Just as I think it would be ludicrous to have a blanket policy of condemning as villainous any lawyer who represents any criminal. (And let us put aside the fundamental argument about whether al-Qaeda detainees are “criminals” in the conventional sense).
Reading Mr. Goldberg, you’d almost think Keep America Safe’s critics are asserting that “lawyers are an infallible priesthood of do-gooders.” Actually we are objecting to ads that suggest American lawyers are on Al Qaeda’s side in the War on Terror instead of our side.
Invoking mob lawyers and tobacco lawyers, Mr. Goldberg neglects to explore why they are unpopular: the former are probably most familiar to the American publica through the Godfather and other mob movies, where the consiglieries help plan crimes before they occur, benefit financially from the criminal acts they’re paid to obscure, and constantly lie on behalf of their clients. Tobacco lawyers are vilified because so many of them helped hide evidence that the product they sell is harmful for one’s health, as dramatized in The Insider. It wasn’t representing clients that sell unhealthy products that gave them their bad rap so much as their illegal complicity with those clients and the premeditated lies told on the client’s behalf.
In other words, the comparison hardly does valid rhetorical work in an argument against lawyers truthfully representing pro-bono for clients who are either innocent or committed their crimes/hostile acts long before the attorney-client association began. Mr. Goldberg may think that a blanket policy against condemning any lawyers as villainous in wrongheaded, but that assertion says nothing about whether Keep America Safe wronged these particular lawyers. He never directly addresses that question, instead choosing to take on only those aspects of this controversy that allow him to make plausible if unpersuasvive arguments on behalf of Keep America Safe.
Mr. Goldberg writes:
Then there’s the twofold issue of these lawyers working for DOJ and the administration keeping their identities a secret. How is this not a legitimate issue? I don’t get it. As USA Today concedes, lawyers who defended al-Qaeda suspects need to recuse themselves from these matters. Everyone concedes that there are conflict of interest issues here. Are we to suddenly believe that Congress has no right to inquire about such things? Tell that to environmentalists who want lawyers for “polluters” kept out of the EPA. Seriously, has no one listened to Henry Waxman for the last 30 years? Do Obama’s countless promises to be “transparent” have no validity when it comes to these lawyers? Why on earth would that be the case?
And yet, to listen to Holder’s defenders, the people who ask these questions are being denounced as demagogues and (Joe) McCarthyites. This is coming from the same crowd that wanted to criminally prosecute Bush’s lawyers? Spare me.
It’s true, there should be transparency with regard to all lawyers in the Justice Department, and there wouldn’t be such an uproar about this if Keep America Safe and its allies were merely calling for transparency. Of course, they’re going much father, asserting that there is something objectionable about the behavior of the lawyers in question. It is because they call these lawyers “the Al Qaeda 7” in a commercial that darkly insinuates they share the values of our enemies that Keep America Safe is called McCarthyite.
It is apparently lost on Mr. Goldberg that the people who want to prosecute Bush Administration lawyers believe that those attorneys broke the law, and present a rather compelling case for it — whereas no one contends that the lawyers of Gitmo detainees broke the law. Nor have I seen any commercials questioning whether Bush Administration lawyers share the values of our enemies. Overall, Mr. Goldberg’s arguments are unpersuasive, and the issues he offers no arguments about overlap almost perfectly with the least defensible aspects of Keep America Safe’s odious behavior.
The Man Who Would Give Away the Bill of Rights
In a post at The Corner that is dripping with sarcasm, Andrew McCarthy writes:
So the attorney general, while he was in private practice at a firm that openly bragged about its “pro bono” representation of numerous Gitmo detainees, chose during our war with al-Qaeda to file a brief on behalf of an al-Qaeda operative who tried to kill lots of Americans. So he argued that such people ought to be treated as criminal defendants swaddled in the Bill of Rights rather than enemy combatants detained for interrogation and war-crimes commissions. So what?
It is telling that Mr. McCarthy invokes swaddling as a metaphor for detainees who seek relief under the Bill of Rights — as if merely extending its protections is akin to treating accused people as delicately as one treats infants, when in fact the Bill of Rights is a document whose guarantees were put in place because the Founding generation believed a federal government that failed to respect them would be guilty of tyrannical behavior.
Mr. McCarthy’s post is particularly galling because the al-Qaeda operative Attorney General Eric Holder wanted to protect under the Bill of Rights was Jose Padilla, an American citizen. In other words, when Mr. McCarthy sneers at the idea of swaddling “such people” in the Bill of Rights, the “people” in question are American citizens accused of terrorism. Were it possible to poll folks on both sides of the Bill of Rights debate, from James Madison to George Mason to Thomas Jefferson to George Washington to Patrick Henry, I’m confident they’d all agree that the President of the United States should not possess the unchecked power to strip an American citizen of his constitutional rights by declaring him an enemy of the nation in an opaque process that isn’t even subject to judicial review. As I’ve written before, the Framers of the Constitution even included specific provisions for American citizens who commit treason.
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
In Mr. McCarthy’s opinion, Jose Padilla — and by extension all American citizens — should be deemed guilty of levying War against the United States based on the say so of whoever happens to be president. It is a damn good thing that folks like Eric Holder spoke up on behalf of Mr. Padilla in order to assure that dangerous, unconstitutional precedent didn’t become American law. If Mr. McCarthy’s view had prevailed instead, every American citizen, you and I included, would have less recourse to the Bill of Rights as protection against folks in future federal government posts who were abusing their power.
Another Exceptional Critique of Lowry and Ponnuru
Daniel Larison offers another deconstruction of the infamous essay and the even weaker response:
[T]heir argument is not really with Obama’s belief in American exceptionalism, but something much more basic. They do not much care for his domestic policy, and they have a sneaking suspicion that there is something wrong with his foreign policy even though they cannot actually prove it. For whatever reason, instead of advancing policy arguments against the administration’s agenda, they have concocted a half-baked theory to make American progressivism and American exceptionalism appear antithetical to one another when any halfway honest accounting of modern domestic and foreign policy tells us that they have been complementary and closely linked. From my perspective, that is one reason to be very skeptical of American exceptionalism, but there is no real reason why anyone who believes in American exceptionalism should doubt Obama’s belief in the same.
Two Links, Both Offered Pro-Bono
At the Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr offers abstract, compelling arguments that Andy McCarthy’s beliefs about lawyers who defend War on Terrorism detainees are “ridiculous.” I take a different approach at True/Slant, using one concrete case to explore the consequences of the ideas that Mr. McCarthy, Marc Thiessen, Liz Cheney and William Kristol advocate.
On a different topic entirely, I ran into frequent American Scene commenter Supra Shoes today.
She appreciated the attractive contents of our conversation, and promised to introduce many friends to it.
"Even the Conservative Conor Friedersdorf..."
On Twitter today, Glenn Greenwald generously linked my Marc Thiessen take-down. It’s gratifying to get traffic from a writer so uncompromising in his assessments, and as I’ve noted to several friends lately, I find Mr. Greenwald’s blog an indispensable read on civil liberties. Despite our many disagreements on political philosophy and domestic policy, I am certain that come what may in this country, he is a blogger who’ll offer informed, intellectually honest arguments in favor of constitutional protections and against government abuses — and agree or disagree with his War on Terrorism coverage, it is evident that if you put Mr. Greenwald in charge of World War II era California, we wouldn’t have imprisoned Japanese Americans, and had he lived during the Red Scare, he would’ve been arguing against Joseph McCarthy. In other words, Mr. Greenwald staunchly advocates for principles that are convenient to forget and important to remember in wartime, even when they are unpopular. What a valuable safeguard in a conflict as indefinite and amorphous as any we’ve ever fought.
I do wish that he wouldn’t have used this formulation in his Tweet:
Conservative Conor Friedersdorf: “Why Self-Respecting editors should be embarrassed to publish Marc Thiessen”
It is a small matter, especially as regards Mr. Greenwald, who doesn’t make a habit of this, but the practice has been on my mind lately, and has significance in general, so I am going to address it here. As I’ve noted on many occasions, the political philosophers whose views I find most persuasive and applicable to American governance are conservatives and libertarians — there are liberal philosophers whose ideas I also appreciate or even advocate, but it is my belief that the insights of the right are most often given insufficient due. In other words, it is perfectly accurate to call me an American conservative, or at least as accurate as any single ideological label can be.
But there are a few things I don’t like about affixing an ideological label to my name. Foremost is the implication that my philosophical affiliation has some bearing on the issue at hand. Whether Marc Thiessen’s articles are professional efforts at opinion journalism or poorly reasoned, factually inaccurate embarrassments may be a matter that people disagree about, but it isn’t a disagreement grounded in differences of political philosophy — Mr. Greenwald and I surely agree that right-thinking conservatives, liberals and libertarians should join in putting his submissions into the discard pile, since it is the quality of argument and professionalism that is wanting, so much so that his work is deficient in a magazine geared for folks of any ideological persuasion.
Since political philosophy is irrelevant, affixing “conservative” to my name must have another purpose: it is meant not to identify the tradition of thought that I find persuasive, but rather to place me into a political coalition for rhetorical effect or as context for readers: “Why look, this guy is a member of the same political coalition as Mark Theissen, and even he, a fellow conservative, thinks that Mr. Thiessen is an embarrassment.”
I understand why this might seem like a legitimate thing to do if one didn’t think about it long enough. But I don’t share a political coalition with Mr. Thiessen or his allies — that is to say, those on the right who argue that waterboarding isn’t torture, that the Bush Administration took the appropriate approach to detainee issues, and that lawyers who represented War on Terror detainees are equivalent to mob lawyers. I’d never support a candidate who believed those things, I write against them, and insofar as I care about the Republican Party at all, I do my utmost to steer it in as far in the opposite direction as possible. When it comes to the War on Terrorism, Mr. Theissen and I share neither an ideological nor a political coalition, even those we both call ourselves conservative — as far as I can tell, that’s because he is using the word to refer to the political coalition called the conservative movement, whereas I am using the word to refer to a body of thought contained in old books. On domestic policy, I think there is still some overlap between these camps, but on foreign policy, not so much.
Perhaps I am saying all this poorly. Let’s try a couple of examples to flesh out what I mean. Were Rich Lowry and I arguing about Milton Friedman, a writer we both respect, invoke, and lay intellectual claim to, this would be a perfectly legitimate rhetorical device for someone like Mr. Greenwald to use — “look, even conservative Conor Friedersdorf, who avers that Milton Friedman is a genius and agrees with him on big picture stuff, acknowledges that this particular assertion the Nobel laureate once made was undermined by subsequent events — even someone who shares the same core premises as Mr. Lowry and most other conservatives agrees with my interpretation in this case.”
On the other hand, say I am arguing with the editor of World Net Daily about whether or not President Obama is eligible to be President of the United States. In that case, I don’t think it would be legitimate to say, “look, even conservative Conor Friedersdorf says he is a natural born citizen…” — the fuller, more honest statement would read, “even conservative Conor Friedersdorf, who has almost nothing in common with World Net Daily’s agenda, and thinks questions of presidential eligibility are utterly unconnected to ideology, political philosophy, or political coalitions, thinks that he’s a citizen — even someone who rejects all the core premises of World Net Daily disagrees with them.”
As you can see, this kind of invocation makes no sense when you think about it. In fact, the illegitimate kind of invocation is made so frequently, and the legitimate kind so infrequently and even then with so little value added, that I wish people would just quit labeling people by affiliation entirely. I am loath to abandon labels that I regard as accurate descriptors of my beliefs — doing so seems inaccurate and disingenuous for the sake of convenience — but it would sure be convenient! Finally, if anyone can say all this more succinctly, I hope you’ll do so in comments, as I found my thoughts on this matter quite difficult to articulate. It seems like the kind of dynamic Julian Sanchez would explain better than I.
Why Self-Respecting Editors Should Be Embarassed to Publish Marc Thiessen
In a recent Slate piece, a former senior military interrogator eviscerated Marc Thiessen’s book Courting Disaster, pointing out errors, omissions, and arguments so egregiously flawed that it’s a wonder their author is asked to recycle them at National Review and The Washington Post.
Consider the excerpt below. In two short paragraphs, assertions core to Mr. Thiessen’s arguments are handily rebutted:
Thiessen promulgates a theory that Islamic extremists are uniquely deserving of torture because they are doctrinally obligated to resist cooperating, after which they may disclose information. Of course this isn’t unique to Islamic extremists. The U.S. military’s own Code of Conduct and the resistance training given American soldiers impose the exact same requirements. Article V, pertaining to interrogations states: I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability. Moreover, regardless of our enemy’s resistance philosophy, we have legal obligations to treat them humanely. If an American soldier is captured, would we want his obligation to resist turned into a justification that allows him to be water-boarded into cooperating?
Thiessen also asserts that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not rendered ineffective after his capture (and was still an active combatant) because he had knowledge of future attacks. The CIA was thus justified in torturing him. But every captured enemy has information of future plans or other valuable information about capabilities. Thiessen’s justification could be used to water-board everyone we capture. The standard for detainee treatment is not a sliding scale based on a particular captive’s knowledge. It’s a constant based on law and our principles.
It is depressing that arguments this poor actually advanced Mr. Thiessen’s career in journalism. The readers who propelled him onto the New York Times bestseller list can be forgiven if they’re not knowledgeable about United States law, the military code of conduct, or devastating counterarguments that require a bit of outside knowledge. But the editors who willingly publish this man again and again, despite the poor quality of his work and his inability to answer his strongest critics, are being negligent and unprofessional.
In his latest effort at The Washington Post, Mr. Thiessen defends Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, and Keep America Safe in its smear campaign against Justice Department lawyers who did pro-bono work representing War on Terrorism detainees — their ad campaign labeled these lawyers “The Al Qaeda Seven.”
Mr. Thiessen writes:
Where was the moral outrage when fine lawyers like John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Steve Bradbury and others came under vicious personal attack? Their critics did not demand simple transparency; they demanded heads. They called these individuals “war criminals” and sought to have them fired, disbarred, impeached and even jailed. Where were the defenders of the “al-Qaeda seven” when a Spanish judge tried to indict the “Bush six”? Philippe Sands, author of the “Torture Team,” crowed: “This is the end of these people’s professional reputations!” I don’t recall anyone accusing him of “shameful” personal attacks.
The standard today seems to be that you can say or do anything when it comes to the Bush lawyers who defended America against the terrorists. But if you publish an Internet ad or ask legitimate questions about Obama administration lawyers who defended America’s terrorist enemies, you are engaged in a McCarthyite witch hunt.
It is perfectly fine for the Washington Post to publish someone who argues that Bush Administration lawyers were unfairly attacked, or that the Keep America Safe campaign is justified — both views I vociferously contest, by the way — but are its readers well served by reading an author who pretends that it is somehow inherently inconsistent or hypocritical to be critical of John Yoo for the legal opinions he issued, and simultaneously defend Obama Administration lawyers who represented unsavory clients?
It is obviously spurious to frame things that way. It intentionally muddies the debate for rhetorical advantage. Yet the Washington Post chooses to cover this issue on its opinion pages by allocating space to a man who takes that most unhelpful approach. On highly controversial issues, I’ll gladly defend editors who publish writing I disagree with, and opinions I abhor, but precisely because this issues are so serious, it is important that those who grapple with them can at least offer arguments that aren’t laughably illogical or deliberately obfuscatory.
UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald expands on my critique of the latest Marc Thiessen column in The Washington Post, noting logical errors and journalistic shortcomings.
UPDATE II: Julian Sanchez has worthwhile thoughts on this subject.
Life Within the Movement Bubble
Though I’ve been critical of Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe, I don’t share the dislike of Hannah Giles that I’ve seen in the blogosphere. Given her age, inexperience, and the crowd that got her interested in politics, I wouldn’t expert her to avoid the forgivable mistakes she’s made, and she’s not a bad writer. Thank God I never received the exposure she’s getting when I was her age.
I am, however, truly puzzled by this piece she’s posted at Big Government. I presume that she is entirely earnest when she writes:
Young, truly devoted liberals, who can defend and properly communicate what they believe and formulate their own ideas to help their team are hard to come by. Very hard. Now, it is true, the Left in Washington has a giant stronghold in Hollywood. There are dozens of young actors/comedians/musicians/artists who side with the political left and promote their policies publicly, encouraging the average youth to behave and think as they do.
But what young warriors do the liberals have? I’m not asking about the automated liberal-spewing machines, or the professional foamers in the blogosphere. Not the kind of public-school-educated robots who grew up obeying Hollywood and defying their parents. I’m talking about leaders, the thinking types.
Ponder this for a moment: currently, names like Aaron Schock, Jason Mattera, James O’Keefe, Evan Baehr, Brendan Steinhauser, Lila Rose and Ben Shapiro are popping up on the public radar. Besides being under 30, this crew is desperately fighting for America on the conservative policy/political side of things, and the scary/really cool thing about it is they have the smarts, creativity, guts, and resolve to do so.
The only young liberal that I would consider in their league is the 25 year-old Ezra Klein of Newsweek. He is extremely intellectual, creative and effective at communicating his ideas to mass audiences. That’s right, his ideas. He doesn’t just parrot what the leftist elites in Washington are saying. And that deserves credit; it is hard to formulate your own thoughts on issues and devote yourself to ensuring they are communicated accurately and efficiently.
Don’t get me wrong. I am impressed by the career Ezra Klein has made for himself, as I’ve written before. Though I don’t share his opinions on health care, I’ve benefited from his explanations and analysis, and I’ll bet we see great things from him in the future. But the notion that he is alone among smart young liberal writers — as opposed to one among many — is absurd, as I’m sure he’d be the first to acknowledge.
Ms. Giles assertion, if it is indeed earnest, suggests to me that she exists in a rather extreme media bubble. Am I wrong? I issue this challenge: Take a look at the work of Charles Homans, Ann Friedman, Chris Hayes, Brad Plumer, and Dayo Olopade — an abbreviated list of exceptionally smart, intellectually honest liberal writers chosen because they’re the first five that sprang to mind. I’m sure I could list a dozen more as deserving of mention.
Can Ms. Giles deny that they’re intellectual, creative, and adept at communicating their ideas? Or that they’ve produced fine work on numerous occasions? I hope that the conservative movement produces young journalists as talented as these folks, but I am not optimistic. Arguing with Ezra Klein is a perfectly good start for a young right-leaning political writer, especially one who is writing about health care, but if he’s the only smart young liberal of whom you’re aware — well, I can’t say it’ll necessarily stop you from rising in the conservative movement, but you won’t have much success finding, understanding, and responding to the most persuasive liberal arguments, let alone winning converts.
The RNC, the Church of the Savvy, and Where to Make Political Donations
I’m surprised that Ben Smith’s scoop at Politico hasn’t garnered more attention. It reports on the contents of a confidential Republican National Committee fund-raising document — here is an excerpt from the piece:
The most unusual section of the presentation is a set of six slides headed “RNC Marketing 101.” The presentation divides fundraising into two traditional categories, direct marketing and major donors, and lays out the details of how to approach each group.
The small donors who are the targets of direct marketing are described under the heading “Visceral Giving.” Their motivations are listed as “fear;” “Extreme negative feelings toward existing Administration;” and “Reactionary.”
Major donors, by contrast, are treated in a column headed “Calculated Giving.”
Their motivations include: “Peer to Peer Pressure”; “access”; and “Ego-Driven.”
The slide also allows that donors may have more honorable motives, including “Patriotic Duty.”
As I note in a reaction now posted at The Daily Beast, this is the most telling revelation about how political elites think about voters since candidate Barack Obama’s comments about rural economic losers who cling to their guns and religion. Even so, the news is so unsurprising — of course this is how the RNC operates — that writing about it violates what Jay Rosen calls the church of savvy. For example, note this comment at The Daily Beast: “None of this surprises me in the least,” Rick Goldin says. “But the press will pounce on this ‘revelation’ (as if no one knew this was the strategy all along) and wear it out for the rest of this news cycle.”
This attitude is so frustrating. Yes, the story confirms something rather obvious to many of us — that the infrastructure of our political parties are run by a bunch of deliberately deceitful cynics whose actions are motivated by wrongheaded principles at best. Allegations like these, however, require evidence, and when it is presented by reporters it shouldn’t be ignored because it is supposedly obvious. Surely there are RNC donors out there who are quite surprised by this information! That’s one problem with the church of the savvy — its implicit assumption is that news should be written for other information junkies, as opposed to an ever-changing audience that ranges from occasionally informed citizen to Marc Ambinder.
All that said, here’s the beginning of my take:
The scoop is bad news for those of us who seek an alternative to President Obama’s domestic agenda: negative campaigns yield neither policy ideas nor a mandate to implement them, even when they are successful.
But certain pages from the controversial document may prove surprisingly helpful to conservative reformers and tea partiers alike, insofar as they confirm accurate critiques of the Republican establishment in Washington DC. These excerpts show that the RNC misleads its donors, ensconces itself in the trappings of the cultural elite, and treats the conservative base with striking condescension…
The lesson for folks on the right who make political contributions: give to a particular candidate, a trustworthy advocacy organization, or a specific cause in which you believe.
And starve the RNC.
As I note later, “Political parties can be useful guides for citizens who haven’t enough time or understanding to make independent judgments about every candidate or issue. Be that as it may, political donors unable to find a worthier organization than the RNC or the DNC are better off accepting that they’re insufficiently knowledgeable to contribute anywhere without getting hoodwinked. Why willingly fund the people most adept at deliberately exploiting your ignorance?”
Thiel's Error
Time! Time…there is no time to do this post right, but go read Thiel’s hugely important piece in Policy Review and thank PEG, who tipped me off. Thiel’s piece is not only crucial reading but it’s very good, except for a certain interpretation of the history of political thought that leads him unnaturally into the arms of all-or-nothing eschatology. The idea of globalization, he claims,
is not new. It is coeval with the modern West. Starting in the seventeenth century, the dawn of the modern era, the global state or market has become the sine qua non for this-worldly peace and security.
This already is implicit in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, the definitive political philosopher of modernity. For Hobbes, the natural state must be replaced by an artificial or virtual world over which humans have full mastery and control. The telos is replaced by the fear of the end, or the fear of death. And so the classical virtues, such as courage, magnanimity, or wisdom, give way to peaceableness as the greatest good. In the state of nature, the war of all against all prevails; but under the artificial human world of the social contract, humans will become citizens by giving a monopoly on violence to the figure of Leviathan, a powerful monster that lives at sea. To make explicit what is implicit, Leviathan cannot be merely the master of a given nation or kingdom, since then the state of nature would still prevail amongst nations and kingdoms. For Hobbes ’ City of Man to be built, Leviathan must rule all nations and kingdoms and truly be the prince of this world. He is the “mortal god” created by the mind of man.
I can only focus on the essential error here, which is that Hobbes’ theory of order is (or, on another telling that might also be at work here, should and must be) scalable: once the problem of natural disorder is ‘solved’ at the level of the state, the leap of contractual faith ushering in the first, tribal Leviathan must be replicated, cascading upward, until it is consummated at the higher level of all humanity. This imputes categories of thought and motives derivative from those categories at once far too purely scientific and far too purely Christian for Hobbes. Reread that phrase of Thiel’s — “to make explicit what is implicit” is to read into Hobbes what, unless you are coming at him from a perspective, inherited but in turn unmoored from Christianity, that holds the flesh cannot comprehend the spirit, is not there. Even if Hegel, as Strauss alleges, did appear to consummate Hobbes, that consummation only appears to exist from within a scientized Christian view: the flesh of Hobbes is overcome by the spirit of Hegel.
What I mean is that the Hobbesian Leviathan, though patently a Christian state, is not a New Testament construction but a most forceful attempt to reassert the validity of Old Testament wisdom against the transgressive and chaotic potentialities of post-Lutheran Christianity – in which Christ, no matter what he said, really did come to put the old covenant in the dustbin of history. Hobbes wants to insist that the Mosaic experience is foundational, of a piece with human nature. To stray into the primacy of possibility unleashed by a political theology in which the flesh of the old law is to be entirely replaced by the explosive interpretive anarchy of the spirit of the new law is to fall once again into the murderous superstition of the Jews at the foot of the golden calf. Leviathan is a tribal survival mechanism that hedges conservatively in two directions: first, against the narrowing, incestuous, fragmenting destruction of irrational pagan power worship, and, second, against the expanding, contagious, universalizing mania of apocalyptic eschatology that emerges when the spirit is unmoored from the flesh.
To come down into practical particulars, the bottom line is that Hobbes is actually a profoundly anti-globalization theorist; to put it provocatively, the state of Israel is more Hobbesian in its order than the international scientific community. Because Thiel does not recognize this, he does not recognize the way in which a more or less catastrophic end to the current globalization boom might not result either in one big anarchy or many small tyrannies. His claim that no one can win the next world war is provocative but without justification. I would bet on whichever powerful participants are most Hobbesian in the respect I present here. And that still speaks pretty well of America.
The Party of Small Government
I’ve got a piece up at Newsweek looking at how Paul Ryan’s deficit-killing Roadmap For America might cause problems for the GOP.
Exceptionalism, Cont'd
In a post on President Obama and American exceptionalism, Victor Davis Hanson explains why he thinks our nation is different from all the others:
Perhaps it would be better, when speaking of an early rural society, to talk of an absence of peasantry: We had no concept of a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs; instead, yeomen agrarians were the Jeffersonian ideal, a nation of independent farmers rather than peasants.
Odd that a historian should forget about American slavery!
In the same post, he writes:
A gun-owning society, unlike Europe — On the theory that an armed citizenry would fight any federal effort to overturn individual liberties: That tradition later made our citizenry more comfortable with firearms, with obvious advantages for our military.
As a military historian, Professor Hanson would benefit from familiarizing himself with Switzerland. Its citizenry is armed, with obvious advantages of its military:
The country has a population of six million, but there are estimated to be at least two million publicly-owned firearms, including about 600,000 automatic rifles and 500,000 pistols.
This is in a very large part due to Switzerland’s unique system of national defence, developed over the centuries.
Instead of a standing, full-time army, the country requires every man to undergo some form of military training for a few days or weeks a year throughout most of their lives.
John McPhee’s book on this subject is exceptional.
Update on the ACORN Story
On Twitter yesterday, Andrew Breitbart issued a confrontational “correction“ stating that James O’Keefe wasn’t actually dressed like a pimp when he interacted with ACORN employees. I am unsure whether a correction has been posted to Big Government, where the video sting initially ran. I can’t find one.
Obviously, Mr. Breitbart or editor Mike Flynn should run a correction if they haven’t already. Corrections should also be run by The Washington Times, where Mr. Breitbart’s column gave an inaccurate impression of when Mr. O’Keefe wore the pimp suit, and Fox News, where Mr. O’Keefe said nothing to disabuse his hosts of that inaccurate impression. Analysis of all that, plus a roundup of other news sources that were misled by the video can be found here. None of this excuses the abhorrent behavior of some ACORN employees whose actions were inappropriate no matter the context, but it does call into question whether or not the video was edited in other misleading ways, and I certainly won’t feel comfortable trusting it until I see an unedited version.
Strangely, Mr. Breitbart says he’ll only release the full unedited video if Eric Boehlert or a couple other Media Matters big shots will debate him after watching the whole thing publicly.
In a recent exchange on Twitter, Mr. Breitbart complained to me that “the media” casts him as a conservative activist, rather than a publisher. In fact, Mr. Breitbart is indisputably an activist and a publisher, having earned both titles, among many others. What I wonder is whether he is a reputable publisher. After watching the ACORN videos, I shared them with several apolitical friends who don’t follow the blogosphere very closely. All assumed Mr. O’Keefe walked into the ACORN offices wearing the pimp suit. A reputable publisher corrects the mistaken impressions of his audience when they’re generated by content that he produced. So here we have a test of professional ethics.
Stay tuned.
The Weak Arguments Offered by Waterboarding Apologists
Over at The Corner, Andy McCarthy and Marc Thiessen are engaged in a tag-team effort to defend Bush Administration interrogation practices. Several of their arguments are severely flawed.
Mr. McCarthy writes:
Officers of the executive branch have a solemn obligation to protect the American people. It is their highest responsibility. They are not good Samaritans. If there is a serious threat of a mass-murder attack, they are obligated to take all reasonable steps to stop it — and what is reasonable depends on the circumstances and the exigency. It is immoral to assume that obligation and then fail to carry it out.
In fact, the highest responsibility of executive branch officers is “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That is the oath every president swears, and the obligation he assumes. Since Mr. McCarthy served as a highly esteemed federal prosecutor he must know as much, so what explains the factually incorrect language he uses? He should revisit the prudence of the Founders, who understood that charging the president with protecting the Constitution implies delineated limits on his power.
In contrast, imposing on the office an open-ended moral obligation “to protect the American people” affords an abusive executive all the justification he needs to claim powers that scarcely have limits.
Beyond this fundamental misunderstanding of the executive branch and its obligations, Mr. McCarthy persists in the simplistic assumption that if “harsh interrogation techniques” elicit useful information from some detainees on certain occasions, they’re proven to keep us safe. Nowhere does he attempt to measure the benefits the information affords against the costs using these controversial techniques impose. How much time is spent following up on false leads elicited under coercion? How many fewer people surrender into American custody? How many talented interrogators uncomfortable with these methods left the CIA? Are terrorist recruiters helped by using the specter of torture in American as a tool to enrage their audiences? How many countries are less cooperative with our War on Terrorism efforts? What is the cost of American citizens who deplore these techniques so passionately that they lose faith in their own country’s moral standing?
These unanswered questions and many others are never grappled with by advocates of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. It’s as if the War on Terrorism is a chess tournament and they’re arm wrestling coaches.
“Take their pawns!”
“Wait, let me think about whether that’s the right move here.”
“Take their pawns you pussy!”
It isn’t that Mr. McCarthy thought five steps ahead, did due diligence, and demonstrated that taking the pawn is the right move. You see, he’s seen pawns get captured before. They were swept right off the board. Some of them were even in positions where if they hadn’t have been taken, they could’ve attacked. Is that what you want? To lose pieces? Mr. McCarthy talks a lot about the War on Terrorism, but his interrogation analysis is almost wholly concerned with battle tactics. Questions about unintended consequences are dismissed out of hand, as if determining e.g. whether waterboarding helps radicalize Muslims is a question to be determined by generalized ideological arguments, rather than urgent empirical research.
Also see Jim Manzi’s characteristically excellent thoughts on this topic, written long before this particular dust-up.
Moving on to Mr. Thiessen, see the post where he writes:
In traditional war, when you capture an enemy soldier, once he is disarmed and taken off the battlefield he has been “rendered unable to cause harm.” But that is not true of senior terrorist leaders like KSM. They retain the power to kill many thousands by withholding information about planned attacks.
As E.D. Kain points out:
If a German soldier or intelligence officer in WWII had been captured that soldier may have possessed knowledge of planned German offensives. Getting that information may indeed have saved thousands of American or Allied lives. A captured SS officer may have had information regarding death camps or other atrocities which would have led to increased support for the war effort. Countless scenarios, whether ticking-time-bomb or not, could be conceived wherein during the course of traditional warfare intelligence garnered from captured soldiers would lead to saving the lives of many on our side.
Mr. Thiessen seldom writes a post without asserting that if everyone would only read his book, Courting Disaster, the strengths of his argument would be apparent. I am certainly amenable to reading books written by folks with whom I disagree, but time is limited. And every time I see an argument this weak — Mr. Thiessen obliviously asserting that captured soldiers in traditional wars can’t withhold information about planned attacks, whereas terrorists can — I think to myself, “No, his doesn’t seem to be a book length effort worth my time, no matter how many occasions he plugs it on The Corner.”
More devastating rebuttals of Mr. Thiessen are rounded up here.
Another post at The Corner by Mike Potemra ignited this conversation. He is substantially correct in his analysis.
Obama Falters Again on Civil Liberties
Don’t worry, the Obama Administration doesn’t assert that law enforcement can track the movement of any American citizen without a warrant, it merely claims it’s allowed to track those of us who carry cell phones. And naturally the FBI would never abuse its power.
Eli Lake Is Worried Too
I should add that I’m not implying Mr. Lake agrees with everything I’ve written on this topic.
Actual Death Panels in the Obama Administration
In my latest piece at The Daily Beast, I excoriate the Obama Administration for its contention that it possesses the power to kill American citizens if they are determined by unknown persons in the executive branch to be imminent threats to the United States or its interests. The whole piece can be found here, and it includes links to pieces by Dana Priest, Eli Lake, and Glenn Greenwald, three talented journalists to whom I’m indebted on this story.
Frankly, I am flabbergasted that the practice is as uncontroversial as it seems to be. Over the weekend, I Tweeted back and forth on the subject with Jon Henke, a razor sharp libertarian whose thinking and writing I am always eager to consume. He argued that this is an inherently difficult subject because there are a lot of “problems, subjective judgments and gray areas” at play. I agree to a point. Obviously I don’t think that an American citizen squaring off against the United States Marines on a battlefield need be arrested. So does a heavily armed terrorist cell holed up in a Baghdad apartment occupy a war zone? What if they’re holed up in a Hamburg apartment? An apartment in Charleston, South Carolina?
But I cannot believe that blurring lines makes it constitutionally permissible to assassinate citizens who aren’t on a battlefield, or sitting armed in an apartment that serves as the equivalent.
As Mr. Greenwald puts it:
The people on this “hit list” are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities. More critically still, the Obama administration — like the Bush administration before it — defines the “battlefield” as the entire world. So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks. That’s quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.
In my piece in The Daily Beast, I argue the following: “That this power helps us to eliminate a few dangerous men in the short term hardly justifies the imprudent folly of indulging an unchecked power so extreme it can only end in corruption.” I stand by this position. How many Americans can there possibly be who are a) terrorists who pose an imminent threat; b) impervious to being captured alive; c) capable of being killed.
But even if you believe that our situation is so dire that American citizens must be killed without having been charged, tried and convicted of anything, shouldn’t you at the very least want this extraordinary, unprecedented power checked by someone in another branch of government? What is the counterargument against that added safety? If these killings are actually free from abuses, surely the president possesses ample evidence that the person targeted actually is a terrorist who poses a grave threat. Is it too much to ask that a three judge panel agrees? And that Congress reviews all killings periodically? Shouldn’t the folks at The Claremont Institute, who champion the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, be arguing that those men would’ve made sure to build checks against such a significant power into other branches of the government?
The balance of my piece is here. As always, I’m eager to hear critiques, and especially curious to hear the argument against oversight from those who insist that this is a necessary practice. Takeaway lesson: no one who rises to the presidency can be trusted to limit himself to powers afforded his office by the Constitution properly understood.
Somehow, I Ended Up in a Bloggingheads Called "Puppies Are Awesome"
But don’t let that fool you: There are no puppies involved, just TPM’s Brian Beutler and myself talking health care reform.
Since puppies actually are awesome, and I wouldn’t want to leave you disappointed, here’s a picture of Bartleby:
