Serfs

Jonathan Rauch shambles through the familiar obstacle course of the archetypal "I was wrong about Iraq" mea kinda culpa before revealing himself at last to be one more deranged Platonist:

I do not regret giving the president authority; I regret giving this president authority. I am sorry. I made a mistake five years ago. But not about the vote. About the leader.

How I love the realm of pure fucking forms. Gawd, how I fucking love it!

Those of us tethered to the material world, alas, must operate by different standards. One notes in the first place that replacing one definite article with another--even when you italicize it!--does not in fact change the meaning of the sentence. Presidents. The thing about them is that we only have one at any given time. The President, this President. Whatever, dude.

It's worth considering how Johnny went astray:

As I came to the 2002-2003 Iraq debate, I was determined not to make the same mistake twice. Another Bush was president, and the younger one looked as decisive as his father had once seemed dotty. This, after all, was the George W. Bush who had impressively rallied the nation and the world after September 11.

His foreign-policy team looked easily the equal of his father's, or anybody's. Vice President Cheney was the wise man of Washington and the elder Bush's successful Defense secretary. Secretary of State Colin Powell was the magisterial architect of the Gulf War. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was the man whose plan had worked like a charm in Afghanistan. If Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, was not the equal of her 1990 predecessor, Brent Scowcroft, she was no lightweight. Surely if any war Cabinet could inspire confidence, this was it.

Wrong again. Zero for two.

George W. Bush had more than his share of bad luck in Iraq. He bet that Saddam would have an active nuclear or at least biological-weapons program; that Iraq's social and physical infrastructure would be functional; that the war would be short. None of those bets was crazy, but he lost all three.

More useless than a Democrat? How about a professional writer? With no particular experience in the actual hierarchies of ordinary human institutions, they see "decisiveness" as a concrete characteristic, a nominalized adjective that has a discrete meaning. Those of us who operate in the seamier world of the, ahem, free market recognize such qualities as who-moved-my-cheese euphemisms for "that jackass district manager who has the loud cell phone conversations that we all suspect might be fake." "Judicious" is a compliment. "Decisive" is a curse.

Likewise "impressively rallied." I once went to high school, and have attended a pep rally or two in my time. Alas, no matter how high the cheerleaders kicked and how loudly we yelled, our poor Mustangs lost year after year after year.

At last, there is nothing less wise than a "wise old man of Washington." The prepositional phrase gives it away, as such phrases often do. Colin Powell was hardly the sole architect of the first Gulf War, and his personal failings--especially the depths of his obsequiousness and cowardice--are now manifest to everyone. Rumsfeld was always quite clearly insane to anyone who chose to listen to the words as they left his ever-wagging mouth, and Condoleeze Rice was a mediocre scholar whose field of study was a defunct empire. Hot damn.

As for the bets. Reader, they were all crazy.

If you read Rauch's piece, what you realize is that all these mistakes and false premises weren't the sort of thing that a person arrives at independently. Raunch might as well have said, "In the run-up to war, I validated the opinions of the Post editorial board to myself, and thus satisfied due dilligence." Conclusions about the "impressive" cabinet and the President's rallying power are not things that real human beings arrive at indepently. Catechisms aren't conclusions, kids.

Rauch writes for Reason and they're all purportedly libertarians, or something of the sort, so the idea that a war to remake an entire society from the ground up through central planning would--you'd think--strike 'em as a bit of a questionable enterprise. The idea that this Soviet project could be redeemed by a better Leader is even whackier. Scratch a Republican, I once said, and find an onanist. Scratch a Reasonoid libertarian, evidently, and find an apparatchik

You Say You Want a Revolution

I have never been in a coffeehouse that displayed posters of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher.

-Michael Gerson, who's all like, "Honey, look! They call a tall, not a small!"

Dear Gerson,

Best,
IOZ

The Names

Democratic Senators huffed and puffed at Michael Mukasey. Oh, they were "disappointed." Oh, they were "troubled." Oh, how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have an ungrateful nominee. Needless to say, they'll confirm him. The future is plain, you see; que sera, sera. For those who care, here's all you need know:

Mr. Mukasey said the president’s authority as commander in chief might allow him to supersede laws written by Congress.

As you know, the President isn't the commander in chief. He's the commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states. The title's meaningless without the prepositional modifier. Now since the oversight, regulation, and maintenance of a military in these United States falls solely under the purview of the Congress under the legislature's Article I, section 8 powers, the President--a coequal of the Congress ordinarily--in his capacity as commander in chief of the military wouldn't have more expansive powers, but powers which are more strictly circumscribed in order to preserve the military's subservience to civilian government and the Congress' constitutional prerogative . . .

Hooo-boy! Had you going. What a bunch of suckers you are. Listen, dudes: the Constitution? How many divisions has it got?

I make fun of Glenn Greenwald, for instance, for being tedious and tightly wound. Well wouldn't you be? Friends, you must shred the assumption that the Republic is "not dead, only dreaming." The heart has stopped. The coin is on the tongue. Charon's poled the barge. Etc. A new reality is better than a new movie, as Amiri Baraka wrote. Listen. America isn't a constitutional republic. Repeat it. You'll feel better. Or, you'll feel worse at first, but then you'll feel better. You have to open yourself up to the notion that there are other kinds of freedom than living under a certain kind of benevolent government, which is what you've been taught since kindergarten. Liberty isn't a symptom of your State. It's surprising what happens to your mind when you start calling things by their real names.

Article I, section 8

The Democratic Congress has granted retroactive immunity to the telecom firms that colluded in violating the privacy of America citizens. I'm sure that Glenn Greenwald has something very tedious to say about it, if you're interested in the details.

Let's return again to our old favorite: There are no laws in Oceania. It's clear that retroactively immunizing entities that violated extant statutory laws is an abrogation of the spirit--at least--of the Constitutional proscription on ex post facto legislation. Hell, the legislative immunization of whole class of entities and the subsequent voiding of civil and criminal suits arrising out of those statutory violations comes awfully close to a Bill of Attainder. These Constitutional proscriptions rank near to habeas corpus (see Arthur Silber) as the central tenets of liberal government. If habeas is the fountainhead of all other liberties in a governed society, the proscription on using after-the-fact legislation to punish or reward people for service or offense to the government is their bulwark.

Is there anything more useless than a Democrat? I'm going to get high. Peace y'all.

No finance, no romance, that's how she told me goodbye

In an interview, Lagarde says that more than two decades at a U.S. corporation taught her: “The more hours you worked, the more hours you billed, the more profit you could generate for yourself and your firm. That was the mantra.”

-Roger Cohen in the Times

You know, the French have got their problems. You won't hear me say otherwise, although I've got to tell you that the last time I was in France I missed the breadlines and beggars. But look-a-here folks, billing practices at corporate law firms aren't . . . well. Gosh. Christ. I hardly know what to say. I once got billed fifty bucks for a five minute conversation with an attorney's fucking secretary. Profit for the firm? Sure. A model for modernizing a national economy? Um.

From the Comments

Dear IOZ,
Though sometimes fun, your writing shows
a penchant for the grandiose:
syllabically it's varicose,
grammatically it's too verbose,
politically it never goes
beyond an unconvincing pose.
Empirically your writing blows.
Your standard tone is bellicose.
You want a crop but will not hoe.
You say you'll leave but never go.
You only care for stylish prose:
how haughtily you hold your nose
and scoff at we who smartly chose
to rise from our recumbant pose
and gather online with our woes
wherefrom and henceforth we propose
investments in politicos
who'll bask in the cathodic glow
of the diarists of DailyKos
from whom such information flows
as why no person may oppose
a Democrat while in the throes
of this election, which you know
is more important than all those
which this quadrennial did appose
and from whose seeds will shortly grow
a salutary ratio
of rich to poor and high to low
and good to bad and yes to no
and war to peace and sun to snow
and up to down and melt to froze--
from hearts to minds and head to toes
upon this world we shall impose
some Democrat who doesn't blow
quite so much as dubya blows
and then at last we'll find repose
until the next cycle comes and goes,
and comes and goes
and comes and goes
and comes and goes.

You'll Have to Put on this Leather Time Mask

Conservative bright lights are now zipping through time to the wintry years of the late 40s, retroactively proposing that the United States invade the Soviet Union, kill its leaders, and convert them to Christianity. I can see no wisdom in this. As General Buck Turgidson memorably told us, "We all know how much guts your average Ruskie's got. I mean, look how many the-the-them Nazis killed off, and they still wouldn't quit!" The fact that jingoes have been reduced to arguing anachronism warms the cold cockles of my tiny heart. Should the US have bombed the Achaemenid Empire, thus preventing the devestating Greco-Persian wars? Yes? No? Let us presume that we did invade Russia in 1947 and done what no one has done since the Khans--succeeded. What then? What the hell would we have done with it? Found some remaining half-wit, inbred Romanov to take over? Yeah. That would've worked to our advantage.

Jimmy Carter's War Against the Jews

No. Really.

Tears of a Clown

Pascal's wager goes Mooooo!

Love Is All That I'm Gonna Give to You

As you know, dear Readers, I make a diligent effort to keep abreast of the latest insanity from the "Look over there, a sick baby holding a dying puppy!" faction of the War Party. This taxing project involves several agonizing daily minutes on DailyKos, a site dedicated to the proposition that one ah dese days, oh boy, one ah dese days, you'll be sorry, you'll see. The people who frequent the site see politics as a sort of psychotherapy, and the emotional effluvia that runs through the postings and diaries is one of the most lachrymose spectacles imaginable, with all sorts of ostensible adults blubbering for someone to return them to the bliss of the Clinton years, almost universally described in terms otherwise reserved for the unique experience of the womb--warm, nourishing, safe, and with the screams of mommy's victims muted by walls of flesh. The metaphor unfortunately breaks down, but you get the picture. The frequenters of DailyKos have long since abandoned any conception of politics as merely instrumental. Into the tacky discipline they pour hopes, dreams, aspirations, and a lot of lousy personality. It's never difficult to find some sentimental panegyric to those wise, noble creatures, the Democratic Presidential Candidates. Consider something called the NewHampster, which writes:

I love Joe, Bill, John, Dennis, Chris, Mike, Barack and Hillary

[...]

Joe Biden for his honest heart felt passion.

Bill Richardson for his wealth of experience in foreign policy, managing government and the fact the he's a Sox fan.

John Edwards for his life long work for the little guys.

Dennis Kucinich for his bluntness, honesty and principles.

Chris Dodd for his stance on national service.

Mike Gravel because you have to love the crazy guy.

Barack Obama for his beautiful oration, his organizing skills and his belief in Democratic principles.

Hillary Clinton because she will always stand by me and never, ever stop fighting the wrong wing conspirators.

Why do you love them all?

A Capetian would weep at such praise. Aside from the unremarkable inconsistency (how can you love Mike Gravel and Hillary Clinton simultaneously, for instance, unless you don't listen to what either one says. Ah, you don't. Ne'ermind) there's the goofy Happy-Meal marketing-copy feel of it. Shouldn't that last line be "Collect them all!"

We could note the merits of each argument, but what would you say? That Obama is a terrible orator prone to the windiest gasbaggery since William Jennings Bryan at least, full of the sort of ecclesiastical nonsense that you could just as easily get on AM radio at four in the morning, Martin Luther King Jr. as rewritten by a bad white screenwriter and spoken by a pompous black guy? That Hillary Clinton will not "always stand by" anyone or anything? That she's not fucking Ghandi, for chrissakes, nor even a Staples Sister? That Mike Gravel is not actually crazy? That national service sounds good until--oops!--the next war comes around and highway cleanup turns into conscription? That there is no such animal, vegetable, or mineral as "the little guy?"

Even more than anyone that you adore.

The Glory Hole of the Coming of the Lord

I have been reading Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream, in which she asks, among other things, how and why it came to pass that women were ejected from the national discourses after 9/11/01 and how and why it came to pass that we fell in love with a cast of comic book strophes, imagined action figures, and an all-male bunch of created heroes. I think this is the wrong question. If Faludi had simply admitted to herself that what we actually fell in love with was an early-aughts version of the Village People, complete with uniforms, then she would understand that America's whininess, its obsession with image, and its casual misogyny all spring from the same source. America is, like, totally gay.

Hottentot to Trot

What are they talking about at the National Review? Well, David Klinghoffer, self-described as an orthodox Jew, defends Ann Coulter's evident opinion that Jews must be "perfected" through conversion. To that controversy, I have nothing but shrugs. My dad can beat up your dad. Etc. But Klinghoffer does make an interesting observation. And yes, Virginia, by interesting, we mean totally crazy and entirely wrong:

The choice is between tribe and truth. In the tribal version of Jewishness, what Ann Coulter proposed — converting to Christianity — amounts to a gentle genocide, the end of the tribe. In the truth version, her view is inoffensive because we regard her in much the same way she regards us. In other words, we think that her perfection lies in recognizing the truth of our religion, in the same way that she sees our perfection in accepting the truth of her religion.

Um. Emphasis mine. You have perhaps noted that Jews, tribeful or truthful or what have you, are rather less numerous than the legion Christians and Muslims, the other so-called Abrahamic faiths. Even Sex and the City fans know that by tradition, rabbis are supposed to try three times to dissuade potential converts. It is, after all, an old Talmudic principle that the righteous of all nations have a place in the kingdom of our buddy Hashem.

How might I put it, as a Jew. Goyim! We don't want you to join us. We just want you to leave us alone.

Poo-Tee-Weet: An Update

Dear Glenn Greenwald,

"Verizon and AT&T said it was not their role to second-guess the legitimacy of emergency government requests."

Shhhhhhhh,
IOZ

Poo-tee-weet

Glenn Greenwald goes on . . . and on and on and on today in his continuing efforts to bore me out of caring about the question of corporate collusion in government surveillance of citizens. He writes at some length about the cooperative efforts between telecoms and government agencies along these lines. Ike had a phrase for this sort of thing. I won't remind you. Greenwald:

There simply is no separation between these corporations and the military and intelligence agencies of the Federal Government. They meet and plan and agree so frequently, and at such high levels, that they practically form a consortium.

You'll hear no argument out of us. But then Greenwald, as is his wont, pivots to toss off a parenthetical observation that, were it true, would entirely obviate everything he's just written:

There is obviously nothing inherently wrong with corporations competing for lucrative government contracts.

Obviously. Reader, I ask you why this government or any should have enough lucre to make those contracts worth the competition.

Greenwald doesn't claim to be a liberal or progressive. He sometimes identifies with a vague libertarianism (as if there's any other kind!), but most often seems to see himself as a disaffected conservative, pushed aside in part because of his sexuality and in larger part because of the abandonment of conservativisms rhetorical--if not actual--committment to constitutional government, the old Republic, and so forth. I'm inclined to agree with this latter self-characterization. Greenwald is basically a defender of the status quo ante. The conditions of said status quo never actually obtained, but conservativism in all its forms has always been essentially arcadian, so I won't bore you with further notes on the fantasism at its core. Greenwald isn't exactly naive, but he's taken a very childish, civics-class notion of American public life and government to heart as a sort of temps perdu to be searched out and regained. I'll let the Proust fans comment on the irony of that idea.

Ultimately Greenwald (and I use him as an exemplar of this view; he isn't alone in it, and I don't mean to single him out) evinces a belief that the United States as constituted since roughly the turn of the twentieth century and the dawn of the Progressive Era represents a fine institutional model, and that the horrors, wars, and degredations we currently face result from the corruption of men and institutions by other corrupt, power-hungry, and ideological men. As Menken said the English used to say, I find myself quite unable to associate myself with that thesis.

The idea that a massive government- and military-subsidized corporatist state is eminently corruptible but equally redeemable depends on several fallacies. Consider Greenwald's argument. On the one hand, it's "obviously" fine for corporations to take billions of dollars from the government, sometimes in the form of direct subsidies, but otherwise through the only slightly subtler means of government contracts. On the other hand, corporations are not supposed to do the bidding of the government--to accede, say, to government demands for private records, because of some sort of committment to the principles of the Constitution. It sounds absurd when I write it here, but that is essentially what Greenwald is arguing: that corporations in these instances should act as our bulwarks against government intrusion--out, one presumes, of some kind of moral calculation. I should hardly have to note the foolishness of such a notion. Corporations, despite the legal fiction of their personhood, are not people. The entire idea of the modern corporation is amoral and apersonal. That's why Joseph Nacchio of Qwest was abberational and not normative.

Greenwald:

This behavior--having telecoms secretly turn over to the Federal Government all information about the communications of Americans--is exactly what multiple federal laws were designed to prevent. We criminalized exactly that behavior through the laws we enacted.

And now that it is revealed that the Federal government and many (though not all) telecoms continuously broke those laws--motivated by profit in the case of telecoms and by a desire for unchecked surveillance power in the case of the Bush administration--our political establishment and Congress are working hand-in-hand to prevent any further disclosures of this lawbreaking and to forever prevent any accountability for it. Merely to describe this behavior is to demonstrate its profound corruption and threat to the very concept of an open democratic government operating under the "rule of law."

Let's ask Mr. Eric Blair what he has to say about it.

A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent. His friendships, his relaxations, his behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not only any actual misdemeanour, but any eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected. He has no freedom of choice in any direction whatever. On the other hand his actions are not regulated by law or by any clearly formulated code of behaviour. In Oceania there is no law.

So it goes.

The Two Party System

One of the self-evident absurdities of the various systems of Communist government is and was the idea that the political yearnings of hundreds of millions or even billions of people can find home and expression in a single party whose ideology is both flexible enough to encompass the vagaries of millions of unique minds--for even orthodoxy admits to some degree of individuation, or else becomes the Khemer Rouge, which was hardly a government--yet is defined with sufficient rigidity to remain right in the outlines of its beliefs. In other words, Communism, for all its brutality, for all the millions killed, maimed, transported, deported, tortured, enslaved, reeducated, and disappeared, ultimately betrays itself as a particularly savage farce, a gallows joke. No tent is big enough for a hundred million people to take shelter from the rain.

Fortunately in mature democracies like the United States, such absurdities do not obtain. Here, we have two parties. And they contain multitudes.

Dim Bulb

Judging religion by its instances of fanaticism is like judging a democracy by its crime rate. You lose far more than you gain. In the case of Harris & Co., their stingy and narrow-minded anti-God polemics are perhaps having an unintended effect. Far from "enlightening" our benighted (if sizzling and fluorescent) society, they may well be moving us into a new dark age of heartless utilitarianism.

-Lee Seigel in the LA Times

Dear Lee Seigel,

Sizzling and fluorescent?

Scientifically,
IOZ

The Greatest Victory in Human History

The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq in recent months, leading some generals to advocate a declaration of victory over the group, which the Bush administration has long described as the most lethal U.S. adversary in Iraq.

But as the White House and its military commanders plan the next phase of the war, other officials have cautioned against taking what they see as a premature step that could create strategic and political difficulties for the United States.

- Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung in the Times

Dear Tom and Karen,

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Be seeing you,
IOZ