The Enlightened Despot

This has been a very video-heavy few days, but I can’t resist posting this. I promise there will be real posts with words in them again soon:

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.

Michelle Malkin points to a provision in the stimulus bill for at least $75 million toward convincing people to stop smoking. I don’t know exactly what “smoking cessation activities” are - indeed, I would have thought smoking cessation required merely the absence of an activity, namely smoking - but I suspect they aren’t the best sort of stimulus. Were this money well spent, it should be passed elsewhere.

While we’re on the subject, though, I’ll point out that I don’t think this is money well spent. There was a case to be made for this sort of thing a decade ago: the tobacco companies spent a long time supressing evidence and lying to consumers about the addictive and harmful effects of cigarettes, so sufferers could claim to be victims plausibly, up to a point. But at this point, the facts are out on the table (and on the pack) and have been for a long time. The death toll from smoking is something that should horrify any human being, but I’d prefer my government to be indifferent.