“Constitutional principles at stake”

The AP story, as Chuck Todd averred this morning, isn’t important because “the American people” don’t care. Of course they don’t: the press has done an execrable job detailing how this administration has violated our freedoms. John Kiriakou and Bradley Manning are doing time. The administration would love to get its hands on The New York Times‘ David Sanger. Digby:

Contrary to what seems to be an emerging narrative about this AP scandal, it is simply not true that the AP and the government are equally culpable. In fact, if there is one person responsible for the detail about the informant getting out, it’s the man who now heads the CIA. And he let it slip during a “talking points” session with a bunch of national security TV commentators.

First, let me just say that the constitutional principle at stake in this AP scandal is so paramount that I’ve been loathe to even write about the details of the case. The idea that the government has the right to do sweeping fishing expedition subpoenas of the allegedly free press without their knowledge or any judicial oversight is mind boggling to me and regardless of the precedent in other cases, I’m simply appalled that any administration would do it. There are ample ways to go about dealing with issues that don’t chip away at the First and Fourth amendment. Unfortunately, this administration is in love with secrecy and covert activity and has turned national security into an intimidation tactic against a free press. It’s extremely disappointing.

What’s a flagpole?

Compiling the delightful things Antonin Scalia has written or said about homosexuals since Romer v. Evans in 1996, Adam Serwer shows the frivolousness of the justice’s arguments. The most useful advice: homosexuals aren’t trying hard enough to couple with the opposite sex. “It doesn’t say you can’t have—you can’t have any sexual intimacy. It says you cannot have sexual intimacy with a person of the same sex,” he wrote in his Lawerence v. Texas dissent.

The dogs of war

Horrendous:

Ten years and $60 billion in American taxpayer funds later, Iraq is still so unstable and broken that even its leaders question whether U.S. efforts to rebuild the war-torn nation were worth the cost.

In his final report to Congress, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen’s conclusion was all too clear: Since the invasion a decade ago this month, the U.S. has spent too much money in Iraq for too few results.

In 2013 I still fight with supporters of the worst foreign policy disaster since JFK committed “advisers” to Saigon. But the weasels have learned. Bush didn’t lie, they reason — even those faggoty French believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction! Besides, the war wasn’t illegal — Congress voted to authorize it. Opponents start with the wrong answer. Instead of relying on “Bush lied,” respond: “Why the hurry? Why were Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Rice and their assistants and undersecretaries already on record before Bush’s installation about the imminence of an Iraqi threat?” Remember the babble about nuclear silos with rockets aimed at Walt Disney World’s Cinderella Castle or something? This public statement was already public record. Glance at the names — scions, satraps, and luminaries of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. The damned still live, paroled on Sunday morning talk shows on the networks and cable TV stations and on editorial pages nationwide.

But the outcome defied my imagination. It wasn’t possible that the Bush administration, having begun a war, would now let the country descend into anarchy for three and a half years — until the much-hyped surge. Ah, the surge. The bipartisan foreign policy establishment supported it, anointed one David Petraeus to lead it. Well, look what The Guardian published today:

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the “dirty wars” in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country’s descent into full-scale civil war.

Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.

After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.

A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding.

Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that Petraeus – who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.

Coffman reported to Petraeus and described himself in an interview with the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes as Petraeus’s “eyes and ears out on the ground” in Iraq.

“They worked hand in hand,” said General Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele and Coffman for a year while the commandos were being set up. “I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there … the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture.”

So now the general and former CIA chief, who resigned under the most venal circumstances, empowered a man who, we learn from reading his CV, advised the Salvadorean miliarty from 1984 to 1986 to shift the “the indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, to a more ‘discriminate’ approach. One of his tasks was to put more emphasis on ‘human intelligence’ and interrogation. As Charles Pierce noted today, “There is no absolution available to any of the people who helped the country down into this epic political and military disaster no matter how lachrymose their apologies or how slick their arguments.”

Of cliffs and slopes

Naturally no paper will carry this story:

On Jan. 1, 2000, the world awoke to find that little had changed since the night before. After years of hype around what was then called Y2K — the fear that computer systems across the globe would collapse, unable to handle the year shifting from ’99 to ’00 — the date change turned out to be a momentous non-event.

Next week, the United States is in for much the same, after months of frantic hype about the economic disruption that awaits if Congress and the president fail to reach a deal and the federal government goes “over the fiscal cliff.” (The difference between Y2K and the fiscal cliff being that computer programmers worked around the clock to ensure the former was a non-event.)

The so-called fiscal cliff is a combination of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1. But the agencies responsible for implementing those changes, including the IRS and the Pentagon, are well aware that congressional and White House negotiators will most likely come to some sort of deal within weeks or months — and so they are planning to carry on as usual, according to a broad review of private and public government plans.

In other words, there will be no cliff. There won’t even be a slope. Congress and the president can have their public and private dramas, but the government officials responsible for carrying out their eventual orders have seen this movie before, and they know how it ends.

Cliff, baby, cliff!

The banality of omission

The problem with the Second Amendment is that it boats the most destructive comma splice in recent human history. Blame the vagaries of eighteenth century grammar, the revisions to the Constitution, or intentional vagueness — what we must deal with is the language of the amendment, as Associate Justice Antonin Scalia and his fellow proponents of a dead Constitution insist on.

The language:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The best recent book on the subject is Adam Winkler’s Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, an impressive history of how until the mid twentieth century jurisprudence had no trouble interpreting the comma splice to mean that gun ownership was limited to militias. Lepore:

The National Rifle Association was founded in 1871 by two men, a lawyer and a former reporter from the New York Times. For most of its history, the N.R.A. was chiefly a sporting and hunting association. To the extent that the N.R.A. had a political arm, it opposed some gun-control measures and supported many others, lobbying for new state laws in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, which introduced waiting periods for handgun buyers and required permits for anyone wishing to carry a concealed weapon. It also supported the 1934 National Firearms Act—the first major federal gun-control legislation—and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which together created a licensing system for dealers and prohibitively taxed the private ownership of automatic weapons (“machine guns”). The constitutionality of the 1934 act was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939, in U.S. v. Miller, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, argued that the Second Amendment is “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security.” Furthermore, Jackson said, the language of the amendment makes clear that the right “is not one which may be utilized for private purposes but only one which exists where the arms are borne in the militia or some other military organization provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state.” The Court agreed, unanimously. In 1957, when the N.R.A. moved into new headquarters, its motto, at the building’s entrance, read, “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation.” It didn’t say anything about freedom, or self-defense, or rights.

My father hunts. I fired my first rifle when I was ten. No lobby had to warn me against the folly of playing with guns — they’re loud and hot! These facts give me, as “they” say, “agency.” It tires me to find the “right time” to discuss “the politics” (when is life not a grappling with gender and the expenditure of tax dollars?). It frustrates me to hear “guns don’t kill people — people kill people” as if it were a newly minted cliche on a dime. To argue that my father or any relative can perform a better job protecting his granddaughter/my niece from assailants than local police is to hang a self-reliance myth on a revanchist fantasy. Citizenship requires a basic expectation that the state can protect life and property. No equivocation: requires. A father with a gun permit who carries a pistol and whose daughter is in danger has no responsibilities to anybody else in the crowd except the assailant. Legislators write laws to prevent such anarchy.

Thanks to Portland, Aurora, and Tucson, thanks most of all to District of Columbia v. Heller, I can no longer defend even the private right to bear arms. The grammarian and uncle can no longer tolerate NRA chimeras delineating the vagaries of eighteenth century punctuation. Liberals need to beware of withdrawing from the battle because it’s not politically possible. We have changed constitutional guarantees on slavery and due process thanks to decades-long advocacy on lower courts. We need to explain what we mean by “gun control” beyond the synecdoche; it’s too facile to call for “mental health” screening as if this solution wasn’t more sinister than confiscating weapons. If there was any a time for the banality of a “national conversation,” this is it.

More grand bargains and fiscal cliffs

I suppose this is encouraging:

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), who has almost become the liaison to the left for cuts to federal health care programs in the grand bargain, gave a speech today at the Center for American Progress that included a couple important points:

• Durbin sequenced the provisions of the deal, saying that Republicans would have to build the framework on taxes, which includes an increase in the top marginal rates, before any Democrat will even begin to talk about social insurance programs. This seems like a hardline stance, but it just mirrors the dominant conversation, which has focused on taxes to the exclusion of practically everything else.

• Though Durbin has sought to bring rank-and-file Democrats along on a grand bargain that would include cuts to those social insurance programs, he set out some red lines. In addition to rejecting the privatization of Medicare or Social Security and the block granting of Medicaid – a common tactic to reject the extreme view to provide space for more modest but still damaging cuts – Durbin took Social Security almost entirely off the table. This matches White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s statements yesterday. It does appear that’s been filed away for the time being.

On the other hand:

In addition, Durbin said, regarding spending cuts on anti-poverty social programs, “Let me be clear: Those cuts will not happen.” And he sought to line up with the Administration’s viewpoint that any changes to Medicare and Medicaid can happen without cuts to benefits, through payment reforms or provider cuts. This would “strengthen” those programs through the reform, he said. He also wanted to exempt infrastructure spending fully from any cuts.

“Changes” to Medicare and Medicaid that would “strengthen” them? I’m sorry if “grand bargain” insults the intelligence as much as “fiscal cliff.”

George McGovern – R.I.P.

For his and my generation, a symbol of haplessness, of fumbling. He’s the man whom Richard Nixon, as Deep Throat told Bob Woodward with more than a touch of smugness in All The President’s Men, wanted to run against. But the GOP didn’t repudidate Barry Goldwater after 1964. The Democratic Party did McGovern, to its lasting shame. As Charles Pierce wrote, “McGovern was the last of so many things — the last true prairie populist, the last truly antiwar war hero, and, really, the last true insurgent to rise through the primaries and capture the nomination of a major party.”

From Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: He was a war hero who’d come away wit ha sense of war’s madness seared deeply onto his conscience, a Cold War skeptic who thought he people ravening for another go at Russia were nuts. He cranked the Dakota Wesleyan history department’s mimeograph machine for Henry Wallace’s 1948 third-party, left-wing presidential bid, fought the bill Richard Nixon cosponsored with McGovern’s home-state senator Karl Mundt to require Communists to register with the federal government, then fell in love with Adlai Stevenson and nearly singlehandedly built the South Dakota Democratic Party. When it came time to run for office himself, to win the loyalties of the conservative farmers and farm wives of South Dakota, he mastered a difficult straddle. “I can present liberal values in a conservative, restrained way,” he explained. “I see myself as a politician of reconciliation.” The young professor won a congressional seat in 1956 despite the suspicious American Legion members who sat in on his classes, taking notes. In his first roll call he was one of only sixty-one congressmen to vote against the “Eisenhower Doctrine,” a kind of 1957 Gulf of Tonkin resolution for the Middle East.

…He won the Senate seat he coveted in 1962, then in 1963 became the first member to speak against the gathering U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Bobby Kennedy called him “the most decent man in the Senate,” adding: “As a matter of fact, he’s the only one.”

I learned a few months ago after reading Elizabeth Drew’s book on the 1984 campaign that he ran for the nomination but made no traction, losing to the former vice president whose administration did much to redress McGovern’s liberalism.

On gender and first wives

(from remarks posted in an earlier form today)

She’s developed marvelous camera presence and it was a delight to listen, especially when she hinted at his liberal past and how it informed the decisions I agree with, but I don’t care whether “Barack” is a good father and husband and it’s humiliating that we still haven’t matured enough as a society to let First Ladies go their own way. At least Mamie didn’t pretend she had illuminations into Ike! It’s retrograde that we expect these women to play a role in these things by “humanizing” their men. As I Love Everything buddy goole noted:

“anyway, look michelle obama is just fine, but come on, our chief executive is married, that’s as far as it ought to go, don’t you think? once you get into the rhetoric of a mom-in-chief to all the wounded warriors exhorting the people into the unyielding struggle, sorry, you lost me! i just want to vote, not see off a viking funeral.

With polls showing Michelle O more popular than her husband, I agree with the strategy: of course she’ll fill DNC coffers. And I have no doubt that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama himself will deliver a DNC speech in ten years extolling their wives. But at the moment the travails of intelligent career women like Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama suppressing the liveliest parts of themselves for the sake of a Mamie Eisenhower mold still bugs the hell out of me.

Where have you gone, Ayn Rand? The GOP turns its lonely eyes to you

I haven’t posted much about campaign season because the Olympics are on and I don’t like to encourage our sports-crazed culture any more than necessary. But I suppose one of the reasons why the GOP’s enthusiasm for turning banal examples of indiscretion into apocalyptic battles between Gog and Magog smothers Democrats is the latter’s shame over its liberal history. If the Democrats weren’t ashamed of it, then how couldn’t they frame arguments like Stanley Kurtz does?

How did we get here, and what does it mean for our future? Above all, now that our internal battle is well-and-truly out in the electoral open, will 2012 decide whether red America or blue America wins for good?
————–
A Romney victory won’t quiet our national conflicts either. Although a Romney victory would be taken by conservatives as proof that we are still a center-right nation, the fact is that the mainstream media and our key cultural institutions are now in the hands of an increasingly ambitious left. The media barely hides its bias now, and they will come at a President Romney with everything they’ve got…

I won’t link to his National Review Online post; you can find it. The Increasingly Ambitious Left whose ambition is to beg Obama not to “reform” Social Security! You get the idea. Democrats are incapable of this kind of imbecility. They take pride in empirical thinking. That’s why they lose. Maybe not this time though. I was stunned when Harry Reid suddenly proved himself an agile purveyor of unfounded accusations — the kind of game in which Karl Rove has excelled. And still centrist types complained.

So let’s hope Paul Ryan proves as irresistable a target as he looks. Everybody gets what he wants: Ryan the patina of intellect that the Beltway pundit class confuses for the real thing, Romney the millions of dollars from the wealthy donors who are the only legitimate Ryan acolytes, and Stanley Kurtz gets his blue vs red playground brawl. But don’t listen to cable news sirens. Michael Grunwald:

I should probably just shut up about Paul Ryan, because I believe there’s a federal statute requiring pundits to marvel at his “seriousness” and “courage.” I think there’s also a constitutional mandate enshrining him as a “deficit hawk,” even though he voted for the Bush tax cuts, the Bush military and security spending binge, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the bank bailout and the auto bailout, and against the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan.

Charles Pierce goes further:

Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them because he doesn’t believe they are a legitimate function of government. He is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in which he never will have to live. This now is an argument not over what kind of political commonwealth we will have, but rather whether or not we will have one at all, because Paul Ryan does not believe in the most primary institution of that commonwealth: our government. The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution make a lie out of every speech he’s ever given. He looks at the country and sees its government as something alien that is holding down the individual entrepreneurial genius of 200 million people, and not as their creation, and the vehicle through which that genius can be channelled for the general welfare

So, Dems, there’s a fight worth winning — if you want to fight it.

Here we go again

If Democratic interns want to do their masters a favor, please fast forward to 1:26 and listen to Ronald Reagan mention the truth: Social Security does not contribute to the deficit. Reading Elizabeth Drew’s invaluable Campaign Journal: The Political Events of 1984 led me to watch the whole debate, known now as the one in which Mondale — for the first and only time — made Reagan look querulous and doddering after a well-aimed question.

Here’s the answer:

Now, Social Security, let’s lay it to rest once and for all. I told you never would I do such a thing. But I tell you also now, Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. Social Security is totally funded by the payroll tax levied on employer and employee. If you reduce the out-go of Social Security, that money would not go into the general fund to reduce a deficit. It would go into the Social Security Trust Fund. So, Social Security has nothing to do with balancing a budget or erasing or lowering the deficit.

Now, again, to get to whether I am depending on magic, I think I have talked in straight economic terms about a program of recovery that I was told wouldn’t work. And then, after it worked, I was told that lowering taxes would increase inflation. And none of these things happened. It is working, and we’re going to continue on that same line.

At last

Good news. However, note John Cornyn’s qualification at the end of this excerpt:

“We’re not mere supplicants to the executive branch, we are a coequal branch of government,” Cornyn said during discussion of his amendment in the Senate committee hearing last week. “So it is insufficient to say pretty please, Mr. President, pretty please, Mr. Attorney General, will you please tell us the legal authority by which you claim the authority to kill American citizens abroad?” (Cornyn also noted that just because he wants to see the memo doesn’t mean he’d necessarily disagree with its contents.)

Beltway myths

David Atkins on the chimera of lamenting the dissolution of bipartisan cocktail parties:

But by far the biggest is that the bipartisanship of the mid-20th century was a special artifact of the uneasy alliance between traditional urban liberal tribes and religious Dixiecratic populists in the South and Midwest. As I’ve written before, FDR was quite able to aggressively take on the financial and corporate interests of his time with a broad coalition. But he couldn’t pass an anti-lynching law without destroying his support base, and he was all too willing to institute the Japanese internment camps. In other words, FDR could take on the power of big money with ease, but he couldn’t take on the power of Big Racism.

The result of this dynamic was an uneasy bipartisanship between otherwise competing interests. Men like Strom Thurmond would vote for “socialist” policies as long as only whites got the benefits.

The advent of the Civil Rights movement marked the beginning of the end of bipartisanship. As tax dollars were increasingly seen as going toward non-whites, Dixiecrats became Republicans and allies of big business interests. Similar dynamics occurred with anti-Hispanic sentiment in the West. All the religious fervor that had been reserved for progressive social justice issues by the “Progressive” movement in the late 19th century (which included, by the way, quite conservative ideas like the prohibition of alcohol: late 19th century progressives would have strongly opposed modern liberals on issues like marijuana legalization alone…) flipped to socially conservative issues. The women’s equality movement only added further fuel to the socially conservative patriarchal fire.

A compelling theory; I’d like to read more corroborating info about whether Jessie Helms’ gimlet glass left a sweat stain on Cokie Roberts’ coffee table. He is right, though, that if any institution can still boast of “bipartisanship” it’s the Democratic Party. This weekend beloved GOP all star Tim Pawlenty thought he had Austan Goolsbee in the corner when he chirped, “But would the Democrats nominate a John F. Kennedy today?” The tax-cutting “pro-defense,” “pragmatic” JFK. The answer: yes, yes, they would and have. A couple have even won presidential elections.