The Future is the Future

Illegal immigrant John Derbyshire has discovered that the aggregate population of non-White Dudes will soon outnumber White Dudes, leaving him quivering at the prospect that an Angry Negro majority will demand a sort of Iraqi Oil Law for payroll taxes, with revenues directed by percentage to the appropriate ethnic group, and furthermore that some Negress nurse will be mean to him in the Alzheimer's wing of the care home.

Will Whitey develop "race-consciousness" as he slumps into the minority? I suspect not but hope so. In a hundred years, some well-heeled Black guy can take to the pages of The National Review to ask, "Why are they allowed to call each other cracker but I'm not allowed to call them cracker?" and to lament to glorification of spousal and alcohol abuse in degenerate country-western music.

Doc Occam's Waiting Room

There are still people who believe, or at least continue to say they believe, that the American project in Iraq is or ever was about "promoting democracy." Even much of the self-legendized liberal Netroots™, for all its howling about the essential mendacity of the dauphin and his courtiers, continues to accept on some level the notion that Wolfowitz and Bush and Powell and Rice (if not Cheney; if not Perle) were basically catastrophe-prone messianists. "You can't impose democracy at gunpoint," goes the protest. Wittingly or unwittingly, it gives credence to the basic line of bullshit spun out by war architects when every other casus belli collapsed under the weight of their immense untruth. Fortunately, even many liberals are now getting hip to the adage: Don't listen to what they say; watch what they do. There is no project to create democracy in Iraq. Elections were organized at the eleventh-hour to sate the demands of Ali al-Sistani--easier to throw up some polling places and give your aggressive war some retroactive legitimacy as an act of popular revolution than contend with a million Iraqis marching in the streets. The Iraqi Constitution likewise is a last-minute hodgepodge, and the current government an impotent jumble that serves specific sectarian interests somewhat and American interests somewhat and popular interests (such as they are) not at all because it has neither the incentive nor the wherewithal to do so. It's increasingly recognized that when Bush & Co. talk about about the project to bring democracy to Iraq, they're just scamming us, because--sound the refrain--there is no project to create democracy in Iraq.

Now Congress has just agreed to spend another $100 billion to smash Iraq up some more, and Democratic Netrootsia just can't figure out why their brand-new majority has folded when they hold the trump of overwhelming public opinion. Matthew Yglesias isn't your average logghoreac KosCo diarist nor your addled FireDogLake Fitzite, so let's turn to him for an example of intellectual bias obscuring the obvious:

To me, the only real explanation for Democratic behavior is this. The party's leadership and political thinkers simply can't conceive of national security issues as anything other than a source of potential political problems to be coped with, never as a set of potential political opportunities. Since congress can't unilaterally end the war, then, there's no reason to have a confrontation with Bush; national security debates are just pure downside. Overwhelming polling data backing the liberal position isn't a reason to go on offense, it's a reason to think Democrats can succeed in slinking away.

The "only real explanation for Democratic behavior" is that "the party's leadership and political thinkers" are not in fact interested in or committed to ending the war. Congress can't unilaterally end the war? Since when? They're the ones with the damn money. (But listen to Rep. David Obey, the most appropriately surnamed politician in history: "There has never been a chance of a snowball in Hades that Congress would cut off those funds to those troops in the field." And there you have it.) Democrats may believe that the Iraq War has been poorly executed, but they are fundamentally committed to the idea that Iraq and "the region" serve the "vital national security interests of the United States," and they are not going to end this war just because their constituents are tired of seeing a foreign war on the evening news. Let's visit that great paean to American democracy, Bullworth:

ANGRY BLACK WOMAN: Are you sayin' the Democratic Party don't care about the African-American community?

BULLWORTH: Isn't that OBVIOUS? You got half your kids are out of work and the other half are in jail. Do you see ANY Democrat doing anything about it? Certainly not me! So what're you gonna do, vote Republican? Come on! Come on, you're not gonna vote Republican! Let's call a spade a spade! [Loud, angry booing] I mean - come on! You can have a Billion Man March! If you don't put down that malt liquor and chicken wings, and get behind someone other than a running back who stabs his wife, you're NEVER gonna get rid of somebody like me!

And so Netrootsia yells and huffs, but raises money anyway for those fightin' Dems. What're you gonna do, KosCo, vote Republican? You're not gonna vote Republican.

Compare and contrast: Senate Majority Whip Dick Durban on the floor of the Senate:

We do not have it within our power to make the will of America the law of the land.

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution of the United States of America:

To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.

It is clear, it is evident, it is plain as life is long that the institutional Democratic party is not interested in ending American involvement in the Middle East. They are not interested in abjuring our self-proclaimed right to take the lives of foreigners in pursuit of our own so-called national interests. They are not interested in closing our world-wide garrisons, least of all the superbases currently under construction in Iraq. They are not interested in dealing with other nations as legitimate sovereign entities rather than willing or coerced vassals to American power. They are not interested in reducing American military expenditures or foreswearing American bellicosity. Their lack of interest doesn't reflect electoral calculations. It reflects their lack of interest. They stand for a larger military, "options on the table," Wars on Whatever, American primacy, the American imperium. How many times must it be repeated: their only institutional concern for American war policy is that it be executed more elegantly and from a higher altitude so that we don't end up exactly where we are now, with the visceral horror of an American war impinging slightly on the infotained American People, causing them to turn moderately against a war because its images disturb them.

Give Me Your Vibrant, Your Strong, Your Entrepreneurial Eager to Make a Buck

Arthur has several thoughts on immigration. We'll add this to the ongoing files of defenders of the West and capitalism who hate the West and capitalism. The current complaint, evidently, is that these newcomers are motivated by base commercial desires.

The solution? Create a vast, ungainly, overly complex, unadministerable federal apparatus to parse immigrants on the basis of determined merit to the national economy--an immense system of quotas and examinations and dossiers and paperwork and flow charts and task forces and teams and multiagency working groups. Yes, folks, the soi-disant conservative project of "small government" is officially dead. It was never more than an animatronic golem, a Turkish chess machine, to begin with, but now even its pretense has been utterly abandoned. Everyone involved in this dance--supporters of the new immigration bill and opponents--is locked in a battle over the same arid centimeters of intellectual territory, between nativist fears of lost jobs and nativist fears of depressed wages. I heard someone on the radio lamenting that Hispanophone immigrants now take jobs that rightly belong to . . . teenagers! Oh, woe betide our little nation! Oh, woe!

Sounding like the most economically innumerate Democrats, Republican anti-imigrationists have actually taken to the claim that once we kick out the Mexicanos, employers in landscaping and food service and hotel janitorial work will just up and hire gringos for the same jobs at higher wages. Note that these are often the same people who argue that raising the minimum wage will cause employers to fire workers like crazy in order to maintain current payroll expenditures. No landscaper is going to pay a white guy $12/hour and benefits when he can pay an eager immigrant $7. And if the crazy plan to get rid of illegals were to succeed--fortunately it will not--then the lawns of America can suffer, because the landscaping company is either cutting its employees by half or raising its rates by that same amount.

Golden Showers

"Clear the jails of nonviolent offenders to make room for everyone who doesn't believe in evolution."

-Dad

Via Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings, I see that Julian Sanchez has said several sensible things about the ontological predispositions, or lack thereof, of your modestly informed evolutionist. Coincidentally, I see that Kenneth Blackwell--yes, that Ken Blackwell--is advising conservative candidates to parse questions about evolution into microevolution vs. macroevolution, acceding to the truth of the former while denying the latter because, after all

Models like the doctrine of irreducible complexity simply explain that certain organs like the eye require dozens of different component parts, each made of millions or billions of complex cells, all working together to function. It argues such organs cannot evolve over time because even if such an organ is 99% complete, it still has 0% function, and thus does not do anything to help the species. This model suggests organs must be entirely present and perfectly placed together or they do not work. Modern theories of macroevolution have no explanation for how such organs can come about.

Now it turns out that "modern theories of macroevolution" do indeed have an explanation for how such organs can come about. Why, just ask this scientitian.

Julian identifies the real sticking point: because creationists see creation as a unitary and purposeful endeavor, they presume that all accounts of natural processes must likewise account for purpose or else reveal themselves as fundamentally flawed. Now Julian says that you could say the same thing about meteorology, but no one does. Except, of course, when they do. Yes, the Columbia Christians for Life suggested that Hurricane Katrina, at the moment of its landfall, took the form of a fetus, implicating godless Louisiana for its aborting ways. Which just goes to show that a theistic worldview allows the imputation of cosmic moral content to any natural phenomena. Fortunately I was disabused of any such ideas a as a very young child. A friend explained to le jeune IOZ that it rained because angels were crying. Le jeune IOZ told this to IOZ père, who asked: "How do you know they're not peeing?"

Q:N::3:7

You could change one letter and one numeral in this article and pass it off convincingly as an archival piece from the run-up to the current occupation. As is and was often the case, the most important piece of information is in the last paragraph:

But the level of enrichment--less than 5 percent--is substantially lower than the 90 percent required to make a nuclear weapon, and it is unclear how much Iran is producing and how smoothly the complicated machines are operating. U.S. government and outside analysts differ on when Iran would be able to produce a bomb, with estimates ranging from 2009 to 2015. The United States and its European partners are sending their top nuclear specialists to the IAEA next week to share information, more fully understand Iran's capabilities and reach consensus on a timeline.

Turning our eyes, ears, and brains from the question of whether or not a nation with two American carrier groups conducting war games just outside of its territorial waters has a legitimate interest in pursuing a nuclear deterrent--oh, why turn? it does--the punchline here is that "substantially" is a pretty robust adverb, and yet it still seems like high-parodic understatement when the difference is that between 90% and 5%. Uranium enrichment isn't a pop quiz; there are no bonus points; the spectrum runs from 0 to 100 with neither positives nor negatives. The difference between nothing and something is something indeed.

In Which Jonah Goldberg Defends the Tire Iron to the Knee and Pistol Butt to the Jaw as Expressive Freedom

But, it's simply not true that liberals are consistently on the side of individual liberty. They aren't when it comes to economic liberty. They aren't when it comes to religious liberty. They aren't when it comes to gun rights or freedom of speech in the form of hate crimes and the like.

-GOLDBERG!

Now I think what Jonah is trying to say is that liberals are by and large disinclined to defending the expressive rights of people to scream "Jew!" at a crowded Klan rally or wear tee-shirts with Matthew Sheppard's face airbrushed under a crosshair. This is basically true. But his gums flap and the fingers of his writin' hand twitch faster than his brain can fire, so he ends up saying that not only do liberals object to guns, but they object to using them to shoot homosexuals and pistol-whip Arabs because of deep-seated, abiding, categorical enmities toward fags and towel-heads. That, after all, is the definition of a hate crime. Yes, these are generally not things of which liberals approve.

It all comes in the context of some sort of doctrinal dispute over the Constitution. Is it, "Alive! Aliiivvveee! Ah-ha-ha-hah!" Or is it merely a musty document in which the founders enshrined their immoveable commitment to the inviolable fetus and the degeneracy of Mexicans? Not one klatcher at this charming coffee seems entirely sure, so Jonah sucks in his chipmunk cheeks and lowers his antennae and says instead:

But even the briefest consideration of how liberalism comes down on all sorts of liberties demonstrates that liberalism is not libertarianism when it comes to constitutional rights.

And apples aren't blueberries and the sky isn't the ocean. Bear it in mind that this man has a job, and it doesn't involve a mop, a nametag, or a belief that the shop steward and shift manager are "out to get" him.

As concerns liberties, Jonah and the Gang are usually google-eyed at the Second Amendment, committed to the First where the firing of homosexuals is concerned, unconvinced that Three through Eight actually exist, and totally unaware of Nine and Ten , although they do have a vague notion that something called "States Rights" exists, which they confuse with the principles of nullification outlined in a musty pamphlet authored by an anonymous slaveowning, anti-tariff crank in South Carolina in 1832. Those of us interested in real liberty are of course great proponents of Amendment Nine:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

In other words: If we didn't mention it here, you probably have it anyway. That mighty principle gives hope to foie gras lovers in Chicago, smokers in New York, gun nuts in Montana, and even to you, Jonah Goldberg, whose daily offenses against sense and literary sensibility are likewise inalienable, or at least inevitable.

Gould!

Donkle Drops Dainty Demands!

I'll say this much: You can't accuse them of inconsitency.

Instead of sticking with troop-withdrawal dates, Democrats accepted a GOP plan to establish 18 political and legislative benchmarks for the Iraqi government, with periodic reports from Bush on its progress, starting in late July. If the Iraqis fall short, they could forfeit U.S. reconstruction aid.

That's nice--the same system, if I'm not mistaken, used for the disbursal of federal highway funds to the states From PennDOT to Baghdad and back again.

As is always and inevitably the case, the Donkle put the kettle on the flame and got its contents lukewarm, but then the dauphin raised his squinting, rodentian face like a Whack-a-Mole puppet and said, "The Troops™." The Donkle screeched like a girl who finds a spider in her hair, threw the water out the kitchen window, backed against the fridge, curled in a ball at its base, and snatched at imaginery flies, whispering, "Moment of truth, moment of truth." Actually, according to the Donkle Doyenne, la Nan herself, September will be "the moment of truth," and if that doesn't get your pulse pacing, why, you're either dead or paying attention.

Over at FrailyKOS, two million tiny feet stamp in time with the discord of one million of the world's tiniest violins. I have not witnessed such symphonic, mythical impotence since Hans Jürgen Syberberg's film adaptation of Parsifal. You can imagine Harry Reid actually carrying his own penis and balls on a platter as an offering, like a medieval martyr carrying her own breasts or eyes, but without the attendent miracles. Meanwhile, something called Tomasky reveals, entirely unselfconsciously, what's really at stake:

As indefensible and tragic as the war is, this is the best Democrats can do right now. De-funding would have handed the Republicans a great argument going into next year's election--which is, of course, one in which Democrats have their best shot at winning the White House in a long time. Iraq is Bush's war, and Democrats need to make certain that it stays that way.

What's a little death between Super-Delegates? Blood under the bridge. But you know, this is America's war, and to an Iraqi the difference between Geroge W. Bush, Harry Reid, Michael Tomasky, and the soldier holding a gun to his wife's face is really vanishingly small. Each speaks English; each is a coward; and none of them truly gives a damn.


(KOS and Guardian links via C&L.)

Ah, Liberation

Ah, Bob Kerrey. A war criminal's war criminal: wracked by guilt for a crime to which he can't quite admit. Hey, it was a village. Women and children, who'd'a thunk it?

Bob takes to the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, where the news reported in the Wall Street Journal goes to die, or at least to be tortured into false confessions, to remind us how we went to war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan beginning in 1932 in a grand campaign to spread democracy, successfully disarming both powers and establishing bulwarks of freedom against the radical régime in Moscow. And that just goes to show that we were right to invade Iraq.

Let's not forget:

Iraq was a larger national security risk after Sept. 11 than it was before.

After all:

This does not mean that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11; he was not.

That's what I love about America: you can embarrass yourself by writing a prominently-placed opinion piece in a major newspaper containing two statements so cosmically contradictory that if they touched they'd poof! out of existence like a virtual particle set, and you can keep your job as the president of a university. That, friends, is the free motherfucking market at work. Cream to the top. Wheat from the chaff.

But wait, as they say on the infomercials, that's not all! Not content to merely posit Iraq as a greater threat after an event for which it bore no responsibility and to which it had no connection than it was before, the hero of Tranh Phong is willing to shimmy even farther out on the bending limb to propose a totally counterfactual hypothetical scenario in which an entirely different series of events occured in Iraq over the last six years, leading to a situation in which many current opponents of the war would clamor for humanitarian intervention in a circumstance totally not of our making. I will grant Mr. Kerrey this point: it's true that many of the current opponents of the Iraq War do misunderstand the nature of intervention and do inconsistently call for its doctrinal application in places like Darfur. That said, Kerrey can't even gather straw for a strawman. He's sitting by the campfire here, uplighting his face with a flashlight, telling the one about the hook left hanging on the rearview mirror.

Finally, after noting that leaving Iraq now "would hand Osama bin Laden a substantial psychological victory"--the sort of child-psychologizing that even children are nowadays too sophisticated to credit--Bob Kerrey says the most dishonest thing I've read about the Iraq War in several years, and that's no game for an amateur:

Those who argue that radical Islamic terrorism has arrived in Iraq because of the U.S.-led invasion are right. But they are right because radical Islam opposes democracy in Iraq. If our purpose had been to substitute a dictator who was more cooperative and supportive of the West, these groups wouldn't have lasted a week.

Since the last Soviet dragged his red ass from the mountains of Afghanistan, radical Islam has been telling the West that it is sick and goddamn tired of US-backed, apostate strongmen desecrating the lands of the Prophet. The Shah. The House of Saud. Sadat. Saddam! It isn't the wizard's smoke machine that they oppose for Oz, but the wizard. My god, man. The race is over, the bleachers are empty, the last baloon floats forlornly toward the clouds, and you're still standing at the starting line.

It Ain't Easy Bein' Green

Soon our children and grandchildren, who are the future, may be blessed with the mandatory opportunity to serve their country on a lily-pad in post-surge Iraq. Sounds pleasant enough. "One of the things we ought to be thinking about is some level of mandatory service to our country, so that everybody in America--not just the poor kids who get sent to war--are serving this country." In John Edward's Amerca, even a poor little rich kid can get callusses and blood on his hands. Edie with an AK. A penny save is a penny eared. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Do unto others. From each according to ability, to each according to need.

The American predisposition to hayseed revivalism has bred its fair share of odd Utopians and Faithful communitarians--witness: Mormonism--but even bearing this in mind, I struggle to imagine what this current national service vogue actually looks like to its imagining Edwardses. Surely it won't be work gangs busting up rocks and asphalting roads, and not even the most Balkan-bombing-sated liberalventionist wants us all in the military. Actually, Mormonism probably is the model, more or less: national service, as it's usually described, seems to consist principally of imaginary gangs of scrubbed, demographically interracial youths shoe-leathering around their communities spreading broad homilies about this, the greatest nation in the world. Bref, to look American, and publicly.

What you've got, then, is a plan to open an archipelago of Hitler-Jugend preparatory schools, but with black people and some Jews, where a few years of mandatory-participatory patriotic calisthenics can prepare young Americans to go toe-to-toe with the Korean mass games choreographic monolith. From these can come a sufficiently indoctrinated corps of military officers to occupy our foreign offices and garrisons--again, not unlike the Mormons. Since it is perfectly clear that we are not leaving Iraq, nor any other country in the world--about six of which remain unoccupied by American troops--anytime soon, this glut of imperial servicemen can only be a boon. They will not know Arabic or Mandarin Chinese, but they will know how to foxtrot, the year that George Washington died, the Preamble to the Constitution off by heart, how to squat thrust, how to euphemize, and how to look the other way.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan

The DEA sent some Colombians to Afghanistan to train a native Afghani force in drug trade interdiction. Meanwhile in Columbia--what a title for a book, Joan Didion in the style of Wallace Stegner--an entire national elite lives by Dylan's adage, "Everybody must get stoned," if by stoned you mean funneling billions into state-sponsored, drug-running, rightist paramilitaries. That'll learn 'em in Kabul!

What a bright future for Afghanistan: A landed elite, funded largely by drugs, will use American money and materiel to wage a paramilitary campaign against an ineradicable rural insurgency, also funded largely by drugs. Afghanistan, being landlocked, will unfortunately lack a squalid Buenaventura, but the tribal people's of Afghanistan are a hearty lot, old as civilization, and I'm sure somewhere some midsized city can also manage to top 400 murders a year.

The Children Who Are Our Future Are Our Future

As director of national intelligence, I see every day the results of FISA-authorized activity and its contribution to our efforts to protect America. This surveillance saves lives--the lives of our children and grandchildren.

And the rest of us are fucked.

What's odd about Mike McConnell's plea in the Post is that it keeps talking about "changes in technology" that abrogate the utility of FISA--"a law that does not address today's global systems in today's terms"--without ever mentioning, nor even attempting to mention, a singular instance, nor even a generalized example, of a failure of the current law in the impenerable face of a Motorola RAZR. We approach the orbit of an example:

Many Americans would be surprised at just what the current law requires. To state the facts plainly: In a significant number of cases, our intelligence agencies must obtain a court order to monitor the communications of foreigners suspected of terrorist activity who are physically located in foreign countries. We are in this situation because the law simply has not kept pace with technology.

Alas, a flyby. "Many Americans would be surprised" by many things, the majority of which are simple and self-evident, for it is our national pasttime to ignore plain facts and believe tall tales, but this is hardly germane. As for obtaining a court order, well, it's working for "our children and grandchildren," so it can't be all fire and brimstone. As we saw during the original flowering of the NSA scandal, the FISA Court holds the doubly unique positions of being America's most secret court and its most compliant. Were the court routinely refusing to issue warrants (or "orders" as they're misnamed in McConnell's article) in pertinent cases or bogging investigators in hours of procedural regulations, a case might be made--and I emphasize the conditional nature of this sentence--that its guiding legislation requires some tweaking. Clearly that's not the case, and let's also recall from the early days of the scandal that FISA has always had provisions allowing for surveillance to begin in exigent, time-pressed circumstances, provided investigators go to the court in a timely manner to apply for retroactive permission. These rules have already been loosened by laws of the last several years. The complaint is specious.

The question remains: What does any of this have to do with new technologies? Having read and reread McConnell's article, I still can't locate a single example of a cellular transmission confounding our land-lined eavesdroppers. Not a hint of an example. Not a suggestion of an outline of an instance. Meanwhile, McConnel notes:

FISA was created to guard against domestic government abuse and to protect privacy while allowing for appropriate foreign intelligence collection.

Yes. And?

(Sweet Little) Lies

Liz Garrigan, bref: "He is Fred Dalton Thompson, and while he's no admiral, he has played one in the movies."

You know, I've played a Templar in an art film, but no one's handed me a map to the true cross and the cup of Christ. I've played a woman at a drag ball, and I've still got no particular insights into the nature of birth and motherhood. The last time we elected an actor to the White House, his gasket quickly blew from the pressure and he started confusing life with film. Remember how he told Yitzhak Shamir that he'd been at the liberation of Auschwitz?

Garrigan and the rest of Thompson's pig-roast posse have the basic story line all worked out. She keeps talking about Al Gore, but she really means George W. Bush. The thesis is that Thompson represents precisely the aw-shuckster the country thought it was getting in 2000. He represents the grand American tradition of fucking around at school, and he looks good with certain props. "As Tennessee columnist Frank Cagle once put it, Thompson fit that [red pickup] truck in a way that Michael Dukakis never fit the tank." These aren't commensurable vehicles, but again you get the unvoiced idea: that a man who drives a tank, were he not driving the tank, would be driving a pickup. Ergo, so forth, thus, therefore, because, and why not. The Thompson campaign is basically a cracked syllogism, which is America's preferred form of reason.

"Like voters everywhere," Garrigan begins, and the tone of breezy discomfort with anything resembling an original thought does not abate over the next thousand words. "Tennesseans want our politicians to be part professor, part John Wayne." Smart, but phony, in other words. John Wayne was not, in fact a cowboy; did not, in fact, like horses; never once, in fact, killed an Indian. This is why I couldn't really join the gales of nervous laughter when the rest of the Republican field--save my main dude Ron Paul--revealed themselves, their supporters, and their media interlocutors to be irredeemably confused about the distinctions between fiction and reality, a confusion reified in the grizzled form of Keifer Sutherland, who, while he's no torturer, has played one on TV. To be fair, there are worse models for a President that a man who occupies the office like a costume, but that type gets quickly used to the uniform, and soon starts to believe that his role is him.