Andy McCarthy has some incredible breaking news, in a post whose title is so long, it can only be included in a blockquote with the excerpt:
“Had [President Bush's Warrantless Surveillance Program" been in place before the [9/11] attacks, hijackers Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi almost certainly would have been identified and located.”
[Really. That's the title of his post. Punchy!]
Another Friday night, another dump by the Obama administration of a report underscoring the vital importance of President Bush’s post-9/11 national security tactics.
The above quote about Midhar and Hazmi and is from Gen. Michael Hayden, the former CIA director who was director of the NSA when that agency ran Bush’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program.” It is a bombshell mentioned in passing on page 31 of the 38-page report filed by five executive branch inspectors general (from DOJ, DOD, CIA, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) pursuant to Congress’s 2008 overhaul of FISA (the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).
I’ll have more to say about the report this week, but it also contains some other interesting facts that the folks who drop these reports late on summer Fridays would rather you didn’t linger over.
Other interesting facts, eh? Other than what, exactly? Unverifiable counterfactual claims are, I do believe, generally referred to as ‘opinions’ not ‘facts’. But never mind. The fact that the former CIA chief would make such a claim is pretty mindblowing. Shame on the Obama administration for hiding this bombshell in a Friday news dump.
Wait, what? Hayden made this claim three years ago, in testimony to the US Senate, and it was widely reported on then? Really?
Shit, Andy McCarthy tricked me again. Sorry, my bad. He just sounds so reasonable all the time…
UPDATE: Presumably a coincidence, but it turns out this is a great time for security hawks to do some hand waving.
On Thursday, Barack Obama will announce the details of his plan to shut down GITMO by January 22. In the meantime, Senate majority leader Harry Reid is doing his best to make that process more difficult, joining with other Democrats to withdraw the $80 million for closing the prison from the defense spending bill. This money had already been removed from the version of the bill passed by the House, however, so the real damage was done by Reid’s bumbling attempts to explain himself:
“Guantánamo makes us less safe,” the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said at a news conference where he laid out the party’s rationale for its decision, which is expected to be voted on this week. “However, this is neither the time nor the bill to deal with this. Democrats under no circumstances will move forward without a comprehensive, responsible plan from the president. We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.”
…
Jim Manley, a spokesman for Mr. Reid, said the majority leader had not intended to suggest that detainees could never be transferred to American prisons, but only to say that the Senate would not provide money for closing Guantánamo until a task force created by Mr. Obama presented a report on detainee policy in July.
Mr. Reid in his comments, however, was unequivocal in insisting that the terrorism suspects never reach American shores.
“You can’t put them in prison unless you release them,” he said. “We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.”
That’s sufficiently incoherent that he is now certain to be accused of flip-flopping regardless of what position he ends up taking. But he is doing everyone a serious disservice by dignifying concerns about terrorists in American prisons. There are actual difficult questions to be dealt with here, but the idea that our prison system can’t be trusted to hold members of Al Qaeda is laughable. Being evil does not grant you super powers. The whole thing is a canard.
On the subject of prisoners who will be released, though, it’s worth noting that the New York Times gets Reid wrong twice in the few paragraphs I reprinted. Reid did not say - at least not in the quotes printed by the Times - that Democrats would never allow Guantanamo prisoners to be released into the US. Rather, he said that they wouldn’t allow terrorists to be released into the US. This isn’t just semantics. There are almost certainly plenty of non-terrorists in custody at GITMO right now, and, more importantly, there is zero chance that the administration was planning to say of any prisoner, “Yes, he’s clearly a terrorist, but we have nothing on him, and we’re thinking Lower Manhattan would be a good place to resettle him.
So, no gold stars for either Harry Reid or the New York Times today.
The VDH Watch is back. There are a million dishonest lunatics out there in the blogosphere, but for some reason this guy really gets to me. There is a depth of propaganda in his writing that really rewards a sentence-by-sentence treatment. So I promise I’ll (try to) lay off for a while after this, but, for now, here we go again, Victor:
Under Obama we are obliterating, by Predator-missile attack, suspected jihadists (and anyone in the general vicinity near them) in Waziristan — the last time I looked, it was a foreign country — something a little bit more discomforting to them than rendition.
The last time I looked, Waziristan wasn’t a country at all, but never mind the details. One can argue about the merits of the drone campaign in Pakistan, but only hard-core pacifists deny that there is a time and a place for firing missiles at people to kill them. Meanwhile, it isn’t rendition simpliciter that the Obama administration has rejected, but rather turning detainees over to other countries for the purpose of torture. Are there people who would rather be tortured than blown up by a missile? Sure. But that isn’t a very interesting point. Over thousands of years of human civilization, people have periodically resigned themselves to the necessity of doing their best to kill other people. Yet most civilizations have maintained that it was a moral imperative to treat their surviving enemies with some degree of restraint. If Hanson wants to argue that humanity has had this one wrong all along, he should say so. Pretending it is a novel hypocrisy of the Obama administration isn’t a serious option.
And blowing the brains out of suspected piratical kidnappers in international waters might be seen, in the now hyper-legalistic universe of Western transnational jurisprudence, as something a little more extreme than bringing detainees out of their Koran- and Mediterranean-food-stocked Guantànamo jail cells for interrogations.
Victor, you’re doing it again! Whatever ‘extreme’ is supposed to mean here, it isn’t relevant. Forget getting shot, I’d choose a few minutes on the rack over life in prison without a second thought. Yet the former has been considered legally and morally impermissable since long before ‘the now hyper-legalistic universe of Western transnational jurisprudence’. (Try saying that five times fast!). Also, that bit about interrogations? Also dishonest. No one has ever suggested we not interrogate prisoners. That would be crazy. What bothers people is when the interrogations look like this:
It is possible to ask people questions without resorting to this sort of evil.
I know I’d prefer to be shown some upsetting nudie magazines as humiliation to make me talk than have a bullet take apart my skull.
I’m glad you like porn more than sudden death. Me too. But, on top of repeating the confusion and hand-waving from above, you are side-stepping the fact that this sort of humiliation is designed for devout Muslims, and doesn’t really apply to you. It’s more akin to someone forcing you to read a science textbook.
Once Team Obama chose to trash Bush as a Constitution-shredder, while blinking and nodding at Spanish theatrics — all the while either not changing, or, in fact, stepping up Bush-era anti-terrorism measures — it put itself in a soon-to-be untenable position that even a fawning media won’t long be able to ignore.
Well, it sort of depends on the measures, doesn’t it? The idea wasn’t to stop counter-terrorism altogether, just the evil, illegal, and ineffective kinds. There is nothing untenable about condemning certain means of fighting terrorism while continuing to fight terrorism. That’s not all that complicated.
Who knows what’s in our future — a Spanish indictment of “judge-and-jury” Barack Obama for ordering the executions of Pashtun and Somali suspects in foreign or international territories, without an arrest warrant, habeas corpus, rights to counsel, and recourse to appeal?
I’m actually in Spain at the moment, so I asked around, and no, it turns out that Spain isn’t planning to outlaw warfare. I’ll let you know if there’s any movement on that though.
Here’s some more hard-hitting analysis from the same Representative Shimkus Frederick quoted earlier as worrying about the potential for lower carbon levels to starve plant life:
The evidentiary worth of the Bible’s testimony is not universally agreed upon, and in any case, the two arguments conflict with each other. If the Bible is literally, infallibly accurate, then the era of high carbon levels Shimkus references never occured - Earth is only a few thousand years old, after all. And anyway, God just said he wouldn’t drown us all; he never said we wouldn’t get our feet wet.
Meanwhile, over at the Corner, Andrew Stuttaford links to this from the Sunday Telegraph:
But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
Despite fluctuations down as well as up, “the sea is not rising,” he says. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” If there is any rise this century it will “not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm”.
I suppose it’s possible that the man who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world is also a guy who believes in dowsing, also known as ‘divining’ or ‘water witching’, and that magnetometry mapping should make it possible to map individual footprints made by Ancient Greeks at a site the rest of the archaeological community thinks is a hoax, but it doesn’t seem all that likely.
There are still rational, honest people out there making the case that global warming won’t do as much harm as we’re told, and that proposed measures against it are therefore not worth pursuing. I think these folks are wrong, but I don’t think they’re stupid or crazy. But I do wonder why they don’t make more of an effort to call the liars and lunatics out for what they are. I will never get back the minutes of my life I spent reading about Morner’s views and checking into whether he was worth taking seriously. That makes me less inclined to bother with the next article purporting to present anti-alarmist science. If these people were ridiculed by people on both sides of the issue, it would be a lot easier to seperate the wheat from the chaff. So, attention Jim Manzi: when the Stuttafords of the world peddle this garbage on a blog to which you are a contributor, why don’t you call them on it?
And to think I debated whether that title was too childish to publish once. But Frederick brought it back with this response to the original:
I would focus on marijuana, for what I think is the very convincing reason of humility. It’s a certainty that legalizing drugs would have both good and bad effects; what’s uncertain is the exact nature, ratio, and pattern of those effects. It’s also certain that the effects, both good and bad, of legalizing cocaine would be more dramatic than those of legalizing marijuana. Why not then legalize marijuana first and observe the results? Then, after a time of say ten years, we can decide whether we want to legalize cocaine; assuming we do, we’ll know better what to expect and be able to legalize the other drugs in a more elegant way, maximizing the good and minimizing the bad.
As it happens, I disagree with this, but I don’t think it’s obviously wrong, and it wasn’t what I was objecting to. I wasn’t really talking about policy at all, but rather about what people say about it. If people want to push for marijuana legalization, that’s terrific - I won’t campaign for it, but I’ll vote for it. But I do object to people using arguments that obviously apply to drugs en masse as if they apply only to marijuana. Legalizing cocaine and heroin is so massively unpopular that admitting that what you are saying implies that we should do so seems to serve as a reductio of your reasoning. But people also prefer to avoid the ‘marijuana isn’t so bad’ argument if they can. So you get rants about personal freedoms, the evils of the marijuana war, the lost tax revenue, the crisis in our prisons, etc., as if these things decided the issue. Which I think they do, in fact. But what these folks really mean is that all these things are true and marijuana isn’t so bad; if it were worse for you than it is, all those ills would be outweighed. Otherwise, they’d be arguing for legalizing it all.
This, for instance, makes me want to stop arguing altogether, and start stabbing people with a fork:
The fact is, the marijuana law in the U.S. is a big lie. It’s racist and classist. White rich people can smoke marijuana with impunity and poor black people get a record, can’t get education, can’t get a loan, and all of sudden go into a life of desperation and become hardened criminals. Why? Because we’ve got a racist law based on lies about marijuana.
Rich white people snort cocaine with impunity too! The marijuana trade is turning poor black people into hardened criminals? I hate to be crude, but, seriously, fuck you. The truth is, as a society, we don’t care about drug use per se. We’ve elected two presidents in a row knowing full well they’d used cocaine. We invest our money with people who use cocaine. We send our kids to college, where they, too, use cocaine, and we don’t lose too much sleep over it. But if we get our hands on the rat bastards who sold it to them…
Okay, that’s enough. I’m taking some deep breaths. If you aren’t bored of this already, there are some thoughts on why I think Frederick is wrong on the policy angle after the jump.
I defy anyone out there to steer me in the direction of a more consistently dishonest politics blogger who began as a classics professor than Victor Davis Hanson. Here’s his take on the AIG bonus drama, which he entitled ‘Cry, the Beloved Republic’ because that’s the sort of calm, thoughtful guy he is, along with some (I hope) helpful suggestions on how he might improve it:
Forget Halliburton, Enron, etc. — AIG is the metaphor of our new century. Let’s get this straight: Our president takes over $100,000 from AIG in campaign donations. Then he signs into legislation a bill crafted by his own party, with input from his own Treasury secretary, giving mega-bonuses to the execs of this bankrupt, federally bailed-out company — and then goes on the stump to trash the culture of Wall Street as typified by . . . AIG, of course.
Let me stop you right there, Victor. I know, I know, you’re just beginning to foam at the mouth, but I really must interject. If there were a bill, crafted by Democrats, with input from Geithner, and signed into law by Obama that awarded bonuses to AIG, that would be outrageous. I’m with you there. The only detail I want to quibble with is the part where you say this actually happened. It didn’t. The AIG bonuses were awarded by, well - you’re going to kick yourself when I tell you - AIG. See, the scheme’s genius lies in its simplicity: AIG determined for itself how it would compensate its employees. In the case of these bonuses, they were written into contracts well before any of the relevant legislation. Sorry, please continue:
Not to be outdone, Senator Dodd denies he put the AIG bonus provision in the bill, then — in a now familiar Obama administration habit — coughs up the truth that he in fact did when the evidence no longer allows him to prevaricate as is his wont.
Sorry, I have to jump in again, but I’ll be quick. Senator Dodd is not, as it turns out, a member of the Obama administration. The clue is in the title ‘Senator’. Think back to your grade school days, when you read about “How a Bill Becomes Law”, and studied the fun diagrams with the various branches of government, and the checks and balances between them.
So ethicist Rangel now uses his position to post facto rewrite tax laws to get back the money from AIG that his party approved, his president signed into law, and he himself used to out-elbow others for.
Actually, that bill would have taken money back from AIG employees, specifically the bonuses they received, which, you will recall, were not provided for in any such bill outside your imagination. And a general word of advice: when trying to demonstrate how corrupt Charlie Rangel is, lying can only hurt you.
For the most part, the reflexively anti-stimulus crowd on the right have been dead wrong about our response to the crumbling economy. But there are, of course, degrees of wrong, and it irritates me to no end to hear their views repeatedly bashed as ‘neo-Hooverism’. The latest instance comes from our friend Matt ‘the YZA’ Yglesias. First, he cites Kevin Drum, coming correct:
Consider, after all, that our response to the Depression appears to have been 180 degrees wrong. We literally did almost everything possible to make it worse: we tightened the money supply, balanced the budget, raised interest rates, passed protectionist legislation, and allowed banks to fail by the hundreds. It escalated a panic into a Depression. And this time around? Just the opposite: interest rates are close to zero, we’re running an enormous budget deficit, protectionism has largely been kept at bay, money is being pumped into the economy prodigiously, and with the notable exception of Lehman Brothers banks are being saved right and left. These actions have reduced a panic to a severe recession. If we had taken the same policy actions that Hoover and Mellon took in the 30s, does anyone doubt that the results would have been another Great Depression? I don’t. We may still be doing a lot of dumb things, but we’re an awful lot smarter than we were 80 years ago.
Kevin’s right. The right-wing advocates of no bailout and “spending freeze” are, in essence, calling for a return to the Hoover-Mellon policies that had disastrous results in the past. The nature of those results is spelled out in the chart. What people are living through today is no walk in the park, but it’s vastly better than the alternative.
This is an extremely dishonest use of the qualifer ‘in essence’. (spending freeze + no bailouts) does not equal (no bailouts + tax increases(!) + higher interest rates + reducing the supply of money(!!!) + higher tarrifs). There is not a lot of enthusiasm for protectionism on the right, and just about no one is wondering why the fed isn’t pursuing a more contractionary monetary policy. The Hoover-era response to the depression and the response to our current troubles urged by Republicans and right-wing pundits are not the same. They are not essentially the same. They are not really even that similar. These ideas are bad enough as they are. Why lie about them?
I’ve been reading a lot of bizarre complaints that the administration is pulling some sort of lawyers trick by claiming that there are no earmarks in the stimulus bill, because there is lots of wasteful spending in it. Perhaps most vocal on this point has been Mark Hemmingway:
“There Are No Earmarks In This Package” [Mark Hemingway]
If you want to play semantic games, you might be able to claim that statement is true. But to anyone who’s being honest with themselves, that’s simply a falsehood.
Then the AP weighed in with what they call a ‘fact check’ which in this case means - as it so often does - ‘poorly reasoned implications check’. A subtle clue to their verdict is in the title of the piece, “Obama has it both ways on pork”:
President Barack Obama had it both ways Monday when he promoted his stimulus plan in Indiana. He bragged about getting Congress to produce a package with no pork, yet boasted it will do good things for a Hoosier highway and a downtown overpass, just the kind of local projects lawmakers lard into big spending bills.
…
OBAMA: “I know that there are a lot of folks out there who’ve been saying, ‘Oh, this is pork, and this is money that’s going to be wasted,’ and et cetera, et cetera. Understand, this bill does not have a single earmark in it, which is unprecedented for a bill of this size. … There aren’t individual pork projects that members of Congress are putting into this bill.”
THE FACTS: There are no “earmarks,” as they are usually defined, inserted by lawmakers in the bill. Still, some of the projects bear the prime characteristics of pork - tailored to benefit specific interests or to have thinly disguised links to local projects.
The scare quotes are presumably there to do the work of Hemmingway’s ‘if you want to play semantic games’, as well as to get me grinding my teeth about scare quotes. Basically, the claim is that while some dictionary somewhere might think that ‘earmark’ refers to something fairly specific, we all know that when John Q. Public says ‘earmark’, he means ‘any spending I don’t like that is passed with specific applications in mind’. This is stupid. For one thing, John Q. Public doesn’t use the word ‘earmark’, or at least he didn’t until John McCain started shouting about them on the campaign trail. And up until that point, the people who did use the word ‘earmark’ used it to refer to earmarks, which worked out very nicely for everyone.
But is Obama taking advantage of a misunderstanding? Well, here he is discussing it with McCain in one of the debates:
Obama points out that there were only $18 billion in earmarks in last year’s budget. They should be reformed, yes, but it’s hardly a central piece of the fiscal puzzle. McCain acknowledges the $18 billion figure but says that they’ve been increasing rapidly, so they’re still a huge problem. This suggests that he’s using the term to refer to earmarks. Later he claims that there is a lot more than $18 billion in pork, suggesting that he’s changing the subject, or that he doesn’t know what earmarks are after all. But the figure for Obama’s earmarks which he keeps repeating again suggests that he does know what earmarks are.
The truth is that earmarks aren’t just a tiny percentage of overall spending, they’re a tiny percentage of awful, wasteful spending. And not all earmarks are particularly bad. The process is bad, and encourages pork, but fixing that problem would not be near the top of any sane budget hawk’s to-do list.
Still, after all the fuss, it was politically inevitable that Obama would try to steer clear of earmarks, and brag about it when he did. The cliff notes of that fuss would go something like this:
McCain: We need to deal with these terrible earmarks!
Obama: Dude, earmarks aren’t so hot, but then, they aren’t -
McCain: GODDAMMIT! We need to deal with these fucking earmarks!
So now Obama produces a bill with no earmarks, and people are calling it a hoax because it hasn’t rid us of wasteful spending. Sorry, Mark, but knowing what the hell you’re talking about is a semantic game you need to play more often.
Victor Davis Hanson, my least favorite human being in the blogosphere, is lying again:
The last two days I got a lot of hysterically angry mail about a rather pedestrian, empirical observation the other day that Obama was in a near-meltdown in his third week of governance. I pointed to Obama’s trashing-then-adopting the Bush security plan (FISA, Patriot Act, renditions, Iraq, sorta of Guantanamo), the serial cabinet appointee implosions, the mockery of our tax laws, the embarrassing provisions of the $1 trillion “stimulus”, the lobbyist exceptions to the no-lobbyist policy, the unfortunate al Arabiya interview, and the McClellanesque performances of Robert Gibbs. But I think, nonetheless, the near-meltdown description is accurate (poll drops suggest as much) and serious. [emphasis added]
If Obama’s drop in the polls is suggesting near-meltdown, it should be commended for its subtlety:
A new CBS News survey out today, detailed in full here, finds that President Obama’s approval rating now stands at 62 percent. Fifteen percent disapprove of the president, while 23 percent have not made a decision.
It is not unusual for a newly-inaugurated president to enjoy a favorable approval rating, though Mr. Obama’s rating two weeks into his presidency exceeds that of his two immediate predecessors.
Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton had approval ratings of 53 percent around this point in their presidency; George H.W. Bush, with a 61 percent approval rating at this point, nearly matched Mr. Obama.
President Obama is not setting records for popularity, however: John F. Kennedy enjoyed at 72 percent approval rating at this point in his presidency, while Dwight Eisenhower had a 68 percent rating and Jimmy Carter a 66 percent rating.
Nearly all Democrats and most independents approve of the job President Obama is doing, while Republicans are evenly divided.
Back in early December, I wrote about an emerging strategy from GOP party-line hacks: portraying certain Obama policies as functionally identical to some of the Bush policies he criticized on the campaign. I imagined that, while sticking to the standard this-is-terror-loving-socialism fare on most issues, they would trot this Bush v2.0 routine out whenever he was doing something particularly popular, successful, or irritating to the hard-left, who would be a great source of rhetorical ammunition. It did not occur to me, however, that they could ever use both of these strategies at the same time. How naive. Here’s Victor Davis Hanson, summing up the early days of the Obama administration:
If one were to have gone into deep sleep in late October during the Dark Ages, and woken up in late January in the AB (after Bush) era of Hope and Change and an end to all evil, would the world seem different? No, it looks pretty much the same. Same old Predator strikes on terrorists in Pakistan [wait, the strikes Obama promised before Bush ever ordered any? Sorry, keep going]. Same old DC and NY grandees caught fudging on taxes and giving complex explanations of hiring less than legal nannies and maids, same old Guantanamo open with the same old pledges to, “Close it now! Or at least soon!”
Yep, the more things change, and all that. This should be wonderful news for Bush fans. Sure, you have to hate Obama for being such a dishonest hypocrite, but you also have to be pretty thrilled that W’s agenda is still on track, right? Er…:
Back in 2002, John Derbyshire wrote an article entitled “Why Don’t I Care about the Palestinians?”, and apparently he’s still very proud of it, as he linked to it in a post at The Corner today. It’s astonishing stuff. It’s not just wrong, it’s crazy. But, still, I can’t help but admire it in a way. Intellectual honesty - a core value of the Despot, just below correctness - is thin on the ground these days, especially where Derb works. This is a man who isn’t holding anything back:
Which leaves us with number 5: expulsion. I am starting to think that this might be the best option. I’m not the only one, either. Here is Dick Armey, Republican leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, talking to Chris Matthews on Hardball:
MATTHEWS: Well, just to repeat, you believe that the Palestinians who are now living on the West Bank should get out of there?
Rep. ARMEY: Yes.
When I say “the best option,” I don’t mean “best for the Palestinians”. I don’t think they have any good options. Being Arabs, they are incapable of constructing a rational polity, so their future is probably hopeless whatever happens. Their options are the ones I listed above: to be ruled by gangsters, or Israelis, or Jordanians, or welfare bureaucrats. Or to go live somewhere else, under the gentle rule of their brother Arabs. Would expulsion be hard on the Palestinians? I suppose it would. Would it be any harder than options 1 thru 4? I doubt it. Do I really give a flying falafel one way or the other? No, not really.
The fact that the top 0.1 percent control 8 percent of national income is hugely relevant to thinking about how to understanding living standards in the United States. We have a similar per capita income to Finland, but our top 0.1 percent is way better off than Finland’s, whereas Finland’s child poverty rate is immensely lower than our own. Various countries come out as slightly poorer on average, even though the average resident of those countries actually has a higher income than the average American.
For some reason, people love to bring up the top 1 percent and the top .1 percent in discussions of inequality. The Times’ graph even lists the top 400 taxpayers. But, pace Yglesias, this is not ‘hugely relevant’ to thinking about how bad inequality is. If you’re actually worried about inequality - and you should be, we have a lot of it - you’re probably worrying about how well off the poor and the middle class are relative to how rich the country is as a whole. You might, if you’ve got an especially big heart, or if, say, you’re blogging career is going very well, care about how the modestly wealthy are doing relative to the whole. But does anyone seriously care how evenly income or wealth is distributed within the top 10%?
Assuming the answer is ‘no’, then once you have established that 10% of the population earns 44% of all income, you are adding exactly nothing of substance to the discussion by adding that .1% of the population earns 8% of the nation’s total. The latter is, of course, a much more shocking figure at first glance. But it contains no new information that we should care about. Whether the top of the income pyramid is made up by people all earning many millions of dollars a year, or by a bunch of people earning only a million or so and an even luckier few earning tens of millions a year is not something that should be keeping us up at night. Throwing these numbers around is an intellectually dishonest scare tactic.
The other day, I wrote about what struck me as a pretty astonishingly dishonest portrayal by Victor Davis Hanson of Obama as secretly appropriating Bush policies he’d formerly condemned. The specifics aren’t worth getting back into, but here was VDH’s take-away lesson:
And I suppose that, given the Obama appointments, Iraq is now no longer an open sore, and of no utility in fighting radical Islam, but quietly evolving into a success better turned over to the Petraeus/Iraq timetable. And I think there will be both no more campaign-trail chest-thumping about going into Pakistan (lest India finds that a useful exemplar), and quiet compliance with existing stealthy Predator strikes against bin Laden followers in Waziristan.
All this is very American: Like taking the same old laundry detergent, sprinkling in a few new inert green crystals, and putting it in a more eye-catching redesigned box, with “New and Improved” (rather than ‘hope’ and ‘change’) spashed in bold cursive across its top.
Bush’s policies, obviously, are far too awesome to abandon. All they need is a little rebranding. I suspect this is mostly hedging; for the most part, the Cornerites of the world will actually be attacking Obama’s policies, not explaining that he doesn’t deserve the credit for how terrific they are. There’s a tanking economy that needs a scapegoat, after all, and signs are not pointing towards a safe and peaceful world any time soon.
Still, on some issues at least, Hanson’s strategy appears to have legs. Here’s Andy McCarthy a few days ago:
In any event, today the Wall Street Journalreports that Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who will be staying on in the new administration, says, yes, we’d love to close Gitmo yesterday, indeed shutting it down remains a “high priority,” but, whaddya know, it may take a while to get that done. Why? “Mr. Gates said the Democratic-controlled Congress would need to craft legislation resolving legal issues before the prison could be closed. Specifically, he said the bill would have to bar freed prisoners from seeking asylum in the U.S.”
…
Moreover, regarding this new Gates/Obama proposal that the Democrat-controlled Congress enact some legislation to bar prisoners freed by the courts from seeking asylum in the United States, Attorney General Michael Mukasey made precisely this plea to the Pelosi/Reid rabble some four months ago — i.e., shortly after the Supreme Court set disaster in motion with its Boumediene decision that gave our alien enemies the constitutional right to petition our courts for their release. In this piece, I recounted AG Mukasey’s proposal and — speaking of deaf ears — the reaction to it by leading Democrats.
Naturally, now that it’s Obama rather than Bush doing the asking, there will surely be action — probably even quick action (though, as Obama will remember and come to rue, many in the hard Left from which he comes don’t mind the prospect of terrorists being freed and would prefer the more detainee-friendly procedures that courts are likely to make up on their own if Congress continues sitting on its hands).
It all underscores a reality that grates even though that we’ve long understood it: Democrats were never going to get serious about the war until they owned it. Be prepared for all sorts of things that were “constitution-shredding” for the last seven years to transform before our very eyes into “smart, effective counterterrorism.”
Now, it may be the case that Pelosi et al didn’t respond to this issue responsibly - I don’t know. But there is absolutely nothing inconsistent between believing that a policy was very wrong and believing that getting rid of it without a lot of ugly side-effects is difficult. McCarthy is being disingenuous in pretending not to recognize this distinction. His closing point - more or less identical to Hanson’s - is a complete non-sequitur - his quotation marks notwithstanding, no one on the Obama team is calling the practice of keeping prisoners locked up indefinitely in Cuba outside the reach of law “smart, effective counterterrorism.” There are voices pointing out that figuring out what to do with them now that we have them there is a serious problem. But GITMO was not conceived as a solution for what to do with all the detainees in GITMO, so this hardly qualifies as a defense of the place.
This line of attack is an area in which the crazy left will be of invaluable help to the crazy right. Take the withdrawl timetable: even during the primaries, Obama couldn’t stop repeating his line about being as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. When the general election rolled around, he “tacked to the center” by, basically, adding on “Oh, and I actually mean that. Really. I’m not just saying it.” The Daily Kos cried treason. To those guys, ‘facts on the ground’ are weasel words, so admitting that he wouldn’t bring the troops back with his eyes closed was a betrayal.
Now that he’s actually president, this is terrific fodder for the right. Any practical considerations that slow down our withdrawl from Iraq, the shutting of Guantanamo, the reform of the CIA, etc. will be offered up as proof that even Obama recognizes that Bush was right. That he won’t be continuing Bush’s policies or doing anything other than what he said he would do will be immaterial. The far right can simply point to statements from the far left screaming about how such behavior constitutes a reversal on Obama’s part. And if Kos and K-Lo agree, they must be right. Right?
With all the gloominess in the news today, it’s nice to know the guys at The Corner are still doing what they love: lying about things. In a post predicting that Obama will co-opt all of Bush’s terrific policies and rebrand them to rave reviews from the media, VDH says the following:
FISA and wire-intercepts of terrorist communications in the pre-Obama president months were once derided as more of Ashcroft-Bush stomping on the Constitution — except that now ABC News reports that, in fact, US intelligence agencies supplied India with general knowledge of the rough time period, place, and perhaps even method of terrorist attack. Are we to believe that such newfound capability to warn a country 7000 miles away about terrorist infiltration on its borders would be of no utility here at home?
I think in response what we will see is that insidiously, bit by bit, Obama and the Obama-brand press will begin to drop the shrill rhetoric about destroying constitutional liberties, and replace it with the vocabulary of ambiguity (e.g., try “complex,” “no easy answers”, “problematic”, etc.).
This is just flat out dishonest. No one has ever argued that we should just give up on intelligence altogether. Of course, no one has reported that we warned them based on information gained from warantless domestic wiretaps, and no one is going to report that, because it didn’t happen.
As far as I can tell, Hanson isn’t claiming something quite that crazy. Instead, he’s saying that we have this shiny new system for finding stuff out that is doing great work abroad (well, something seems to have gone wrong in this particular case, but still…) and we’d love to use it at home but the whiny Democrats won’t let us. But no part of this is in any way true. There is nothing ‘newfound’ about our capability to warn a country 7,000 miles away about things going on there. That’s called foreign intelligence, and we’ve always done it. Nor is there anything revolutionary about doing the same sort of thing at home. That’s called domestic intelligence, and we’ve always done that too.
What is at issue is something far more specific: warantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens. Some people think it’s a vital source of intel. Other people think it isn’t worth the loss of privacy rights. There is a serious debate to be had there (though the former group of people are on the wrong side of that debate, and anyway it’s illegal). But there is nothing at all serious about pointing to the existence of intelligence gathering as evidence one way or the other. It doesn’t even begin to bear on the question at issue. It is dishonest drivel, and that is the M.O. of the National Review these days.
