The party of fiscal responsibility

Here's a chart on the amount of federal debt relative to GDP, demarcated by different Presidential administrations.

When will the Democrats start systematially marketing themselves as the party of fiscal and moral rectitude?

Trading pictures of dead Iraqis for free porn

A couple days ago I wrote about how the war in Iraq destroying America's moral fibre, a decline that anyone with the slightest sense can recognize is far worse than adulterous Presidential semi-sex.

Well, here's proof: the East Bay Express reports on a Web site that lets soldiers trade pictures of dead Iraqis for free access to amateur porn. This definitely falls into the "you can't make this shit up" category. The lede:

If you want to see the true face of war, go to the amateur porn Web site NowThatsFuckedUp.com. For almost a year, American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been taking photographs of dead bodies, many of them horribly mutilated or blown to pieces, and sending them to Web site administrator Chris Wilson. In return for permission to post these images, Wilson gives the soldiers free access to his site. American soldiers have been using the pictures of disfigured Iraqi corpses as currency to buy pornography.

At Wilson's Web site, you can see an Arab man's face sliced off and placed in a bowl filled with blood. Another man's head, his face crusted with dried blood and powder burns, lies on a bed of gravel. A man in a leather coat who apparently tried to run a military checkpoint lies slumped in the driver's seat of a car, his head obliterated by gunfire, the flaps of skin from his neck blooming open like rose petals. Six men in beige fatigues, identified as US Marines, laugh and smile for the camera while pointing at a burned, charcoal-black corpse lying at their feet.

The captions that accompany these images, which were apparently written by soldiers who posted them, laugh and gloat over the bodies. The person who posted a picture of a corpse lying in a pool of his own brains and entrails wrote, "What every Iraqi should look like." The photograph of a corpse whose jaw has apparently rotted away, leaving a gaping set of upper teeth, bears the caption "bad day for this dude.

I'm so flabbergasted, words escape me. Is this even illegal? More bad apples? I sure hope Iraqis love their "freedom."

Hat tip: BP.

They walk among us

I wonder how many Bush voters feel this way? My guess is not many: that no matter how bad things get under Bush's tenure, the ones who voted for him will continue to mutter to themselves that "Gore would have been worse! Kerry would have been worse!"

Hat tip: BR.

Releasing Abu Ghraib prisoners

The U.S. plans to release 1000 prisoners from Abu Ghraib, as "a goodwill gesture to mark Ramadan." If anything proves the moral and political bankruptcy of the Bushist project in Iraq, this is it. "Symbolic" prisoner releases is not something that one does with dyed in the wool criminals and terrorists; it's something one does for political prisoners.

Don't get me wrong: it may well make sense to grant political concessions to various opposition and resistance groups in Iraq. It's a truism that the solution to insurgencies always takes place via a political process. And in political processes, granting concessions and finding political middle ground, including via symbolic gestures, can be an important element of reaching a compromise. So perhaps I should look at this announcement and just be thankful that (maybe, finally) some reality-based grownups rather than crypto-Trotskyite illusionists are finally making policy decisions in Iraq.

But if that's true, then isn't the Bush regime admitting the bogusness of the political premises for the war? Haven't the Bushists and the wingnutosphere dittoheads unceasingly insisted that the War in Iraq can only be understood as an element in the wider GWOT? And hasn't the GWOT in turn been continually defined under the Doctrine of Moral Clarity, e.g. that "either you're with us or against us"? Isn't it clear, then, that under the Bushist strategic doctrine these inmates are criminals and/or terrorists -- in which they deserve to be in jail and on trial (though perhaps not tortured) -- end of story?

What this prisoner release shows is that the powers that be in fact recognize that the people in this jail are political prisoners in a complex war in which there isn't a simple right side and wrong side. As I say, it shows some policy seriousness, but it also shows that even the last premise under which the war is being fought -- to destroy "evil" terrorism -- has essentially been abandoned.

Cronyism

Frank Rich, who has become my favorite New York Times columnist, nails another one:

THERE are no coincidences. On Monday, as L. Dennis Kozlowski was slapped with 8 to 25 years in jail for looting Tyco International of some $150 million, the feds were making their first arrest of a high-ranking member of the Bush administration. The official was David Safavian, the chief of White House federal procurement policy who once worked for Jack Abramoff, the sleazy Republican lobbyist whose disreputable client list, in another noncoincidence, included Tyco. While it's an accident of timing that Mr. Safavian was collared at his suburban Virginia home just as Mr. Kozlowski was sent to the slammer in New York, the two events could not better bracket a corrupt era worthy of the Gilded Age.

Ours will be remembered as the Enron era. Enron itself is a distant memory - much like all that circa 2000 talk of a smoothly efficient C.E.O. presidency led by a Harvard M.B.A. and a former chief executive of Halliburton. But even as American business has since been purged by prosecutions and reforms, the mutant Enron version of the C.E.O. culture still rules in Washington: uninhibited cronyism, cooked books, special-favors networks, the banishment of whistle-blowers and accountability. More than ideology, this ethos has sabotaged even the best of American intentions, whether in Iraq or New Orleans. Unchecked, it promises greater disasters to come.

As recently as 10 days ago, when he resigned before his arrest, Mr. Safavian was the man who set purchasing policy for the entire federal government, including that related to Hurricane Katrina relief. The White House might as well have appointed a contestant from "The Apprentice." Before entering public service, Mr. Safavian's main claim to fame was as a lobbyist whose clients included Indian gaming interests and thuggish African regimes. Mr. Safavian now faces charges of lying and obstructing the investigation of Mr. Abramoff, the Tom DeLay-Ralph Reed-Grover Norquist pal who is being investigated by more agencies than looked into 9/11. Mr. Abramoff's greasy K Street influence-peddling network makes the Warren Harding gang, which operated out of its own infamous "little green house on K Street," look like selfless stewards of the public good.

You know that the arrest of Mr. Safavian, one of three known Abramoff alumni to migrate into the administration, is the start of something big. Alberto Gonzales's Justice Department announced it only after Mr. Safavian had appeared in court and had been released without bail. The gambit was clearly intended to keep the story off television, and it worked.

It won't for long. The Enron odor emanating from Mr. Safavian is of a piece with the rest of the cronyism in the Katrina preparedness package. The handing off of FEMA from President Bush's 2000 campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, to Mr. Allbaugh's even less qualified buddy, Michael Brown, in 2003 is now notorious. (The two men have been friends for 25 years but were not college roommates, as I wrote here last week.) But that's only the beginning: the placement of hacks like "Brownie" and Mr. Safavian in crucial jobs hasn't been slowed one whit by what went down on their watch in New Orleans.

Witness the nomination of Julie Myers as the new head of immigration and customs enforcement at the Homeland Security Department. Though the White House attacked the diplomat Joseph Wilson for nepotism because he undertook a single pro bono intelligence mission while his wife was at the C.I.A., it thought nothing of handing this huge job to a nepotistic twofer: Ms. Myers is the niece of Gen. Richard Myers and has just married the chief of staff for the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff. Her qualifications for running an agency with more than 20,000 employees and a $4 billion budget include serving as an associate counsel under Kenneth Starr; in that job, she helped mastermind the costly and doomed prosecution of Susan McDougal, and was outwitted at every turn by the defense lawyer Mark Geragos.

Ms. Myers is only the latest example of Mr. Chertoff's rolling the dice with Americans' safety during his brief tenure in Homeland Security. After the bombings in London in July, he vowed to maximize his department's "finite human and financial capital to attain the optimal state of preparedness." Yet the very same day, the president nominated Tracy Henke as Homeland Security's new executive director of the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness. Ms. Henke, a John Ashcroft political appointee at the Justice Department, has since been unmasked as an Enron-style spinner of numbers. As Eric Lichtblau of The Times reported in August, it was she who ordered the highly regarded nonpartisan head of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Lawrence Greenfeld, to delete a reference to politically embarrassing data in a government press release for a report on racial profiling. When Mr. Greenfeld complained, he was demoted.

Imagine Ms. Henke, in her Homeland Security job, having sway over press releases about our disaster readiness. There is likely to be nothing but good news until it's too late. But if the hiring of the likes of Ms. Henke, Ms. Myers and Mr. Safavian is half of the equation in Enron governance, the other half is the punishing of veteran civil servants like Mr. Greenfeld for doing their jobs honestly. Even as it fills its ranks with Abramoff golf-junket partners, political flunkies and underemployed relatives, the administration silences those who, like Sherron Watkins at Enron, might blow the whistle on any Kozlowski or Ebbers or Rigas fleecing or betraying the taxpayers. Three weeks before Mr. Safavian's arrest, the Army Corps of Engineers demoted another procurement official, Bunnatine Greenhouse, who was a 20-year veteran in her field. Her crime was not obstructing justice but pursuing it by vehemently questioning irregularities in the awarding of some $7 billion worth of no-bid contracts in Iraq to the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root.

Ms. Greenhouse and Mr. Greenfeld are only two of the many whistle-blowers done in by this administration so far. (Congressman Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, lists nine on his Web site.) Even top government officials who are not whistle-blowers, merely truth-tellers, are axed. Lawrence Lindsey, the president's chief economic adviser, was pushed out after he accurately projected the cost of the Iraq war at $100 billion to $200 billion. Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, was shunted aside after he accurately estimated the number of required troops ("several hundred thousand") for securing Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, who presented rosy scenarios of getting the job done with Iraqi oil income and low troop deployments, stayed on to bungle the war.

Their errors were compounded when the administration staffed the post-Saddam American occupation with exactly the same kind of appointees it would later bring to homeland security: the two heads of "private sector development" in Iraq were a former Bush fund-raiser in Connecticut and a venture capitalist who just happened to be Ari Fleischer's brother. As The Washington Post reported last year, major roles in the L. Paul Bremer regime were given to 20-somethings with no foreign service experience or knowledge of Arabic simply because they had posted their résumés at the Heritage Foundation, the same conservative think tank where Mr. Bremer had chaired a task force.

The damage done to the mission in Iraq and homeland security alike by Enron governance is immeasurable. Administration apologists who now claim that hurricane relief will bring still more examples of innovative, C.E.O.-style governmental enterprise (Mr. Bush's "Gulf Opportunity Zone," for instance) conveniently sidestep the harsh truth that such schemes are destined to be as empty and corrupt as Andrew Fastow's Raptor partnerships at Enron once they're staffed from the apparently infinite crony talent pool.

YET it's not only the administration that is to blame, any more than it is only the executives who are at fault when a corporation rots. Culpability also belongs to the board that rubber-stamps the shenanigans - to wit, Congress. Republicans in the Senate are led by Bill Frist, who, in the grandest Enron manner, claimed last week that it was to avoid a conflict of interest that his supposed "blind trust" unloaded all of his holdings in a Frist family-founded company just before its stock tanked. (Federal prosecutors and the S.E.C. are investigating.) As for the Democrats, they are nonpareil at posturing about the unstoppable nomination of John Roberts - a conservative, to be sure, but the rare Bush nominee who seems both qualified for his job and unsullied by ethical blemishes. Yet when David Safavian was up for a job involving hundreds of billions of dollars, and much of his dubious résumé was fully known, he was approved by the ranking Democrat, Joe Lieberman, and all his colleagues of both parties on the Governmental Affairs Committee.

Which is to say that the rest of us, the individual shareholders in government who have voted in our Enron-era politicians, are responsible, too.

Hat tip: WAB.

The country's moral fiber

An indispensible post on Balkinization on the ever-burgeoning torture story simmering around the edges of the GWOT: it's systematic, and it's being both covered up and hand-waved away. I don't think Juan Cole is one bit hyperbolic when he says that, "The brutalization of the US military and of its prisoners is a brutalization of the entire American public. It is an undermining of the foundational values of the Republic. We cannot remain Americans and continue to behave this way routinely."

The fundamental reason why Cole is right in this judgment is that the whole situation -- the ongoing torture, the "defining down of 'humane,'" the scapegoating of enlisted troops, the systematic coverups -- has been vastly documented in the media. The situation is well understood by any member of the public that has bothered to want to know. It's therefore very difficult to conclude anything other than that the American public, as a whole, has essentially decided that such behavior is, if not desirable, then at least acceptable. Andrew Sullivan sneered a year ago when Susan Sontag declared that the Abu Ghraib pictures were a direct reflection of the United States today. But the longer the torturing goes on, and the more that it becomes politically tolerated, the more Sontag's argument becomes inescapable.

Maybe my moral compass is wound up the wrong way, but if we have to choose between an America where more chief executives get blowjobs from slatternly interns, or an America where more chief executives sanction torture, it's pretty clear to me which kind of moral decay represents a greater threat to the America I cherish.

Condie feels the Lord coming

Reuters reports from Condoleeza Rice's recent "feel your pain" tour of Katrina victims:

On Sunday, she attended a church service in Whistler, Alabama, and prayed alongside the congregation for victims of the hurricane.

Asked to say a few words from the pulpit, Rice, a preacher's daughter, said: "The Lord Jesus Christ is going to come on time." She added: "If we just wait."

One suspects that some efficient government relief might temper the people's impatience.

Hat tip: JG.

What to do In Iraq?

Greg Djeregian over at Belgravia Dispatch last week posted a long rumination on what is to be done in Iraq. I recommend it as the most thoughtful (if long-winded) possible defense of what the U.S. must do going forward if it is to achieve neocon strategic goals. Clear-eyed about the need to establish security as the starting point for anything else worthwhile in Iraq, Greg has long argued that the U.S. should radically increase its ground presence in Iraq, if needs be to lock the place down by putting a soldier on every street corner.

Greg calls for us "to put the past behind us and try to dwell in the realm of the practical." Amen to that. So let's get practical. What "practically" it would mean for the United States to radically increase our commitments in Iraq? To begin with, we must acknowledge that what we face in Iraq, under best case circumstances, is a five year (and perhaps far longer) counterinsurgency campaign. Since per Greg's dictum we're remaining in the realm of the practical, we must also acknowledge that a 5+ year counterinsurgency campaign is likely to completely undo the American Army as it is currently constituted. Indeed, Greg even quotes Anthony Cordesman referencing the problem ("If the President has the magic wand necessary to create new forces, and is willing to ignore the impact on our all volunteer force structure of increasing deployments....") but then passes it right by and keeps calling for more troops. In short, if we are to remain in the realm of the practical, as Greg exhorts, then we must begin with the fact that American ground forces are facing a manpower and morale crisis of unprecedented proportions.

To get a sense of just how dire the situation really is, let me quote at length from an article by Jim Hoagland in last month's Washington Post:

Iraq has also brought into sharp focus the costs of the decision by Vietnam-era generals to embed critical skills in reserve and National Guard units to force the call-up of citizen soldiers in an extended conflict. The commanders reasoned that this would bar political leaders from pursuing wars that did not have substantial public support.

But the effect of this decision was to load into the reserves the civil affairs, psychological warfare and other specialized units important to fighting low-intensity conflicts or nation-building. The debate over how many U.S. troops should be in Iraq is a legitimate and important one. But it obscures the equally vital point that the United States does not have available enough of the kind of troops it needs to deploy in Iraq in any event.

Some retired and active-duty senior officers fear that another year of combat duty in urban areas of the Sunni Triangle will break the military cohesiveness and morale of the regular Army, Reserve and National Guard units being rotated into Iraq on multiple tours. Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey says the National Guard already is "in the stage of meltdown and within 24 months will be coming apart."

McCaffrey sounded that alarm in testimony and a compelling memorandum he submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on July 18 after a wide-ranging trip to Iraq in June. He predicted the United States would succeed in Iraq -- but added that it would take five years and dramatic changes in the way the American military and diplomatic establishments conduct business there.

His memorandum reinforces the impression that the U.S. transitional authority essentially wasted its 18 months in effective power and helped create "a weak state of warring factions" that still has to get on its feet. Understaffing and too rapid turnover by the State Department as well as the Pentagon have created a crippling lack of continuity for the decisive months ahead, McCaffrey wrote.

Such concern is driving a dramatic shift in U.S. military planning in Iraq. An emerging aim is to reduce the damage being inflicted on America's armed forces as an institution. It is the structural damage -- the hollowing out of America's military -- that most concerns McCaffrey and other military leaders. Reducing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq's contested urban areas by the summer of 2006 is now a key component of that planning.

The origins of this crisis of the American armed forces is intimately related to the domestic and international political circumstances of the war itself. Internationally, the diplomatic failure to secure widespread support for the war from most of the other Great Powers (and it was a failure, no matter who deserves the blame) is a major reason why the U.S. didn't get more troop support in theater.

Domestically, moreover, Bush has signally failed to demand of the American people an iota of personal sacrifice on behalf of the war. How much time has Bush spent exhorting people to enlist? I can't recall him do it even once. Why is that? There's actually a very good answer to that question: it's because the GWOT has been relentlessly marketed as being about preserving "the American way of life" (as idealized by Republicans) down to the smallest detail, up to and specifically including shopping sprees in SUVs. Despite all the windy bullshit about America's mission to liberate the world, the practical message of the Bush regime has been: this is a war to prove to the terr'rists that we can kill 'em without changing one iota of our behavior. And while that might seem like a position of moral clarity, and is certainly one that sells well during campaigns, it's also not a message that sends the kids running down to the local Army recruiter's office. (Put it in personal terms: Pat Tillman made headlines precisely because his choice to give up his comfortable life at home was so unusual; the contrast could not be sharper between Tillman and the vast majority of pro-warriors, who experience no cognitive dissonance or sense of hypocrisy as they cheerlead for war despite disinclining to sign themselves up for duty.)

It also must be pointed out that this crisis of the American armed forces is leading directly to strategic compromises in other theatres. As I commented earlier today, the wingnutosphere has been thunderingly silent on the radical policy reversal the Bush regime has adopted in North Korea. But let's pause for a second and ask ourselves, why are the Bushies doing this deal with NoKo now? Is it because they suddenly had a change of heart and believe that "we can do business" with a madman like Kim? Is it because they've suddenly starting loving international agreements? Seems pretty unlikely, I think most would agree.

Instead, the explanation for why the Bushies agreed to almost everything Kim has been demanding for the last five years is that they have no choice. Debunked is Rumsfeld's prewar bravado about the American capacity for fighting multiple simultaneous full-scale campaigns. If the Iraq war was designed to show that the U.S. meant business, it has instead neutered our ability to deliver the business: the idea that the U.S. could credibly threaten another war of choice is at this point risible. In short, we've spent our military wad in Iraq for a mess of geopolitical pottage.

What Greg and all other pro-warriors generally fail to do is to roll up all their exhortations to stay the course into a wider strategic discussion of feasibility and means and tradeoffs. If Greg and the other neocons are going to insist that we dwell in the realm of the practical, then it's time for them to start being a lot more forthright about the true costs and benefits of continuing the GWOT, as currently incarnated -- in terms of both large-scale domestic sacrifice, and diversion of resources from other significant long-range threats. In sum, what's missing from Greg's otherwise exhausting post is an engagement with the question of who should pay, and how, the enormous costs of staying the course.

Krauthammer on NK agreement

The conservosphere has been conspicuously silent on the diplomatic deal with North Korea to give up nuclear weapons. That's because there's no way to make partisan hay on this one: the deal can't possibly be spun as anything other than a conspicuous backing away from the musclebound cowboy platitudes that passed for grand strategy during Bush's first term (read: GWOT vs. "Axis of Evil").

But finally one conservative has spoken up with something intelligent to say about the deal, and that's Charles Krauthammer (!!), who points out that if the deal holds what it really heralds is the official emergence of China as a mature strategic rival to the United States. Worthwhile reading.

Katrina and the Republican succession

Reader PS asks a rhetorical question, "Why hasn't Cheney been named the reconstruction czar already?" He's got a hypothesis: that Bush/Rove plan to handpick their preferred successor to the throne by designating him (presumably him) the proconsul for Katrina recovery. Doing so will give the nominee $200B with which to build an immediate grateful constituency -- lots of doing good, sympathizing, photo ops, all at no political cost to the czar. But PS goes one step further: he believes the plan then is for Cheney to resign after the midterms and to appoint the Katrina Czar to the Vice Presidency -- thus allowing him to run with the advantages of quasi-incumbency in 2008!

I like this theory mainly for its appreciation of the Machiavellian (Mayberry or otherwise) nature of Bush-Rove political team. The idea that the political team that runs this country might try to change in some fundamental way how Presidential succession takes place in this country is certainly within the bounds of reason: they have repeatedly shown a ruthless willingness to disregard and even trample of the customs of our democracy. It's easy to imagine how the reasoning might go for Rove: "Who says long-sitting incumbent Vice Presidents shouldn't resign so that we can groom a successor? OK, OK, it's true that it might seem at first glance like the procedure undermines democracy since, just in case the President dies before the next election, we'll now suddenly have a President who the people never voted for -- but hey, how often to Presidents just up and die anyway? Furthermore, it's a myth that the Vice President is really elected anyway. Does anybody think that Cheney v. Lieberman swung a single significant vote in 2000? Given that, why not use the Vice Presidency as a grooming procedure for the next President? In fact, wouldn't it actually be better for the country if Presidents had a period of apprenticeship, as it were, getting to see how Washington operates, so that there won't be any administrative bumps during the handover? After all, don't well-run corporations -- those repositories of administrative best practices, disciplined as they are by the marketplace -- make a very big deal about providing a long-running plan for ensuring orderly successions of chief executives? Why should we accept that our country be run worse than most companies?" Etc etc.

(As an aside, I note that this willingness to trample on customary notions of political fair play is the most disturbing thing about this political team, and the thing that really makes one feel as if some kind of Caesarian moment could be approaching the Republic. As Mark Schmitt rightly points out, political customs and norms are at least as important as the actual rules to keeping a democracy in working order:

Politics, like much of civilization, depends on the existence of some unquestioned, "it just isn't done" customs. An example that I've mentioned a couple times is the explicit theory, on display once again in the CAFTA vote, that you want to pass a bill with as narrow a margin as possible, because every vote over 218 in the House is wasted and might represent a compromise. That's not something that legislative strategists ever thought of before -- they wanted to go into votes with the most comfortable margin, and to win with enough to have a clear endorsement against future challenges. And I'm convinced that Bush/Rove brought that same mindset to the presidential campaign. Most incumbents would want to have a nice Reagan-in-1984-type landslide in order to feel a clear mandate. But Rove/Bush thought that of every vote above 51% as a wasted concession; they knew that all Bush had to do was win, and he could declare the mandate.

I suppose Rove would dismiss Mark as a sentimentalist, and Rove would also probably point out that most pivotal presidencies -- notably Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR -- have radically revised previously held conceptions of acceptable political practices.)

Despite the fact that I consider it plausible that Rove/Bush might try something like this Katrina czar and/or VP stunt, I remain skeptical. My reason for skepticism has nothing to do with any illusion that these people consider elections a preferable way to determine political succession. Nor is it because I think the Democrats would sniff out the ruse and effectively put a stop to it. Rather, I think it's likely to fail because of internal opposition within the GOP itself. There are a lot of Republican Senators and governors who are currently fantasizing about the White House in 2008, and a plan like this would be opposed by every single one of them. In sum, Rove would have to push his own party's strings to get this thing done. It's one thing to bamboozle Democrats and liberals -- it's another to hornswoggle your own team.

Moreover, it's not clear to me that being the VP/incumbent is much of an advantage, as the record shows. It's a well-known fact that Bush I is the only sitting Vice President in the last 200 years to win the Presidency. The other recent efforts, Gore in 2000 and Nixon in 1960, resulted in losses.

Then again, a Vice President who had successfully overseen the Katrina (and Rita?! gulp!) disaster recovery efforts might well be a formidable candidate. And these people, as I say, will stop at nothing short of the outright criminal, and maybe not even there.

Homemakers or gold-diggers?

In response to the comments on the piece below, let me say that I don't think Professor Russett assumes that not maving a job makes a person "inferior" in some ontological sense. What's more likely is that she's assuming (and it's pretty hard to gainsay this view) that not bringing in an independent income puts women (or men, for that matter) in a potentially inferior power position. I say potentially, because I'm sure Russett would acknowledge that it depends on who you marry. If your spouse is a mensch, then he won't exploit that power advantage. But rare indeed is the power disparity that does not lead, at least at times, to exploitation.

Moreover, for the old second-wave feminists like Russett, the home front is only one dimension of the power question, and perhaps not the most important. Even under the best of domestic circumstances, choosing to become a homemaker diverts a woman (or man) from the path to political power. This is empirical: what percentage of the women, say, elected to Congress, were primarily homemakers before going into politics? Vanishingly few.

One might argue that it's silly to care so much about power, and that homemaking is appropriate for people who don't care that much about power. The significance that one attaches to attaining power is indeed the crux of the matter. The reason Russett is disappointed is that she appears to think, more or less, "We fought a revolution for this?!" It's a truism, of course, that the long-term results of revolutions always disappoint the original revolutionaries.

BTW, I have no problem with people trying to achieve "work-life balance." But just as most people recognize that there's something wrong with someone who works all the time and doesn't leave time for family and home, I hold to the view that there's something wrong with someone who spends all her time with family and home, and doesn't have any gainful employ. (The fact is that spending all your time alone with kids will [should!] drive any adult crazy. In fact, I suspect that the communal child-rearing practices of much pre-modern village life is probably the best thing for the sanity of the parents vis a vis child-rearing; on the other hand, such small communities instantiate all sorts of other oppressions, which is why people have been fleeing them for centuries.)

It's also worth emphasizing that working part time or not at all, esp. when the kids are small, is often the only economically rational choice for many families, given the cost of day care in the United States. Part of the reason why conservatives voice such strenuous opposition to subsidized daycare, of course, is that cheaper daycare would remove the economic pressure for women to quit or scale back their work when they have kids. In other words, it undermines "the traditional family," with proton mommy at home with the little electrons.

Ultimately, what grates about the co-eds in the original NYT article is their smug self-assurance that the decision to stay home with the kids will be a lifestyle choice rather than an economic necessity. It's the classist complacency that's irritating: these young women seem to assume they'll find some guy who will work his ass off so that they can "choose" to stay home with the kids. One strongly suspects that at least some of these chicks are basically gold-diggers, who dress up their venal ambitions in the immaculate drapes of alleged devotion to motherhood.

One sees these ladies all the time in San Francisco, by the way: self-described Ivy League SAHMs who, after a while toting the babies around Pacific Heights all day by themselves, decide that, well, they actually need a part-time nanny, too. At some point, when you see women like this, it's hard not to conclude that their choice to exit the labor force boils down to something other than a commitment to "providing the best for the kids."

Finishing School Redux

Here's an annoying piece about young women at Ivy League schools (I think calling them "co-eds" might not be inappropriate given the tenor of the article) who are cheerfully planning on eschewing a career in favor of becoming SAHMs (stay at home moms, for those of you not reading the appropriate parts of Craigslist).

Though none of the subjects of the article come right out and say it, it's apparent that they view Harvard and Yale educations as, mainly, useful resume builders in their hunt for a rich man. The idea that they might end up in a financial situation where they actually had to bring in an income -- e.g. the situation for the large majority of mothers -- is hors question. As for the old-school feminist notion (or just plain socially responsible notion) that consuming all those scarce educational resources imposes a social obligation to do something that only such an education enables, well, apparently that quaint notion can be shrugged off with a giggle.

Look, I don't begrudge these women their lucky opportunity to make these choices. One of the main myths of feminism was that having a job was a privilege and a fulfilling delight. Utter poppycock. Instead, I have not a feminist but a Calvinist view of work: if you don't have a job, then you don't have a proper social identity, and you don't have the right relationship with God. That's why all women (all people) should have jobs. In short, these women are lucky to be able to make this choice; but they are irresponsible for taking it.

A more detailed perspective here, with an emphasis on the childcare policy background to all this.

More signs of the death of neoconnery

Today's deal with North Korea is overall good news. Not so much because it in itself improves the situation much in North Korea (as numerous articles point out, the hard work remains to be done), but rather because it shows that the Bush regime has abandoned the dangerous idiocy that regime-change is the only way to deal with so-called rogue states. The deal with Kim is a de facto admission that the imperative for regime change -- e.g. the geopolitical strategy that got us into the Iraq catastrophe -- is a strategic failure. Sayonara to the long-cherished Boltonian notion that it's pointless to do deals with nutjobs.

The fiscal conservatives revolt

The Wall Street Journal is pissed about the $200B federal "hand out" for Katrina clean-up. If Washington is "Hollywood for ugly people," then Bushism is a New Deal for wingnuts -- and the WSJ doesn't like it.

P.S. My favorite line in this piece was when they described Grover Cleveland as "one of our greatest presidents." That's a good one.

$1,000,000,000 stolen from Iraqi Defense ministry

If this is true, this story is beyond comprehension. Unfortunately, the article is unclear on what exactly happened, and mixes in the news report with unsupported allegations about how the loss is compromising the Iraqi army's ability to resist the insurgency.

What gives this story credibility, however, are the quotes from Ali Allawi, Iraq's Finance Minister. Clearly something happened. But what? The money clearly wasn't physically stolen -- you can't cart off that kind of cash. But then what exactly happened? Was it embezzled? Or did it simply disappear via corrupt procurement contracts -- in which case "theft" is being used rather metaphorically, in the sense of "a rip off." But the article also hints that some money may have disappeared without even the figleaf of procurement. This much is certain: Allawi is definitely grinding an axe with the Ministry of Defense.

Forbes is also reporting on the story.

Hat tip: JG

Flooded New Orleans

Takes a while to load, but check out the highest-res satellite picture of New Orleans on August 31 I've seen so far.

Teen habits

The Onion, apparently, didn't survey the kids.

Arab democracy

George Bush claims (with dubious credibility, it is true) that the goal of our invasion of Iraq is to create a democracy "in the heart" of the Arab world, which his house intellectuals hypothesize will provide a positive demonstration effect for the rest of the region.

But what would the policy outlook of an Arab democracy look like? This is a question that American neocons typically avoid asking for themselves; they presume that any democracy would be pro-American (and pro-Israeli).

The Israelis, of course, don't have the luxury of making such presumptions. And Ariel Sharon, who is nothing if not politically astute, appears to have a good idea what Arab democracy would look like, in Palestine anyway. Which is why he's vowing to stop democracy in Palestine. Of course, stopping a free and fair Arab election has multiple virtues: for one thing, it ensures that AIPAC will be able to go on claiming that Israel is "the only democracy in the Middle East."

Civil war in Iraq

Quotes from Iraqis, on their country's plight. This one is especially grim:

Who said there is no civil war in Iraq? It has already started, but the Iraqis are trying to hide this fact because they know how awful this term is. We daily hear about another incident in which Sunnis are getting killed by Shias and Shias who are getting killed by Sunnis.

Well-fed kids

This headline seems, well, a little off.