http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Thu, 26 Jan 2006 20:48:13 EST http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/01/26/204813.php Douglas Anthony CooperAlito is a menace. Friends, this is no time to invoke the Powell Doctrine. Sometimes you have to enter a battle without overwhelming force and without the assurance of victory - that's what's known as "courage." Conservatives are salivating for a reason - Samuel Alito's succession to the court would render the Bush era permanent. Even those who have quietly abandoned their feckless leader are thrilled that what he stands for will live on in the person of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. It's hard to align yourself with, much less love, a party that hasn't the guts or the sense to fight the one necessary battle. I hope this doesn't describe the Democrats, whom I otherwise think very highly of. If I am to believe the mainstream media, however, the most courageous statement we've yet to hear from a Democratic senator is something along the lines of: "Well, yes, in a remote corner of my mind I'm thinking that I might possibly entertain a tiny little filibuster notion, kind of, except that it would be silly, really, and after all nobody wants to, and that's a good thing, and anyway I'm busy."This battle is everything. If you believe in a tripartite government, in checks and balances... in short: if you are committed to the founders' wise provisions against an emerging tyranny, then you simply cannot permit this man to sit on the highest court in the land. The New York Times, bless them, has finally acknowledged this. In a negative fashion, and with great subtlety, so has Harvard's wily Straussian, Harvey Mansfield: read this article to understand some of the thinking behind the administration's hubris. Mansfield, a theorist suspicious of democracy, has nicely reinterpreted the Framers' intent to justify a Hobbesian supreme executive. And many of the thinking members of this administration (yes, they quietly exist), were influenced by Mansfield's mentor, the closet Nietzschean, Leo Strauss.Mansfield and his school of thought deprecate liberal democracy as inherently weak and potentially self-destructive: in times of war, you want a proud leader who will circumvent the vulgar rule of law in order to act decisively, with cruel Machiavellian virtu. You want a president who is not squeamish about torturing captives, denying habeas corpus, quietly ignoring the quaint fetters placed upon the executive by the masses (read: Congress).The Straussians, if you're not familiar with them, stress the necessity of esoteric writing: read this article carefully, with an eye to the hidden "dark teaching." Andrew Sullivan, who studied with Mansfield, nails the pivotal assertion (without fully taking Mansfield to task for his pernicious intent). With this ill-defined War on Terror, the state of war is now permanent, meaning that the Executive's unrestricted power to act efficiently is now -- if you believe this perverse reading of the Framers -- a permanent fact. In short, the United States has become a benevolent tyranny.(For a nice refutation of this reading -- one that concentrates upon Madison's profound fear of arbitrary powers in a time of war -- read John Nichols' superb article Samuel Alito v. James Madison.)Alito's confirmation is an absolutely crucial step in the completion of this new regime. (And a new regime it is; we will have passed out of an era of pure liberal democracy, into something which looks similar, but is in fact horribly different.) Mansfield does not address Alito specifically, but it is clear that the redefinition of the executive requires the Supreme Court to retreat behind a screen of quietism. As the New York Times points out, Samuel Alito's entire career points towards a strategy of castrating the judicial branch, in favor of a Brave New Presidency. In particular, the tactic of "signing statements" -- in which the president is encouraged to take acts of Congress as pleasant advice, rather than binding legal stricture -- is Alito's personal contribution to the decline of a free republic.I want to call myself a Democrat; I really do. Decency has long pooled almost exclusively in the center; the Republicans have become as vicious and unprincipled as the far left. The problem -- and Mansfield's thesis is unfortunately dead accurate here -- is that the vicious and unprincipled tend to be much more effective. I'm not calling for the abandonment of principle, of course; I'm insisting that principle be pursued, now, with ruthless conviction. Filibuster this dangerous man. Just do it. Even if you have become utterly infected by the weeping defeatists -- even if you buy the (by no means certain) inevitability of failure -- do not go gentle. Everything that we believe in depends upon this. And history demonstrates that many battles fought in this way -- in the teeth of almost certain failure, by virtue of the absurd -- prove our finest hours.(Where is the Outrage? Here is the Outrage: Dysblog) Politics42803@blogcritics.org Thu, 26 Jan 2006 20:48:13 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/12/04/183649.php Douglas Anthony CooperAt last we have details regarding "special rendition." This is important. If you are mistakenly kidnapped and tortured by the CIA, it's useful to know what to expect. The intrepid Dana Priest (WaPo's new star, now that Woodward has become Dubya's pet hack), has written yet another remarkable exposé of the Cheney/Bush reign of (t)error -- Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake. Don't read this simply because it's fascinating, and nauseating. Read it because it may come in handy:Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.Right. So, let's say you've just had a spat with your wife, and you take a spontaneous trip across the border to "blow off steam" -- oh, and you happen to have an ordinary Arabic name -- then this is a possible outcome. It is in fact what happened to Khaled Masri, an innocent German citizen.Let's try to picture this. You've taken a quick trip to clear your head, and suddenly you're surrounded by guys dressed like ninjas, who blindfold you, cut off your clothes, give you an enema, and put you in a diaper. Which is, okay, sort of humorous. Right? Until they take you to a cell and torture you."Masri said his cell in Afghanistan was cold, dirty and in a cellar, with no light and one dirty cover for warmth. The first night he said he was kicked and beaten and warned by an interrogator: 'You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know.'"Now, it's hard to argue, in this case, that the coverup is worse than the crime, but it sure competes. And the suggested coverup is nothing short of mind-boggling -- by comparison, enough to render credible any conspiracy theorist at his most paranoid. When the CIA recognized that they'd kidnapped and tortured the wrong man -- something they've done a fair bit of, recently -- it was crucial to figure out the PR ramifications. (Perhaps they consulted Rove.)At the CIA, the question was: Now what? Some officials wanted to go directly to the German government; others did not. Someone suggested a reverse rendition: Return Masri to Macedonia and release him. 'There wouldn't be a trace. No airplane tickets. Nothing. No one would believe him,' one former official said. 'There would be a bump in the press, but then it would be over.'Unbelievable. (Perhaps they consulted Ludlum?) Ah, but it didn't happen. Well, not quite. It's true that when Masri was released -- after five months in isolation -- they told him "that he would not receive any documents or papers confirming his ordeal. The Americans would never admit they had taken him prisoner." The compromise, however, is that the German interior minister was told about Masri's case. Of course, this polite tip came with a specific request: "that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public."I hope you're taking notes. This is what can happen to you, at the hands of the Bush administration (let's remember that this is policy): you can suddenly, for no reason, find yourself bound and stripped by masked men, drugged and imprisoned, held in isolation for an unspecified period of time -- during which you will be tortured -- then released with the suggestion that you keep this unfortunate business to yourself, because nobody's going to believe you if you try to complain.The problem is that this kind of story is no longer incredible. We do believe you. I can't imagine that anyone seriously questions whether Masri's tale is true -- in the Age of Cheney, this is how the United States is expected to act abroad. (Not at home. If the masked men pick you up here, you'll be shipped off to a "black site," perhaps in Romania, where they cannot hear you scream.)Remember when fatuous Republicans were constantly huffing, "where is the outrage?" I believe that the most fatuous of them all, the swinging gambler Bill Bennett, wrote an entire book with a title something like this. Well, I think it's time to revive that question. Where, for Christ's sake, is the outrage? (If this post struck you as inflammatory, head over to Dysblog for the unbounded inferno.) Politics40486@blogcritics.org Sun, 4 Dec 2005 18:36:49 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/11/25/234947.php Douglas Anthony CooperYesterday I stumbled upon an entirely new genre of literature. While searching for a Sonny Rollins disc on amazon.com, I happened upon the following customer review of Saxophone Colossus:Among the finest jazz works ever. Typically, I order mayonnaise as my condiment of choice on a sandwich. But after my cat's death, I can't seem to come to terms with mayonnaise anymore. Silly right? It's not like I blame mayo for my cat's death -- I think it has something to do with the opening of the jar. "Buttons" would always run into the kitchen if she heard me opening the mayo jar. But now, I open the jar and there's nothing. Just me and my empty apartment. My life didn't realy end up how I thought it would. I thought for sure Sonja would say yes when I asked her to marry me and I'd have a better job. But she looked so disappointed when I asked that I knew that she was going to choose Greg instead of me. He was already successful and had his own car. I was an aspiring writer, not much to bank on there. Now years later, I'm still aspiring, while she's driving a big Mercury SUV. Sonny Rollins rocks.Now, I was not entirely sure that this customer, Jake, hadn't perhaps had a small psychotic break in the midst of assessing Rollins for Amazon; nevertheless, I was impressed. I began to wonder about Jake. Has he finally published outside of amazon.com? Well, this I don't know, but what I do know is that he has published considerably more within amazon.com. When I clicked on "see all my reviews," I found that Jake had, as I say, created an entirely new genre of literary text: the tiny confessional narrative, hidden within the Amazon merchandise review. The following small masterpiece appears on the page devoted to Welding Metallurgy by Shinto Lu.But don't most of us already know the basics of metallurgy? It reminds me of the time I saw my brother smoking cigarettes behind the garage. He had stolen them from my mother and didn't really seem to be enjoying himself. But he smoked the whole pack. As he finished, I thought to myself, "what a loser." But the fact was I had sat there for 45 minutes watching him smoke all those cigarettes. So, I guess I was even a bigger loser. A moniker that stayed with me most of my teenage life. I didn't dislike school, I got to see a lot of pretty girls that would never have sat next to me anywhere else. I didn't get good grades, as I was addicted to after-school cartoons like Tom & Jerry. Even well into my teens. If I see them now, I watch them in totality looking for what appealed to me when I was younger. I can't find it.While Jake's Welding Metallurgy review is to be commended for having attached itself to such an inspired book, I do find that it represents a decline in structural nuance: Jake's Saxophone Colossus review returns, in the final sentence, to the actual merchandise at hand -- if nothing else, this is a more successful attempt at hiddenness, which is the essence of all esoteric writing. And the Jakean narrative is, most certainly, esoteric.Perhaps Jake's most successfully esoteric piece is the virtuosic Stiletto T114MC Titanium, Milled Face, Curved Handle Framing Hammer. Here Jake employs the circular structure so powerful in Saxophone Colossus, yet -- in a subtle twist -- makes the deviant narrative relate, tangentially, to the merchandise reviewed:Great hammer. Makes me yearn for the days when putting up drywall and drinking brew were a carpenter's obligation as much as his desire. Nowdays, you get these wannabe carpenters staying lucid and not double charging. Frankly, they've ruined the industry. I mean, I try to keep an open mind and all, but there comes a time in a man's life when he has to look in the mirror and take stock of himself. I don't judge a man by his choice of friends or what he does when he's not at work. But golly, if you're a carpenter, be one. Great hammer.For a moment, the reader believes that he or she may have just read an actual review of the Stiletto T114MC Titanium, Milled Face, Curved Handle Framing Hammer. (Which is $69.99, and ought therefore to be a pretty fine hammer indeed.)I must confess, however, that I found the actual sentiments expressed in Stiletto T114MC Titanium, Milled Face, Curved Handle Framing Hammer a touch less moving -- less deeply considered, in fact -- than those apparent in Jake's finer efforts. While it stands as a superb example of hiddenness, Stiletto T114MC Titanium, Milled Face, Curved Handle Framing Hammer remains a slight opus -- a triumph, finally, of mere technique. Compare it with the tender Massacre ~ 50 Cent, surely the most affecting piece in the Jakean ouvre:50-Cent is the grooviest. Early in my life I thought for sure I'd find someone who'd love me and I could love back. It hasn't worked out that way. I've had a spell of bad luck that seems to have lasted for years. I hate my boss and I have thoughts about quitting, but fear grips me and I can't do it. My gosh, what a failure I am. Working 35 hours a week, going home to an empty apartment, no friends. Heavy debt. My only outlets for creative expression are my synthesizer and watching late-night TV. Though I always wake up in a bad mood 'cause I stay up watching 1980s sitcoms that I didn't even like the first time I saw them. 50-Cent is the real deal.It is impossible to overstate the importance of this body of work. Jake (who goes by the name "Jake," mystery augmented by quotation marks) has issued in a new era -- not simply in genre, but in means of publication. We may soon see entire epic poems lying coyly hidden within CNET reviews; picaresque novels masquerading as users' comments at various software sites; haiku inserted into responses on this very blog. (If this post annoyed you, please visit Dysblog, where you will be crushed beneath the weight of your irritation) Culture40084@blogcritics.org Fri, 25 Nov 2005 23:49:47 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/25/162117.php Douglas Anthony Cooper"He's a vile, detestable, moralistic person with no heart and no conscience who believes he's been tapped by God to do very important things."No, that's not an assessment of George W. Bush. It's the beginning of the smear campaign against the prosecutor: the quotation is from "a White House ally... referring to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald."I'm not the first to note the irony that the White House, which is being prosecuted for a smear job, is beginning to resort to just that tactic in response. They have to; they're not much good at anything else. But a smear campaign without Rove is like the Astros sans Clemens -- here you have a talent that comes along maybe once in a generation. Rove is the Great One, the Gretzky of Libel; can you imagine anyone else cooking up that bit about McCain's illegitimate black child? Perhaps he'll continue to orchestrate the slander from his cell, but it won't be easy.I took that quotation from the New York Daily News, by the way, and it's a fine time to be reading the tabloids. The best sports writing is always found in the tabs; and now that Washington politics is beginning to resemble Mexican wrestling, these are the go-to papers for jazzy political coverage. (I've been getting a huge kick out of over-the-top Sox metaphors -- will get to that in a moment.) You won't find this kind of opera in the sober, serious, unreliable New York Times; time to turn to the Daily News: Facing the darkest days of his presidency, President Bush is frustrated, sometimes angry and even bitter, his associates say....Bush usually reserves his celebrated temper for senior aides because he knows they can take it. Lately, however, some junior staffers have also faced the boss' wrath.'This is not some manager at McDonald's chewing out the help,' said a source with close ties to the White House when told about these outbursts. 'This is the President of the United States, and it's not a pleasant sight.'(No, it's not the manager of your local McDonald's. If it were, the franchise would be in the red, the Freedom Fries soggy, and the burgers tainted with salmonella.)Presidential advisers and friends say Bush is a mass of contradictions: cheerful and serene, peevish and melancholy, occasionally lapsing into what he once derided as the 'blame game.'Speaking of tabloids, the National Enquirer reported recently that George has begun drinking again. Now, the National Enquirer is only marginally more reliable than the newspaper of record, but that Jekyll/Hyde description sure fits the profile. (Actually -- contrary to popular belief -- the Enquirer gave up on "Space Aliens Ate My Baby" stories a long time ago, and has an admirable record when it comes to fact checking. If they reported it, then it's likely true. Slate has a good piece on the surprisingly high standards at the tab.)Bush is so dismayed that 'the only person escaping blame is the President himself,' said a sympathetic official, who delicately termed such self-exoneration 'illogical.'Illogical, perhaps, but utterly consistent. (For a rigorous psychological assessment, read "The Children's Hour.") The President has simply never been able to take a hard look in the mirror. And do you blame him? What he would see there, especially now, is what many of us have always seen - he's a little man. A blustering, peevish martinet. In the absence of an honest mirror, I sometimes wonder which image of George Walker Bush he retains in his head: the magnanimous, folksy Texan that he puts on in front of the cameras, or the vicious bully that's emerging at the office. I suspect the former, augmented by all sorts of hilarious martial and religious virtues, too wacky even to insert in scripted speeches. Let's face it: "not pleasant" is an understatement. Imagine some poor earnest Republican intern, straight out of a small-town Midwestern college, having to hold back tears as the most powerful man in the world dresses him down in front of his friends. (I'd be no good in that situation. I'd be inclined to say, "Get out of my face, clown." Hello, Gitmo...)How did this happen? American historians will be pondering this for decades. How did a man with these qualities -- which were never a secret -- rise to the most important office in the land? Nixon was a dark figure, to be sure, but he was a giant relative to George. Reagan, even if you thought him asleep at the wheel, was a monument of competence beside this fumbling zero. Even Bush Sr. looks almost presidential in retrospect. What's interesting to me is that you're hearing just this sort of talk these days from the far right. As the Harriet Miers wrecking ball smashes holes in the false front, suddenly hard-core Republicans are describing the President in terms that I could have written. God bless them. -------------------------------- So, anyway, how about them Sox. Humble people finding unexpected success is a bit more uplifting than faux cowboys predictably biting the dust. And those hyperbolic sports metaphors -- damn. My favorite trope isn't actually from the tabs, but from John Donovan at Sports Illustrated, in his description of Joe Crede's glorious glove-work:"Not since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a man with leather made so much noise."--------------------------------If this post made your hair curl, Dysblog will make it fall out.Ed:LisaM Politics38502@blogcritics.org Tue, 25 Oct 2005 16:21:17 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/16/152547.php Douglas Anthony CooperOkay, tadpoles, time to strike up the March of the Frogs! (That would be the under-rated amphibian passage in Beethoven's Pastoral.) I suspect I'm not the only one, in my Rove reveries, to look up the origins of that exquisite expression: "to frog-march." Now my friend Jesse Sheidlower -- North American editor of the OED, and The Guy Who Knows Shit About Slang -- is liable to spank me for this, but as far as I can discern the "frog" bit comes from the fact that the marchee was originally held upside down, giving him a frog-like appearance. Also (and this has no linguistic significance) it was common for the police, while frog-marching a perp, to beat a tattoo on his butt. When Karl Rove is frog-marched, as per the wishes of Wilson, do we dare hope that he will be held upside down, while a drum solo is paddled with Keith-Moon-like abandon upon his oft-kissed rump?He deserves no less."What's that, Karl? Got a frog in your throat?" "Yes, but last night it was a prince..." (rimshot)Oh, it's a glorious image to be sure. Even a modern frog march would be a treat. In fact, I don't care if they pin his arms -- it might be nice to see him holding up his jacket, in an effort (finally!) to get that loathsome puffy face out of the media.There is still much to discover; in the next dozen days all will be revealed. Every question answered. How much did Rove cover up, and with whom did he conspire? What did Cheney contribute (and will Halliburton be able to somehow capitalize on this?) How much did the president know? How much did Ashcroft know before recusing himself? Should Rove be held upside down? What precise rhythm should be paddled upon his butt?Meanwhile, I'm going to curl up with my translation of Aristophanes' The Frogs. (Favorite line: "O, dear! O, dear! Now I declare, I've got a bump upon my rump.") Then I intend to cook up a mess o' frog's legs. After all, I live in the state of Guanajuato ("Hill of Frogs"). And I quote from the (fabulously obscure) Odis Bird:Froggy went a courtin' and he did rideRolly-bob-rinktum-kimoAnd took miss Mousey by his sideRolly-bob-rinktum-kimoKimo-karo-captain-karoBombineeshee-kimoShim-a-nicki-bombinickiRolly-bob-arinktum-kimoCan you tell I'm in good mood?----------------------------------If this struck you as a petty, gratuitious smear, feel free to visit Dysblog for more of the same, gratis. Gracias. Politics37995@blogcritics.org Sun, 16 Oct 2005 15:25:47 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/14/014725.php Douglas Anthony CooperI had a dream about Harriet Miers the other night. (Yes, yes, I know: Cooper, get a life.) The dream -- not my narrative unconscious at its most exciting, I'm afraid -- involved George Bush withdrawing her nomination. That's all I remember. However -- and here is where this transcends a dreary "I had a dream that had nothing to do with sex" anecdote -- I woke up in a bad mood. (You think I'm making this up. I assure you, if I were making this up it would be way less banal.)Why, I wondered to myself, would such a dream be a bad dream? After all, I've already weighed in on the Miers question -- I believe I dubbed her a "joke." Well, upon reflection, I've decided that she's a good joke. A joke that deserves to be told. A joke at which, I strongly believe, we shall laugh last.First of all, let's consider what would have been the least funny nomination. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Janice Rogers Brown, very much on the shortlist, who is quoted as deprecating Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal as "our own socialist revolution." (I often wonder what people who hate the New Deal think of fondly. The Great Depression? The age of the robber barons?) It's worth concentrating upon those words, which would have done McCarthy proud. Now, the thing about a "revolution," when appended to the word "socialist," is that it tends to imply barricades and streets awash in blood. Especially in America, where the word "socialist" really means "communist" to the average non-socialist. The New Deal was, of course, bloodless, not a revolution, and not really socialist. It was, however, civilized. For originalists like Judge Brown, of particular interest is "freedom of contract" -- which, though not in the Constitution, is treated as if it were not only there, but a very pillar of our civic structure. The notion of freedom of contract comes from the Lochner decision of 1905, in which the Supreme Court decided in favor of a bakery owner, Joseph Lochner, who felt that a New York law limiting his bakers to a sixty-hour work week was unconstitutional. Lochner challenged the constitutionality of his conviction on the grounds that it violated his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In a 5-4 decision, a majority of the United States Supreme Court agreed with him, ruling that the New York law interfered "with the right of contract between the employer and employees concerning the number of hours in which the latter may labor."This "freedom of contract" is contained nowhere in the Constitution.The New Deal was predicated on a 1937 decision, West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, which effectively put the last nail in the coffin of this putative freedom. All seems a bit dull, doesn't it, but the implications are huge. The Lochner court, which Justice Brown remembers with such nostalgia, was an enemy of many things much cherished by most Americans (not just by, you know, those revolutionary socialists):If "freedom of contract" had still been important to the Court in 1937, laws like the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act (which protects the right of workers to organize into unions) and the Fair Labor Standards Act (which includes the first minimum wage and bans child labor) would likely have been ruled unconstitutional violations of this right.This is the woman we might have had instead of Harriet Miers: a judge who explicitly endorses what many suspect that Bush has always wanted -- it's never been a question of "reforming" Social Security; it's a question of destroying Social Security, and all of its attendant "socialist" baggage. The New Deal, for Bush and his ilk, was a raw deal; and those of you who own oil companies (or sweat shops) probably agree.So, if you're in favor of deep-sixing Social Security, demolishing the minimum wage, banning unions, and bringing back child labor, then Brown's your woman. (I like to think that even the most hardcore so-called conservatives would balk at the notion of child labor, but what I like to think has proved astonishingly ineffective when it comes to circumscribing their actual beliefs.)Now, contrast Janice Rogers Brown with Harriet Miers. I have no doubt that Judge Brown is the superior intellect, with far far greater expertise in the area of constitutional law. In a debate, I suspect she could make puppy chow of poor Ms. Miers. But ask yourself: who would you prefer to have deciding cases on behalf of the average American?Miers, unlike Brown, is nicely mushy. Think of those cooing love letters to George Bush, the best governor ever and the most brilliant man she's ever met. Yes, I'm fairly certain Harriet comes from the "poor Joshua" school of jurisprudence. (Justice Harry A. Blackmun famously wrote "Poor Joshua!" in a dissent, when the Supreme Court refused to find state officials responsible for not removing four-year-old boy Joshua DeShaney from the custody of a father who beat him so badly that he was permanently brain-damaged. This is often held up as an example of judicial "sentimentalism.") Call me sentimental: but mush trumps steel, sometimes, when it comes to justice.While everyone is obsessing over Roe v. Wade, it's worth noting that Miers has taken distinctly liberal positions on all sorts of fetus-neutral matters: As the first woman president of the State Bar of Texas and the Dallas Bar Association, Harriet Miers pushed for inclusion of women and minorities. Even though Janice Brown is both female and African-American, I suspect that's not a very Janice Brown thing to do. And there's this:When a black county commissioner was arrested after a physical altercation with an off-duty police officer who allegedly had spat a racial slur at him, more than 1,000 demonstrators marched on City Hall. Many feared violence until Harriet Miers, a first-term City Council member and local lawyer, spoke to the crowd. "If it means anything to you, I want to apologize," Miers said in her native Texas drawl. "I want to apologize to the African American community of this city for an unprovoked and unexcusable attack on one of their elected leaders."In order to wring that kind of apology out of any of the other candidates on Bush's shortlist, you'd probably have to resort to extraordinary rendition.As for Roe v. Wade, that seems to be one area in which Harriet might actually have her mush under control. There's one person who knows Harriet even better than Handsome George does: Justice Nathan Hecht, her occasionally romantic friend. And let's look at what Hecht -- himself an arch-conservative -- has to say:"What they really want to know is how's she going to decide Roe v. Wade if it comes again," Hecht said of the case that led to legalized abortion nationwide. "And the answer is you cannot extrapolate (legal decisions) from religious feelings. If you could, the right wouldn't be as nervous as it looks like they are."And this:"Yes, she goes to a pro-life church," Justice Hecht said, adding, "I know Harriet is, too." The two attended "two or three" anti-abortion fund-raising dinners in the early 1990's, he said, but added that she had not otherwise been active in the anti-abortion movement. "You can be just as pro-life as the day is long and can decide the Constitution requires Roe" to be upheld, he said.And this:When asked if her personal opposition to abortion would give her sufficient cause to overturn the Supreme Court's abortion precedent, Hecht said, "I think she'll say they won't."Lastly, Your Honor, I'd like to present this summary of Harriet's Collected Works:As president of the Texas bar, Miers also published regular columns about her priorities, offering some of the few glimpses -- albeit vague ones -- into her approach to the law.A common theme was her belief that the legal community should do more to assist people who feel shut out of the legal system, or who can't afford to break into it.She pressed for more money to improve legal representation for indigent defendants and said root causes of crime -- poverty, lack of mental and other health care, inadequate education and family dysfunction -- must be addressed.Not only is that last bit not very Janice Brown, it's not very George Bush. It's what you'd call compassionate -- a word that actually has meaning when you liberate it from the slogan "compassionate conservatism."This perhaps explains my dream. I don't admire this woman, particularly; I certainly don't respect her, intellectually; but I'm starting to like her. No, she may not have the nutcracker intellect of Janice Brown or Michael McConnell or Michael Luttig. In fact, I suspect she may well prove to be quite the opposite: a sentimentalist in the mold of Harry Blackmun. Which is fine by me. And, evidently, fine by my subconscious.----------------------------------------------If this post made you yelp, please visit Dysblog, which will make you scream.Ed:LisaM Politics37896@blogcritics.org Fri, 14 Oct 2005 01:47:25 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/11/124204.php Douglas Anthony CooperRemember when public figures were impressive? It's a dim, distant memory, but not a nostalgic hallucination: once there were good men, and we'd occasionally elect them.This desiccated memory crawled back to mind a few days ago, when John McCain rammed an anti-torture bill through the Senate. Now, there are those who would dismiss McCain as a foaming imperialist: James Wolcott in particular, whose reliable judgment seems to lose its compass whenever a pol or pundit refuses to insist upon an immediate retreat from Iraq. Wolcott has denounced McCain as a "choleric hawk," borrowing his words from his good friend Camille Paglia. And Paglia derives her opinion from McCain's face, believe it or not: The TV camera does not lie: Just as it showed from the get-go that ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was a nervous, shifty, sweaty, petulant mental adolescent, so has it exposed McCain over time as a seething nest of proto-fascist impulses. Despite his recent flurry of radiant, P.R.-coached grins, McCain has the weirdly wary and over-intense eyes of Howard Hughes and the clenched, humorless jaw line of Nurse Diesel.Well, the television does lie. It's what it does best. The television has, for instance, on occasion portrayed Camille Paglia as sane.Yes, McCain's a warrior. But that's not quite the same as a bloodthirsty chickenhawk. In fact, it's pretty much the opposite. Yes, he supports the current war in Iraq, but I'd be interested in knowing what that really means. He's also on record as supporting George Bush, a man he patently despises. My sense is that McCain is triangulating (even the greatest men do that, when thrown into the cesspool of Realpolitik): he needs to stand elbow to shoulder with Bush, in order to have any chance at the Republican candidacy in 2008; and I suspect he has very complex reasons for supporting the war.Those reasons? Well, let's face it: have you heard any coherent plans for dealing with the Iraqi toxic waste dump? Those who loathe the war (and I'm one) are inclined to say "cut and run" -- but that is probably not the most intelligent strategy. The current poisonous mess could grow even more lethal: imagine a former Iraq, split into a democratic Kurdistan (nice, but the ensuing war with Turkey could prove ugly); a rogue Sunni state, constituting little more than a base and spawning ground for terrorists; and a Shiite theocracy, now tight with Iranians fellow travelers, and sitting on at least 112.5 billion barrels of oil -- the second largest pool in the world, after Saudi Arabia.Not a pleasant thought. And no: I haven't the faintest idea what to do about it, except that "cut and run" may not be the most realistic option. If anyone in America does know what to do in this situation, it will be someone like McCain or Kerry: a proven military leader, with a long history of successful diplomacy. McCain, in particular, is as much a skilled and principled diplomat as anything else -- this is a man who went out of his way to forge peaceful relations with a nation that imprisoned him for years, and tortured him for much of it. If McCain says that we need more troops on the ground, for the moment: well, I'm inclined to value his opinion. That does not make him a "choleric hawk" -- it simply makes him a guy who recognizes the importance of cleaning up Bush's mess properly.Which brings us back to the current bill. Christ, finally someone has had the courage to stand up to this administration's shameful embrace of utter barbarism. And McCain has done it in language that will stand up well in the history books: "The enemy we fight has no respect for human life or human rights. They don't deserve our sympathy. But this isn't about who they are. This is about who we are." Absolutely right: it's about the soul of America. And I mean that in the full religious sense, which someone like Bush ought to comprehend (if his religion were about something more than sentimental self-esteem) -- it's about the Good, and it's about damnation.----------------------------------------------If this post ruined your lunch, please visit Dysblog, which will spoil your dinner. Politics37763@blogcritics.org Tue, 11 Oct 2005 12:42:04 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/03/173536.php Douglas Anthony CooperThat Harriet Miers is a joke, we have no reason to doubt. David Frum reports that Miers "once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met." David -- whatever you may think about his views; he's a very swift guy -- must have choked. I mean, it's one thing to argue that Bush is the Right man, but I can't imagine that David seriously considers him a Bright man. Either Miers doesn't get out much, or -- more likely -- she's a besotted groupie, and an intellectual lightweight. In fact, when David first floated her name, he admits, "I have to confess that at the time, I was mostly joking."Can anybody be thrilled with this nomination? The right wing is weeping into its collective beer. The liberal center is scratching its collective head, feeling that it may have dodged a bullet, only to be slapped in the face with a wet fish. I mean, come on folks: this is funny. The woman is not second-rate; she's not third-rate; she doesn't even rate. Harriet Miers is a nice woman, who graduated from unimpressive schools, and "rose" through the Texas ranks (in other words drifted sideways and slightly downward). Here we have a candidate only marginally more impressive than the president himself. I suspect this is the problem: Bush, who has managed to convince himself that overcoming alcoholism is sufficient reason to deserve the presidency, has no concept of mediocrity. He just doesn't get it. The Roberts appointment was not about excellence (and I do believe, as I have argued elsewhere, that he is a truly impressive man): Bush accidentally chose a man with demonstrable virtues, while doing an entirely incidental calculus. One huge supporter of Ms. Miers is none other than Joseph Allbaugh, that towering figure of competence and objectivity, who installed his roommate at the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. So, Michael Brown bagged FEMA, and Harriet's off to the Supreme Court. We may even witness the odd sight of Democratic senators filling out the majority in support of this nomination, in the absence of full support from the right. I'm wondering, in fact, whether we'll see this appointment deep-sixed by Republicans.So, where does this leave those of us who don't want to see the court turned into a playground for hillbilly activists in constructionist drag? Well, for one thing, I'm not too happy about becoming a cheerleader for the bozocracy. And let's not get too comfortable here: the last mediocrity appointed by the right was Clarence Thomas. It's not entirely clear that liberals should be celebrating.On the other hand, she's sixty years old. So we're only stuck with Harriet Miers for a while, and there's a good chance the president who chooses her replacement will be a Democrat. (Republicans look as if they're not likely to have a lock on power in the foreseeable future: I never would have expected it, but Americans seem to have at last overwhelmingly recognized their shameful error in voting for this administration.)My advice? Let the GOP hang itself. This is hardly worth wasting a filibuster on: if Republicans choose to approve this non-entity, then that's their funeral -- further proof that this clan is about little more than cronyism and myopic allegiance. If they choose not to let his choice pass, then we can sit back and watch the right wing shoot their own buffoon in the foot: the last thing George needs is to be abandoned by his loony core at this precise moment in his decline. -------------------------------------------------------- If this post felt like a kick in the head, and you enjoy that feeling, visit Dysblog Politics37334@blogcritics.org Mon, 3 Oct 2005 17:35:36 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/01/023427.php Douglas Anthony CooperAren't these people special?"George Bush has distanced himself from comments made by a leading Republican crusader on moral values who declared that one way to reduce the crime rate in the US would be to 'abort black babies.'"I suppose I'd distance myself too. Although it would be easier for me to do, given that I don't head up a party which once saw fit to make this drooling, crypto-genocidal caricature of a human being secretary of education. That's right, our special man of the day is William Bennett, not only secretary of education under Reagan, but also chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He conducted a little "thought experiment" on his radio show, in which he demonstrated -- convincingly, I imagine, to the kind of people who listen to Bill Bennett -- that all you'd have to do was abort every single one of those black kids, and you'd sure clean up the streets. Bill's precise words: "If you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose; you could abort every black baby in this country." He followed that up with the suggestion that this would be "impossible." Also "ridiculous." Thanks Bill. It would be kind of silly, wouldn't it. And so difficult to pull off. Finally, he suggested that it would be "morally reprehensible." Well, yes. He was careful, however, to cap this probing moral distinction with the reminder: "but your crime rate would go down." Which is what really matters, if we're going to be all daring and philosophical.Equally deep thinkers could well argue that this intriguing hypothesis be more fully investigated. Why not abort all children? And murder their parents. I guarantee -- and this is incontrovertible -- that crime would be completely and permanently eradicated. (To give Bill credit, he did include in his thought experiment the race-neutral abortion of all children: yes, even those that aren't black. But he didn't properly examine the efficacy of lining up their parents and shooting them.)Bill has a problem, though, mathematically speaking. Given that he's "a leading Republican crusader on moral values," surely he must insist -- or he'd lose this honorific -- that abortion itself is a crime. So, let's see: by aborting all black children ("murder," I believe, is how leading Republican crusaders on moral values see it), Bennett would be causing a huge spike in the murder stats -- the assumption being that this brief genocidal spike would be more than compensated for by all those murderers that wouldn't get born.Let's do the math, however: in order to balance the books, murder-wise, this would mean that each of those aborted black babies would have to have become -- had he or she not been murdered by a leading Republican crusader on moral values -- a murderer. Or you're still seeing a bit of an uptick in crime, statistically speaking. Every murdered murderer would constitute a murder. And the murdered non-murderers... well, you see the problem. The aborted murderers would have to do a fair bit of murdering in order to make up for the aborted innocents. Luckily, the media has accustomed us, in the past couple of weeks, to think of most black Americans -- poor ones, anyway -- as rapists of babies, so I suppose it's not too hard to make this mental leap: sure, hell, they're all basically serial killers. The thought experiment works! Right? I think... Okay, I'm not so good at thinking this way. Which is why they pay people like Bennett the big bucks -- I'd make a lousy secretary of education.Yes, I defer to the expert. Bill Bennett -- with his "multi-million dollar gambling habit" -- clearly knows a lot more about morality than I do. I mean, I have opinions, but he's written whole books about this stuff: The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals; and Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism.Moral clarity. If I had some of that, I suppose I'd be outraged that we weren't taking clothes hangers to black children in the womb. -------------------------------------------------------------- If you find this kind of reasoning irritating, or even repulsive, please visit Dysblog for whole pages of the same. Politics37192@blogcritics.org Sat, 1 Oct 2005 02:34:27 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/09/28/214921.php Douglas Anthony CooperI'm no economist. Thank God. Which means that I haven't had my veins pumped full of economism (a religion that is very much the opiate of the academies, and a much more effective soporific than Christianity, Islam, or Judaism). "I never met a tax cut I didn't like," said the Nobel-winning Chile-miraclizing Milton Friedman. Yeah? Well I've met a few. For instance, every single one of George's gifts to the ultra-wealthy. I know, I know: "a rising tide raises all boats." Which is great if you own a yacht. If you don't own even a dinghy, then a rising tide merely destroys your home and drowns your neighbors, as we've just witnessed in New Orleans. If those tax cuts (along with the Iraq war) hadn't gutted FEMA's budget, then perhaps we might have seen an adequate response. Even Reagan met a few tax cuts he didn't like, which is why he raised taxes during his administration. Not to mention George's Dad, who read his own lips, carefully, and discovered that they in fact whispered: we need more revenue.Nevertheless, mainstream economists (not those Krugman firebrands) will tell you that the economy cannot withstand a high tax rate. The economy. Not the wealthy -- who cannot stand a high tax rate -- but the nation's economic health, and competitive edge, require taxes to be mean and lean. Since I never took ECON 101, let me detour around those damned statistics and turgid prose, to present an interesting little fact:Finland has the world's most competitive economy. Finland. Edging out even the United States. This from a survey of 11,000 business leaders, in the Global Competitiveness Report, released today by the World Economic Forum.Augusto Lopez-Claros, chief economist and director of the Geneva-based institute's global competitiveness program, "said the Nordic nations were disproving the common belief that high taxes hinder competitiveness:"'While the business communities in the Nordic countries point to high tax rates as a potential problem area, there is no evidence that these are adversely affecting the ability of these countries to compete effectively in world markets, or to provide to their respective populations some of the highest standards of living in the world,' he said. 'Indeed, the high levels of government tax revenue have delivered world-class educational establishments, an extensive safety net, and a highly motivated and skilled labor force.'"Damn. And if I had a PhD from Chicago, I'd know that was false. I could marshal impressive models and statistics (and some truly bad writing -- ever read Friedman?) to demonstrate the counterfactual nature of that, um, fact. I might even win a Nobel Prize for my tendentious special pleading.I have a friend who did a PhD in subatomic physics, and worked on string theory with the great Witten at Princeton -- who is, in short, rather good at the hard sciences -- and he becomes apoplectic when you mention the Nobel Prize in economics. That Alfred Nobel instituted a prize for these "crystal ball gazers," and not for mathematicians, drives my friend to Job-like cosmic rage. (The rumor is that Nobel's wife was seduced by a mathematician, which is why he slighted the discipline.) Another friend, whose graduate work is in economics, insists that you can rig any economic model to demonstrate vastly differing conclusions, depending upon how you arbitrarily design the parameters. This hardly surprises me: the soft social sciences have been abusing statistics for years -- why should economics not engage in analogous bafflement?Let me say, before you pounce, that I am not in fact innumerate. I was first in calculus and physics in architecture school, and every standardized test I've ever taken has indicated that I should have been a mathematician, not a novelist. (Now there's fuel for the literary critics.) So I did not avoid ECON 101 for reasons of math angst, but simply because My Eyes Glaze Over when you ask me to spend more than thirty seconds on figures relating to agricultural production in the Midwest. It's abysmally dull stuff, the dismal science.That said, I value what certain free-thinking non-aligned economists have to say. St. Paul, for instance, at the New York Times -- the great Krug- (as opposed to Fried-) man; I take him pretty seriously. Why? Because I'm going to have to lean on authority, here, and simple psychology suggests to me that Krugman is trustworthy, since he is manifestly one of the few truly distinguished economists who does not have his lips glued to the butt of the plutocracy. His arguments do favor the free market, but only because he has demonstrated (in academic work that has short-listed him for the Nobel), that free trade benefits poor countries. I sense the right wing despises Krugman for this as much as anything: the ideologues require his work on the fragmentation of markets to prove some of their own sacred theories. You'll hear a lot of mumbling about how he is no longer taken seriously in the academy, etc., which is of course canard al'orange: Fareed Zakaria -- hardly a Maoist -- has championed Krugman; and Jeffrey D. Sachs -- a liberal, but one whose academic credentials are pretty hard to smear -- is also a fan. I suppose you could argue that the Nobel Prize for economics -- and yes, Krugman is a front-running candidate -- is only given to leftwing ideologues. You know: Friedman, Hayek and comrades.Krugman tells us that you have to do the math in order to have a full, perspicuous understanding of economics, which is fine by me. That level of expertise is not something I intend to achieve -- life is too short. (If I had three more lives, I'd devote them to theoretical physics, chess, and number theory, long before I'd wade into the swamps of Chicago.) I'll simply take his word for it, read his layman's version, and note the occasional indisputable fact:Such as that embarrassing detail regarding Finland. The most competitive economy in the world. Oh, and Sweden, which is third after the US; Denmark, which is fourth; Iceland, which is seventh. The lowest ranked Scandinavian country is Norway, at ninth.We're talking stratospheric income tax here. To rival Finland, Bush's friends would have to kick in money to fund FEMA, build a few roads, even help out the poor. Which is not to say that the Nordic countries endorse high levels of taxation across the board:"The governments' philosophy is to leave businesses alone, taxing them at some of the lowest levels in the world so they are competitive and efficient. They then levy the high taxes on personal incomes to pay for those social services that underwrite their labor force, according to Simeon Djankov ( who co-authored a 2004 World Bank study that -- yes -- also placed Finland at the head of the pack, with Sweden third, Denmark fifth, and Norway sixth)."'You have to look behind the numbers, ignore the Nordic reputation for tax burdens and you'll see they have established a system that does not distort production, that gives people an incentive to invest in businesses and in stocks because the taxes are so low,' he said."So we're hardly talking about Stalinism here. In fact, we're barely talking about socialism (in the way that the word is endowed with cellulite and fangs by Republicans -- many of whom sport cellulite and fangs). Did Bush permit the City of Voodoo to drown, so that embarrassing documents regarding voodoo economics would disappear in the flood? Okay, that's a bit silly. But you can bet that he'd love to see a hurricane take out the World Economic Forum, and shred that incriminating survey.Now, those 11,000 business leaders, you could argue, are biased. I mean, perhaps they're anti-business. Or, unlike economists, they just don't know real wealth when they're looking at it. Or... anyway, choose your lie.Let me end this by suggesting that you all hie yourself over to one of the more interesting documents of the last few years. It probably seemed dull at the time, but here's the full text of Joe Albaugh's testimony in front of the Senate Appropriations Committee. (Joe being, um, Michael Brown's roommate in college.) A few words from this inspiring document have become famous in the wake of Katrina: Albaugh worried in 2002 that FEMA had become an "oversized entitlement program." No matter how you dress that one up, you can't take it out to dinner. (You especially can't take it out to dinner at Antoines in New Orleans, which lost a wall when those underfunded levees broke.) Some of Albaugh's blather is prophetic blather: "Faith-based groups at the community level, like the Salvation Army and the Mennonite Disaster Service, play critical roles in disaster relief, as does the American Red Cross." Well, yes they do, Joe -- even more critical when they are required to replace incompetent, cash-strapped federal agencies.My favorite paragraph in this rousing document: "President Bush's compassionate conservatism is a hallmark of his core philosophy. The President is promoting faith-based organizations as a way to achieve compassionate conservatism. Not only does FEMA work with the faith-based organizations that I mentioned, but FEMA's Emergency Food and Shelter Program is the original faith-based initiative and is a perfect fit with President Bush's new approach to helping the poor, homeless and disadvantaged."Such compassion. Such faith. Indeed, our man Joe wasn't lying when he said that FEMA was "a perfect fit with President Bush's new approach to helping the poor, homeless and disadvantaged."So there we have it: the original faith-based initiative -- operating on a wing and a prayer -- turned out to be the single most incompetent program cooked up by an administration famed for its glorious incompetence. Take your angels' wings and your mawkish prayers, George, and let's have a fully funded initiative -- one that may, yes, require you to raise your friends' income taxes back to civilized levels. While we're pushing aeronautical metaphors: call me reckless, but I'm willing to risk the possibility that repealing those tax cuts might send the economy into a tailspin. Just like Finland's. ----------------------------------------------------- (If this post reduced you to a sneering fit, feel free to visit Dysblog, which will make your face fall off.) Politics37034@blogcritics.org Wed, 28 Sep 2005 21:49:21 EDT