outlook not so good

So says the Magic 8 Ball on whether we'll see McCain or Romney moving into the West Wing in two years. Based on my very amateur, probably completely wrong analysis, the Republicans will have a tough row to hoe in 2008, mostly due to the war in Iraq.

As Matt Yglesias and other commentators have pointed out, during the remainder of his presidency, Bush seems unlikely to (a) withdraw significant numbers of troops from Iraq or (b) find a way to stop the bloodshed and manage a political resolution to the country’s problems. This most likely means that Iraq—and the Republicans' political fortunes—will continue to bleed until Bush leaves office.

Given this, I don’t see a scenario where a Republican nominee for president has a good chance of winning in 2008. Right now, as possible candidates (in rough order of popularity), you have Giuliani, McCain, Rice, Gingrich, Romney, Brownback, Pataki, Bloomberg, Huckabee, Hagel, Hunter, Thompson, and Tancredo.

Gingrich and Pataki are not viable candidates in a general election—probably enough Republicans will realize this to stymie their nomination. Also, Giuliani, Bloomberg, and Pataki don’t have a chance of winning the primaries—they’re too liberal on too many issues. I don’t know much about Hunter and Thompson, but I’ll count them as long shots. Rice is too closely identified with Bush and the failed Iraq policy to have a chance—also, no matter how much conservative elites love her, count me unconvinced that a black woman has a chance of winning the Republican primaries in the South and Mountain West. Romney and McCain—the two candidates with perhaps the best chance of winning a general election who could also conceivably win the nomination—have been strong supporters of Bush’s Iraq policy. As Digby has pointed out, McCain’s recent calls for more troops could backfire if the president actually goes down that road and the situation does not improve. Given my assumptions that Iraq will still be screwed in two years and that U.S. troops will still be in the middle of it, McCain and Romney would have a tough time explaining their support for what is already a toxic policy—by then it will be pure poison. Also, Romney’s religion and past support for gay rights are likely to trip him up in the primaries.

McCain has publicly opposed the president on some high-profile issues—torture being foremost—which would advantage him in the general but hurt him in the primaries. (Never mind that McCain actually accomplished very little in rolling back officially-sanctioned torture--he managed to convince the press that he was really socking it to the president.) Also, he makes a lot of Republicans uneasy because of his stances on the environment and immigration, and because of some ambiguity in his position on abortion.

Hagel has the advantage of having distanced himself from the administration’s Iraq policy (helps him in the general, hurts him in the primary). He has a moderate image—probably due to his foreign policy positions—but he’s actually fairly conservative. His Achilles heels are his support for comprehensive immigration reform and his tenure in the Senate—he’s easy to tar as a Washington insider (I think McCain overcomes this problem through his high visibility and reformist credentials).

Brownback is actually similar to Hagel in many ways, but I’d say his chances are better. He’s more socially conservative, and he’s taken care lately to strike out on his own on Iraq. Also he’s not as well-known, which, given the recent history of the Republican Congress, is a benefit. However, he voted for comprehensive immigration reform, which conservative voters are unlikely to forgive unless he changes his tune.

The wild card is immigration—if the Democrats pass an immigration bill that is perceived as overreaching, it could propel a hardline anti-immigrant demagogue like Tancredo to the nomination. I don’t think the Democrats will do this, though. As long as they maintain their standing among latinos as the lesser of two evils on immigration—which seems likely given the way this issue motivates conservatives to do stupid things—they will not risk creating a new generation of Reagan Democrats by “going too far” on immigration.

Huckabee is well-positioned as an outsider who can reshape his position on Iraq as necessary. But he seems less able than Romney and McCain to withstand the sort of intense, damaging scrutiny they are receiving now.

A caveat I would add is that if Republican elites realize they are doomed in 2008 without an about face on Iraq policy, you might see heightened pressure on Bush to pull troops out quickly. But if he actually does so, I don’t see how any Republican wins the general election. (It’s a Catch 22—conservatives have invested so much in success in Iraq that they have to advocate staying and winning to salvage any credibility on national security. But the longer we stay in Iraq, the more unpopular the war becomes and the less credibility conservatives have on national security.) If Bush doesn’t pull out, you might see McCain, Romney, and others turning on the president as he descends into Nixon-land. But I don’t know how they would then neutralize everything they’d committed to on the war up to that point.

The best possible candidate for the Republicans would be Lou Dobbs. Anti-immigrant, populist, anti-government, against the war in Iraq—he would kill in the current political environment. Fortunately for Democrats and the country, I don’t see anyone with those attributes among the current crop of candidates. We’ll see how much the candidates modify their stances in the next two years to approximate Dobbs’s.

In short, I think Republican support for the war in Iraq gives a Democrat the White House in 2008.

forcing Congress's hand

The NY Times reports on the recent immigration raids on meatpacking plants in the West:

Homeland security officials emphasized that only the company’s workers — not the company — had been charged with wrongdoing, though the investigation is continuing. They said Swift’s situation demonstrated the need for a temporary worker program, such as the one advocated by President Bush, to ensure that companies have access to foreign workers.

Looks as if the government is consciously using enforcement as a tool to push for legislative change—acknowledging that the system is broken and applying the law in such a way as to get maximum pushback from both immigrant advocates and the business community. Businesses will lose money; meanwhile families will be separated and lives destroyed. It is certainly messy, but will it work? Even if many of the most extreme anti-immigrant Republicans lost in the recent election, it seems that some Democrats who won office also took a hard line on immigration. There’s no guarantee that the Democrats will put the immigration issue high on their priority list once they take control of Congress. Also, is the administration really pushing for productive change to the system (albeit through cruel and hamhanded measures), or is it simply trying to salvage what little credibility it has left on immigration with conservatives?

"sadness overwhelmed me"

Here is an interesting biographical essay by a gay Mormon convert (via the General). It seems odd to read now about how accepting his local leaders were before the Church laid down the party line on gays and lesbians. Of course, I don’t really know what the practice is now at the ward level—if there is a consistent position—since I haven’t been to church regularly for almost 10 years. My roommate during my first semester at BYU was a grandson of Elder Packer. He was smart and unassuming, and he preferred that people not know who his grandfather was. I get the impression—again, having been out of the loop for quite some time—that Elder Packer is looked to as a leader among the apostles. He certainly seems to have taken the lead on the Church’s position on LGBT members, and that is too bad.

a new approach to immigration enforcement

From the WaPo today:

Federal agents targeting illegal immigrants raided meatpacking plants in six states yesterday, arresting hundreds of workers on the uncommon charge of identity theft and shutting down the world's second-largest meat processing company for much of the day.

About 1,000 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents with search warrants entered plants owned by Swift & Co., of Greeley, Colo., charging that "large numbers" of workers illegally assumed the identities of U.S. citizens or legal residents by using their Social Security numbers to get work, ICE officials said.

. . .

U.S. authorities cast the 11-month investigation as an attack on identity theft, not more typical immigration violations. Swift officials were not charged, despite recent administration vows to get tough on companies as well as workers.

Reframing the immigration debate in terms of “identity theft” does not productively advance the discussion. It is another way to criminalize what Congress had originally chosen to characterize as a civil offense—working without authorization and living in this country with no immigration status.

Identity theft connotes stealing someone’s credit card information and running up large bills, or using someone’s identity to take out credit cards and run up large bills. Implicit in the term is harm to the person whose identity is stolen. It is not clear to me how using nine numbers chosen at random that happen to constitute a social security number belonging to someone else harms the person whose number is used. At least it is not clear from the article. If these immigrants were using the social security numbers to steal something of value from the rightful owners, then “theft” would be a more accurate description. If immigrants are using the fake social security numbers to apply for credit cards, take out loans, etc.—things that might affect the credit rating of the true owners, then I would see more cause for concern. I’m not sure whether this is happening, and if so, if it is the reason the feds are taking this approach now. If so, it was nowhere mentioned in the article. Certainly the vast majority of illegal immigrants will not be attempting to steal money from people by fraudulently using their identities—you know, engaging in identity theft—because the last thing most of them want to do is get in trouble with the law. Most of the immigrants caught up in these raids have probably never even used a computer, much less perpetrated complicated electronic financial fraud.

Use of the term “theft” is generally understood to mean appropriation of something that belongs to someone else—taking for your own benefit something at someone else’s expense. Now, these immigrants are looking for the opportunity to work 70 hours a week at very low wages in order to make large companies billions of dollars. Since, for most of them, there is no legal channel for accomplishing this, they bend the rules in order to have the chance to basically be exploited. Accusing the immigrants of theft is simply Orwellian.

"Swift believes that today's actions by the government . . . raise serious questions as to the government's possible violation of individual workers' civil rights."

This is true, but also fairly hypocritical, since these companies benefit a great deal from the current system where their workers have no legal or political status in this country. Illegal workers can be easily fired or intimidated, can’t unionize, and will gladly take low wages with little complaint. I’d like to see the business community come out strongly and publicly in favor of a fair immigration program that provides them with the workers they need and provides those workers with the legal status they need, but so far I haven’t seen it.

If we continue to see ramped-up enforcement with no serious effort to address the underlying problems with the system, I think we will see more mass protests, more immigrant-friendly voters (principally, but not solely, latinos) becoming politically active, more legal challenges to the system, re-energized unions becoming more active, and serious erosion of the American bargain that if you work hard and keep your nose clean, you will get ahead.

Unfortunately, I don't see any easy solutions since the problems stem from an international legal/political system that is not currently able to deal with the changing global economic landscape.

who killed the electric car

I watched the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car" from NetFlix tonight. It was some good muckraking--turns out the car and oil companies put the kibosh on a product for which there was pretty strong demand. GM actually had to threaten legal action and physically take back the electric cars, all of which were leased, from customers who didn't want to give them up. They refused to sell the cars to the lessees. Then they drove the cars off to the desert and crushed them. I guess this is the kind of visionary leadership that led the US automakers to embrace SUVs just before the longest period of high gas prices since the 70s. At least now that Ford and GM are facing bankruptcy, maybe someone will give consumers what they want.

Orson Scott Card on Iraq

My dad’s cousin always said Orson Scott Card was a weenie. She went to high school with him, so I guess she would know. Weenie or not, he seems to have gone off the deep end after 9/11.

He is one of those unfortunate “liberals” who has latched onto the war in Iraq as the single transcendent issue of our time, and then drawn exactly the wrong conclusions from the experiences of the past five years. I stumbled onto an essay of his through Glenn Reynolds shortly before the election—a true gem, its length is only exceeded by its stunning and complete wrongness.

Wrong on the “war on whatever”:

[W]e are not waging a "War in Iraq." We are waging a world war, in which the campaigns to topple the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan were brilliantly successful, and the current "lukewarm" war demands great patience and determination from the American people as we ready ourselves for the next phase.

Wrong on the "war of choice":

No matter which miserable dictatorship we moved against after the Taliban -- and we had no choice but to keep moving on if we were to eradicate the grave danger we faced (and face) . . .

Wrong on Vietnam:

As happened in South Vietnam. The negotiated peace was more or less holding after American withdrawal. But then a Democratic Congress refused to authorize any further support for the South Vietnamese government. No more armaments. No more budget.

In other words, we forcibly disarmed our allies, while their enemies continued to be supplied by the great Communist powers. The message was clear: Those who rely on America are fools.

Wrong on Iraq Adventure, the First:

Bush Senior did nothing as Saddam moved in and slaughtered them. The tragedy is that all it would have taken is a show of force on our part in support of the rebels, and Saddam's officers would have toppled him. Only when it became clear that we would do nothing did it become impossible for any high-ranking officials to take action. For the price of the relatively easy military action that would have made Saddam turn his troops around and leave the Shiite south, we could have gotten rid of him then -- and had grateful friends, perhaps, in the Shiite south.

Wrong on Iraq Part II:

In Iraq and Afghanistan -- but especially Iraq -- President Bush is behaving according to America's best and most honorable tradition. We did not come to destroy, we came to liberate and rescue, he says -- by word and deed. We bring freedom and opportunity. Our money will help rebuild your devastated (or never built-up) economies; our expertise will help train your most talented people to be ready for prosperity and self-government; and our military will keep enemies from overwhelming you as you reinvent yourselves.

Wrong on Muslim perceptions of the West and Bush’s commitment to democracy in the Middle East:

[T]hrough nation-building, through the promise of democracy, Bush has created a rallying point with far stronger resonance than anything the Islamic puritans have to offer.

What is their program, after all? We'll take your sons and get them to blow themselves up in order to murder westerners! Forget the rhetoric -- Muslim parents are human beings, and there is nothing more devastating than to lose a child. The only consolation is when it seems to be in a noble cause. But because of President Bush's promise of democracy, the Muslim puritan cause does not seem noble to more and more Muslims.

. . .

There are, of course, fanatics who will embrace Islamic terrorism because they choose to blind themselves to the truth and embrace the noble-seeming lies of the tyrants. Al-Qaeda does not lack for recruits.

But it also does not lack for people who fear and hate them. There are few pro-Al-Qaeda demonstrations on the Arab street. The people remember the images of liberated Iraqis tearing down the images of Saddam. And they know -- because they have relatives and friends, they hear from merchants and travelers -- that in most of Iraq, there is freedom and prosperity like never before.

(Wow. You really need special training to be this detached from reality.)

Wrong on Iraqi support for continued American presence in the country:

even more than they fear terrorist bombs, the pro-democracy forces within Iraq and Afghanistan fear American withdrawal.

Wrong on . . . so many levels:

Critics of Bush love to cite the many "mistakes" his administration has made. Most of these "mistakes" are arguable -- are they mistakes at all? -- and when you sum up the others, with any kind of rational understanding of military history, the only possible conclusion is that this is the best-run war in history, with the fewest mistakes. And most of the mistakes we've made are the kind that become clear to morning-after quarterbacks but were difficult to avoid in the fog of war.

Wrong on the future (I hope):

If we do not win this containable war now, following the plan President Bush has set forth, we will surely end up fighting far bloodier wars for the next generation.

Only if people like you are still in charge of our foreign policy, which looks increasingly less likely. Oh, wait:

If we, the American people, are stupid enough to give control of either or both houses of Congress to the Democratic Party in this election, we will deserve the world we find ourselves in five years from now.

That might actually be true!

Card also goes into an "incisive analysis" of the politics of the Middle East that, on its own, should safely ensure he is never taken seriously on the topic again. Well, maybe that’s too much to ask of the blogosphere. We go to war with the brains we have, not the brains we want.

This essay is a gift that keeps on giving. Somehow I don’t think any amount of empirical evidence will ever convince this man of anything new.

He’s been so thoroughly and consistently wrong that he couldn’t limit himself to penning lengthy discourses of wrongness located in the world we currently inhabit—the nonfiction genre did not provide sufficient ground for developing his wrong ideas—he had to write a work of fiction to bring to pass the fullness of his wrongness. (The liberal sphere took a look at it a couple weeks ago here, here, and here.)

Here’s an excerpt:

What the terrorists aren't counting on, thought Cole, is that America isn't a completely decadent country yet. When you stab us, we don't roll over and ask what we did wrong and would you please forgive us. Instead we turn around and take the knife out of your hand. Even though the whole world, insanely, condemns us for it.

Cole could imagine the way this was getting covered by the media in the rest of the world. Oh, tragic that the President was dead. Official condolences. Somber faces. But they'd be dancing in the streets in Paris and Berlin, not to mention Moscow and Beijing. After all, those were the places where America was blamed for all the trouble in the world. What a laugh -- capitals that had once tried to conquer vast empires, damning America for behaving far better than they did when they were in the ascendancy.

"You look pissed off," said Malich.

"Yeah," said Cole. "The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy."

Orson, for the love of God, stop calling yourself a Democrat. It’s embarrassing for all of us.

And whatever happened to that movie version of Ender's Game?

Kofi Annan on human rights

I went to hear Kofi Annan speak yesterday in Manhattan at a Human Rights Watch event to mark International Human Rights day, coming up on December 10. “After ten years as secretary-general, he promises to speak his mind,” the organizers claimed. Not having heard him speak before, I don’t know if he spoke more of his mind than usual, but I thought he made some fairly blunt points for a sitting secretary-general.

In his introduction, Ken Roth, executive director at HRW, clearly promoted the narrative that Annan has been the “human rights” secretary-general. This even though as head of peacekeeping under Boutros Boutros (Boutros) Ghali, Annan presided over both Rwanda and Srebenica. In a new account of the Annan years reviewed by Stephen Schlesinger in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs, James Traub

compliments Annan's calm in the midst of diplomatic tornadoes swirling around him as being almost "extraterrestrial." "There was something uncanny, even a bit weird," Traub writes, "about the perfect equipoise [Annan] maintained in all settings."

He was calm, unflappable, possessed of a serenity I associate with Mormon leaders of my youth who had complete inner assurance of the truth of their message. Not elected in the way most politicians are, he displayed few traits common to them—he was soft-spoken and very low-key. He managed to maintain a relentlessly positive outlook while describing dire situations in many parts of the world.

In his prepared remarks, he worried that the world might not be any better off than it was ten years ago with regard to advancement of human rights by intergovernmental organizations like the UN. He urged that national sovereignty not be considered sacrosanct in cases of dire threats to human rights—an obvious reference to Darfur. He rejected the claim that peace must come before justice in societies recovering from conflict. He called for anti-terror programs to be built on human rights, and rejected the need for secret prisons and “ghost detainees” kept away from Red Cross workers—a clear rebuke to current U.S. policies. He characterized human rights as individual rights, and emphasized that individuals may have multiple or shifting identities and cannot easily be pigeonholed—reminiscent of Amartya Sen’s recent work on identity and armed conflict.

He then answered questions from a panel of human rights practitioners from around the world: Argentina, Kenya, Russia, Egypt, and South Africa. He sat patiently as Ann Njogu from Kenya berated him for what seemed like forever, asking again and again when Africans could expect to see results from all this talk about human rights. He responded diplomatically that yes, there are many problems and difficulties, but we should not focus too harshly on the gap between principle and action. To me his answer rang a bit hollow. He also said that African women didn’t know the power of their numbers—I didn’t know quite how to interpret that. I don’t see much use in laying the blame for Africa’s problems at the feet of African women for being politically marginalized.

Tanya Lokshina posited that the rest of the world was ignoring rampant human rights abuses by Russian security forces in Chechnya in order not to upset the Russian government. Annan responded that the Security Council has accepted Russia’s claim that the Chechen conflict is an internal matter. He asked whether the UN could apply its principles fairly across the board or whether principles were applied differently depending on how powerful the country under scrutiny was. “I think we all know the answer,” he said. I took that to mean that the rule of law has little meaning in the context of the Security Council.

After the panel, Annan took questions from the press. Someone asked him if he felt vindicated on Iraq. He managed not to gloat. The conventional wisdom, as expressed in the Traub book on Annan’s tenure, has been that he started out with several successes during the Clinton years and then faced a series of setbacks during the Bush years, Iraq being principal among them. Schlesinger writes:

Bush's . . . decision to invade Iraq in defiance of the UN came as a sharp rebuke to the organization. It was also a shattering personal experience for Annan. Traub writes that as he saw the UN pushed aside in Iraq, Annan "suffered a kind of slow-motion collapse." He retreated to his New York residence, started taking antidepressants, and even temporarily lost his ability to speak.

It seems clear by now that history will be kinder to Annan than to Bush on the issue of Iraq, and probably on many other issues as well (the International Criminal Court and human rights, to name two).

One journalist asked what the impact has been of the US’s relinquishment of its traditional leadership role in the area of human rights. Annan said this had an impact on the negotiations for the new UN Human Rights Council. Given his previous admission that the Council had not yet lived up to expectations, one could surmise that he thinks the US is to blame to some degree for the failure of the Council thus far to do anything meaningful. But he said he interpreted the US’s decision not to seek a seat on the Council as a “soft no” rather than a “hard no” (meaning the US would not participate but would also not stand in the way of the Council's work) and he held out hope that the US would support the Council in the future.

Someone asked him whether his experience presiding over Rwanda affected his views on state sovereignty and the need for intervention. He said that the governments that failed to act were to blame—many of them knew more about the genocide as it was occurring than did the UN, and even if they didn’t know the full extent of it, as some countries claimed, when they found out, their first (and for many, only) action was to send in troops and planes to evacuate their own nationals. It was clearly a sensitive subject for Annan, but it is also the height of hypocrisy for nations that failed to act during the slaughter to blame the UN for their own very calculated inaction.

It is hard to overstate the calm assurance that Annan projected. He was never caught without an articulate answer. His comments were permeated by a contagious optimism. It is too bad that his goals—and the goals of human rights advocates around the world—have been largely hamstrung by the US reaction to 9/11. I believe that he leaves office with the international stature of a Clinton or a Mandela. I look forward to good things from Kofi Annan as he moves into the private sector.

the Economist--just say no

The Economist weighs with a cover story on the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. From the leader:

What will not help is scuttling from Iraq before exhausting every possible effort to put the country back together. The Baker-Hamilton group is right to say that America should neither leave precipitously nor stay forever. Leaning harder on Iraq's politicians is an excellent idea. But setting an arbitrary deadline of early 2008 for most of the soldiers to depart risks weakening America's bargaining power, intensifying instead of dampening the fighting and projecting an image of weakness that will embolden enemies everywhere. On this recommendation, Mr Bush needs to insist on his prerogatives as custodian of America's foreign policy and just say no.

I forget who in the shrillosphere has said the best way to determine an effective foreign policy is to do the opposite of whatever Bill Kristol is advocating at any given point. I’d like to extend this principle to the Economist’s analysis of the war in Iraq. As far as I can tell, the newspaper's editorialists have never been right about any aspect of Iraq policy.

vivir sin fronteras

I came across an interesting survey conducted by the BBC:

Four out of five youngsters believe people should be able to live in any country they choose, a BBC global survey of 15 to 17-year-olds suggests.

Two-thirds also say that they would emigrate to secure a better future, and one in seven said they would risk their life to reach another country.

. . .

The 10 key cities involved in the poll, conducted by Synovate, were New York, Nairobi, Cairo, Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, Baghdad, Delhi, Jakarta, Moscow and London

. . .

The results show the desire of young people to be highly mobile, with very little difference between developed and developing countries.

Well, with the caveat that these are all city-dwellers. The opinions of New Yorkers are not particularly representative of the country as a whole, and I imagine this is true in many of the other countries surveyed.

Based on my experience studying in Buenos Aires three years ago, educated, urban, globally mobile middle/upper class youth often have more in common with their global counterparts than with working class and rural people in their own countries. Europeans, Japanese, porteños (residents of Buenos Aires), North Americans, Australians, Mexicans, and Lebanese all spoke the same languages—Spanish and English—listened to the same music, watched the same movies, drank the same kinds of alcohol, went to the same dance clubs, and all hated George Bush (he’s a uniter, not a divider. I once met a Romanian law student in Geneva who had good things to say about Bush’s foreign policy—he’s the only one that comes to mind out of the places I’ve been.)

Of course, most of the people I met in Buenos Aires who could afford to live abroad were fairly wealthy in their home countries—probably the vast majority of kids outside of Europe either don’t have the opportunity or the inclination to travel for pleasure. But many of those who can't travel for pleasure will travel for work. This generation, more than any other, does not believe in borders. To many kids around the world, the idea that you should be able to live and work where you choose feels like a human right. The idea that your opportunities should be limited by something as arbitrary as where you are born or who your parents are makes little intuitive sense.

When asked which was the most important issue globally right now, 36% of the respondents listed terrorism.

The issue caused most concern in New Delhi (66%), New York (63%) and Baghdad (59%).

And an overwhelming majority, 71%, said that the so-called US war on terror was not making the world a safer place. Just 14% of respondents disagreed.

Ninety-eight percent of Baghdadi respondents said the war on terror was not making the world a safer place.

Lucky for them, they’re the most direct beneficiaries of the US war on terror.

Bolton resigns

Great work, Steve Clemons. America thanks you.

This headline from the NY Times made me laugh:

At the U.N., a Mixed View of Bolton’s Tenure

On the one hand, we had:

[Mark Malloch Brown, the deputy secretary general] had angered Mr. Bolton during the summer by accusing the United States of “stealth diplomacy” — turning to the United Nations when Washington needed it while showing public disdain for the institution.

At the time, Mr. Bolton demanded that Secretary General Kofi Annan “personally and publicly” repudiate Mr. Malloch Brown’s remarks, but Mr. Annan stood by them.

Brown is a Brit--installed by one of our closest allies--and he visibly can't stand Bolton. Bolton completely alienated Annan, also selected with US support 8 years ago.

A year ago, at a monthly lunch for Security Council ambassadors, Mr. Annan signaled how deep the divide had become by chastising Mr. Bolton for trying to “intimidate” him.

Here are the good things diplomats had to say about Bolton:

Security Council ambassadors said they respected Mr. Bolton’s professionalism and command of the subject matter, and thought he had represented the Bush administration’s foreign policy goals well.

Keep in mind these are diplomats--congenitally incapable of giving offense directly--most of whom thought the Bush administration's foreign policy goals were batshit crazy. Some compliment!

This is about as close as you'll hear a diplomat come to complaining about a colleague:

On the other hand, they said his manner, often described as abrupt, unyielding and confrontational, had alienated traditional American allies and undercut American influence.

In the end, Bolton failed in his stated goal to engage in meaningful reform of the UN because he was such an abrasive asshole. You can't be an effective diplomat if you don't believe in diplomacy. Sending Bolton to the UN was like sending Strom Thurmond to reform the NAACP or Dick Cheney to reenergize the ACLU. Thankfully in the end the Republican Senators who would have had to sign on to this madness wouldn't do it. Chalk up one more wasted opportunity for Bush's legacy.

Update: Matt Yglesias puts his finger on one reason Bolton's effort at the UN was doomed to fail: he didn't want to reform the UN so much as destroy--or at least eviscerate--it.

Bolton and his biggest fans think the UN is a menace. Not that the UN is a flawed institution that sometimes can't or doesn't accomplish everything one might like. Rather, it's a menace. Not something that should be improved, but something that should be wrecked. Hit, in other words, with a wrecking ball. People who believe that a "strong American presence" in Turtle Bay means strident efforts to destroy the institution.

denied!

This nifty site shows the total number of asylum cases granted by immigration judges in the U.S. and the percent approved vs. denied.

Note that (per a recent NY Times article which has now vanished into the archive) in New York between 2000 and 2005, Judge McManus had a denial rate of 9.8% while Judge Hom denied 91.4% of the asylum cases he heard, and Judge Vomacka denied 95.8%!

These extreme differences should put safely to bed the claim that asylum-seekers can count on any sort of fair and impartial process to determine the truth of their claims. (Immigration judges aren't even part of the judiciary, they're part of the same executive branch as the government attorneys laboring to send asylum-seekers back to their home countries.) The immigration judges have so much discretion to bend facts and law to fit their ideological preferences that asylum proceedings are often a sham. Due process? We’ve decided, through our legislators, that it is not particularly relevant to the life and death situations that many asylum-seekers find themselves in.

stabbing ourselves in the back

Digby writes:

Josh Marshall is chronicling the rapidly emerging rightwing "stab in the back" meme in which George W. Churchill was betrayed by both the American and Iraqi people.

. . .

[I]f the current stab-in-the-back argument is that the American people should have supported the war more, perhaps the people who are making that argument should go back and look at what the American people actually thought at the time we went in. It's not something that couldn't have been anticipated. A majority backed the war if the US could get an international coalition together. Throughout the run-up polls said over and over again that Americans expected Bush to get UN backing. He did not feel he needed to do that, he lied repeatedly, invaded anyway and once the invasion began most Americans rallied because they felt they had no choice. They hung in longer than they had any reason to.

So Kurtz is essentially right. The public had never fully approved of the war in the first place.

I don’t know about this. It certainly seemed as though the American public, to the extent that you can talk about it as a coherent entity, strongly supported the war at the time we went in. Approval of the invasion was above 70% in March 2003.

I think the “stabbed in the back” analysis by the left right now is misguided. The American public might not be responsible for losing the war (to the extent that "losing the war" has any meaning in this context), but it’s harder to say it is not responsible for supporting the war in the first place. It would be nice if the American public had cared enough at the outset of the war to really find out what it was they were supporting. But the fact is that most didn’t. I laid out the case against war to a sophisticated, well-informed hawkish friend of mine before we went into Iraq. I said something along the lines of “We aren’t going in for the right reasons, therefore it is likely to go badly for the Iraqis. We are going to do this for our benefit, not theirs, and they are expendable, and lots of them will probably die as a result.” His response was that he didn’t really care how many Iraqis died. It wasn’t his concern. I was a little shocked, but I have to give him credit for saying what many others who supported the war thought but wouldn’t say—or would have thought, had they taken the time to think it through. I believe that many Americans, if feeling sufficiently threatened, feel little compunction about trampling however many non-American lives it takes to protect “me and mine,” which doesn’t typically extend to anyone outside of our borders.

There is little moral justification for this position, but it’s such a deeply-held, unspoken assumption of American foreign policy that it seems shocking when people put it into words.

This sentiment gives rise to statements like Jonah Goldberg’s classic paraphrase of Michael Ledeen before the war: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."

This is why, with each new Lancet study calculating the number of Iraqi dead since the war began (who would not have otherwise died), the administration and its supporters attacked the researchers and said the numbers were too large to be taken seriously. First 100,000 was beyond the pale, then 655,000. The second Lancet study predicted with 95% confidence that 392,000 people had died—by this time 100,000 didn’t seem so outrageous anymore.

After the second study came out, the Bush administration said no, that’s too high, we think it’s more like 30,000, but they provided no evidence of this claim. I’m not aware of any comparable conflicting studies (Iraq Body Count uses a different methodology that, by their own admission, is likely to undercount deaths). So, the argument goes, the Lancet numbers couldn’t possibly be accurate, but we won’t provide any evidence for this claim because: (1) we’re worried what the real numbers will turn out to be, (2) we don’t really care what the numbers are, (3) you’re a dirty hippie, and/or (4) (insert serious argument here) . . .

Samantha Power wrote in A Problem from Hell (paperback, p. 381) that, before President Clinton sent in 200 troops to stabilize the Kigali airport so relief could be flown into Rwanda (well after the killing was finished), a U.S. officer called Romeo Dallaire, head of the UN mission there, to find out how many Rwandans had died. Dallaire asked why he wanted to know, and the officer replied, “We are doing our calculations back here, and one American casualty is worth about 85,000 Rwandan dead.”

There it is in black and white; it doesn’t get any clearer than that, although the government and punditry don’t normally come right out and say it like that. The calculation presumably varies from country to country—a developed-country life would be worth more than a developing-country life, but only ever some fraction of one American life.

Now there are some decent justifications for prioritizing the security of people in your own community—on a smaller scale, if a parent doesn’t ensure the safety of her child, who will? Democratic systems of government are more effective than alternative systems largely because democratic leaders are responsive to the security demands of their constituents. But in an anarchic international state system, where you have extreme imbalances of power and wealth, these localized democratic mechanisms to ensure group protection have massive externalities which negate the underlying moral justification. You can’t kill thousands of “them” to save dozens of “us” (or none of "us" at all, as it turns out in Iraq) and claim to be acting according to any sort of morally defensible set of rules.

In the case of the US invasion of Iraq, you had a very powerful community using force ostensibly to protect itself, but with very little accountability to anyone outside of that community, and virtually no accountability to the community being invaded. So you had the secondary justification, largely post hoc, that what we were doing was “for their own good.” This was never more than window dressing, and even now, as other justifications for the war have faded away, it is still not the case that we are acting in Iraq for the benefit of the Iraqis in any meaningful way. This is because our elected leaders are in no way accountable to the Iraqis, and whatever sense of obligation the American public feels toward the Iraqi people, it is nowhere near strong enough to actually cause American leaders to act on behalf of the Iraqis. Once the argument that our actions in Iraq are improving the security of the American public is finally disposed of, we will desert the Iraqis to their fate with surprising speed. The invasion and its consequences have killed hundreds of thousands—we quibble about exactly how many, but have so little invested in finding the truth that the discussion quickly fades from memory. Much more attention is focused in the US national conversation on the number of US dead—a precise tally of which is monitored daily—which by comparison is minute. How many Iraqis have died? How many more will die? Why did they die? Was it really necessary?

We. Just. Don’t. Care.

That’s what makes this “stabbed in the back” pushback vaguely silly. Who "lost" Iraq? Who "lost" Vietnam? The fact that those questions are seriously entertained shows that the national security debate is taking place on warped and twisted ground. We’ve learned very little since the Vietnam War, and the nature of the national conversation on Iraq makes me think it’s likely we’ll face this problem again before too long.

my accent

Apparently it's as bland as can be.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The West Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you're a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta.
The Midland
Boston
North Central
The Inland North
Philadelphia
The South
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

(Via Yglesias.)

Update: For some reason, the bars showing how much of each regional accent I have are not showing up ... blame it on Blogger, I guess. Also, something to do with Blogger's interface with Mozilla means you may have to refresh the page to get the most recent postings.

in today’s news

Stunned by a significant loss of support from Hispanic voters in the 2006 midterm elections, Republican politicians redoubled their efforts to reach out to the Hispanic community.

Or not . . .

(Via Atrios)

the modern slave trade

I watched a movie the other day called “Lilja 4-ever” and it reminded me of a Foreign Affairs article I read recently titled “The New Global Slave Trade.” Ethan Kapstein writes:

When most people think about slavery -- if they think about it at all -- they probably assume that it was eliminated during the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. Slavery and the global slave trade continue to thrive to this day; in fact, it is likely that more people are being trafficked across borders against their will now than at any point in the past.

This human stain is not just a minor blot on the rich tapestry of international commerce. It is a product of the same political, technological, and economic forces that have fueled globalization. Just as the brutal facts of the Atlantic slave trade ultimately led to a reexamination of U.S. history -- U.S. historiography until the 1960s had been largely celebratory -- so must growing awareness of the modern slave trade spark a recognition of the flaws in our contemporary economic and governmental arrangements. The current system offers too many incentives to criminals and outlaw states to market humans and promises too little in the way of sanctions.

Contemporary slavery typically involves women and children being forced into servitude through violence and deprivation. Disturbingly, the advanced industrial states have failed to take much action to address the issue. The problem is one of political will, not capability, for the rich countries of the world have at their disposal numerous instruments that, if their leaders had the courage to use them, could greatly curtail the global slave trade. Just as the British government (after much prodding by its subjects) once used the Royal Navy to stamp out the problem, today's great powers must bring their economic and military might to bear on this most crucial of undertakings.

Some more facts:

[T]he total number of people estimated to be living in some form of forced servitude around the world (according to the International Labor Organization) [is] 12 million. Whatever the exact number is, it seems almost certain that the modern global slave trade is larger in absolute terms than the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was.

But this is primarily a problem in developing countries, right? Well, not entirely.

The Justice Department reported in 2006 that about 17,500 persons are trafficked into the [U.S.] annually; in the late 1990s, the CIA put the figure at about 50,000. [Kapstein does not explain whether the numerical difference is due to different methodologies or an improvement in the situation, or both.]

And the U.S. has been relatively aggressive and successful in its efforts to combat the slave trade. If this is what success looks like, I’d hate to see failure. One possible problem: in the U.S., “drug traffickers generally face much stiffer sentences than do those who traffic in humans.”

How does the slave trade work?

Slavers typically recruit poor people in poor countries by promising them good jobs in distant places. A recruiter will then offer a victim a generous loan—at an exorbitant interest rate—to help with travel arrangements, papers, and locating a job in the new community. On arrival, the promised job never materializes, and thus the large debt—up to several thousand dollars—can never be repaid. The victim is then stripped of all travel documents, given a false identity, and forced into a job. He or she—and his or her family—are threatened with disfigurement or death should the slave try to alert the authorities or escape. If they are paid at all, slaves get the bare minimum required for survival.

Roughly 2/3 of slaves are estimated to be used for sex. The trade is lucrative since slave traders can earn on average $10,000 per slave.

Kapstein concludes:

It is worth remembering that in the nineteenth century many people argued that slavery would end “naturally” once the practice was no longer economically profitable. But historians now agree that since slavery remained extremely profitable until the day it was aboloished, such an end was unlikely ever to come. If this was true in the past, it is even more true today, since the costs associated with the slave trade have shrunk so dramatically. As long as slavers continue to face only mild penalties from a handful of countries—and none from the rest—they can be expected to continue their work, underminng in the process the legal and ethical foundations of the global economy. If the United States and some of its European partners wish to halt modern slavery, they will have to use their power to do so, just as the Royal Navy halted the Atlantic slave trade on the high seas in the nineteenth century. There is no “natural” end to slavery in sight, and any productive policy must start by recognizing that fact.

the rule

Let me see if I’ve got this right.

Using the courts to advance the cause of gay marriage is judicial activism.

Using the courts to defeat the cause of gay marriage is NOT judicial activism.

Ok.

the national interest

In the NY Times Sunday Book Review, Michael Lewis writes about Colin Powell’s speech in front of the UN in February 2003:

Walking into the United Nations, Powell understood he was being used by the administration to persuade not foreign governments but the American people. And persuade them he did. Before his speech, DeYoung points out, two-thirds of Americans were against going to war; after it, half of them favored war. Three-quarters of those polled by The Los Angeles Times said they felt Powell had proved the case against Iraq. Before the speech Colin Powell was the most unambiguously admired figure in public life. “You’ve got high poll ratings,” Cheney said to him beforehand, as he poked Powell in the chest. “You can afford to lose a few points.” “They needed him to do it,” Powell’s wife, Alma, says here, “because they knew people would believe him.”

Colin Powell used the trust he had earned over decades of public service to sell the American public on a dubious war. This will not easily be forgotten.

But in the end, the American public is responsible for this war. The public supported the war and re-elected President Bush a year and a half into it, basically ratifying the decision to invade. It's true that many people opposed the war from the start, but these people were generally ignored or marginalized until recently. There was certainly a failure of leadership on both sides of the political aisle, and the media mostly abdicated its role as government watchdog in the run-up to the war. But the failings that made this war possible run much deeper and broader than that—they are failings in how we see the world and how we see ourselves.

We see ourselves as always doing the right thing, even when we’re not (firebombing Dresden and Tokyo in WWII, installing the shah in Iran in 1953, helping to overthrow democratically-elected governments in Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973, invading Vietnam, or bombing Cambodia, for example). For many people, definitionally, the U.S. cannot err in its foreign policy because it acts, based on Constitutional principles, with the consent of its people. (Whether consent has been given when it is not asked for until after the fact merits another discussion entirely.) Along these lines, Americans tend to think the government spends much more on foreign aid than it actually does.

We go to great lengths to convince ourselves that what is in America’s interest is in everyone else’s interest as well. We most often run into trouble when we fool ourselves into thinking we’re acting in the interest of other people when we’re really only acting in our own interest, and often not even that. Guatemala 1954 led to Cuba 1959. Iran 1953 led to Iran 1979. Iraq 2003 will lead to . . . God knows what.

The fact is that, aside from national rhetoric about all men being born equal, we don’t really believe foreigners have the same rights as we do—the right to life, liberty, and so on. And they clearly don’t under the domestic political system we’ve set up and the international political system in which we participate. So when we went in to “liberate” Iraq or Afghanistan, making the Iraqi or Afghan people better off was never one of our top priorities, and it never will be under the current international political system. All assertions to the contrary are either deliberate untruths or pleasant self-delusions. If the Iraq invasion had truly been a humanitarian intervention, the American public never would have supported it. This fundamental disjuncture between the interests of the Iraqis and the interests of the U.S. is why so many Iraqis have died and why we have no idea what we’re doing there now. And it is why whatever we end up doing to extract ourselves from the situation, the Iraqis will suffer for it more than we will.

The American people bought this war, and now we—and (mostly) the Iraqis—will pay for it.

Iran’s government . . .

. . . ever teetering on the verge of collapse.

If only the MSM would show us what’s really going on there! Thankfully, Michael Ledeen has the story for us at NRO.

Given the ECHR’s actions in the case of the Iranian refugees, does this mean that Ledeen supports an enhanced role for the Western Hemisphere’s counterpart, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights? (The one that no one in the Western Hemisphere has actually heard of.) Would he go so far as to advocate that the United States, renowned defender of human rights around the world, finally ratify the American Convention on Human Rights and accept the Court’s contentious jurisdiction?

Does it mean Ledeen supports an increase in the number of U.S. visas granted to refugees and asylees, and a streamlining of the process by which those people obtain legal status in the U.S.? Does he think we should revisit the process by which asylees are sent back to their home countries, a process known, in the proud tradition of sending boatloads of Jewish refugees back into Hitler’s arms, as “expedited removal”?

If so, it is welcome news to me.

a complaint

Andrew Sullivan wrote today:

Mitt Romney will surely provide a fascinating glimpse into the Christianist mindset in the coming two years. He will be the candidate for the Christianist right, but he's not a Christian. And many Christianists may well recoil at the man's Mormon faith. In fact, the latest Rasmussen poll shows that 53 percent of evangelical Christians would not even consider voting for a Mormon president. That's more than the 43 percent in the general population. So this emerges as a delicious irony: a candidacy made possible by sectarian politics could subsequently be made impossible by the same forces. I'm sorry if I have little sympathy for Romney's plight. Live by fundamentalism; die by fundamentalism.

While I mostly agree with the substantive point, Sullivan’s casual comment that Romney is "not a Christian” bothered me. So I wrote him this:

I'm sure I won't be the only one to correct you on this, but Romney is a Christian by any meaningful definition of the word. All Mormons are Christians. Christ is unquestionably the central figure of the faith; in fact, the official name of the church is "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints." Some other Christians have decided that because Mormons have a different view of the Trinity, spend a lot of time talking about church founder Joseph Smith, and believe that each person has the potential for godhood, they are not Christians. Ask any Mormon if he or she is a Christian and they will say yes. Who gets to decide this important question: Mormons themselves who profess a profound belief in Christ or exclusionary Christianists who want to denigrate the faith of others?

I say this as an atheist ex-Mormon who really doesn't give two cents about the underlying theology, but it still bothers me every time I see this trope coming from some quarters that Mormons aren't Christians which apparently gets picked up and passed on without a second thought. And it's something people need to get right as I'm sure it will be discussed ad nauseam once Romney's campaign gathers steam.

And he responded:

I take the reader's point. But Muslims also revere Jesus. And the inspiration for Mormonism's radically innovative understanding of the message and life of Jesus - Joseph Smith's "discovery" - is so alien to mainstream Christianity (and so transparently loopy) that I don't consider Mormons Christians. This is not to say I don't support their religious freedom or their right to play a full part of American politics and society. But they're not Christians as I understand Christianity.

Which didn’t exactly resolve my concerns, so I wrote back:

In response to your post, I have a few nits to pick. Muslims may revere Christ, but do they worship him? Is he the central figure of their faith? No, that is Mohammed. More importantly, Muslims do not self-identify as Christians, whereas Mormons do.

It seems to me that people of faith should take care when describing the beliefs of others as "transparently loopy." To a non-religious person, belief in supernatural phenomena like turning water into wine, raising the dead, or walking on water might seem "transparently loopy." As far as a "radically innovative" message that is "alien to mainstream Christianity," that could easily have described the beliefs of Martin Luther during his life. Few now would dispute that he is a Christian. In fact, Luther and the Mormons share the unpleasant characterization of the Roman Catholic church as the Whore of Babylon described in the Book of Revelation.
I don't see the need for all the name-calling, on all sides. It seems to me that religious belief is highly subjective and, on definitional questions such as who is a Christian, the benefit of the doubt should go to the believer, not the outside observer.

C.S. Lewis, who is highly regarded within the Mormon church, espoused this view:

It is not for us to say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men's hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge. It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any man is, or is not, a Christian in this refined sense . . . When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.

No response yet …

say goodbye to the NPT

If it wasn’t clear already, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) is a dead letter. From the NYTimes:

The Senate gave overwhelming approval late Thursday to President Bush’s deal for nuclear cooperation with India, a vote expressing that a goal of nurturing India as an ally outweighed concerns over the risks of spreading nuclear skills and bomb-making materials.

By a vote of 85 to 12, senators agreed to a program that would allow the United States to send nuclear fuel and technology to India, which has refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The agreement, negotiated by President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India in March, calls for the United States to end a long moratorium on sales of nuclear fuel and reactor components. For its part, India would divide its reactor facilities into civilian and military nuclear programs, with civilian facilities open to international inspections.

Critics have been unwavering in arguing that the pact would rally nations like North Korea and Iran to press ahead with nuclear weapons programs despite international complaints and threats. Opponents of the measure also warned that the deal would allow India to build more bombs with its limited stockpile of radioactive material, and could spur a regional nuclear arms race with Pakistan and China.

This is a great way to put the nail in the coffin of the already shaky weapons regime. We’re helping India do an end run around the NPT to advance our goals in the region—but will this really even do that? What credibility do the nuclear powers have now in arguing that Iran must abide by its treaty obligations to use nuclear technologies for only peaceful means? The administration has made no effort to build a new rule-based system for regulating and containing nuclear technology. It’s made no effort to address the dubious moral ground on which the NPT is constructed (by what principle do some countries get nukes and others none?) by taking real steps towards a nuclear-weapon-free world. So the current weapons regime is crumbling beneath us and we have no replacement ready—in fact, we aren’t even seriously talking about a new system, it’s not even on the radar. Not a proper subject of discussion in the Senate or the news media, apparently. The only conclusion I can draw is that the administration never saw the NPT as a particularly useful piece of paper to begin with and is now glad to be freed from its constraints. Either that or our national security policy is being decided by true incompetents.

Bush draws lessons from Vietnam

From the NYTimes on Friday:

President Bush, on his first visit to a country where America lost a two-decade-long fight against communism, said Friday the Vietnam War's lesson for today's confounding Iraq conflict is that freedom takes time to trump hatred.

I guess that’s true, but probably not in the way he intended.

''My first reaction is history has a long march to it, and societies change and relationships can constantly be altered to the good,'' Bush said after speeding past signs of both poverty and the commerce produced by Asia's fastest-growing economy.

Also true. It only took Vietnam 30 years to get past being bombed back into the Stone Age.

No mention was made of the 2 million (or more) people killed and the suffering that continues to this day. No mention was made of the genocide next door in Cambodia we triggered then ignored.

"It's just going to take a long period of time for the ideology that is hopeful -- and that is an ideology of freedom -- to overcome an ideology of hate," Bush said after having lunch at his lakeside hotel with Australian Prime Minister John Howard, whose country has been one of America's strongest allies in Iraq, Vietnam and other conflicts.

''We'll succeed,'' Bush added, ''unless we quit.''

This man has the mind of a child. It reminds me of when my first grade teacher proudly told the class that the U.S. had never lost a war. I guess no one ever told her about Vietnam (or Korea, for that matter). Or sufficiently explained to her the concept of “losing.” Whatever lessons Bush is drawing from Vietnam, I am not very confident that they will help us resolve the problems we now face in Iraq.

Vietnam became successful only after the invading powers, the U.S. and France, were expelled. I wonder if anyone has bothered explaining to Bush the concept of nationalism (it’s like patriotism, but for people in other countries) and how people don’t usually like having their homeland invaded by foreigners.

''For decades, you have been torn apart by war,'' Bush said, toasting his hosts. ''And today the Vietnamese people are at peace and seeing the benefits of reform.''

The president's welcome by the public was much less enthusiastic than the rock-star treatment afforded President Clinton when he came in 2000. Happy crowds thronged Clinton, who normalized relations with Vietnam.

But Bush encountered a country where many with long memories deeply disapprove of the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- even as they yearn for continued economic progress to stamp out still-rampant poverty.

With all traffic halted, many Hanoi residents gaped at his long motorcade from their motorbikes. Other clusters of onlookers gathered before storefronts, a few waving but most merely looking on impassively.

Huynh Tuyet, 71, a North Vietnamese veteran who had his hand blown off fighting the Americans, recalled his own lesson.

''Even though the Americans were more powerful with all their massive weapons, the main factor in war is the people,'' he said. ''The Vietnamese people were very determined. We would not give up. That's why we won.''

borat recap

I saw the Borat movie last weekend. I liked it, but was also fairly exhausting to watch. Having seen all the HBO Ali G shows on dvd, I had a good idea of what was coming, but I still felt violated by the end. It was the final scene with Pamela Anderson that did it. Reading what she says here made me feel much better about the whole experience. Running naked through a mortgage insurance convention brandishing a dildo is one thing, but assaulting someone unawares is something else entirely.

My fiancé and I were talking afterwards about how people would react when they saw the movie. I was kind of hoping for riots a la Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or The Rules of the Game in WWII-era France. But judging by the Brooklyn audience we were part of, I think many people won’t really know what it is they are watching. I certainly didn’t when I first saw the Ali G show in Britain several years ago. First of all, I could barely understand what he was saying. And it looked like a goofy British news talk show to me. The people on the show seemed to take it seriously, so I did at first as well.

Evidently, some people in our audience felt the same way about Borat. At one point in the movie, somewhere near the gay pride parade segment where Borat says “You mean the person that put plastic fist in my anus is homosexual?” someone in the audience yelled out “faggot!” I think Borat will have the last laugh on America if half the country watches and cheers him on unironically. He plays a 21st century Candide, a bumpkin traveling the world peeling up the corners of polite convention to reveal the often dystopic reality underneath. But you can read Candide as a straight story, too, as a colorful travelogue. And you can watch Borat for the slapstick and funny accent and completely miss the rest of it. I have to wonder how many people will watch the movie and not know he is not really from Kazakhstan …

There was also a 7 or 8 year old kid sitting next to us in the theater. During the naked hotel scene, my fiance overheard his dad, who was sitting nearby, say "I wouldn't have brought him if I'd known there was all this gay shit" in the movie. Never mind any number of other things in the movie that an 8 year old might be better off not seeing (just about all of it). But Borat could turn him gay so look out! Protect your children!

Dad, if you are reading this, I would think twice about watching the movie. I think you might feel kind of like Grandma felt when you took her to Shaun of the Dead. Although if the orthodox Jews or parents of young children in our audience didn’t walk out, I guess anyone can make it through to the end.

America we stand as one

I think this should be the theme song for the new era of bipartisan cooperation we are now apparently entering. Still great after all these months. It is how I will always remember the Bush years.

back in blue

Let me just say ... Yay Democrats! It is nice to see someone in power finally facing some of the consequences of their actions. The last 5 years in American politics have been an unmitigated disaster ... hopefully we are witnessing a first step towards rehabilitation.

Also, in case you are tempted to take seriously anything written by political reporter Adam Nagourney in the NY Times ever again, this not-so-prescient article should put that idea to rest. When Karl Rove confidently predicts victory for his party in 2002 and 2004, it's good politics. When Democrats do it in 2006, it's hubris. What a joker.

amnistia!

Matt Yglesias is skeptical that the Democrats will do as well next month as everyone is predicting, and mentions immigration concerns as a data point. I think he's right--with the elections coming up shortly, Democrats would do well not to forget about immigration. Or rather, they’d better hope the electorate does forget about it and is distracted by other issues. Which is hard when Bush is pushing the issue back into the headlines by signing the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which mandates that a 700-mile fence be built along vulnerable sections of the Mexican border.

The result was the Secure Fence Act of 2006. It cleared Congress on Sept. 29, but Bush's signature was delayed by four weeks to provide Republicans with something fresh to campaign on leading up to the Nov. 7 congressional elections.

Will the immigration issue, which is a net positive in the near term for Republicans, counteract in the minds of voters negative perceptions of the war and general Republican sleaze? Just because the press isn’t covering immigration every day doesn’t mean it’s not still one of the top two or three concerns among middle class voters.

It’s the flip side of the economic issue that Democrats assume favors them. Stagnant wages, ballooning health care costs, and shrinking pensions in the midst of a “booming” economy mean middle class voters feeling the squeeze are casting about for people to blame. Bush and the Republican Congress get a lot of that blame, but so do immigrants. Every time a Democrat talks about how the economy is leaving middle class people behind, many people think “Yeah, if only those *@$& illegals weren’t stealing all our jobs.”

Luckily for Democrats, Bush appears not to have gotten the memo from Rush and Hannity on this point.

"We must reduce pressure on our border by creating a temporary worker plan," Bush said at a signing ceremony attended by Republican congressional leaders and the heads of some government immigration agencies. "Willing workers ought to be matched with willing employers to do jobs Americans are not doing."

. . .

"We must face the reality that millions of illegal immigrants are already here," the president added. "They should not be given an automatic path to citizenship. That is amnesty. I oppose amnesty.

"There is a rational middle ground between granting an automatic path to citizenship for every illegal immigrant and a program of mass deportation, and I look forward to working with Congress to find that middle ground."

Unfortunately for the president, this is not an era of middle ground. By signing the fence bill now, Bush is convincing (non-Cuban) Latinos and other immigrant-sympathetic communities nationwide not to vote for their local Republican candidates—if there was any chance of that by now anyway. Republicans have to hope that conservative voters hear about the fence going up but don’t hear Bush saying “temporary worker plan blah blah blah rational middle ground” because their talk radio overlords have convinced them that this is code for “I love me some Amnesty!”

call on me

If you have a Hummer, keep a close eye on it. Otherwise, this could happen. And no one wants that.

From www.ihumpedyourhummer.com

the news cycle

Now this from Reuters is just silly.

American University communications professor Jane Hall said that access [to conservative talk radio] appeals to politicians frustrated by a traditional news cycle they have little control over.

``It's a way to go around the filter, go directly to people who might be more inclined to agree. It's a friendlier audience,'' Hall said.

It's not entirely clear whether she actually said conservative politicians have little control over the news cycle or if this is what the reporter thinks she said. If the representation is accurate, is Hall suggesting that the political party that controls all three branches of government has no power over (1) what gets covered in the news (e.g. legislation, government initiatives, official announcements and press conferences) or (2) when it gets covered? The Bush/Rove White House has made manipulation of the news cycle an art. That is why we’ve had a different “plan” to win in Iraq every other week, with little discussion in the press about all those that came before; why David Kuo said on PBS last night that the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives managed to make lots of grand announcements while delivering very little; why we have new federal legislation every election year to ban gay marriage.

Conservative talk radio is a way for movement conservatives to send their message directly to the ears of conservatives unmediated by any opposing points of view, any attempt at balance, or any process of fact-checking or editing whatsoever. This is fine as far as it goes—talk radio serves the purpose for the right that the Shrillosphere is beginning to serve for the left. But it doesn’t make the stuff you hear on talk radio true or the dialogue any less distorted. In other words, it is the last refuge of many Republicans in office now.

And this whole victim schtick by the party in power is getting just a bit old.

Update: Wow, that was quick:

President Bush said today that he was “not satisfied” with the situation in Iraq and that the United States was shifting its tactics by working on a timetable with the Iraqi government that includes political measures to stem some of the violence. But he also emphasized that the plan was different from an “artificial” timetable under which American troops would be withdrawn.

Is this a new "new plan" or the same one from yesterday? I can't keep them straight anymore.

Worst Person in America

Sean Hannity is putting in quite a bid. (via Atrios)

Although he inadvertently helped out the Democrats yesterday by giving Rumsfeld, who obviously hadn’t been prepped on the new party line, enough rope to hang himself on Iraq. (from Atrios again)

Matt Yglesias is down on Obama

There's perhaps no holder of comparable office who's had less experience tangling with the Republican Party than Barak Obama. This worries me.

Who had more experience tangling with the Republicans after umpteen years fighting it out on the Senate floor than Kerry and Gore? All that experience didn’t seem to help them much when it came right down to it. How about JFK or Clinton—they seemed to do pretty well with relatively little experience.

Obama is my top pick for 2008—next Feingold then Gore then Clark then Dean (who won’t run). The rest should stay the hell out of the race—especially Clinton and Kerry, since they could potentially do the most damage to the Democrats' chances.

We need politicians who do what they believe is right without sticking a finger to the wind every ten seconds. This is a little Colbertesque, but my gut tells me Obama is the one. And I don’t really know why people I respect in the leftosphere are dissing him right now. I know he’s been appealing to the center like crazy, he got owned by McCain earlier this year in a minor kerfluffle, and he has talked about how Democrats should reach out more to people of faith. To me this means he is a smart politician.

I’m having visions of how he could lay waste to the competition in a general election—except for McCain. For all their hangups about McCain, I think the Republicans will be smart enough to know he is their only chance in 2008. And I think Gore and Obama are the only two who could—either of them—beat him. Better if they ran together.

tortured by both sides

From the AP in the Seattle PI:

Abdul Rahim insists he's an apolitical student who fled a strict father. But he's fallen into a black hole in the war on terror in which first the Taliban and then the United States imprisoned him as an enemy of the state.

Arrested by the Taliban in Afghanistan in January 2000, Rahim says al-Qaida leaders burned him with cigarettes, smashed his right hand, deprived him of sleep, nearly drowned him and hanged him from the ceiling until he "confessed" to spying for the United States.

U.S. forces took the young Kurd from Syria into custody in January 2002 after the Taliban fled his prison. Accusing him of being an al-Qaida terrorist, U.S. interrogators deprived him of sleep, threatened him with police dogs and kept him in stress positions for hours, he says. He's been held ever since as an enemy combatant.

The government says this:

"Multiple reviews have been conducted since each detained enemy fighter was captured, including for these three individuals," said a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon. "There is a significant amount of evidence, both unclassified and classified, which supports continued detention of these detainees and others at Guantanamo."

Bullshit.

The whole point of our criminal justice system that distinguishes it from that of, say, Iran, is that a jury and judge get to evaluate the claims of the government to see whether they are full of shit. Enemy combatants have few of those guarantees. Hence the government can make whatever empty assertions it feels will help its p.r. effort in the GWOT and face absolutely no consequences. Unless the courts strike down the recent torture bill, detainees now have no habeas corpus rights—they can’t appeal the legality of their detention. Their cases supposedly will be tried by military tribunals (although few—any?—have been tried after 5 years) where they will not have full access to the evidence being used against them.

I am open to the possibility that the government is right and that Rahim is lying about his time in Afghanistan. But that is the whole point--we don't really know if he's guilty or innocent until he gets a fair trial.

Due process exists for a simple reason: to prevent errors in the process of determining guilt or innocence. When you gut those procedures, it makes sense that you would drastically decrease your chances of being right on that important question.

And surprise—the government has been wrong in many cases we know about already. Like the Uyghurs who were flown to Albania three days before their hearing so the government wouldn’t have to admit they were innocent after being locked up and mistreated for four years.

If the government says anything at all on the issue of Guantanamo detainees, you are better off assuming that the opposite is true.

Rahim on his experience over the past several years: ''Nothing changed in my life. I was taken from prison to prison.''

Romney: it wasn't me

I haven’t been following the Romney/LDS Church story that closely since it broke at the end of last week, but it still seems to be chugging along nicely in Boston and Utah.

The key claim by the Boston Globe was this:

Holland, a former BYU president, suggested using the alumni organization of the university's business school, the BYU Management Society, to build a network for Romney [to campaign for the 2008 Presidential election], according to the documents.

The immediate problem for the Church is this:

Both the church and BYU, as tax-exempt, nonprofit organizations, are prohibited by federal law from advocating on behalf of a particular candidate or political party.

According to the Deseret News, the Church says the Globe got it wrong: [The Deseret News, as always, doesn’t disclose in its story about the Church that it is owned by the Church. Minor conflict of interest, one might think. Although it would get tiresome since half the stories they report on involve the Church in some respect.]

[A]ccording to the transcript provided by [LDS Church spokesman] Otterson, Elder Holland did not advise Romney's people to use the BYU Management Society.

"He told them what they already knew — that neither the Church, nor BYU, nor any other direct arm of the Church would or could ever sponsor or publicly support a political candidate, and that our position of institutional neutrality was well-known and of long standing," according to the transcript.

Either the Globe or the Church is wrong. It seems odd that Holland would meet with Romney’s supporters only to advise them that the Church could not help them. I didn’t see a retraction or “clarification” from either party in today’s follow-up story in the Globe.

The question Romney must be worried about right now is how will reports of official outreach on his behalf by the LDS Church affect his chances of becoming the Republican nominee for President in 2008? The only groups Americans think are less likely to be elected President than Mormons are atheists and gays and lesbians. As much as Romney needs financial backing and campaign support from Church members as he eyes the upcoming campaign, he will be wanting to play down any official ties with the Church to avoid alienating evangelicals, many of whom deeply distrust the LDS Church.

Now I see in today's Globe article that Romney’s supporters are actually using this argument explicitly to show that they wouldn’t have been courting the Church on Romney’s behalf because that would upset evangelicals. With friends like these . . .

I am inclined to believe that Romney is smarter than to pull something like this. I guess it might be like when those supporters of Chris Cannon (R-UT) a few years back got overzealous and put up some inflammatory posters around Provo without his approval, causing him more damage than if they’d just stayed home. At any rate, the problem this is posing for Romney's nascent campaign shows how volatile an issue his religion will be in the next couple of years.

miss clare

There was an article Sunday in the NY Times about crazy neighbors and landlords in NYC. One of the stories featured was about Miss Clare, my old landlady.

People are more likely to vote with their feet when the solution begins to seem more bothersome than the problem, especially when the problem is the landlord.

Pam Fica learned this the hard way during a two-year tenancy in a town house near Washington Square in Greenwich Village.

Ms. Fica, now 29 and an agent at DJK Residential, thought she had found the perfect share in September 2004: $840 per month for a room in a sprawling four-bedroom apartment at the top of a five-story town house owned by a woman who lived downstairs — and ran the establishment more like a halfway house.

“She had a whiteboard in her apartment where she would write our names and try to jot down our comings and goings,” Ms. Fica said. The landlady, who had lived in the building since the 1940’s, also interrogated nonwhite visitors and disapproved of long-haired tenants, who might clog the plumbing, she said. (Ms. Fica wore her hair up during her initial interview with the landlady and passed inspection by accident.)

Then, there were the mandatory “team meetings” organized every few weeks in the younger women’s living room. The object was to “tear apart every problem, but she would focus on things like dirty dishes in the sink, that we had too many plants and too much furniture, causing damage to the ceiling below our apartment. And whenever we would bring up any problems with the lack of heat”—at times the temperature dropped to 50 degrees in the winter —“or the freezer, she would say, ‘That’s not my problem.’ Anytime you would challenge her on something, she would say, ‘I’m not going to renew your lease.’ ”

Ms. Fica said she shivered it out for two years because of the prime location, good roommates, cheap rent and her own low-maintenance personality.

“I think I lost sight of what normal was,” she said. “My friends started really getting concerned. ‘You don’t even realize how unusual this is,’ they said. ‘You’re being abused.’ The more I thought about it, the more I realized they had a point.”

Finally, she listened to her friends and moved to a two-bedroom share in Harlem a month ago.

(When Ms. Fica left, she and her roommates were responsible for bringing a new candidate/victim for their landlady to vet. Their advertisement on Craigslist asked, “What is your tolerance for a crazy landlady: high, medium or low?” With affordable New York City rentals an endangered species, the ad received hundreds of responses.)

I’m sure it did.

I lived on the fourth floor for a year and a half with three roommates, a year of which was during the period described in the article. I remember I was watching TV one night in the living room while a party was going on upstairs on the fifth floor. Evidently there were too many people in the room above because the ceiling started to cave in. The next morning there was a big chunk of plaster on the floor and on bits of it on top of the TV.

The ceiling in our bathroom also started to fall at one point. We’d go days with no hot water, during which time I would shower at the NYU gym if I didn't feel like an icy blast. I was the only one of my roommates who attempted to use the oven periodically. It was at least 50 years old and I always worried it would explode. Miss Clare discouraged guests because she thought they’d make the utility bills go up. Any visitors who spent the night at the apartment did so in a state of fear that they’d run into Miss Clare on the way in or out—that never turned out well.

One time, the ceiling below my roommate’s bedroom fell into the room below. One might sensibly attribute this to the fact that the building hadn’t been renovated since Eisenhower was in office. Miss Clare said it was because my roommate had too much furniture in his room.

Did I mention she was nuts? She used to live with a sister who died some years ago. I was told Miss Clare was the kinder and gentler of the two.

I always got along well with her, though. Underneath the paranoia, she was just an anxious, lonely woman determined not to be taken advantage of. I think she liked me partly because of my Mormon background. (The second and fourth floors were all LDS while I was there.) She would often make comments about how Mormons were clean, quiet, and good tenants. I quickly realized the futility of trying to explain that I wasn’t particularly religious anymore. Once a Mormon, always a Mormon, in her eyes.

I used to speculate that she so obtrusively latched onto the lives of her tenants because that was all she really had. At the very least, 116 Waverly will always be good for some interesting stories.

political jeopardy

Here’s the deal: invading Iraq was a mistake. There are few outside of the Bush administration who will publicly assert that this is not the case.

But the problem is that, back when it mattered, before the war, virtually no one in any position to do anything about it spoke out against the war. My letters (and those of many others) to Senators Clinton and Schumer in October 2002 asking them to oppose the authorization of force were ignored, as were the 500,000 people I marched with against the war in February 2003 in New York City. These were not crazy people on the fringes of society with nothing better to do. These were professionals, families, students, veterans—most of them New Yorkers who had lived through the horror of 9/11. But even if pundits or politicians thought going to war was a bad idea then, most were too frightened to say so. Or they actually believed the bullshit coming out of the White House. Any politician who had had the guts and foresight to stand up against the president then might have lost his job in 2002 or 2004. But he or she would be happy as a pig in shit right now.

Our soldiers and all Iraqis are paying now for the cowardice of our leaders in 2002-2003. But the problem our politicians are most concerned about now is not how to prevent something like this from happening again, or examining how things went so badly wrong, but how best to evade the anger of voters for leading them astray.

Mark Leibovich catalogues the myriad ways in which politicians are trying to weenie out of the consequences of their actions:

“You can all second-guess and Monday morning quarterback,” Mr. Allen said in a debate in July against his Democratic opponent, Jim Webb.

“We made decisions,” Mr. Allen added on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “You can’t say, ‘Gosh,’ five years later.”

But of course, Mr. Webb is saying a lot of “Gosh.”

“And this is what my opponent’s campaign’s about,” Mr. Allen said, “is the second-guessing.”

. . .

“Look, Chris Dodd, Joe Lieberman and I voted to go to war,” Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, told The Hartford Courant. “I consulted with a lot of people, including Bill Clinton.”

. . .

Democrats who supported the Iraq resolution in 2002 are often quick to point out that they didn’t actually vote for the war. Rather, they only voted to give the president the option to go to war, and they never expected him to rush to war as he did.

“In retrospect, it’s clear to me they had no intention of doing anything other than going to war in Iraq,” said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, told The Manchester Union Leader.

. . .

“We know now that they had no plan for winning the peace,” said Harry Reid, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, in a news conference. “But we didn’t know it at the time.”

Pathetic.

What are we doing in Iraq now anyway? This video (via Jesus’ General) from a reporter for the Guardian indicates that, on an operational level, Iraqi and U.S. forces are often not getting along too well.

news of the weird, circa 1945

In Fruita, Colorado, they still celebrate Mike the Wonder Chicken, who lived a full 18 months after his head was chopped off.

The Amazing, true story of this famous fowl dates back to September 10, 1945 when Mike, a young Wyandotte rooster, was about to become the dinner of Fruita, Colorado, farmer Lloyd Olsen.

With a sharp ax in hand, Mr. Olsen firmly held Mike, preparing to make the bird ready for his wife Clara's cooking pot. Mr. Olsen swung the implement, thereby lopping off poor Mike's head. Mike shook off the event, then continued trying to peck for food.

Impressive and disturbing.

Nintendo blogging

For my legion readers out there, blogging has been light lately because, well, I acquired an original Nintendo Entertainment System awhile back and I’ve been busy beating Metroid and Punch Out.

When I was a kid, Metroid for me evoked a surreal alien world devoid of any trace of humanity, where fantastic creatures try to kill you in strange and disturbing ways. Even the character you play, with its feline motions and curved back, seems inhuman. The game was fascinating and addictive. The influence of Ridley Scott’s Alien on the game is evident (to me, at least) from the second boss, “Ridley”, which looks kind of like the titular character from the movie.

The game’s pull on me was strong enough almost 20 years after I first played it to keep me occupied several evenings this past week. I finally broke down and checked the internet for maps and hints to beat the game.


Bonus tip: Did you know that if you beat Metroid in under an hour, Samus not only pulls off her helmet but all her clothes except for a bikini?

Now that is nerdy in the extreme.