Blogito, Ergo Sum - 1 May 2009

Hooray, hooray, the first of May, outdoor... Well, you either know the rest of that one or you don’t. Good for you, either way. Today is a holiday in Costa Rica, our equivalent of Labor Day in the U.S. I don’t know, I guess this is because we’re sort of a semi-socialistic country still. I suppose the system could be better, and also worse. I can live with it. In any event, it’s like Sunday morning here with my dogs being among the worst offenders, barking at the loose dogs free to wander the streets

Interesting news on Souter’s impending retirement, huh? Shows what you can tell about an appointment in advance, since GHWBush nominated him—not that GHWB was ever our best president, anyhow—and I don’t think he can be replaced by anyone significantly worse, knock wood. And I still think he should lose his home to a shopping center development.

It will be interesting to see how Chrysler turns out, too. Obama says the government will get all of its money back before Fiat is allowed to continue its par of the buy-out and if that turns out to be true then the idea is not without merit. I’m not as rigidly against temporary government intervention as some are.

Charles Krauthammer sticks his neck out and says there are two exceptions to the no-torture rule:

I’m in agreement (he goes into more detail in his column) but even more so with this line!

Even John McCain, the most admirable and estimable torture opponent, says openly that in such circumstances, "You do what you have to do." And then take the responsibility. ... Under those circumstances, you do what you have to do. And that includes waterboarding. (To call some of the other "enhanced interrogation" techniques -- face slap, sleep interruption, a caterpillar in a small space -- torture is to empty the word of any meaning.)

I’ve tried to make two points in my own writing, one being that until we actually write torture laws which are as detailed and distinct as our laws describing rape, for instance, or the various degrees and levels of murder, manslaughter and negligent homicide, say, then we’ll never be able to arrive at any meaningful agreement on what constitutes torture.

And my second has been Krauthammer’s: in order for the word to have meaning you cannot trivialize it. Your argument simply lacks stature and merit for those of us who have had that much, and worse, done to us in fraternity initiations and Marine Corps boot camp. I strongly suspect that most complaining about torture have experienced neither. Torture needs to be at least worse than the things I voluntarily encountered as a free citizen of the United States. I could have told either the fraternity or the Marine Corps that they could keep their memberships, I didn’t like the way they were treating me and I wasn’t taking any more of it, but I didn’t.

For those who want to argue that the terrorists aren’t free citizens, you’re missing the point or else trying to divert attention from it. If I had told the Marine Corps I no longer wanted to be a member then they would have released me. I might not have benefited from some of the conditions under which they released me, but they would have. And the same with the fraternity, although I might not have enjoyed my future social status on campus as a result. But the terrorist has the same option: all he has to do is talk openly and completely. To be sure, he may have other goals which resist taking that path...just as I chose to continue to endure in order to gain full membership in those two societies afterward.

So I say that just as face slaps and sleep interruption and caterpillars do not meet any of the careful definitions of rape or the various categories of murder, neither do they fit any careful definition of torture.

It depends on who is writing the definitions, doesn’t it? In the case of torture, I think it should be people like McCain, who know what they are talking about from real-life experience, and not from people like one of my favorite phony jerks of all time, the guy who got three purple hearts in record time without a scar to show for any of them. Kerry diminished the stature of the purple heart as much as Algore and Arafat diminished the status of the Nobel Prize for Peace.

...the morality of torture hinges on whether at the time the information was important enough, the danger great enough and our blindness about the enemy's plans severe enough to justify an exception to the moral injunction against torture.

Judging by Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress who were informed at the time, the answer seems to be yes. In December 2007, after a report in The Post that she had knowledge of these procedures and did not object, she admitted that she'd been "briefed on interrogation techniques the administration was considering using in the future."

Today Pelosi protests "we were not -- I repeat -- were not told that waterboarding or any other of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used." She imagines that this distinction between past and present, Clintonian in its parsing, is exonerating.

On the contrary. It is self-indicting. If you are told about torture that has already occurred, you might justify silence on the grounds that what's done is done and you are simply being used in a post-facto exercise to cover the CIA's rear end. The time to protest torture, if you really are as outraged as you now pretend to be, is when the CIA tells you what it is planning to do "in the future."

But Pelosi did nothing. No protest. No move to cut off funding. No letter to the president or the CIA chief or anyone else saying "Don't do it."

On the contrary, notes Porter Goss, then chairman of the House intelligence committee: The members briefed on these techniques did not just refrain from objecting, "on a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda."

More support, mind you. Which makes the current spectacle of self-righteous condemnation not just cowardly but hollow. It is one thing to have disagreed at the time and said so. It is utterly contemptible, however, to have been silent then and to rise now "on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009" (the words are Blair's) to excoriate those who kept us safe these harrowing last eight years.

I’ve never been able to figure out why some people think their lame excuses make sense, such as this one like Pelosi’s. Or Hillary’s, justifying her Iraq war vote after she changed her mind for political purposes by explaining that she didn’t read the intelligence report before she voted. That’s an excuse? Or those who spent the months during the excruciatingly long build-up to the invasion of Iraq by repeatedly, month after month, describing it as a ‘rush’ and later claiming they were fooled not by a cunning genius but by a moron who might even have been an idiot!

I’ve been fooled in my life, but I sure don’t think any of it was done by morons or worse. Not when even some bright guys like Algore haven’t been able to pull it off.

I’m not sure there will be any kind of show trial unless Pelosi finds a way to keep herself off of the stand being interrogated by a prosecutor with questions like Krauthammer’s would be of her. If you knew these were future plans then your responsibility to prevent them was clear, if you felt they really needed to be prevented.

I’m fairly certain that Pelosi would claim that they didn’t tell her the details, just said things like “water boarding”...and presto, there you are back to my point again. If you don’t write down the details for all to see, how can you decide?

And clearly, with the ruins of the Twin Towers still smoking, few people charged with the responsibility for preventing more attacks felt like those things were even torture at that time.

And the world seems to be full of Monday Morning Quarterbacks, doesn’t it? I can’t see how that guy could possibly have thrown that stupid pass to that clown at a time when it could be intercepted with such disastrous results. I’d have gone 50-for-50 passing in every game and marveled at how easy it was.

Why should it be probable? Why wouldn’t we expect the oh-so-pragmatic Obama to select someone who was so middle of the road that he couldn’t be fairly described as either liberal or conservative by anyone? What’s that? He can’t stand the heat from MoveOn? Oh.

And then we have Joe Biden on the "Today" show. The vice president is sent out to deliver the administration's message on swine flu, which is absorbing 23-1/2 hours a day on cable news and is the lead every night for Brian, Charlie and Katie. And he proceeds to insert all five toes into his mouth.

VPOTUS says he would tell his family not to go anywhere in a confined space: "If you're in a confined aircraft when one person sneezes it goes all the way through the aircraft. That's me. I would not be, at this point, if they had another way of transportation, suggesting they ride the subway."

Yikes! Matt Lauer, in a rare fumble, fails to follow up. But the clip replays all morning, the travel industry goes nuts and the White House rushes out a statement backing off the Biden advice.

How can you call Lauer’s deliberate sidestep a rare fumble? Matt didn’t know how or even want to touch that one! Even the White House was having it’s troubles:

ABC's Jake Tapper presses Robert Gibbs: "Representatives of the travel industry have accused the vice president of coming close to fear-mongering because of these comments. I'm wondering if you wanted to clarify or correct or apologize for the remarks that he made."

"Well, I think the--what the vice president meant to say...” ...

I happen to like unscripted politicians. I've known Biden a long time and he is a very engaging guy. But he has a remarkable tendency to go off script. (Remember him saying that Obama was a "clean" and "articulate" candidate, and later, that his running mate would be "tested" by an international crisis?) When the media are hyperventilating over a new disease, it's not the best time to start freelancing.

Will the White House keep Biden off television for fear he will start more brushfires? And will the media start depicting him as a gaffe machine?

Actually, I think what the vice president meant to say was exactly what he did say: the honest truth. But the honest truth is no more welcome in Washington than it ever has been, maybe more so now because of the very carefully crafted image which was been created for Obama. For all I know it might even be a mostly fair image, but the deliberate craftsmanship is unmistakable and bare-bones truths are definitely not part of the image. He’s not presented the way that Cromwell directed his painter to portray him.

I’m not very fond of Biden, but I do think that he speaks his mind honestly enough. And isn’t it a bit unfair to call it a gaffe when what it is really is only an unpalatable truth?

Maybe not fair, but most of the moron (perhaps even an idiot) comments are like that, even when they are funny.

Actually, he might even be a good enough counselor, for all I actually know, but he shouldn’t be allowed to go public with his notions any more than one should shout “fire” in a crowded theater.

Roger Simon explores one of the president's secrets:

"In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that was taken April 23-26, an incredible 81 percent of adults in America said they liked Obama personally. According to the poll, '51 percent like him personally and approve of most of his policies, and another 30 percent like him personally but disapprove of his policies.'

"Got that? Nearly a third of those people who disapprove of what Obama is doing still like Obama! I wish I could get that deal. Everybody wishes they could get that deal."

I’m in the 30%. I suspect he’d make for a really enjoyable conversation on many subjects. Actually, Bill Clinton was/is probably much the same way when it came to himself, personally. Without wanting to reveal too much about my own self let’s just say that I’m not really qualified to condemn outright Bill’s personal behavior. The Oval Office was hugely inappropriate, of course, which is what caused a lot of the outrage since his extramarital behavior had been widely known about ever since Arkansas and probably before and nobody really cared all that much, and some of those who professed that they did were hypocrites quite a lot like Elliot Spitzer and John Edwards and Martin Luther King Jr before their own falls. The French, I heard, wondered what all the fuss was about.

There’s a big difference between liking someone and not liking their policies, although some people seem to want to relate them directly.

There was, however, a missing question, as the Weekly Standard's Mary Katherine Ham reminds us:

"The president declined to take his $21.5 million worth of prime-time TV coverage to say, 'Hey, sorry for using Air Force One to re-create 9/11. Mix-up at the office.' No reporter in the room availed himself of the opportunity to ask Obama about the $329,000 terror attack run-through, surely figuring that it was totally worth it for the 'investment' in lowering future health care costs by making New Yorkers sprint through the streets in gut-wrenching panic."

And this comment was from Daily Beast's Reihan Salam shows how the Liberal mind works:

"The political right, lest we forget, is convinced that Obama's aggressive intervention in the economy reflects a statist--some would say socialist--mind-set. Yet I got the impression that no one at the press conference took that idea seriously, and not just because of Obama's sardonic wit. There is a real and growing sense that Obama is a post-ideological figure, which is another way of saying that he is successfully moving the American center to the left . . .”

He sees no chance at all that no one at the press conference took that idea seriously for the very good reason that no people like that were invited in the first place? No, he does not. When you are preaching to your choir you seldom find rebuke.

You've probably seen video of CNN's T.J. Holmes declaring that Barack Obama "just has a bit of a swagger that is familiar to black men." That gets the ridicule treatment from National Review's Mark Hemingway:

"Evidence of 'swagga' offered by the panel included: Obama being corrected by his wife during an interview and accepting it graciously; and, Obama hugging people.

"My other favorite bit -- CNN anchor Kyra Phillips teased the segment by saying, 'If you look closely, you might notice the commander in chief has more swagger than Mick Jagger . . . ' That's some fine journalism, right there . . .

"UPDATE -- A reader asks, 'Wasn't it just yesterday that a swaggering president was a bad thing?' The answer to that is clearly yes."

Yes, well, that was Texas swagger. An entirely different strain.

No comments on the “black men” part? It’s a good thing some conservative on Fox didn’t say it.

Carol and I were married by one of the judges we knew well in Amador County, California. Considering the separation of church and state which does actually exist (“Congress shall make no law”) how can that be anything other than a civil union?

And, in fact, aren’t there a large number of marriages performed by justices of the peace and other civil officials authorized to do so, and aren’t those also civil unions?

And since Congress can make no laws respecting churches, how can the government control the rights of a church to decide to marry gay couples if it wishes to do so?

"I won't be happy if I don't get to chair something because of Arlen Specter," said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), who sits on the Appropriations Committee with Specter and is fifth in seniority among Democrats behind Chairman Daniel Inouye (Hawaii), Sens. Robert Byrd (W.Va.), Patrick Leahy (Vt.) and Tom Harkin (Iowa). "I'm happy with the Democratic order but I don't want to be displaced because of Arlen Specter," she said.

One senior Democratic lawmaker told The Hill that the Democratic Conference will vote against giving the longtime Pennsylvania Republican seniority over lawmakers like Harkin, Mikulski and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) when they hold their organizational meeting after the 2010 election.

Specter was elected in 1980, and under his deal with Reid would jump ahead of all but a few Democrats when it comes time to dole out committee chairmanships and assignments.

“That’s his deal and not the caucus’s,” the senior lawmaker said of Reid’s agreement with Specter...

Several Democrats believe they did Specter a favor by allowing him to join their caucus and give him a chance to run as a Democrat in 2010.

“He was a cooked goose,” said the senior Democrat. “He was going to lose to [former Rep. Pat] Toomey [R-Pa.] and we were going to beat Toomey. We did him a favor by allowing him to remain in the Senate.”

Less than 24 hours after Specter announced his party switch, Democrats have already begun to grumble loudly, exchanging phone calls to complain about Reid’s gambit, said one participant.

Wars are messy, and in just 100 days Obama is already responsible for the deaths of more than a few civilians resulting from the targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish magistrate who launched an investigation of six Bush administration officials, has also begun investigating Israeli officials for just such targeted assassinations as part of the Gaza campaign. Garzón at least seems to believe that all state-sanctioned violence is criminal. Obama would have us believe it's only criminal when Bush sanctions it.

Obama very likely knows there will be some country, somewhere, which will want to similarly prosecute him. Iran, maybe.

Only two weeks ago, when he was still running for reelection as a Republican, Specter said that keeping him in the Senate was the only hope of blocking the Dem agenda, adding that if he lost a GOP primary, his seat would go to a Democrat, giving Dems “anything they want.”

Specter made the comments on Morning Joe on April 7th. He said that if his challenger from the right, Club for Growth President Pat Toomey, beat him in a Republican primary, Toomey would almost surely lose to a Democrat in the general election, adding another Dem Senator.

“Look here, our country is built on checks and balances,” Specter said, according to Nexis. “The only check and balance in America today are the 41 Republican Senators who can talk and filibuster. Otherwise, the White House, the House of Representatives [will] be a streamroller.”

“If there’s a Democrat in my place, then they’ll have anything they want,” Specter continued, speaking of the Dems. “It will be a bulldozer.”

Which raises the question once again: Would it have been a better deal for Dems long term if Specter had stayed a Republican, lost the primary, and an actual Democrat had been installed in his place?

Eight years ago, Jeffords' decision cost Specter his chairmanship of the Veterans Affairs Committee.

It comes at about the 5:50 mark. Cliff May asks Stewart whether Truman's use of the atomic bomb was a war crime, Stewart ruminates and then responds with an unequivocal "yes." He's certainly not the only American who would take that view, but it's a useful reminder that the most vocal and popular criticism of the Bush administration's war on terror policies comes from people who, if they were being as honest as Stewart, would also judge Lincoln (suspension of habeas), FDR (internment), and Truman (use of nuclear weapons) as war criminals or tyrants or worse.

Stewart repeats the charge again later in the interview, but you have to wonder whether this was one of the rare times that he just got outmaneuvered on his own show. Serious people have debated Truman's decision for 60 years, but even those who disagree with that decision rarely describe it as "criminal." And if it was criminal, whatever crimes the left alleges of President Bush seem pretty trivial in comparison.

So much seems to revolve around intent, and determining intent seems to be strongly associated with whether your side won or lost. If Japan had won would Truman be a war criminal? Yes. How about Lincoln if the south had won? You see?