Nec lethaea valet Theseus abrumpere caro vincula Pirithoo

You know, I was going to write in some detail about the inconsistency and incoherence of David Sanger's positions as articulated in this painful interview with Terry Gross, how within a space of minutes he goes from claiming that the virtue of the Times reporting on the leaked diplomatic cables is its striving for their "responsible" release to claiming that as a "journalist" he entirely lacks "political motivation, or how he says that if the Times had not published it in redacted form, someone else would have published it unredacted, and then the Times would not have been able to determine what to redact, and so on and so forth. And I was going to write about the gaudy preening of this self-declared journalist who, like so many of his professional peers, sees fit to look down his nose and dismiss the man who, oh, by the way, provided all of the material on which David Sanger is now reporting, who undertook at great personal risk all of the fundamental legwork necessary to the endeavor of journalism, only to have Sanger and those like him deride that work, and moreover, to have them take on the mantle of that work, a switcheroo as crazed as a student writing a paper on Housman and claiming, upon getting back his B, that he is, in fact, and personally, Horace. I'll leave all that to Glenn Greenwald. I was going to point out that David Sanger's self-righteous claim that the Times went to the extraordinary step of going to the government with a few hundred cables to do the--here is the word again--responsible thing and get additional help redacting sensitive names and places is something that Julian Assange and wikileaks did with all 250,000, only to be rebuffed and rejected.

Instead, I just want you to draw up the image of the Times staff and editors hauling ass down to Washington to make sure that they were only reporting what the government felt they ought to report.

Appalachia

Off to the family compound for the weekend. I leave you with this lovely aphorism, courtesy of Charles Krauthammer:

The six German saboteurs referred to in my last column were not shot. They were electrocuted.

The Other Team

My Pens look great. Also, they are playing exceptionally well. Sidney Crosby is one of the great athletes of this generation in any sport, just an astonishing, beautifully virtuosic player of a fast, brutal game. The fact that he does not appear to have a predilection for rape washed down with Jagerbombs is the gild on the lily, although, I have to admit, if I was gonna let someone slip it through the five-hole, it'd be Kris Letang.

Apologia pro mainstream media

A death-bed has scarcely a history; it is a tedious decline, with seasons of rallying and seasons of falling back; and since the end is foreseen, or what is called a matter of time, it has little interest for the reader, especially if he has a kind heart.

Jamelle Bouie at The American Prospect is not pleased with the Times sucking up to Mike Bloomberg (via this). Naturally, he is offended.

Not to repeat myself too much, but this "centrist" hackery is little more than a thinly veiled contempt for democracy.

He goes on to knock "Beltway chatterers" and to wonder how an independent Bloomberg presidency would "pass legislation," an unintentionally if accurately scatological phrasing.

It calls to mind any number of Progressive/Liberal screeds against David Broder et al., in which it is always presumed that these mainstream media types who long for a bipartisan, or nonpartisan, daddy have had their brains rotted out by staring too long into the bright morning star of official power. They don't know what they're talking about! The Republicans are irrational, will never compromise! Legitimate disagreement! Factionalism as the rootstock of democracy! Et cetera!

Now the public media is maintained at the periphery of real power, not at its heart. Obviously you can't tell a bunch of loudmouthed Blitzers what is really going on; they are too vain and too naturally locquacious to keep a goddamn secret; they will blab that shit all over town. (You can by the way ignore any protestations to the opposite; for example, about the propriety of the wikileaks leaks. That's just professional jealousy and backbiting. Geraldo revealed troop positions on Fox News. If some disgruntled state dept. employee leaked that shit to Margaret Carlson, she'd be on your teevee five minutes later to reveal the "dramatic revelations.") Mainstream journalists are given just enough access and just enough information to keep them manipulable and, in turn, to manipulate public sentiment. And yet--this is the important point--the child at the door still hears some of what goes on in the bedroom, even if it mostly just bewilders and confuses him.

What reporters correctly perceive is that behind the veil of partisan skirmishing, there is a permanent ruling class, an oligarchic set of institutions with a common, governing viewpoint. And that is not to say that every individual in government and finance and so on operates in lock step or that there are never palace intrigues, nor even that factionalism doesn't to some extent exist. It is, however, to say that in the privacy of their own social class, these people are peers with a shared outlook. Media types, who have some access to this world, see this, and so they wonder: why do they fight? Powerful Democrats and powerful Republicans actually do seem to David Broder and Richard Cohen to agree in principle on many things. It is David Broder, not Jamelle Bouie or Duncan Black or the permanently disabled empathophiles at Shakespeare's Sister or the stable of Nation bloggers, who sees and understands more clearly. Of course, the "bipartisan" government that Beltway gossips pine for already exists.

The actual rulers of this country understand the value of apparently intractible partisan battling. It distracts from what they are actually doing, or, when what they're doing becomes so patently obvious that even Digby's Hullabaloo can figure it out, it allows blame to fall on some or other disposable elected party. Washington is full of dim-bulb Senators and freshman House reps to keep this sort of thing going, and the media are obliged to report and credit it, even though, on occasion, their befuddlement breaks through as they wonder why the lords can't just dispense with the pretense of disagreement and embrace their obvious noblesse.

Tony Pin Kushner

"And the LGBT community, what are they, we, looking for?" Kushner continues. "Yes, we’ve been asked to wait a very long time, asked to eat oceans of shit by the Democratic Party; we’ve been 75 percent loyal for decades without a wobble and without a whole lot of help from these people. And it’s important that somebody keeps screaming; the trick is how do you scream, and who do you scream to? If we’re dissatisfied with these Democrats, let’s get better ones instead of fantasies about mass uprisings that are going to resemble the October Revolution. Yes, it might sometimes feel good to throw the newspaper across the room. There’s much criticism of Obama that’s legitimate. He backs down on things, he waffles, like on the mosque, and you wince. And I consider his decision to appeal the Federal court ruling abolishing DADT to be unethical, tremendously destructive, and potentially politically catastrophic. But is Obama really supposed to say, as the first African-American president, that same-sex marriage is his first priority? Clearly he believes in it; he’s a constitutional scholar. It’s not conceivable to me that he believes that state-sponsored marriage should be unavailable to same-sex couples, even if he has religious scruples."

-The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Himself, New York Magazine

The penultimate and ultimate sentence in this excerpted quotation betray such shocking political naïveté, such self-willed credulousness, such an astonishing lack of perspicacity, and such lousy insight into the psychology of political leadership that I actually paused when I first read it. Did he really say that?

The idea that Barack Obama either believes or does not believe in same-sex marraige, let alone the notion that he "clearly" believes in it (clearly . . . how?) is perfectly indicative that Tony Kushner, for all his evident learning and admirable erudition, for all the sweep of his intellectual grasp, for all his intricate knoweldge of modern Western history, is upon consideration a deeply ignorant man, a person for whom the susurrus of beautiful "theory" is an irresistable lullaby. He's asleep at the library desk. Outside the window, the world turns.

Kushner goes on to say that Barack Obama concealed or de-emphasized certain principles in order to get elected, which in its partially correct analysis is all the more wrong. The basic premise is incorrect. It presumes a preexisting principle to conceal. Barack Obama doesn't believe in gay marriage. He doesn't care about it one way or another, except insofar as splitting the difference on the issue signals to various slices of the "coalition of constituencies that brought [him] to the White House" that he secretly believes whatever it is that they themselves believe. If you are Kushner, you can believe that this purported "constitutional scholar"--pray tell, where is the written evidence of this scholarship?--believes deeply in something that he must conceal in order to appeal to more socially traditional elements of his party. If you belong to those elements, you can give greater credence instead to those "religious scruples", or whatever, that Kushner, believing Obama to be like-me, dismisses outright. Of course religious scruples do not trump constitutional principles. Of course secular legalism doesn't trump moral conviction. Everyone gets to pretend like they win! In the meantime, one man has actually won what he wanted: a presidential election. The rest of you suckers can suck it.

Just a few paragraphs earlier, Kushner was betraying an even more inexcusably naive attitude as he mentioned the American liberal attitude toward labor:

The fate of the actual first black president has been on Kushner’s mind as he takes stabs at rewriting [The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide], though the original was inspired, in part, by the Broadway stagehands’ strike of 2007. "I thought all us liberal-shmiberals would be out on the line with them," he says, "but instead it was: 'They’re ruining the theater with their featherbedding.' It was stunning to me, because isn’t the idea of labor unions that you get working-class people to live in nice houses and send their kids to college? It’s great that they’re making $100,000 a year, why the fuck shouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t they have an iPod?"

Once again, this man is supposed to be the most penetrating political artist in America, and yet somehow he's not noticed the fifty-year alienation of America's rump labor movement from its ostensible labor party, the Democrats? I do understand that his observation is being made toungue slightly in cheek, but the core of his surprise is real, even though everyone knows that, of course, stagehands don't deserve iPods and 100K wages. I mean, it's not like they went to college. A person should have to work for his salary, not simply work for it. What's offensive in this gentle scolding is that it seems so oblivious to the actual nature of American liberalism, in particular liberalism as represented by the Democratic Party. Contempt for workers isn't symptomatic of lefist principles gone lax in an era of material prosperity; it is a principle, one might even say the principle, of the Democrats, whatever their quadrennial appeals to the management lackeys running the AFL-CIO may be. This is perfectly plain, "clear" if you will, to anyone who pays attention. But Tony Kushner is not paying attention.

To admit to my own naïveté: I find Kushner's bland political attitudes dispiriting. (Compare this mild-mannered apologia for Obama to mad Harold Pinter calling for Tony Blair to hang.) His defense of Obama's militarism is that he "inhereited" two wars. His defense of Obama's wealth-coddling is that he "inherited" a "collapsing global economy." These are the sorts of defenses that you'd expect in the hack pages of The Nation. Oh . . . oh. What? Tony writes for The Nation? He's on its editorial board?

Nevermind.

Yglesias vs. Yglesias: Hamster Cage Match

If you have no idea what your intelligence services are doing, and if politicians know they can engage in illegal activities by working through the cloak of secrecy that hangs over intelligence operations, then you have a recipe for law-breaking, incompetence, and corruption, not awesome intelligence success.

-Matthew Yglesias, April 26, 2009

And under Barack Obama we’re basically looking at the things the permanent national security state wants looked into. An alternative investigation might focus not on who leaked classified video of a U.S. military operations, but on the question of why that sort of video should be classified. Certainly I can see why the Army might have preferred to keep it under wraps—in the eyes of many it reflected poorly on their conduct—but it hardly contained operational military secrets. In general, we expect things undertaken by America’s public servants in America’s name on America’s dime to be matters of public record.

Matthew Yglesias, June 7, 2010

That’s not a military secret that puts people’s lives at risk. It’s not a scandalous secret that needs to be covered up, either. It’s just a small data point that gives us some greater understanding of Afghan society but that’s being kept secret out of an obsessive and ultimately counterproductive obsession with controlling the flow of information.

-Matthew Yglesias, July 26, 2010

There’s the rub. I have mixed feelings about a lot of different aspects of this, but there are two key points. One is that the leaker here (presumably Bradley Manning, but that’s not yet been proven in a court of law) has broken the law and needs to be punished.

Matthew Yglesias, December 7, 2010

As both Ethan and Montag quickly point out to odious, totalitarian, albino squirrel, Matty Woodchuck, Bradley Manning, having been neither tried nor convicted, does not "need" to be punished, and yet is being punished, indeed, tortured. Ethan wonders that even someone with the "twisted, authoritarian point of view required to be an establishment liberal" isn't more troubled by this fact, but one suspects Yglesias thinks Bradley Manning, if he were in fact the leaker, should've written his Congressman.

Dear My The People's Representative,

It has come to my attention that the United States is destroying the world in an orgy of late imperial violence.

Also, Mrs. Brown's sycamore continues to drop unmanageable amounts of bark on my mother's yard, and the local zoning board of adjustment has not responded satisfactorily.

Your attention to these matters is greatly appreciated.

Your constituent,
Pfc. Bradley Manning

I mean, what kind of moron spends the better part of a year saying that not only is the government traducing all the basic principles of a consenting, informed citizenry as the fundament of representative government, but also that it is actively working against its own internal, organizational, institutional interest by over-compartmentalizing information in a game of bureaucratic territorialism, only to conclude in the end that one figure who allegedly, allegedly, allegedly participated in cracking open ever-so-slightly this misguided, undemocratic, counterproductive, inefficient, morally dubious, ethically suspect, poorly conceived, improperly overseen, badly practiced, no good, very bad culture of supreme secrecy oughta be tossed in the clink, key thrown away, justice served. He broke the law! Bad!

This is the moral universe of a teat-sucking sycophant, but what makes it worse, what makes it all the more odious and reprehensible, is that it is plainly not a matter of actual conviction for Yglesias to argue that Manning must be tortured; he actually does not care about the matter at all. He cares only about maintaining his career-making bona fides, and he would say anything to promote a reputation as a reasonable person: the law is the law, one must work through proper channels, etc. etc. I wonder what it feels like to be hollow in the middle. I suspect it keeps a man hungry.

These Kids Today, with Their Youspace and Mybook

Christian Caryl is the Washington Chief Editor for CIA shell company, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, so it should come as no surprise that he finds that wikileaks lacks "an adequate reason for exposing official secrets", by which obviously he means that wikileaks has not sought to make a mock moral case for its document dump somehow acting to the betterment of the United States. Bear this in mind. It is the fundamental, underlying principle of his entire essay.

One of the truest truisms of the craft of writing is that if your entire essay can be summarized as "no," then it is probably not worth writing.

One is justified in asking: Will deaths occur? We do not know, and we may not hear about them if they do. But damage of various kinds is sure to result.

Damage of various kinds? That's milquetoast even by the standards of a government stooge. Will the moon fall into the Pacific Ocean, causing the extinction of all life on earth? We do not know, and we may be dead before it happens. He makes a bizarre and otiose claim that wikileaks front man Julian Assange is incapable of responding to the charges that opened secrets will proximately cause human deaths, and then he prints Assange's response to precisely those charges:

(For his part, Assange seems remarkably unable to discuss these very real dangers; in the Time interview he claims that “this sort of nonsense about lives being put into jeopardy” is simply an excuse.)

So, he is "unable to discuss these very real dangers" because he dismisses the notion that they are very real. He says the accusation isn't creditable, and the accuser mumbles that he isn't being specific.

And then we move on to territory so familiar, so worn, so rife with cliché that I am surprised even the fuddy New York Review of Books would print it, even on a blog.

One of the most obvious is that WikiLeaks is posting these raw documents on the Web, the most permissive information medium we have yet to invent. As a result we are now experiencing yet another jump from the ploddingly analog to the explosively digital. Just as the concept of “privacy” fades into obscurity when sixteen-year-olds can present their innermost thoughts to an audience of billions, so, too, does the Internet distribution of official secrets change the rules of the game.

Oh, man, paging Tom Friedman: someone has stolen your patented formula. The rules of what game? The ability of teenagers to embarrass themselves in front of a modestly larger audience than their own high school (but billions? Guurrrrll) is comparable to "the distribution of official secrets" how, exactly? What is the object and what is the vehicle in this bizarre metaphor. Is the world's preeminent military hegemon the oversharing sixteen-year-old, or is Daddy's little girl nuclear tipped, if you know whaddahmean? It's impossible to take this kind of writing as anything but a joke, because it labors so thoroughly to maintain a pretense that some delicate moral line is being crossed, that the operation of empires is fraught as the sexual reputation of an adolescent girl. That is plainly preposterous. Even if you grant the premise that wikileaks is destructive, heedless, and incoherent, it remains an absurd and offensive comparison.

Caryl, like pretty much every other American, um, journalist, has got the ethical onus exactly backwards.

The Internet has brought countless benefits to mankind, but, as we see now, it also creates incalculable potential for mischief: it amplifies the threats of schoolyard bullies, empowers terrorists and fringe groups, and opens up huge new spaces to technologically savvy criminals. Now that data can be shared, linked, and exploited with near-instantaneous ease, the risks entailed by the publication of information mushroom out of all recognition; there is simply no way that any editor, however well-meaning, can make an informed judgment about the potential repercussions entailed by the release of vast amounts of confidential data of this sort. But this is where we are, and I wonder whether preaching restraint can have much effect. The technology has outpaced the ethics, and I wonder whether the ethics can ever catch up again.

Oh, yes, yes. On the other hand, the Internet has not yet, to my knowledge, killed a few hundred thousand Muslims, deposed a couple of governments in order to establish expatriate kleptocracies, and launched secret wars throughout the gulf and East Africa. Any effort in contravention of the government that engages in such acts is inherently more ethical than that government and its acts. And notice too that embedded in the argument against document-dumping is an argument against secret-sharing of any kind. It's right there in plain sight. "There is simply no way that any editor, however well-meaning . . ." Since we cannot determine whether what the government keeps secret is good or bad (for the government) due to the sheer volume of additional secrets to which we are not yet privy, we should therefore remain silent, knowing not whereof we speak.

Annals of Comparative Constructs

Just as Abraham Lincoln had to lead the nation from slavery and Franklin Roosevelt from the Depression, this president must lead the nation from the calamitous failures of three decades of conservative dominance.

-Katarina maxima Noodle

That's one hell of a just as.

Hot Meat Injection

Watching Ross Douthat discover that the practical mores of the underclass are, well, practical, is as amusing as a twelve-car pile-up and just as messy. They must be seriously easing off the core requirements at Harvard, since the easy-spreading legs and loosey-goosey ways of the peasantry are as native to the English stage comedy as puns and breeches. Libertinage and moral rectitude are inventions of the aristocracy. The common people have always made do, and made the best, of what was available--to their credit, by the way. To paraphrase the youth of our day: moral philosophy is gay.

I don't have to tell you that Douthat misses the obvious implication of all this, which is not that the voices of the un-college'd crowd are under-amplified in the debating society of the so-called culture wars, but that a majority of Americans are non-participants in the great, ongoing farce that Douthat et al. imagine to be the national conversation, in other words, democracy. If marriage as an economic institution is disappearing--and it is--among the used-to-be-working class, then that is because it serves Douthat's class; whereas, in the industrial economy, married, single-earner households served a necessary and stabilizing purpose within the workforce, Money now views stability and mutual support within the lower orders as dangerous, not in the least because the bonds of family and community are the first steps to, whisper it softly, organization. Douthat laments the passing of the Catholic Church among the "ethnic working classs". He obviously fails to mention its corollary: the labor movement.