Enthusiasm Gap

I've done my level best for some months now to stop obsessively following politics in America.  I still think it's important (being that this is the game that determines the shape of the field and the rules of the game we all play by), but I've been trying to concentrate on other things, for the sake of my sanity as well as many other good reasons.

But I still keep my ear to the ground, if for no other reason than that obsessions die slowly, and one thing I keep hearing in the run-up to the midterm elections this November is about the enthusiasm gap between those on the left and those on the right.  The story I keep hearing goes something like this:  the wingnut right is in ascendance, making lots of noise and getting lots of coverage, because their side lost last time and so they've decided it's the End of Days, and as a result they've gone even crazier (or just gotten louder about it).  And since apparently very few of them work they spend a lot of time protesting and driving up Glenn Beck's TV ratings.  They hate Barack Obama and everything he stands for, even when he stands for the same things they do, and they're all really excited to go to the polls and elect like-minded ignorami who believe things that are completely crazy, like that doctor visits should be paid for with chickens, that social security ought to be privatized or abolished, and that tax cuts will solve the budget deficit.

On the flipside you've got the left, who're upset because Obama hasn't completely reversed the world-historical fuckups of the Bush Administration and because the political realities of actually governing (especially when the opposition party doesn't negotiate in good faith or actually want government to work) require compromises that are disappointing to them.  And apparently many of them are so upset that they are considering staying home en masse come November in order to punish the Democrats for not living up to their dreams and making everything better in the two years or so they've had control of the White House and both Houses of Congress.

Now, I have every sympathy for people who find the Democrats maddening. 

Obama's Oval Office Speech

Can be viewed here.

In all, I can't say I was impressed.  For me, this was a lost opportunity, a chance to go big, and ask the American people to rise to the historical occasion in a meaningful way.  Which, frankly, he didn't.  Far as I could tell, his grand call to arms was sort-of kind-of urging the Senate to pass the Climate and Energy bill that passed in the House a few months ago.  Oh, and to pray.

As somebody said in the comment thread at the Washington Monthly (and I'm paraphrasing here), when the President tells the American people to pray, we are well and truly f-cked.

Here's what I would have liked to have seen:

"In this entire year and a half of cleaning up the mess, it's been tough because the folks very responsible for a large portion of this mess decided to stand on the sidelines," Obama declared. "It was as if somebody had driven their car into the ditch and then just watched you as you had to yank it out, and asked you: 'Why didn't you do it faster -- and why do I have that scratch on the fender?' And you want to say: 'Why don't you put your shoulder up against that car and help to push?' That's what we need, is some help."

Why Everyone in the Circular Firing Squad Should Turn Around

There was a lot of delusion among progressives who convinced themselves, in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, that Obama was a strong champion of their values. He wasn’t and isn’t.
That doesn’t mean that there’s no difference between the parties, that everything would have been the same if McCain had won. But progressives are in the process of losing a big chance to change the narrative, and that’s largely because they have a leader who never had any inclination to do so.
-Paul Krugman

For what it's worth, I never thought Barack Obama was anything more than a center of the road politician. I appreciated that he at least told the lies I wanted to hear during the campaign, and it was nice to hear lip service being paid to my beliefs and agenda. But I never expected him to be anything other than what he is, which is a politician. Perhaps smarter and certainly more eloquent than the average politician, but a politician nonetheless.

But whatever he is, it remains the case that a good portion of the electorate that voted for him, his 'base' if you will, was the Progressive Left, many of whom did a little projecting, unfortunately, and came to believe, in the face of plenty of evidence to the contrary, that he shared their values and their policy agenda. And to some extent he might have. Probably not as much as they (or I) might wish, but at very least he recognized many of the obvious problems that thirty years of being a 'center-right nation' have caused, and at least paid lip service to solving them.

Now, after months of bickering and mishandling, one of those solutions, Health Care Reform, which is something that's needed doing for several decades if not a centrury now, is on the brink of getting the foundation laid or failing for another generation. And while it's important in and of itself, it's also important in that it provides a rallying point for Progressives to organize around.

You can bitch and blog all you want, and God knows I do plenty of both myself, but at the end of the day, you gotta get in there and do your duty as a citizen. You gotta write the letters and make the calls and put the pressure on your elected representatives, because if you don't, they'll just listen to and aim to please the people that do, starting with the people that pay for their campaigns. Votes are great, and we all know that nobody gets elected without them, but money comes in a close second, and it certainly concentrates influence more than votes do.

Progressives may not have the leverage we think we deserve, and perhaps we never will, but we have more now than we've had in decades, and it's more important than ever that we use it. For most of the last decade, we could howl and scream all we wanted, but the people in power (i.e. Republicans) weren't going to listen because it wasn't our votes that elected them.

But that's all changed now. Obama and the 111th Congress need us in order to stay in power, which means that, if we act in sufficient numbers and with a modicum of discipline, we can influence the direction of policy more than we could in the recent past. If we can actually get some legislation enacted, like Health Care Reform (imperfect though it is), then it will make life better for people, which will go a long way to convincing them that our ideas are better than the ideas of the people on the other side of the aisle. We're already halfway there, because the folks on the right had the whole damned government for six or eight years and everybody saw how well that went.

But now we own it, at least in the eyes of the public. So that means we have to make it work.

Eyes on the prize, people. It's a long, hard slog, and it'll be filled with disappointment, but if we aren't willing to get in there and make it happen, nobody else is going to.

The Peace Prize

[I]n his 1895 will, Alfred Nobel stipulated that the peace prize should go "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses."
John Dickerson, writing in Slate

So, unless you've been hiding under a rock today, you've probably heard that Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. So far as I can tell, Mr. Obama and the White House staff were as surprised as anybody, and have handled the news in a perfectly reasonable and dignified fashion. This is not a surprise. Barack Obama is a classy guy, and I'd expect no less from him or the people who work for him. Also not surprisingly, the wingnut fringe has exploded in outrage, without even bothering with a moment of graciousness and congratulation to Mr. Obama and these United States. Glenn Beck even went so far as to say that the Prize should be awarded to the Teabaggers and the 9/12 protesters, which is a hoot, but not a surprise, since that guy has absolutely no shame at all and will say or do anything to get attention, much as a recalcitrant two-year-old will say or do anything to get attention, because to a two-year-old, attention is like publicity: there's no such thing as bad.

And before I go any further, let me just say that this a great honor, both for President Obama and for these United States, and that, as an American citizen and a patriot, I cannot help but be proud that such an honor has been bestowed on a serving American President for the first time since Woodrow Wilson received it for helping to set up the League of Nations, the precursor to the UN.

That said, I have real reservations about the award. And before anybody's panties get all bunched up, let me say that my reservations have way way way more to do with the Nobel committee and its decision than they do with Barack Obama, with whom I have my issues but in whom I am still willing to put a little faith.

First and foremost, I think the award is as much a repudiation of the policies and administration of George W. Bush as it is a positive affirmation of Mr. Obama. It may be that I'm too entrenched in following domestic politics to see just how wonderful the rest of the world thinks we are for electing Obama President, but even the Cairo speech hasn't really moved the favorable view of the US numbers in the Middle East, and while I think it was a good and even historically significant step in the right direction (along with the outreach to Iran, the attempt to reset things with the Russians, the scrapping of the Anti-Ballistic Missile installations in Eastern Europe, and the promise to draw down our troop deployment in Iraq), it's just a step, and bromides about the first step being the hardest or getting you halfway aside, there's a long slog ahead if we're going to make any real progress on any of those fronts.

And while I do understand that the Nobel Committee sometimes awards Peace Prizes as a way to encourage future actions (hat tip to Kim S.), I'm not sure they're really helping themselves or their agenda by taking this action, and, more importantly, I think, honestly, that they cheapen the prize by lowering the bar like that. Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but to me the Nobel Peace Prize should be an acknowledgement of actual accomplishments in the realm of world peace, not just steps in the right direction. And while I understand the way forward the Nobel Committee hopes to encourage, and even agree with it, I think that today's announcement is actually going to make it more difficult to continue taking steps in that direction because of the opposition it's going to engender. Yeah, the wingnuts and the Movementarians are already dead set against anything Obama says, does, or stands for, and maybe, in the end, this won't make a difference. It's hard to see how this puts anybody who was still on the fence over the edge, but it seems like the Nobel Committee could have accomplished nearly as much just by putting Obama on the short list and giving the prize to someone more deserving.

Because, really, I don't think Obama yet deserves the Peace Prize. He may someday, and he certainly deserves encouragement for some of the steps he's taken and some of the unwinding he's done of the previous Administration's encroachments on nearly every aspect of the American experiment that is good and righteous and just and true, but he's only been in office for nine months. That's just not enough time to have accomplished Nobel Peace Prize-grade world-saving.

Furthermore, need I remind everyone that Barack Obama is currently presiding over not one but two wars of aggression? Yeah, we might've had to go into Afghanistan to uproot Al Qaeda and kill Osama bin Laden. I was and remain for that. We were attacked, and while we should've seen it coming and stopped it beforehand, it was justified and necessary to go get the motherfuckers what came and got us. But that was 2002. Now it's 2009, and nobody can say what we're doing there, aside from using southern Afghanistan as a base for our rightfully controversial and highly problematic (as well as apparently effective) program of targeted drone-based assassination of Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders in the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas of Pakistan. If that's the point, then maybe I'm willing to get behind that, but for right now we're just there because we're there, and our boys and girls in uniform are getting shot and blown up because of that, and that's not okay. As for Iraq, I recall there being some noise about drawing down forces and ending combat operations, but as far as I know we still have tens of thousand of troops stationed there, with equally murky mission parameters.

And yes, Obama did inherit those conflicts. He didn't start them. But the drone-based assassination program was his idea, floated in one of the Primary debates, as I recall, and picked up by the Bush Administration, who were floundering and in need of some good ideas since all of theirs were horribly misguided at best.

In the end, it may be that Obama will do the right thing regarding the wars he inherited from the Bush Administration. There's even a case to be made that the collateral damage and civilian deaths that are a direct result of the drone attacks in Af-Pak are justified and necessary. But war's war, and it just seems odd to me that a man in the middle of waging two of them would win a prize for peace. Yes, there are lots of hopeful signs, and it's a testament to how far and how fast we fell during the Bush years, both objectively and in the eyes of the world, that even just doing some basic diplomacy and not telling everyone else in the world to go suck it can seem like the dawn of a new day, and I hope that it is. I really do. But this is not kids' soccer. You shouldn't get a trophy just for showing up and trying your best. Trophies should be symbols and acknowledgments of accomplishment and not just effort. The Nobel Peace Prize should be the same.

I'd Say This is About Right

[T]he unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the 'hyper-power' as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it's a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was 'normal history' rather than dark aberration.
Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo

I Wonder How Much Time He Spent Practicing in the Mirror

Barack Obama's amazingly consistent smile from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

(hat tip to John Scalzi @ Whatever)

It's good to know that, in a world full of change, some things stay the same.

Look! Look at the Shiny Ball! Look! It's Shiny!

I was heartened and relieved to read this:

The Justice Department is preparing to impose new limits on the government assertion of the state secrets privilege used to block lawsuits for national security reasons. The practice was a major flashpoint in the debate over the escalation of executive power and secrecy during the Bush administration.

The new policy, which could be announced as early as Wednesday, would require approval by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. if military or espionage agencies wanted to assert the privilege to withhold classified evidence sought in court or to ask a judge to dismiss a lawsuit at its onset.

Until I read a little further, and got to this:

Leading Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have filed bills that would restrict how the privilege could be used. The Obama administration has not taken a position on those bills, but the new policy, which is intended to rein in use of the privilege by erecting greater internal checks and balances against abuse, could blunt momentum in Congress to pass legislation.

And I realized that it's a head fake. One of the things that's been so alarming about the Obama Administration has been their enthusiasm for following in the Bush Administration's footsteps in using the state secrets privilege to keep the press and the citizenry in the dark about not only the policies and clusterfucks they've inherited, but also the policies and clusterfucks they've created. Given Obama's campaign promises involving transparency and open government, promises, I should add, that were instrumental in this writer's early and enthusiastic support for the campaign, it's hard not to be disappointed in how quickly we've gone from brand new day to same old shit.

It's not even that I don't believe that Eric Holder wouldn't or won't do the right thing. It's that in a nation of laws we make rules to fix problems, rules that count no matter who's in charge, and while I believe Eric Holder probably does mostly want to do the right thing, for something as important as when the state can say 'no, sorry, you're not allowed to know that, national security, you know' I don't want to put my trust in the goodness and righteousness of a single man (or those who will come after him). I want to put my trust in a clearly articulated law that spells out when and why and how the government can claim the state secrets privilege, with sunsets, outside enforcement, and clearly articulated consequences for breaking said law, which are not contingent on the character of the enforcing officials.

Cuz that's what the rule of law is all about. And if we learned anything from the Bush Administration's eight years of catastrophic cowboy-ism, it's that if you put your trust in things like character and tradition and settled practice, without clear articulation of laws and limits, then you will eventually and inevitably find yourself dealing with people who don't have character, or respect for tradition and settled practice, and they'll do whatever the fuck they want until they run into those laws and limits, and even that might not stop them.

Which is another reason we need to see high-ranking officials from the Bush Administration on trial for all their various law-breaking. After all, if they didn't do anything wrong, they have nothing to hide. But that's a rant for another day.

Just remember what Louis Brandeis said: Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Let's hope the Obama Administration remembers, and lives up to their campaign promises.


UPDATE
I should add that I do consider this a small step in the right direction. Anything that makes it harder for any government agency to hide anything they're doing behind the state secrets privilege is a good thing, in my book. What concerns me is that by confining the change to administrative policy rather than legislation, the possibility is left open for abuse, so long as Eric Holder or any of his successors can be convinced it's necessary or legitimate.

There's a lot of walking back from a lot of very dangerous moral precipices to be done, thanks to the previous Administration. But even given the sheer quantity of such challeges that we face as a nation and a people, more than baby steps need to be taken back from each and every one of those brinks. Our country and all it's supposed to stand for are at stake.

Newsflash: New Guy Surprisingly Similar to Old Guy

So Obama gets elected and swoops into Washington with a big mandate and now the question for him becomes, how do I make all of my various sponsors happy? If you look at the proposals carefully you can see that the whole policy debate is shaped by this dynamic. What is consistently present throughout the policies favored by the White House is an effort to use tax money to subsidize the existing employer-based private system instead of doing the logical thing and taking the bite — for a bite had to be taken out of someone — out of the pharma and insurance industries.

As an added bonus for all of us, the “reform” will include individual mandates designed to significantly increase the insurance and pharma industry’s customer base. So in the end, what we’re looking at is a pair of handouts to corporate donors: tax subsidies to ease the cost of insurance for employers, and mandates to push more business to the health care industry.

-Matt Taibbi

Here's a fun fact: during the dueling Golden Ages of the '50s and '60s (depending on where you stood on the political/cultural spectrum), and for a few years before and after, the United States of America experienced one of the longest and most sustained periods of prosperity in its (or possibly anyone's) history. Wages rose, year after year. Homeownership became the default setting, even for the lower middle-class. The segment of the population able to attend college and get higher education exploded, and even those without a degree managed to live the middle-class American Dream, thanks to the efforts and sacrifices of labor and community organizers and the (perhaps enforced) largess of the massive companies that employed most people, who typically hired on somewhere and stayed there for life, taken care of by and invested in their workplace, where they were provided not only a living (and generally rising) wage, but benefits like pensions and health insurance. It was a good deal for everyone, lots of mutual back-scratching going on, where if you made the good faith effort to see that your employer thrived, your employer in turn saw to it that you had what you needed, both now and in the future, after you retired.

Then, somewhere around 1973, things changed. Since then, wages have been stagnant, which means that even if you make a little more money every year than you did the last, for the most part wage growth has, at best, just barely kept up with inflation. This means that even if you get paid more money (your cost of living raise), your purchasing power remains the same, because, thanks to the magic of inflation, that money is worth less than it used to be. This is why bankers and people at the Fed and at Treasury are always so on about curbing inflation, because even the rich and powerful with whom they lunch and play golf feel the effects of inflation, and they sure as hell don't want their money to be worth less than it was last year, just the same as you and your socioeconomic peers.

So what happened? Well, for one thing, corporate profits are up some 200% in that time, and executive pay has gone from an average of 42 times average worker pay in 1980 to 344 times average worker pay in 2007 (down from a high of 525 times average worker pay in 2000). But that's not the whole story.

The truth of the matter is, you have been getting those raises. It's just that, instead of getting them in the form of spendable cash, the money goes to your employer-sponsored health care. See, it's not just you who pays more for health care, though the magic of higher premiums and higher deductibles. The cost to employers goes up, too, to the tune of double-digit percentage increases every year. Right now, one out of every six dollars spent in the US is spent on health care. GM went broke thanks to its health-care (and, to a lesser extent, pension) liabilities, to the point where some $1100 of the price of every car they made was already promised, to pay for the ever-more-expensive health care of its active and retired workforce. That's just one example, and it's one of the reasons that health care reform is even possible now, because American industry, stuck offering health insurance by its own historical choices, is finding its ability to compete in a global marketplace hampered by its obligations.

Now, them on the right would tell you that the right thing to do is to back out of the deal and leave those folks high and dry. After all, to them on the right, if a person makes a bad decision, then that person must pay the price, and they will, as a general rule, be glad to stand around and hoot and holler while the punishment is being meted out. They love them some punishment on the right, so long as it's individual people (and poor ones, at that) being punished. Serves 'em right, they say, between cackles and hand-rubbing. But let it be a large corporate entity that makes said mistake, and consequences simply cannot be allowed to happen, for them on the right, whether they know it or not, are the tools of said corporate entities, and most of them don't even get compensated. They're like suicide bombers: they'll pay the price so their masters can make a buck (or a point).

But it's not GM's fault that health care keeps getting more expensive. It is, for the most part, the insurance companies' fault. The fee-for-service model, and the lack of competition, cause perverse incentives to be built into the system, making it more profitable for doctors to order unnecessary tests and medications, because that's how they make money. Not to mention the whole dropping you when you get sick because you had acne/toenail fungus/a headache once thing. There's a whole article in the September 2009 issue of the Atlantic that deals with some of this stuff, as well as make some recommendations as to what to do about it. I don't agree with all of the man's conclusions, but it's provocative stuff.

Health care reform is necessary. Of that there's no doubt. That we will not get the radical reworking we so desperately need is also not in doubt. What scares me is that we are likely to end up with a mushy middle-ground 'compromise' like the one in the Taibbi quote above that is the worst of both worlds. Yes, we'll probably get specific rule changes that, say, make it harder for insurance companies to deny people with 'pre-existing' conditions treatment or coverage, and they might even force health care into the information age, so that records are kept electronically, which with a few other common-sense, tinkering-around-the-edges-reforms could save up to $2 trillion (that's $2,000,000,000,000) over the next ten years. But if things go as they seem like they might, what we'll end up with is the individual mandate, in which you will be fined for not having health insurance, but without, say, a public option, which would be a (gasp! pearl-clutch! faint) government-run health care provider (like-gasp!-Medicare, or the VA) that would, ideally, be able to engage in economies of scale and common-sense cost-saving measures in order to deliver a better product at a lower price, which would provide a benchmark against which private insurance could (and should be made, imho) to compete. So the insurance companies are rewarded for their years of fuckery by a vastly expanded, captive pool of fuckees who are now required by law to buy their product, without an effective counterbalance to the new fuckery that will inevitably result.

See, I'm a big believer in capitalism, despite any appearances to the contrary. I think that insurance companies that say they couldn't compete with a government-run health plan aren't trying hard enough. I think they lack faith in American ingenuity, which managed to go from Great Depression to Kicking Fascism's Ass in less than a decade, and, as such, have shown themselves to be the parasitic, anti-American scum that they are.

I guess I'm like the folks on the right, except opposite. I'm for giving people, living, breathing, fallible-but-trying people another chance, especially when they find themselves in a bad situation through no fault of their own. But cold-blooded corporate entities whose food, air, and water is the sweat of the working man's brow and the product of his labor? Fuck 'em. Evolutionary conditions change, and those that can't adapt will perish. And when they do, something will arise from their ashes that can do the job for a fair price, and I will be the first one to sign up.

Capitalism works. It really does. But the rules have to be set up to where the right people win. We got out of the jungle, and we built this nice city to live in. We should start acting like it. As for Barack Obama, well, I'm willing to reserve judgement for just a bit longer, but he sure is starting to look like more of the same, just another politician, even if he does give good speech. We didn't elect him to hand the insurance companies another few quarters of unsustainable growth at the expense of middle- and working-class prosperity, much as we didn't elect him to continue Bush's policies of domestic surveillance or Wall Street's continued rapacity. We sent him to Washington with the expectation that he'd do what he said he would. It's high time he started.

Posted Without Comment

The Movement plays for keeps. The Democrats just play. What remains unclear to us is whether the netroots writ large can rebuild a new Democratic Party from within fast enough. Or whether the whole rotten edifice needs toppling in favor of something new, unfettered with ghosts of mediocracies past.
-stiftung leo strauss

Does Michelle Malkin Know About All This?

Think my favorite is Barack Obama pees in your gas tank.

Also Posted Without Comment

"The key to understanding Obama is that he is a hybrid of delicate, magic unicorn and ravenous zombie. He will frolic in the woodlands, spreading pixie dust and joy, until his hunger for human brains begins to rise..."
Christopher Orr, in the New Republic

Also Posted Without Comment

"The key to understanding Obama is that he is a hybrid of delicate, magic unicorn and ravenous zombie. He will frolic in the woodlands, spreading pixie dust and joy, until his hunger for human brains begins to rise..."
Christopher Orr, in the New Republic

A bit nitpickety, but

not sure I can let this one slide by.

For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding.
from President Obama's Cairo speech today

So, what was up with that whole War of Norther Aggression thing, then? Oh, right. I remember now. When governments and militaries engage in violence, it's called "force" and it's okay, cuz they're nation-states or something.

Yes We Can

The administration took the same basic position as its predecessor but placed it in prettier wrapping.
[...]
President Obama has not changed much of substance from the late Bush practices, and the changes he has made, including changes in presentation, are designed to fortify the bulk of the Bush program for the long-run.
-Jack Goldsmith, The Cheney Fallacy in the New Republic

Jack Goldsmith is a law professor at Harvard, and was an Assistant Attorney General during the Bush Administration. He was also the guy in John Ashcroft's hospital room when Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales showed up to try and get Ashcroft's signature on the warrantless wiretapping memo.

In The Cheney Fallacy, he lays out eleven principles of the Bush era War on Terror, and then devotes a paragraph or two to how those principles, and the policies that flow from them, have evolved under the Obama Administration. The answer is not very much.

Aside from a rather tepid repudiation of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, the changes appear mostly to be rather superficial. Instead of altering the policies themselves, which is arguably what Barack Obama was elected to do, the Obama Administration has mostly just altered the way they are presented to the public. There's still warrantless wiretapping, we're still denying habeas corpus rights to the prisoners at Guantanamo (and afforing virtually no rights at all to the prisoners at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan), we're still killing fifty civilians for every Al Qaeda/Taliban leader we get with unmanned Predator drone attacks in the FATA in Pakistan, and we're still calling our conflict with several de- and semi-centralized non-state actors and terror networks a war, instead of a law enforcement action, thus triggering various commander-in-chief powers that Barack Obama, being only human, is apparently loath to give up.

And while the Bush Administration's various over-reaches and blunders were taken up and moderated, by Congress and the courts, during the last years of the Bush Presidency (the differences between 2002-3 and 2008-9 are significant, even if they don't go far enough for many, including this commenter), the case can be made, and Goldsmith makes it (unwittingly, perhaps, as he seems mostly to approve of the current state of play), that, so far at least, what Obama has done amounts, essentially, to putting lipstick on a pig.

Now, some of this stuff is not necessarily Obama's fault. The Bush Administration seems to have done its level best to tie Obama's hands, and many of the problems with the current state of play are the result of decisions made before Obama was elected President, decisions he might have made differently. I, for one, like to think that he would, partly for sentimental reasons, but mostly because I think they were the wrong decisions, from both a strategic and moral standpoint.

For those that take a Machiavellian view of the world, strategy and morality are separate spheres and, mostly, never the twain shall meet. Morality is lovely, no doubt, and most power players pay at least lip service to its virtue and desirability, but the world is a vicious and nasty place, filled with evil men who are willing to do anything to further their own interests, and we, powerful though we undoubtedly are, must bow to the realities we face in a Hobbesian state of nature and fight back with all means necessary. So, while we might, in a perfect world, extend civil rights to the 'enemy combatants' and other unfortunates sucked up in Af-Pak vacuum cleaner, and abstain from torturing them or extraordinarily rendering them to third countries that don't suffer the same (albeit shrinking) compunctions about torture that we do, or holding them indefinitely without charges while an ill-defined conflict with a nebulous, non-state network of enemies plays itself out, over the course of who knows how long, we do not, alas, live in a perfect world, and so, unfortunate though it may be, we must fight the enemy with all the means at our disposal.

Here's why this is wrong.

The real battlefield in this 'war' is the hearts and minds of world's peoples, most especially the world's Muslims. There are two sides, two alternatives for them to choose from. On the one hand, there's the Taliban and Al Qaeda, who represent the most radical and intolerant aspects of their faith (not unlike, perhaps, some of the more radical evangelical elements of the American population, only somewhat better-armed and more willing to actively kill people who fail to live up to their rather stringent standards of behavior and comportment), and who cut people's heads off on videotape and throw acid in the faces of women who take a walk in public without a male relative to escort them.

On the other hand, there's us, a more complicated case. We're more tolerant, more modern, have greater prosperity and more individual and collective freedoms. We also send evil robots to bomb the shit out of civilians in order to get at a few select targets who may or may not be players in the Taliban/Al Qaeda universe. We grab people off the ground, or buy them from their enemies, and put them in prison half a world away with little or no hope of freedom or even a fair trial.

George W. Bush used to say the terrorists hate our freedoms, and to some extent he was right. There is a hard core of dedicated Islamist nutjobs who genuinely hate the freedom we take for granted and exercise on a daily basis (never mind that there seems to be an almost equal number of radical evangelicals and conservatives that also hate this freedom). But the vast majority of people who take up arms against us do so for more personal reasons, like, say, we dropped a bomb on their cousin's wedding party, or we nabbed them and threw them in prison for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

And here's where the strategic meets the moral. To win the battle for hearts and minds, we have to be the good guys. We've already got the whole best outcome thing locked down. You can choose to live under Sharia law, and live in a medieval world of poverty and oppression, or you can choose engagement with the West, and move towards our greater prosperity, comfort, and freedom from undue government intrusion into your daily life (yes, I know we're not exactly doing a great job on this one lately, but compared to life under the Taliban, it's no comparison at all). If the world were made of rational actors pursuing enlightened self-interest, then it would already be no contest.

But the world is not made of rational actors pursuing enlightened self-interest, and so we must not only produce better societal outcomes in order to win the battle for hearts and minds, we must also be the good guys, the ones not willing to cross certain lines, even if the bad guys do. This is, in fact, the difference between being the good guys and being the bad guys, and while the bad guys almost always consider themselves the good guys, and the morally repugnant things they feel they have to do to win to be unfortunate negative consequences of the conflict they're in, in actuality, they are not the good guys, at least not in any objectively defensible sense of the term.

And while it may be that there's a case to be made about doing bad things in the service of good (there is certainly a strain of the American mentality that gets off on the notion, cf. every action flick ever), in the present case, where we are not engaged in a conventional war with a state or coalition of states that fields an army and meets us in battle, and our enemy, such as it is, relies on secrecy and terrorism, and depends on the good will of the surrounding population to stay hidden and thus out of our reach, it is not only morally necessary to fight with the proverbial one hand tied behind our back, it's strategically necessary, too.

Look, I understand that there is a hard core of dedicated extremists that will do anything, and I mean anything, in order to blacken our eyes and bloody our noses (which is really about all they're capable of doing at present), and that we have little or no choice but to hunt those men down and kill them, or, even better, throw them in prison for the rest of their lives (a much worse punishment in my, and probably their, view). But the vast majority of the world's Muslim population would almost certainly gravitate to our way of life and thinking if given half the chance, and the less we do to alienate them, the likelier we are to win the struggle for hearts and minds.

Win that, and we win the war.

Maybe then we can start ramping down from the national security state, and return America to the path it was meant to be on.

dept. of corrections

President Obama said on Wednesday that he is seeking to block the release of photographs that depict American military personnel abusing captives in Iraq and Afghanistan, worrying that the images could “further inflame anti-American opinion.”

dear mr. president,
it's not images of american military personnel abusing prisoners that inflame anti-american opinion. it's american military personnel abusing prisoners that inflames anti-american opinion.
sincerely,
dallas taylor