The Enlightened Despot

Well, not me personally, but anyone who reports on things outside of the context of his 9-5. Schumer is one of the sponsors of the senate version of a federal shield law, which would allow journalists to refuse to testify about their anonymous sources. He recently decided to make his bill a little worse:

Previously, the Senate was working with a version of the shield law (S. 448) that defined a journalist in broad terms, focusing on the process and craft of newsgathering. That stood in contrast to the House version (H.R. 985), which passed in March and defines a journalist as someone who gathers news and information “for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial financial gain.”

On Thursday, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) offered an amendment to the Senate version that hews toward the professional definition in the House. Under the amendment, which was adopted by the Senate Judiciary Committee, a journalist is defined as someone who:

(iii) obtains the information sought while working as a salaried employee of, or independent contractor for, an entity—
(I) that disseminates information by print, broadcast, cable, satellite, mechanical, photographic, electronic, or other means; and
(II) that—
(aa) publishes a newspaper, book, magazine, or other periodical;
(bb) operates a radio or television broadcast station, network, cable system, or satellite carrier, or a channel or programming service for any such station, network, system, or carrier;
(cc) operates a programming service; or
(dd) operates a news agency or wire service;

You know a book-reading technology is doing well when illiterates adopt it. Dan Brown’s new book is flying off the virtual shelves faster than the physical ones.

You would be forgiven for assuming that any day when a senator from Iowa steps down as chairman of the agriculture committee must be a great day for agriculture policy. Certainly, no right-thinking person will miss Tom Harkin’s leadership on all things farm-related. If Harkin is a religious man, he is surely hoping that Thomas Jefferson was right when he said “those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God”, and that it goes without saying that the earth in question is American earth; if God has much interest in poor brown people farming in poor brown countries, Harkin is in for an awkward debriefing on the other side.

Unfortunately, the structure of senate committees pretty much ensures that every paid-for chairman will be replaced by another just as bad. Or, as in this case, one that is even worse:

Lincoln is as vigorous a proponent for large farms and livestock interests (think Arkansas-based Tyson Foods) as there is in Congress. Pair her with the panel’s senior Republican, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, and you have a powerful one-two punch for the southern perspective on agricultural policy.

The southern perspective being, roughly, the midwestern perspective minus the belief that global warming is bad. So that should be fun.

In other news, you’ll notice an unfamiliar author name at the top of this post. I am, in fact, Akhbar the Great, but from now on I’ll be posting under the absurd name ‘NC Saint’. It’s not quite as dignified, but I’ve landed a gig that could occasionally lead to my writing posts elsewhere, and my new employers refuse to believe that I am a 16th century Mughal emperor. I apologize for combining this news with an unrelated rant about farm subsidies, but King Felix says I’m not allowed to write updates about the status of the blog. But, while I’m at it, I’ll mention that regular posting here resumes now.

If your local Chrystler dealer is having a going-out-of-business sale, you’d better act fast - the sale could be off soon, an not because they’ve gone out of business. Back when we were giving billions of dollars to automakers, it was important for lawmakers to emphasize that the money came with the requirement that the corporations be downsized and otherwise restructured with an ever-hopeful eye toward some day becoming profitable. As part of that process, GM and Chrystler announced they were closing over 2,000 dealerships nationwide. Congress is now working to make it clear that cost-cutting was never meant to entail spending less money in the districts of Congressmen. A bill to keep the dealerships open now has 221 co-sponsors in the house, enough to pass. Jim Manzi has an excellent, though brief, analysis:

The practical effect would be to reverse or prevent the vast majority of dealer closings that were a key component of the auto restructuring plans. This seems only fair, as the dealers paid good money for these politicians.

Felix Salmon thinks the Senate will put a stop to the madness. Here’s hoping, though the Senate version of the bill already has 14 sponsors. That’s a far cry from 60, but it’s a depressing start. So, just who are these clowns? Some highlights:

• Ted Kennedy. It’s extremely unlikely that Kennedy will ever vote on this. It is insane that legislators have to physically make it into the building to vote, without exception, but then again, it’s also insane that, knowing this, we continue to elect so many very old people. Why Kennedy thinks he needs to take a purely symbolic stand in support of a piece of graft that no disinterested party could possibly support is beyond me.
• Ron Paul. There must be some nutty piece of reasoning that makes this move fit his ideology, but I confess I can’t figure it out. Perhaps all the recent government intervention in the economy has driven him (more) insane. Or maybe he’s just in it for loot with the rest of them.
• Iowa and Minnesota. Five out of five Iowas Representatives, six out of eight from Minnesota, both Iowa Senators (including the bill’s principal sponsor), and Tom Harkin from Minnesota. Al Franken is late to the party, so we’ll see. Apparently these states are tired of being accused of ruining our farm policy, and want to prove they can screw up the economy in other ways too.

Other sponsors from both houses worth mentioning: Maxine Waters (natch), Barney Frank (chair of the relevant committee, big fan of getting paid), Frank Lucas (no, really, that’s his name), Adam Smith (ditto. I believe the kids call this sort of thing ‘ironic’. They should cut that out), John Murtha (always thinking up clever ways to remind me how much I dislike him), Mark Begich (where there’s graft, there are Alaskans), and, finally, John Kerry, who is too boring to be worth a pithy insult.

Since I was one of the many people to say nasty things about Joe Klein’s remarks on Krauthammer’s disability, it’s only fair that I post his defense. On the other hand, if I’m going to put this sort of nonsene on the Despot, it’s only fair that I mention that it is nonsense. So here’s Klein’s post in full, broken apart for comments:

The usual neoconservative malingerers have been hammering me about a quote I gave to Politico, regarding Charles Krauthammer’s limitations as a columnist.

Not just neocons, Joe. Not even just people who don’t hate Charles Krauthammer.

Obviously, I didn’t mean to imply second-class status for disabled people. On the contrary, the distance and perspective that comes with physical deficits often leads to enhanced insight and abilities. The greatest President of the past 150 140 years–(Thanks, commenter flownover!)– sat in a wheelchair.

Ugh.

So it is possible to write brilliant, nuanced commentary—on the war in Iraq, for example—without visiting there. But it sure does help to understand a complicated situation in an unfamiliar culture if you can see it for yourself.

So far, so obvious. A person in a wheelchair could write brilliant nuanced commentary about Iraq, or he could write single-minded partisan drivel. Furthermore, the fact of being handicapped can affect one’s perspective for good or ill. Just about anybody would agree with that. What very few people would agree with without further evidence is that Krauthammer’s work would be nuanced instead of dogmatic if only he could walk.

Indeed, I believe the leavening effects of direct experience are especially valuable for those who are blinkered by ideology and debilitated by extreme views.

This is really the only explanation we’re going to get. Sure, some people - like FDR - can think as well as Joe Klein about wars without being able to visit them, but it’s very hard for extremist ideologues to write rationally and even-handedly about places without visiting them. Color me unimpressed.

And while Krauthammer’s skills are impressive, his commentary has been dangerously bellicose, arrogant and wrong.  Given his influence with the Bush Administration, his unflinching support for American unilateralism–his invention of the notion of  a unipolar world–did extensive damage to our nation’s security and reputation overseas, and caused the unnecessary loss of  life.

Yes, Krauthammer is awful. So?

Still, it seems clear that my remark could be construed by some as insensitive—and if I have caused any discomfort to any disabled person, I apologize sincerely.

This is an ugly cop out. People will contrue all sorts of things as insensitive. The hell with them. But you actually said - in reference to his disability - “his work would have a lot more nuance if he were able to see the situations he’s writing about.” Insensitivity has nothing to do with it. This is a straightforward declaration that the man’s work wouldn’t be so awful if he weren’t crippled. Even though you’re ready to concede that other men in his condition wouldn’t be so hindered and - no doubt - that plenty of people who can go to Iraq still write about it without nuance. So you’re attributing his failings to his handicap for no rational reason I can see. That’s condescending and ugly.

In the end, Krauthammer’s deficit is not a matter of body, but of judgment.

Yes. Also in the beginning and middle. As is obvious to everybody who isn’t Joe Klein.

The result is, unsurprisingly, jerkish. Joe Klein on Charles Krauthammer:

“There’s something tragic about him, too,” Klein said, referring to Krauthammer’s confinement to a wheelchair, the result of a diving accident during his first year of medical school. “His work would have a lot more nuance if he were able to see the situations he’s writing about.”

Assuming Ben Smith isn’t distorting Klein’s words, that is truly appalling, and completely idiotic. Most people I know have never been to the Middle East yet can think about it with more nuance than Krauthammer. “You’d understand things better - the way I do - if you weren’t a cripple” appears to be the message here. The subtext is “I’m an asshole.”

Jerry Taylor is a CATO fellow and a contributor to NRO’s the Corner. As libertarian types go, he’s about as Republican-friendly as you could ask for. He generally posts about issues on which he agrees with the party line and pipes down when he doesn’t. He doesn’t believe the science on man-made global warming is conclusive. But earlier today, he had the nerve to point out that talk radio is stupid. So, naturally, he’s being brutalized over there:

Rush has been on the air three hours a day, 15 hours a week for 20 years. If he’d left that many hostages to fortune in all those thousands of tapes, you’d think Jerry Taylor could find something a little more substantial to link to than a feeble New York Times story that isn’t about talk radio at all. Is this the level of research required for a Cato Institute study? C’mon, man, surely you could at least link to a George Soros-funded “Media Matters” laundry list of outrageous if ellipsis-heavy quotations (or “ransom-note racism”, as it’s known in the trade).

It reflects a bizarre set of priorities when an obscure think-tanker lazily endorses the liberal critique of American conservatism’s only mass outlet. I confess I don’t quite understand where The Corner’s going with this shtick. Perhaps my colleagues will enlighten me…

Take that you lazy, obscure think-tanker! At this point, I don’t think the National Review is serious enough to be worth saving. There are still a few serious, intelligent people working there, but at this point, I don’t know why they haven’t left.

UPDATE:

Bonus question: are there non-obscure think tanks or think-tankers? What would a mainstream think tank do, exactly? Does Christina Aguilera write policy papers on the merits of rocking the vote?

UPDATE 2:

Mark Steyn defends his first attack:

Insofar as I understand it, I thought the critique of conservative talk radio was that these fellows were too “harsh” and “mean-spirited” and “partisan”. So as evidence of what’s wrong Jerry Taylor approvingly cites two books called Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them and Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot. Sorry, I think that’s pathetic on its face, and an embarrassment to National Review.

Here’s what Taylor actually said:

Regarding my claim that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity often use “dodgy evidence“ to back their claims, I can only plead that on the rare occasions that I’ve listened, this is exactly what I have found. Sure, maybe I just happen to listen in when they go off the rails . . . but I doubt it. Regardless, if you want chapter and verse on that score, you can’t do better than Al Franken’s two books on this subject (Lying Liars and Rush Limbaugh). Now, I know that this will double my hate mail, but the fact is that Mr. Senator-Elect is often spot-on regarding the facts when he goes after these guys.

Taylor says that Franken’s books provide evidence that Rush and Hannity have lied or twisted facts, without saying anything nice about Franken or even endorsing the books. Steyn’s response: Franken is a hypocritical jerk! Stop talking about facts! They’re pathetic! And a disgrace to the National Review!

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.

It’s about time I came clean: my name is not ‘Akhbar’ and I was not born in 1542.  I’ve decided it’s best you hear it from me, rather than from some legislator I offend, as happened to AKMuckraker:

The day that Sarah Palin got nominated to be John McCain’s Vice President, life changed.  My sister called me at some pre-dawn hour and said, “Did you hear?”  I, like many Alaskans, was completely stunned.  Sarah Palin?  Was I still dreaming?  Really?  I knew I had to take the day off.  I made a pot of coffee, and thought to myself, that my 250 people might not be the only ones interested in this VP pick.  Now, many people adored Sarah Palin, and maybe some of them had blogs too….I had never checked, but they must be out there somewhere.  But I knew some things about her, and her policies and positions that others might not be able to find out so easily.  I decided to write my opinion.  So I wrote a post, “What Is McCain Thinking?  One Alaskan’s Perspective.” And that’s exactly what the piece was - one Alaskans perspective.  My perspective.  Just in case anyone was interested.

It took me about 45 minutes to crank it out and click Publish.  (Yes, I was still in my pajamas at the time) And it turned out that people were interested. Really interested.  By the time I’d made myself a couple eggs and toast, and sat back down there were more than 7,000 hits.  By the end of the day there were 64,000.  The total readership of that post ended up being almost 270,000 with more than 1300 comments.  To say I was shocked is putting it mildly.  I began to get emails and comments asking me when I was going to post again, asking questions about Palin, and saying that this was the only “real” information they were getting.

…

After [publishing a post critical of State Representative Mike Doogan] in Mudflats, I started hearing from fellow bloggers that Mike Doogan was trying to figure out who I was.  It seemed strange to me, because really, all I’d done was take his own words and actions and comment on them.  Anyone was perfectly free to disagree, or comment on the piece.

…

I didn’t think much more about it until yesterday, when I got this email:

From: “doogans@gci.net” <doogans@gci.net>
To: akmuckraker@yahoo.com
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 2:55:14 PM
Subject: your identity

Jeanne:

I am reliably told that you are the anonymous blogger who writes Mudflats. I am planning to reveal this in the enews I send to my constituents tomorrow, and am writing to let you know this and offer the opportunity to comment.

Mike Doogan

I was a bit surprised to see my real name, as you can imagine.  But after the initial surprise wore off, it really hit me.  This is an elected State Representative, of my own political party, who has decided that it’s not OK for me to control the information about my identity; that it’s not OK to express my opinion on my own blog without shouting from the rooftops who I am.

This infuriates and saddens me. But I’ll start by saying that I am biased on at least two fronts: I am an (ostensibly) anonymous blogger, and I am a fan of Mudflats. I qualify the former point for a reason: I don’t care about anonymity, and I have done nothing to protect mine. People I know are aware that I write for this blog under the name ‘Akhbar the Great’. Occasional contributor and regular source of background information Meiji is also not very anonymous, because I’m not, and I don’t know all that many members of the United States Marine Corps. We adopted the pseudonyms because Frederick wanted to remain anonymous, and thus far that has worked out swimmingly.

If the Despot were to become famous overnight - yeah, I know, but just hear me out - that wouldn’t, I imagine, make Frederick any more eager to reveal his identity. Indeed, I would think anyone who doesn’t want to admit their authorship of a blog with a small readership would care at least as much, if not more, about concealing his identity on a blog with a huge readership. Yet Doogan felt that by becoming widely read and influential, AKMudflats forfeited her right to anonymity. Doogan had this to say in his defense:

My own theory about the public process is you can say what you want, as long as you are willing to stand behind it using your real name.

If you turn that comma into a period and purge the rest, you have a sensible take on American freedom of speech. The right to comment on government does not have enterance requirements. Nor is anonymity a child of blogging. Perhaps Mr. Doogan is unfamiliar with the Federalist Papers, but if so, he doesn’t belong in government in the first place.

The good news, however, is that in a place as small (population-wise, of course) as Alaska, a blogger with a large national audience is much more of a heavyweight than a low level elected official; I strongly suspect that Doogan has just torpedoed his own career. In the meantime, AKMudflats is back to work reporting on (amongst other things) the ever expanding list of Palin scandals. The latest:

She has selected Tim Grussendorf as the person to replace the recently relocated to Washington D.C. Senator Kim Elton.

Normally, the Senate sends a list of 3 possible replacements to the governor, who chooses one.  This time the Senators bucked tradition because one candidate shone so brightly above all others - Rep. Beth Kerttula.  The candidate must be a Democrat who lives in Juneau, and Kerttula is smart, very qualified, and ready to step from her role in the house, to a new position in the senate without missing a beat.  She is so beloved and respected, that hers was the only name submitted to the governor.  This one is kind of a no-brainer, which means right off the bat, we know we’re in trouble.

Here’s the problem.

Kerttula has been an outspoken opponent of the governor for quite some time.  And we all know how that works out for people.

So, the governor made an announcement saying she’d like to get applications from other qualified Alaskans who are interested in the appointment.  It’s kind of like when the teacher asks a question, only one kid raises their hand, jumping up and down in their seat,  and the teacher scans the room and says, “Anybody?  Anybody else??”  Obviously Kerttula wasn’t going to get the nod.  At least not in the first round.

And so after interviews, Palin has made her selection.  She has chosen Legislative aid Tim Grussendorf.  I, like many of you, had no idea who Tim Grussendorf was.  And let me start off by saying, he may be a stand up guy. *shrug*  But we know this:

Until two weeks ago, he was a registered Republican. According to Grussendorf, he didn’t realize he was registered as a Republican and it was some kind of clerical error in 2006.  I’m not entirely clear on how someone could have gone through the 2008 political season and not realize one was a registered Republican, but that’s the story.  I guess the “R” on the voter registration card slipped under the radar.  Perhaps he thought all those donation requests, and shiny 4-color postcards, and letters from the Republican party were just coincidence.  We may never know.

Just when you think Palin is done shocking you, she goes and does something like this. I don’t see how grabbing one more seat for her party can possibly be worth the blowback on such obvious fraud, but this is just Palin being Palin. God bless her, and AKMudflats too, for keeping up the good work.

Sorry for the lack of posting over the past few weeks. I have one hard drive in the loss column, which brings me down to a total of zero (0) functioning computers. The New York Public Library has been fairly accomidating, but I haven’t had enough time online to post, nor do I have enough of an idea what is going on in the world. I assume we’re descending ever deeper into a depression while Pakistan becomes steadily less politically stable, making it difficult to guess whether we will all be able to die of starvation before the terrorists get us with a nuclear strike. But maybe everything is just peachy. I can’t stomach much television news coverage, and I don’t like getting ink on my hands, so without a computer, I might as well be living in a cave.

A normal rate of posting will resume once the technical issues are resolved. Until then, here’s a quick thought: I’ve seen a lot of posters around my neighborhood advertising a series of live events (debates? discussions? mud wrestling matches?) featuring Ann Coulter and Bill Maher. These posters boast that they provide direct access to these folks with ‘no spin’. And I’ve seen them referenced elsewhere - apparently this is sort of a big deal. This blows my mind. Apparently someone thinks that all the brilliant, nuanced political theory Coulter and Maher have been developing all these years, toiling away thanklessly in their respective think tanks, has been mangled and spun by partisan hacks. Now - Gods be praised! - the people will be able to understand what they really think.

It seems to me, though, that if someone really wanted to improve the public’s understanding of political thought from both left and right, and for some reason that person really, really wanted to involve Coulter and Maher in that effort, the natural thing to do wouldn’t be to put them on stage together, but rather to shoot them both dead. Just a thought.

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…:

(more…)

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Bush signed a lot of ethics legislation (including the Sarbanes-Oxley Wall Street reform) and, compared to past administrations, his was probably the most free administration of scandal and ethical lapses of any in a quarter century.

Go on with your bad self, VDH!

Via The Corner, funnily enough, here’s a simple online logic test. If you can’t score 100% on this, do the reading: if everyone understood these things, The Corner would have to fire a lot of people.

Torture has now officially cost our country the ability to prosecute a man almost certainly guilty of terrorism:

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a “life-threatening condition.”

“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.

The torture is of course awful, but we knew that already. Not being able to prosecute Qahtani is also pretty bad, and the problem of what to do with him instead is the sort of thing that will make closing Gitmo harder, which is terrible.

On the other hand, having this flat declaration come from a member of the Bush administration will make this issue harder for people to ignore or blow-off as partisan posturing. This is very good. It will also put a little more political pressure on Obama to set up a special investigator, truth comission, or something along those lines, which is also good. Hopefully, such a process will help us restore some standing in the world, which would be great, but in the meantime, it’s just about guarunteed to generate a lot of headlines and images that will help make Arabs hate us even more, which is absolutely terrible.

So rejoice, or weep, or, you know, whatever seems appropriate. In any case, these jerks will be gone a week from now. That is fantastic.

The Weekly Standard has a glowing review of the Bush era, listing his top 10 achievments. Here they are, with commentary. Boldface type is the Standard, the rest is Despotic wisdom:

1.) [H]is decision in 2001 to jettison the Kyoto global warming treaty so loved by Al Gore, the environmental lobby, elite opinion, and Europeans.

Strictly speaking, I’m with them. Kyoto had zero chance in congress, and wasn’t all that hot anyway. Admitting the obvious truth that Kyoto was something we weren’t going to do could have been a good way to start talking about what we were going to do. As it turns out, what we were going to do was nothing, which wasn’t such a hot approach either.

2.) Second, enhanced interrogation of terrorists. Along with use of secret prisons and wireless eavesdropping, this saved American lives. How many thousands of lives? We’ll never know. But, as Charles Krauthammer said recently, “Those are precisely the elements which kept us safe and which have prevented a second attack.”

If Krauthammer has any evidence for this claim, he didn’t let the Weekly Standard in on it. That anyone considers this an accomplishment is too depressing to dwell on. On to:

3.) [T]he rebuilding of presidential authority, badly degraded in the era of Vietnam, Watergate, and Bill Clinton. He didn’t hesitate to conduct wireless surveillance of terrorists without getting a federal judge’s okay. He decided on his own how to treat terrorists and where they should be imprisoned. Those were legitimate decisions for which the president, as commander in chief, should feel no need to apologize.

This is breathtaking. It’s almost as if they’re trying to sound evil. If they cited Skeletor as an advocate of this position, it wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. Sure, torture is awesome, but if you clear it with some bigshot judge, it kind of cheapens it. Also: ‘the era of Vietnam, Watergate, and Bill Clinton’? I remember that era well. Or, perhaps I wasn’t born. It’s hard to tell with these discontinuous eras…

4.) [U]nswerving support for Israel.

If there’s one thing I demand out of my president’s support for foreign governments, it’s refusal to swerve. If we actually take Israel’s actions into account when determining our response to them, the terrorists have already won.

5.) His fifth success was No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the education reform bill cosponsored by America’s most prominent liberal Democratic senator Edward Kennedy.

Yes, this was very good. As part of a general Bush-can-do-no-right attitude, people love to focus on the shortcomings of the act, but the fact is that the federal government is spending a lot more on education than it was, and has the beginnings of a system for holding schools accountable. It isn’t enough money, and nowhere near enough reform, but he did some good here.

6.) Bush declared in his second inaugural address in 2005 that American foreign policy (at least his) would henceforth focus on promoting democracy around the world.

Can declaring something in a speech really be considered a major accomplishment, if you get through it without stuttering? No.

7.) [T]he Medicare prescription drug benefit, enacted in 2003.

Sure, why not?

8.) John Roberts and Sam Alito.

Conservatives who do what they want without worrying about the Constitution, rather than liberals or moderates who do what they want without worrying about the Constitution. My dog in this fight was killed off many decades ago. Whatever.

9.) He strengthened relations with east Asian democracies (Japan, South Korea, Australia) without causing a rift with China. On top of that, he forged strong ties with India.

A mixed bag here. I like Australians as much as the next guy, though I’m not convinced that much hangs on whether we are great friends, or simply very good friends. Forging strong ties with India sounds terrific - but then, so does coming to an understanding with Iran. I think the Standard would agree that giving our blessing to Iranian nukes and helping them build reactors outside Tehran wouldn’t be such a good price to pay for it.

10.) Finally, a no-brainer: the surge.

A no-brainer! Remember when that asshole started a war in Iraq and didn’t have a plan or enough troops to run the country? Good thing Bush came along to clean up. That first guy really sucked, though.

Sir Not-appearing-in-this list.) Combating AIDS in Africa. Admirable stuff. But, you know, not exactly water-boarding good.